Introduction: What Can We Learn About Global Education from Historical and Global Policy Studies of the OECD?

In this article I discuss the effects of global policy discourses on the educational restructuring of the work of equity workers in Ontario, Canada. Research in two school boards with those directly involved in equity work revealed that the restructuring process had uneven and unexpected effects on the activities of equity workers. Using the critical policy analysis framework, the analysis moves into a discussion of the complexities of policy studies. I argue that the policies introduced at the government level are implemented and practiced on the basis of the historical specificities found at each local site. (Note 1)

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The Oxford Handbook of Global Policy and Transnational Administration

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198758648.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Keyword(s):

Public Administration ◽

International Organizations ◽

Policy Making ◽

Professional Associations ◽

Policy Studies ◽

Global Policy ◽

Goods And Services ◽

Administrative Practice ◽

New Public ◽

The Many

Global policy making is unfurling in distinctive ways above traditional nation-state policy processes. New practices of transnational administration are emerging inside international organizations but also alongside the trans-governmental networks of regulators and inside global public—private partnerships. Mainstream policy and public administration studies have tended to analyse the capacity of public sector hierarchies to globalize national policies. By contrast, this Handbook investigates new public spaces of transnational policy making, the design and delivery of global public goods and services, and the interdependent roles of transnational administrators who move between business bodies, government agencies, international organizations, and professional associations. This Handbook is novel in taking the concepts and theories of public administration and policy studies to get inside the black box of global governance. Transnational administration is a multi-actor and multi-scalar endeavour having manifestations at the local, urban, sub-regional, subnational, regional, national, supranational, supra-regional, transnational, international, and global scales. These scales of ‘local’ and ‘global’ are not neatly bounded and nested spaces but are articulated together in complex patterns of policy activity. These transnational patterns represent an opportunity and a challenge for the study of both public administration and policy studies. The contributors to this Handbook advance their analysis beyond the methodological nationalism of mainstream approaches to re-invigorate policy studies and public administration by considering policy processes that are transnational and the many new global spaces of administrative practice.

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