Social policyāincluding education and training policyāis of growing importance to national economies due to technological progress, labor market exigencies, and globalization processes. While it can traditionally be regarded as a domain of the nation-state, recent trends have challenged this perspective. The internationalization of social policy is reflected in growing exchanges across borders. At the same time, various international organizations (IOs) such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the United Nations (UN), the World Bank, and the European Union (EU) have strongly intensified their commitment in areas such as education policy, labor market policy, and health policy. This trend has increasingly been addressed by research on the āriseā of global social policy (Leibfried 2001; Deacon 2007). With social policy-making ever more subject to developments of internationalization and regionalization (Wulfgramm et al. 2016), this chapter addresses the need for research on convergence processes in the education sector using both international and European policy examples.
In recent years, paradigmatic changes have occurred in the policy field of education. In many OECD states, school students are now studying for international tests, curricula in all European countries are being re-conceptualized, the exchange of school and university students and academic personnel is evolving, long-running traditions of vocational education and training such as apprenticeships are being replaced by market-oriented systems, and English has become the global lingua franca in academia. While a few decades ago, internationalization processes were most obvious in the areas of the economy or the environment, today other policy fields have become subject to these transition processes. Education, in particular, has been increasingly influenced by international developments, although it was formerly an area in which foreign influence through other states or IOs was rather exceptional. Indeed, education policy traditionally belonged to the classical domains of the nation-state and served the primary aim of integrating the society through communicating and nurturing a national language and identity (Goldthorpe 1997: 1; Enders 2004: 361; Furlong 2005: 53). In addition, education has also gained in importance for promoting national competitiveness in knowledge-based economies through the training and schooling of national citizens (Wendt et al. 2007: 12ā13).
With the growing interlinkages of the worldās national economies and the resulting similarities in the economic challenges they face, international cooperation in matters of education has become a key element of national wealth. Consequently, educational issues have been increasingly tackled in cross-national forums of IOs that offer platforms for domestic decision-makers to jointly develop strategies to address common problems (Martens et al. 2007). Such organizations committed to educational activities comprise institutions as diverse as the OECD, the World Bank, the International Labour Organization (ILO), the EU, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Several studies exist on the educational activities of IOs and on their emergence, for example on the ILOās early learning initiatives, the World Bankās Education Strategy (de Sigueira 2000; Ilon 2002), UNESCOās Education for All program (Little et al. 1994), OECD benchmarks through the educational indicatorsā program (Jakobi and Martens 2007), the World Bankās and the ILOās lifelong learning policies (Jakobi 2007), and so on.
Despite the striking differences in their resources such as funding and staff, in the education sector all IOs are ācreated equalā, and share one characteristic: they are formally powerless. Due to the traditional national autonomy in education matters, IOs have only non-binding instruments at their disposal to promote and spread their political programs, aims, or recommendations to the nation-states. In contrast to āhardā powers such as legislative acts or economic coercion, these āsoftā powers rely on political dialogue and the exchange of ideas and information through publications, conferences, speeches, and so on. At the domestic level, the implementation of these international aims and ideational conceptions remains voluntary and is not sanctioned by either positive or negative incentives. Thus, they are unlikely to bypass domestic politics (Knill and Tosun 2008), and the leverage of these noncommittal devices of IOs is commonly assumed to be negligible.
Nevertheless, there are prominent indications that the soft power exerted by IOs can effectively influence national policies. An almost classic example is the highly proactive role that the UNESCO played in shaping domestic policy choices regarding the internal structure of the state (Finnemore 1993: 593). From a constructivist perspective, Finnemore argues that the reasons behind the altered idea of the stateās role and the creation of science policy-making organizations were the result of international developments, rather than domestic demands. However, IO influence does not stop there. Evidence shows that in recent years IOs have even started to play an increasingly important role in fostering convergence processes in education, although they cannot exert coercive influences on the countries (Hackl 2001; Alesi 2005; Witte 2006; Dobbins 2011). Examples of this impact include the cross-country assimilation of obligatory schooling periods, an international trend toward further education and lifelong learning, a common focus on the improvement of teaching quality, and the introduction of early learning offers in many countriesā pre-school sectors.
In spite of these facts, there is still little systematic research on the effects IO activities and initiatives actually have on the policy-making of nation-states, and even less so on whether and how this may finally result in a convergence of national policies. In other words, does the worldwide promotion of educational ideas through the activities of IOs eventually result in a global assimilation process in the education field, as some studies, such as Meyer et al. (1997) on the global spread of educational practices within a world society, suggest?
In this book, I will address this issue by exploring whether the international level may trigger policy convergence in education policy, and through which causal mechanisms this influence may occur. The main argument I make is that IOs actually have caused convergence by purely soft means of governance in a policy field that formerly was only really governed by the nation-state. To illustrate the power of this argument, I will make special use of Switzerland as a case in point. This country lends itself as a telling example because it exhibits a specific arrangement of political factors thatāfrom the theoretical perspective of this bookāhas extremely retarding effects on reforms and thus makes internationally induced policy change particularly unlikely. Thus, it is comparable to the case of Germany. Regarding the results of the analysis, this implies that if Switzerland exhibits far-reaching policy change and converges toward international aims, my argument is strongly supported. The results from the Swiss example will be contrasted with another federal country, the USA.
Against this background, I demonstrate the effectiveness of noncommittal governance mechanisms through IOs. In the present study, I have chosen a qualitative research strategy in order to trace the processes of convergence and to identify the relevant causal mechanisms. In addition, there are severe shortcomings of the accessible quantitative data in the field of education. The comparative case study contrasts the impact of three cases of political initiatives promoted by IOs on domestic public policies in the sectors of compulsory education (CE), higher education (HE), and vocational education and training (VET) in Switzerland over two decades starting in the mid-1990s. In particular, I investigate how the latest offsprings of globalization in educationāthe OECDās Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the European Bologna and Copenhagen processesāactually impact public policy-making in Switzerland. This assessment occurs based on a theoretical frameworkāconstructed through a synopsis of different academic strands of literatureāand a theory-guided analysis. While the approaches to IOs and policy convergence capture the international mechanisms fostering policy convergence, veto player theory accounts for the political institutions in Switzerland such as federalism, consociationalism, and direct democracy which influence the convergence patterns with a country-specific āimprintā.
This book intends to contribute to both academic research and public policy-making. Academic knowledge on educational convergence is promoted in several ways. First, I add to the theoretical debate on internationalization and convergence through noncommittal governance mechanisms in education and trainingāan important but rarely researched topic to dateāand expand the scholarly understanding of education policy-making in federalist states. Second, I intend to make a methodological contribution by developing globally applicable instruments for measuring convergence of domestic education policies toward international policy models in education. Third, this book adds contemporary empirical information and knowledge to research on the causal mechanisms of āsoft governanceā in education relating to convergence within the multi-level context of IO actors and a federal state. The practice-related contribution consists of providing domestic and international policy-makers with recent original data on the status quo and on recent developments in different educational areas concerning both progress and drawbacks in transnational cooperation.
In order to lay the foundation for the study, this chapter introduces the topic of policy convergence through soft governance in the education sector. For this purpose, I present the empirical examples of three initiatives under study promoted by IOs: the PISA study conducted after completion of CE, 1 the European Bologna process in HE, and the EUās Copenhagen process in VET. Subsequently, I explain the approach of this book, in which I focus on Switzerland, its politicalāinstitutional characteristics and reactions t...