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Transnational educational reforms

Transnational strategies such as the Lisbon Strategy and the Bologna Declaration, emphasizing the goal of a competitive European knowledge society and an inner market of higher education respectively, have become increasingly influential in relation to national education policy and practice. At the same time, international rankings such as PISA and TIMMS have consolidated the use of a calculable and comparable data set as the fulcrum of national education policies. Despite education being a responsibility of nation states and not mandated by the EU as part of the competency of the union due to the subsidiarity principle transnational organizations have increasingly developed an interest in education and lifelong learning as a major economic factor in the knowledge society and found ways around the subsidiarity principle that enable transnational governance across the entire education sector.

In the research programme Policy Futures, we examine how transnational organizations and processes such as the EU, the OECD, the World Bank and the Bologna Process work, how their political agendas develop, the entanglements between them and which mechanisms and infrastructures give them the capacity to influence national education policies, national administrations, and local practices.