The politics of generating best practice knowledge: Epistemic practice and rendering space technical in a European Commission working group on education policy

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand how best practice knowledge is constructed and maintained as a hegemonic form of policy knowledge. The paper argues that best practice is based on two claims: firstly, that best practice draws on situated practices of ‘what works’ in specific policy contexts, and secondly, that best practice uses these practices to build universal policy lessons that can be transferred across political space. How do policy actors tasked with generating best practices manage to deal with the challenge of integrating knowledge that is situated in particular places with knowledge that holds true across political space? The paper explores this question through the lens of political discourse analysis and studies the relationship between epistemic practice and the social construction of space. Drawing on observation and interview data, the paper analyses how best practices are generated by a group of education policy experts coordinated by the European Commission. Analysis demonstrates that producing best practices involves ‘rendering space technical’ whereby the complex, relational nature of political space is transformed into a series of ‘contextual variables’ from which universal policy mechanisms can be extracted. This allows for the enactment of an epistemic practice which draws clear distinctions between policy and political space rather than understanding them as co-constitutive – a dualism which is pivotal for upholding the hegemonic status of best practice. By analysing counter-hegemonic moments where the claims of best practice are called into question, the paper also considers alternatives to rendering space technical in policymaking practices.