Guest editorial: Considering the global-local relationships in education

Abstract

This special issue of Policy Futures in Education invited authors to consider and re-consider the global-local relationship in education policies. Collectively, the articles in this special issue reflect the dominant perspectives among scholars and practitioners interested in research on globalisation and education, where studies investigated how intertwined worldwide discourses, processes, and institutions affect local educational practices and policies. They underscore both structural and agency processes and the cultural divergences that emerged locally as local institutions and players recontextualise and remake these global policies and discourses. Most articles begin with the narrative of how intergovernmental organisations such as UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank contributed to disseminating worldwide discourses on human capital and lifelong learning for economic development, which are reflected in many national education policy documents. In line with the dominant perspectives on globalisation and education, the authors largely frame globalisation as a realm of reality with agency that interacts with and transforms another realm of existence, the local. They then demonstrate how the local dimension is and can also be agentic in that local governments, institutions, and people did not adopt these global initiatives wholesale; they adapted and transformed these initiatives to suit the local contexts and needs, resulting in various local variations. Overall, the collection of papers highlights how the global-local relationship is a multi-layered process involving diffusion, adoption, and adaptation.