Trajectory of international education policy: A conceptual framework

Development aid has a profound impact on education policy in recipient nations, with donor agendas and global governance ideologies frequently attached. Mainstream policy analysis is often insufficient to explain the dynamics of policy transfer in non-Western, authoritarian, or postcolonial settings. This paper outlines a conceptual framework for tracing international education policy trajectories, with particular emphasis on borrowing and adaptation processes propelled by development aid. It attempts to unpack the power dynamics between donors and aid recipients as well as between policymakers at the center and policy actors at the periphery. The framework is a theoretical bricolage drawing from policy borrowing and lending literature, critical policy analysis, dissimulation, and Jones’s Four Orientations to Education. Policy transfers through development aid is not a linear process. While global governance mechanisms like EFA, MDGs, and SDGs promote standardization, recipient countries exercise agency through appropriation or dissimulation. Local actors also reformulate policies through situated practices that are conditioned by historical, cultural, and political circumstances. The proposed framework enables an explanation of international policy transfer as a dialectical, power-laden process. It is transferable to other aid-dependent, postcolonial contexts, underscoring the agency of local and national actors in shaping educational outcomes.