8 - Policy mobilities are more than global policy movement: concepts and methodologies in education policy research

Summary

Introduction

The 21st century is intensifying policy formations that involve movement and interconnectivity. These formations are created through transnational migration, climate impacts, new forms of digital data movement and infrastructure, and the continuing development of networked governance. Indeed, policy making can now be said to increasingly stretch beyond, overflow and flatten the territorial borders of the traditional Westphalian nation state. The presence of the new policy formations, and the processes by which they are developed and disseminated suggest that policy research now requires novel conceptualizations and methodologies that can adequately attend to these emerging phenomena and that can provide both descriptive and analytical power.

In this chapter, we focus on policy mobilities as a broad term that captures work identifying and conceptualizing how policy moves through multiple and diffuse means, including nonscalar modalities. Policy mobilities work evolved a decade or so ago, connected to scholarship in urban, economic and critical geography (Peck and Theodore, 2010; McCann, 2011; Cochrane and Ward, 2012; Baker and Temenos, 2015), as well as the broader “mobility turn” in sociology (Sheller and Urry, 2006; Urry, 2007). Mobility concepts posit that social formations are in constant movement and mutation rather than being static and immutable (Cresswell, 2006; Gulson and Symes, 2017), and can be distinguished from previous cross- disciplinary scholarship that focused on policy transfer and diffusion models (for example, Meyer, 1971; Ramirez, 2012). Such approaches sought to downplay the political, social and economic influences of specific national and local contexts in favor of a policy isomorphism deemed to be shaped by the increasing demands of an imagined world society (Carney et al, 2012). Policy mobilities are related to but distinct from political science notions of policy diffusion, for example, via modalities such as borrowing from other nation states.

Mobility studies developed in relation to increased globalization and a more relational orientation to space, which understood geographical scale (for example, the nation state and the subnational) as socially constructed rather than inherent and immutable (Amin, 2002). A policy focus within the mobility turn was explored initially by human geographers, who were suspicious of essentializing the national as the ultimate a priori reference point in discussions of policy transfer and diffusion.