Travelling, Diffusion and Translation of Ideas and Policies in the Area of Post-Secondary Education I

Abstract

Post-secondary education, including both higher education but also vocational education and training, is a policy area that witnessed increased internationalization and transnational cooperation resulting to a certain extend in processes of convergence. In this, activities such as international bench-marking, policy forums for exchanges of best-practice and active policy coordination lead to increased potential for ideas and policies to travel both horizontally between countries and vertically between different levels of policymaking. This created a multi-level, multi-issue, and multi-actor policy field, which also due to the increased political salience of post-secondary education offers an interesting framework to study more general processes of how policies and ideas travel in this complex environment. In this, it cannot be assumed that these traveling ideas and policies are simply copied, but rather that they have to be translated to the local context in order to become implemented. This panel includes contributions that empirically study these phenomena either with regard to higher education or vocational education and training.