policy analysis

: As an introduction to this special issue, this paper presents a discussion of different theoretical and methodological challenges in analyzing the ways in which global policy flows are shaping education policies and practices within and across federal systems.


Global Policy Mobilities in Federal Education Systems
This special issue aims to contribute to scholarship on how global policy flows are shaping education policies and practices within and across federal systems, and the implications of these dynamics for understanding contemporary power and political relations in education policy. The point of departure for this special issue is a gap that we have identified in the literature on education policy. Existing scholarship analyzing global policy mobilities tends to focus on how global influences are adopted and adapted at the national level, paying less attention to the complex power relations and policy dynamics between different political scales within federal education systems (Wong et al., 2018). As scholars have recently argued, research on education policies in federal systems rarely considers the intricate ways that global policy flows interact with and contribute to shaping national and sub-national political and bureaucratic structures, and the relations between these (see Savage et al., 2022;Savage & Lewis, 2018).
As scholars who have focused on globalization and education within our respective federal systems and comparatively (i.e., Australia, Argentina, United States, and other federal systems), we argue that further connecting the empirical and theoretical work on global policy mobilities and federalism in education is a necessary move. Bringing these together draws productive attention to politics and power relations in education across space, the flows and transformations of educational policy discourses within and across different sites, and the socio-material arrangements through which influence travels in education (and morphs as it travels). However, even if the need for connecting global policy mobilities and federalism is clear, we stress that any attempts to do so must recognize that the dynamics between the global and the federal system are complex, non-linear, multidirectional and ever changing. For example, a key challenge in our recent work has been to overcome the vertical metaphor of the nested Russian doll, as Brenner (2004) first challenged critical geographers to do, in order to understand power relations in education in the context of globalization. Instead of the verticality and linear implications of this nested dolls metaphor, papers in this special issue show that while global flows can move vertically from the national to the subnational, sub-national entities and local authorities can also connect in horizontal and topological ways with global actors and in ways that do not necessarily implicate national-scale policy actors or organizations. This is not to suggest, of course, that global forces cannot deeply shape national scale developments. Think, for example, of the reforms in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico in the 1990s, which promoted a major shift of authority over education, changing long standing patterns of federal/sub-national attributions. Global pressures, exerted mostly through international organizations were key in defining these policy changes (Beech, 2011). More recently, the development of the national curriculum and national testing in the Australian federation (Lingard, 2018;Thompson et al., 2016) were justified as a response to global social and economic factors. Broadly similar trends can be seen in the development of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and English in the United States (Savage & O'Connor, 2015), with similar global pressures used to justify the reform.
Global flows can be reassembled into federal systems of education in different ways, and in ways that contribute to shifts in power relations among actors and organizations (including government departments) at different scales within those systems. The development of some federal reforms in Germany following the shock that resulted from the less-than-anticipated performance of German students in the 2001 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a case in point. Specifically, in the context of this PISA shock, the Standing Conference of the Education Ministers of the German States (KMK) agreed to record some standardized data across the states, but excluded the standardization of test data (Hartong et al., 2021). In 2010 the Australian federal government, along with the states and territories in the Australian federation, agreed to the creation of national census tests in literacy and numeracy for all students in all schools across Years 3, 5, 7 and 9. In contrast, the Canadian federation, which has no federal department of education, faced a different situation with global pressures influencing the alignment of testing and curriculum across some provinces (Engel & Frizzell, 2015;Wallner, 2018).
Global flows, therefore, are not universal flows nor do they lead toward universal results or linear policy convergence across nations. Furthermore, the articles in this special issue illustrate the necessity to think about federalism not as singular but in the plural, as federalisms. The global flows always come up against the path dependent (North, 1990) ways in which federalisms function in different nations. In suggesting this orientation toward global policy mobilities and federalisms, we draw attention to the multidisciplinarity necessary in this inquiry, linking geography and sociology with comparative studies of education and education policy studies to push the bounds of some of the existing political science (and specifically international relations) inquiries into federal systems. The differences in the functioning of education policy in the federalisms mentioned to this point (Australian, Canadian, German, Latin American, and U.S. federal systems) drive home this argument about the necessity to speak about distinct federalisms.
In this introduction article, we start by discussing the notion of global policy mobilities and the kinds of theoretical approaches that we suggest can be productive in understanding the flows of power in education across spaces. We draw out several key themes, including changing state formations, spaces and spatialities, power dimensions, and translation. We then move on to conceptualize "the federal" in education, reinforcing the notion that federalisms in the plural is more appropriate, as the political structures and historical trajectories of federal systems are often diverse. In the next section, we highlight four analytic tensions and new directions for future research on global policy mobilities in federal systems, and in the final part we introduce the papers in this special issue.

Global Policy Mobilities
The movement of discourses, power, and technologies across space has been a central theme in the fields of comparative education, sociology of education, and education policy studies. Concepts such as education transfer and policy borrowing have been used to analyze how policies move, how they are transformed as they move, and how they are translated in different contexts (Peck & Theodore, 2015;Steiner-Khamsi, 2014). The notion of global policy mobilities extends these analyses with a focus on new spatial formations aimed at overcoming methodological nationalism, acknowledging the changing role of the state (and associated shifts from government to governance), illustrating the increasing participation of new kinds of non-state actors in networks that influence education policy, and highlighting emerging forms of power and authority that are visible, for example, through the growing digitalization and datafication of education. In their study of fast policy making, Peck and Theodore (2015) contrasted the policy transfer literature with that on policy mobilities. Amongst various differences, they suggest that policy transfer emphasizes the sequential diffusion of a policy design across jurisdictional borders, while policy mobilities stress policies in motion involving continuous "transformation and mutation" (p. 6).
Studies of global policy mobilities in education aim to focus on dynamics of globalization in education policy. The notion of global, while contested, is indicative of, and a descriptor for, the creation of a space outside and across the borders and boundaries (real and imagined) of national educational governance. It also provides a spatial reference that can overcome methodological nationalism, and denote a space that is more than the "inter-national," "trans-national," and "supra-national"; a series of concepts based on the nation-state as its original spatial reference. A focus on the global implies an analysis of the enhanced policy role of international organizations and the role of new global non-state actors that participate in the production and promotion of education policies and policy discourses, such as for-profit corporations, philanthropies and big tech firms and the concomitant creation of new spaces in which education policies are made. It also considers shifts in dynamics of power and new modes of influencing education policies and practices, such as international large-scale assessments and digital data infrastructures that connect global policy spaces with situated policies and practices in intricate ways. Instructive here is Sassen's (2007) argument that globalization (and we would add the enabling of global mobilities) is actually the creation of global infrastructures. Finally, an empirical gaze on global spaces sheds light on the kinds of policy priorities, discourses, and narratives promoted globally and the ways in which they are constructed, who constructs them, and their consequences. However, we should also be aware that while such approaches overcome methodological nationalism, there is a danger in replacing it with a methodological globalism, which stresses the seamless flow of policy discourses across the allegedly flat space of the globe (Clarke, 2019).
Our understanding of education policy aims to overcome reductionist approaches that privilege a vision of policy as a primarily technical process framed around providing solutions to "policy problems" or guidance for improvements (Bacchi, 2009;Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). Indeed, Bacchi (2009) argues that policy in its first iteration is about constructing the policy problem in a particular way to which the policy subsequently developed offers a putative solution. We are interested in examining how policy discourses and artifacts promote specific ways of thinking about education. For example, what does it mean to be an educated person? What kinds of knowledge and pedagogic practices are valued? And how should education be organized, financed, and evaluated? By focusing on policy formations, in other words, the processes and broader social and economic patterns in which policy is nested and by which it is constructed, we understand that power does not always flow through nor emanate exclusively from formal state regulations. Thus, if we focus our attention exclusively on state policies expressed in texts and regulations we might be ignoring a whole set of other socio-material arrangements through which power circulates in education, with implications for policy formations and effects. We are aware that the state continues to play a key role in shaping education policies and practices and in no way are we suggesting its power should be overlooked. We are, however, alert to other sites and networks through which power circulates that may be partially linked to the state, bypass the state, and even clash with state policies. We would suggest that the nation-state and its bureaucracies continue to morph and change over time in changing global contexts, but nonetheless remain important in education policy processes.
Mobilities suggest how something (in this case, education policy) is both (a) moving across various places and contexts and (b) mobilizing actors and being mobilized by different actors. Policy mobilities, a term originating in the work of critical geographers, Theodore (2010, 2015) and used by many scholars (see, e.g., Gulson et al., 2017), orient the focus to how policy is moved and mobilized. More recently, McKenzie (2017) has shown how affect is important in relation to which policies move. Mobilities speak to an active process, calling attention to policy as not fixed to a singular place, but rather in production and in movement and mutating as it moves. It also is suggestive of an understanding that policy is not made singularly by national governments alone, but rather that it is shaped and reshaped by a wide range of different actors and broader economic, social, political, and cultural dynamics, globally, sub-nationally and locally.

Mobilities In and Through Education Systems
These processes of shaping and reshaping policy through mobile flows are mediated powerfully by the conditions of possibility within different education systems. As the papers in this special issue suggest, broadly similar flows of policy ideas, actors, and practices can have distinct impacts in different federal systems. In this section, we draw attention to several themes of this body of literature relevant to this special issue.
The focus on global policy mobilities involves tracing, following, exploring, and mapping education policy changes in different environments, which brings new attention and understandings of the relationality of power and agency within policy formation across vertical and horizontal policy scales, global to local and local to global (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2015), as well as shifting spatial and temporal dimensions emergent in new topologies of governance (McKenzie et al., 2021). This orientation toward global policy mobilities offers insights into the new emergent spatialities, blending insights from diverse fields of study including comparative education, contemporary policy sociology, and critical geographical orientations. These insights are noteworthy in early comparative education scholarship on scale, scale-jumping, and re-scaling of educational governance (Engel, 2008;Robertson et al., 2002), space in education policy (see, e.g., Brooks et al., 2012;Larsen & Beech, 2014;Nóvoa & Lawn, 2002), and more recently, policy assemblage (Gorur, 2011, Savage, 2021, policy flows, mobilities, and topologies in global educational governance (Gulson et al., 2017;Lewis & Lingard, 2022;Lingard & Sellar, 2013;McKenzie et al., 2021), and the institutional logics of policy and field formation (Burch, 2018).
The attention to shifting spatialities in education elicits new understandings of the range of new actors and networks involved in education policy formation. Existing research illustrates a vast number of interdisciplinary approaches to describe and map the resulting networks and interrelationships across multiple actors and sites in the formulation and mobilization of education policy. The kind of actors that participate in these new policy spaces and the networks through which they collaborate are unstable and dynamic, to the point that they can become difficult to follow within the slower logics and times of traditional education policy research. For example, forprofit organizations that provide low-fee private schooling for some of the poorest populations in the world receive funding from philanthropies, the World Bank, aid agencies, and other for-profit companies as well as national states (Riep, 2017). Educational technology companies (edtechs) and platforms are also becoming conspicuous in global policy formations. For example, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) partnered with the Australian edtech Janison, which is now the universal International Platform Provider for hosting and delivering the digital version of PISA for schools, bypassing the state and connecting directly with schools (Lewis & Lingard, 2022). Other edtechs like Apple offer professional learning and certification directly to teachers through its platforms (Lewis, 2022). The digitalization and datafication of education policy have pressed the need for researchers to not only understand the proliferation of new actors involved in such governance processes, but also the processes by which such networks are formed and shift across space and time.
Furthermore, recent literature has put attention on the reformation of topologies of power, whereby power and influence bridge geographical distance and redistribute and reimagine horizontal or vertical relations. With the topological perspective, relations matter more than locations (Lingard, 2022). Think, for example, of schools participating in PISA for schools in different national contexts, comparing their school's performance with that of students in different nations. Here the OECD, the organization that administers PISA, is reaching inside nations and schools are reaching out beyond national borders.
Global policy mobilities focus not only on the movement of policy, but on how policy ideas and ideologies are re-contextualized and translated. As discourses move from one context to another, they are transformed. Discourses do not exist in a vacuum; they are part of a network of power relations, institutional configurations, political traditions, and historical experiences. When they travel from a particular time and place to another, they become part of another discursive network, and their meaning and practical effects change. Since global policy actors aim to influence education policies and practices in different places, they need to produce a malleable and adaptable set of ideas that can be acceptable and applicable in very different cultural, ideological, socioeconomic, and political contexts (Beech, 2009). Yet, the kind of discourses they produce also need to have certain stability that contribute to an aura of authority (Harvey, 1989).
Concepts such as recontextualization, indigenization, and translation illustrate that localized effects of a singular globally mobile idea (e.g., global competency, social and emotional learning, student wellbeing) or program (e.g., International Baccalaureate) cannot be taken for granted and will vary from one setting to another. By studying the modifications and re-framing of global policy across contexts, there is an appreciation of individual and community agency, power, and resistance that underlies local and national differentiation of global education policy. In federal systems, opportunities for translations and transformations are multiplied, given the involvement of local policy actors, but also because sub-national states within a federation might have very different demographics, cultures, and political traditions that respond differently to global policy flows. A good case in point here is how the Francophone province of Quebec in Canada works in relation to global policy pressures in comparison with other Canadian provinces, and how this characteristic seemingly prohibits national approaches in the Canadian federation and schooling.
Much of the work on global policy mobilities has not explicitly interrogated how global flows interact with the structures of federalism and the multitude of actors within federal spaces of education, where power is more diffuse and complex. As we bring federal education systems to bear with global policy mobilities, we wish to frame federalism in education as more than a case study, context, or place. In other words, federalism is not merely the backdrop in global policy mobilities, but rather federal structures are always actively assembled and reassembled by and through global policy dynamics that are mobilized in and through federal structures. This requires particular conceptual and methodological sensibilities from scholars trying to frame and understand these dynamics. It requires researchers to hold both an orientation to global flows and new policy spaces and actors and at the same time consider bureaucratic and federal forms of government that exist alongside new forms of authority and influence in education.

The Shifting State and Staying Power of National Ethnos
New voices and new ways of governing education policies redefine the state, while policies are simultaneously being redefined by states. Thus, another important issue to consider when analyzing the circulation of discourses and power relations at the global level in education is the shift from government to governance. This shift refers to a series of changes in the nature of the state and the way it works (Ball & Junemann, 2012;Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). While the logic of government is based on hierarchies and formal authority exerted through the bureaucratic structures of public administration, the logic of governance rests on informal authority and flexible and diverse networks including both state and non-state actors (Ball & Junemann, 2012). This shift does not necessarily entail a weakening of the state, but changes the division of labor in governing education between international organizations, nation states, sub-national entities, and non-governmental institutions at the global, regional, national and local levels (Dale, 2005). In this way, the state transforms itself into a "network state," consisting of "a complex web of power-sharing, and negotiated decision-making between international, multinational, national, regional, local, and nongovernmental, political institutions" (Castells, 2000, p. 10).
We see these developments in global policy mobilities as particularly fruitful in research on the changing role of the state in education policy formation, especially with respect to global policy paradigm shifts marked by neoliberalism (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). At the same time, some analyses remain focused on the cosmopolitan nature of educational reforms, overlooking the ways in which they can in fact aggravate, enact, and give rise to nationalistic tendencies (Tröhler, 2022;Tröhler et al., 2022;Yemini et al., 2022). As is increasingly the case in systems of education around the world, and adding to the complexity of understanding the shifting role of the state in global-local connectivities in education, the influence and power of the nation-state in education policy has not disappeared. Rather, the role of schooling in protecting a kind of national ethnos (Appadurai, 2006) has surged in recent years, as shown in large nationalistic movements, such as Brexit and America First, and the rise of populist, nationalistic, anti-globalization political parties in many nations worldwide (Rizvi, 2022). Appadurai (2006) argues that in the face of losses to economic sovereignty, national ethnos remains the issue over which nation-states have retained full authority. This situation can be seen the growing debates and battles over curriculum in the United States, where the America First agenda has motivated state-level bans of the teaching of topics related to race and gender.
This phenomenon, of course, must be viewed against the ever-changing imbrications of the national and the global in politics generally, and more specifically, in the context of education policy and in relation to subnational states in federal systems. Other examples can be found in the national ethnos of subnational regions such as Catalonia and the Basque Country as a powerful defining element in shaping education policies and the ways in which global and national influences are translated (Bonal & Tarabini, 2013).
There is a need then, given this reality, to move beyond a simple binary of methodological nationalism and methodological globalism in education policy studies (Lingard, 2021, p. 11). Moving beyond a kind of zero-sum framework about global mobilities and nationalistic tendencies means adopting a set of both/and perspectives, including the ways in which nationalism and national interests can be motivated by and through global dynamics (Engel, 2009;Yemini et al., 2022). Additionally, as we argue in this introductory paper, we must think about the ways the division of powers regarding education policy in federal political systems mediates both global and national pressures, and not only in top-down ways. In some cases, global pressures have resulted in a reification of power within central governments. In other cases, new power dynamics emerged, whereby subnational political units are able to utilize new supranational and global scales as spaces to advocate for their interests and quests for deepened autonomy or in some cases, independence, outside of the nation-state (Engel, 2009). Thus, as we will further develop in the next section, we argue for an approach to global flows and federal education systems that examines how power relations between national and sub-national units have become reoriented, reactivated, and reimagined with respect to global pressures on education.

Conceptualizing Federal Systems through the Lens of Mobility
Each of the articles in this special issue seeks to analyze federal systems through the lens of policy mobilities, but does so in distinct ways. Across the issue, it is clear that what a federal system "is" also differs across national contexts. At a basic level, federations can be understood as political systems that rest on a division of power between national and subnational governments, with the latter designed to embody principles of self-rule and autonomy, while the former seeks to govern matters of national interest and steer the nation as a whole (see Savage 2021;Wong et al., 2018). Power is shared, therefore, between the national government and the nation's constituent subnational units (e.g, states, territories, provinces, regions, autonomous communities), usually with an explicit division of roles and responsibilities that is defined and protected by a constitution or other legislative framework. Historically, many federations were established as a composite arrangement of extant relatively autonomous subnational governments (Wallner et al., 2020), each pursuing distinct social and economic goals, while forming together to ostensibly reap the benefits of union as a nation-state. Responsibility for schooling has traditionally tended to reside with subnational governments, which over time has led to unique subnational policy formations and cultures, and distinct approaches to the governance of schools.
However, as illustrated in the articles in this special issue, and in multiple contributions that we editors and others have made to the field (Engel, 2008(Engel, , 2015(Engel, , 2019Engel & Frizzell, 2015;Savage 2016Savage , 2021Wallner et al. 2020), one of the primary impacts of globalization has been a blurring/complicating of the division of labor in federations, in terms of both the vertical relations between national and subnational governments, and the horizontal relations between subnational governments. In nations like the United States, Germany, and Australia, there has also been a significantly increased role and influence of the federal (national) government over policy decisions that technically remain the constitutional responsibility of subnational governments. In many cases, this federal influence has been driven by fiscal incentivization, with federal governments tying funding to reforms that align with federal political and policy agendas. The degree of vertical fiscal imbalance in a given federation also affects the capacity of the federal government to put into effect funding/compliance trade-offs. A prime example of this can be seen in Di Gregorio's contribution to this special issue, which helps illustrate how in Australia, the federal government's national political and policy ambitions have been powerfully pursued by increased funding incentives to state and territory (subnational) governments.
Australia has also undergone significant and arguably novel developments in intergovernmental relations, especially since the late 2000s, with federal, state and territory governments now co-funding some key elements of national education reforms (see Savage, 2016). Exemplary of this is the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), which was established in 2008 via an Act of Parliament under agreement between federal, state and territory governments. ACARA plays a major role in schooling policy at the national scale, with especially important responsibilities relating to the development and management of the Australian Curriculum, the National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) and the My School website. ACARA is jointly owned and funded by all nine governments (that is, the federal government plus six state and two territory governments) on an ongoing basis. Its unique governance structure means that it receives directions from (and is accountable to) the federal Australian Government and all state and territory education ministers. Its design, therefore, can be seen as an attempt to portray a new form of collaborative federalism and an associated commitment to policy co-design, but in a way that is directly responding to global agendas insofar as the national reforms it is engaged with have been justified as necessary responses to enable Australia's education system to be more competitive globally, based on an argument that increasing system equity and performance will maximize economic performance and human capital potential (Savage, 2021). This human capital framing, and the broader economization of education policy, has been a discourse proselytized by the OECD and is now a common framing of education policy in many nations around the globe (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010;Schmelzer, 2016) While our primary aim in this special issue is to examine how global policy mobilities shape, and are shaped by, federal structures of governance, we are keenly aware that the diversity of federations globally means it is important to avoid broad-sweeping claims about what a federation is or how it is structured. Thus, while it is somewhat useful to consider typical features that give federations a family resemblance (i.e., generic features that tend to be shared across federations), we stress that these typical features are mere starting points for more fine-grained and specific analyses of different federal systems-rather than serving as a strict framework of features for structuring comparative analysis. Indeed, as noted already, the diversity of federal structures globally means it is more accurate to speak in terms of federalisms (plural) rather than federalism (singular) as the latter risks obscuring from view the distinctive features of different systems.
The plurality of governance forms arranged under the name of federalism poses multiple challenges for scholars seeking to engage in comparative research and analysis. Take, as just one example, the challenge of comparing schooling reforms in Brazil and Canada. While there is much to be gained by comparing reforms in these nations, an immediate challenge arises. In the Brazilian case it is impossible to understand contemporary reform trends without focusing on the initiatives of the federal government, which since the constitutional reform of 1988, has developed an extensive centralized system of regulatory policies based on standardized testing, economic incentives and redistribution of resources that is combined with furtherer devolution to local authorities, even transferring the responsibility for primary education to its more than 5000 municipalities (Rivas, 2022). On the other hand, Canada has no federal department of education (see Wallner et al., 2020) and national schooling reforms are not a dominant feature of Canadian federalism, even if it has progressively moved towards more consistency across subnational policies in education.
As editors of this special issue, we have discussed and reflected at length on the challenges of conducting comparative analyses of education policy in federations. This special issue began as a seed of an idea just before the pandemic. The global events that followed not only slowed our ability to engage in collaborative work, but more importantly provided rich fodder for reflecting on the role and importance of federations in the governance of nations and education systems. With each editor residing in a different subnational system, across Australia, the United States and Argentina, we witnessed diverse responses to COVID-19, and in some cases, very different implications for schools. The importance and power of subnational governments to shape all aspects of schooling were sharply highlighted; and this included the very capacity for young people to attend school or not, with widespread but unevenly distributed school closures across different subnational systems. Across the United States, school closures and masking policies varied wildly locality-to-locality and state-to-state, Some public schools closed down and shifted to distance learning, while others remained open; some systems mandated masks and others made masks optional. For example, the election of a new state governor in Virginia in Fall 2021 drastically shifted the state, local, and institutional level education policies with the new governor signing a state-wide "mask optional" law, a sharp contrast to neighboring Washington, DC, which maintained its mask mandates in schools until March 2022. In contrast, in Western Australia, where the borders of the state were shut not only to the rest of the world but to the rest of the nation, creating an insulated bubble that saw zero infections for a significant period, schools operated normally for all but a few weeks early in the pandemic. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, the Australian state of Victoria went into widespread lockdowns involving school closures, particularly in the city of Melbourne. In Argentina, different approaches to school lockdowns in the Province and the City of Buenos Aires, governed by opposing parties, became the arena of heated political disputes and tensions between national and subnational governments.
As we take stock of the current moment and look ahead, we see a planet underwritten by tensions and contradictions. The contemporary world points to a future of worsening and unprecedented ecological crisis and increasing inequalities, social fragmentation, and weakening democracies. The transnational flows of people sit alongside mounting nationalisms, closed borders, and ethnically-motivated violence (see Rizvi et al., 2022). The digital world, promising limitless access to information and global connections, is also fueling spaces for hate, mis-information, and anti-democratic principles. What frameworks-both conceptual and methodological-do we need to make sense of these dynamics? How might the various disciplines that inform studies of globalization and education policy cross-pollinate insights to develop new theoretical and methodological approaches that enable policy analysts to understand and frame policy directions, interventions, and power dynamics?
Reflecting on these recent events and global trends, in combination with our engagement with the articles herein, has not only reinforced for us the importance of analyzing and comparing federal systems, but has helped to highlight some of the opportunities and challenges of doing so. In our view, multidisciplinary insights are needed to understand the analytical tensions and new directions in studies of global policy mobilities in federal systems. The contemporary world appears deeply rooted and, in many cases, dominated by complex geographies of power, which raises questions about what we may be missing from fields of political science and international relations that might shed light on the interactions between global policy ideas and the structures within national and subnational systems (see, e.g., Jeong & Engel, in press;Robertson, 2021). In this spirit, we draw attention to four points that we feel are especially relevant to this special issue and our desire to better understand how global mobilities shape education policies within and across federations.

Global Policy Mobilities in Federal Systems: Analytical Tensions and New Directions
First, we argue that comparative analysis of global policy mobilities in federal systems draws attention to the need to develop deep understandings of the political and policy forms, structures and technologies that shape the architectures of governance in different federalisms. We agree with scholars who have repeatedly called for a more robust theorization of the state both in comparative education (Carnoy, 2006) and comparative social sciences at large (e.g., Scokpol's [1985] argument to bring the state back in). In other words, we must pay crucial attention to how different federations are technically arranged and constituted, through laws, policies, regulatory frameworks, as well as the different governmental bodies and actors. By examining these forms, structures, and technologies, we can, on the one hand, recognize the extent to which nation-states have lost considerable economic sovereignty as a result of globalization and state-level policies generated in the name of global competitiveness, while on the other hand, have fervently activated education policy decisions motivated by advancing national ethnos. By focusing on these trends at the national and subnational level, it is possible to identify the variance of sub-national policies within federal systems. Take, for example, the case of North Carolina in the United States. It has notably adopted globally oriented education policies within the state (linked to and shaped by national and global discourses about global competence), tied to enhancements about state-level economic growth opportunities (Engel & Gibson, 2020). Simultaneously, the North Carolina House of Representatives has continued to introduce bills that limit the extent to which schools can teach about racism or sexism. This subnational variance within federal systems elicits the need for careful attention to the technical constitutions of federal systems, including the ways that laws are constituted and carried out, who is involved (and not), and the historical contexts related to the creation of these forms, structures, technologies, and architectures.
Second, when we look comparatively at federalisms in education, close attention is needed to the political and policy arrangements operating at different 'scales' within the nation (e.g. national, subnational, local), and the complex interaction between such scales. Thus, while we maintain that there is a need to move beyond the vertical nested dolls metaphor, we should not obscure from view the importance of scales in the making of political and policy systems and the role played by scalar systems in mediating global policy flows. As Savage, Di Gregorio and Lingard (2022) have recently argued, maintaining a critical focus on scalar processes is especially crucial in research on federal systems, because scale is a central category used by policy actors to imagine and assemble political spaces and reforms. Literature on scalecraft is especially useful here as it provides "an articulation of scale as an epistemological rather than ontological concept and therefore views scale as a socially-crafted rather than pre-existing (a priori) phenomenon" (Savage et al., 2022, p. 963, italics in original;see also Papanastasiou 2017). In this sense, scalecraft aligns strongly with existing policy assemblage research, with the two concepts together providing generative means for examining the socio-technical work of policy production. An attention to scale also helps illuminate how policy organizations and actors at different scales can engage in different and uneven ways with global policy flows. For example, the way one state in the U.S. schooling system engages with policy advice coming from an organization like the OECD might be very different from that of another state (see Engel & Frizzell, 2015). Some subnational states might also work together to share and cross-pollinate policy ideas and practices relating to global reform influences, whereas other states might not. Understanding such policy phenomena cannot be achieved through the assumption of a vertical flow from the global to local. Instead, an analytical lens sensitive to scalar processes and disjunctive flows is required.
Third, the papers in this special issue highlight the importance of distinctive national and subnational politics, cultures, histories, and path dependencies. In other words, it is not only that the forms, structures and technologies that make political and policy systems matter, but also that the very conditions of possibility of those systems are deeply informed by what has gone before and what presently exists. Our point here is not to suggest that prior and current arrangements lock in future reforms to a fixed or predetermined path. Rather, the political and policy conditions in place are likely to make some future trajectories more or less likely than others. This is because policy change is often incremental, building piece by piece on what has gone before in ways that tend to rely on pragmatism and political compromise. This can limit the potential for radical epistemic shifts that break sharply with norms. For example, as Di Gregorio's analysis in this special issue shows that the Australian federal government has, over a period of decades, used its fiscal powers to insert itself so thoroughly into national schooling reforms that it is hard to see how any significant reversal of this might occur in the decades to follow. Instead, the federal government's influence continues to grow, expanding into almost all major areas of schooling policy across Australian states and territories. When considered comparatively, for example, it is hard to imagine how the United States might ever see the kind of wide-scale national consistency that Australia has produced in areas such as curriculum policy, due to significant political and cultural divisions between U.S. states regarding the kinds of knowledge and skills curricula should prioritize (Ravitch 2010), and different historical expectations and norms among the public about the extent to which the federal government should be involved in schooling policies (Savage & O'Connor, 2015). For example, historical trajectories are not only different, but they are informed by different ways of imagining the federation itself (see, for example, Bonal, Pagès, Verger, and Zancajo's analysis of the historical, political, and policy dimensions in Madrid and Catalonia in this issue).We suspect there is rich further research to be done on this imaginative element and its co-constitutive relationship with political and policy forms and practices.
Fourth, the special issue points not only to the need for deeper theorization of global policy mobilities in federal systems, but also to methodological approaches aimed at avoiding decontextualization, endless description, and simplistic comparisons of these dynamics. Much of comparative federalism research tends to be based on descriptive analyses (e.g., describing phenomena and differences between systems) or based on typologies that are used as frameworks for comparisons based on thin descriptions. Similar trends are seen in comparative education, which has historically relied on descriptive case studies of single or multiple country level systems. As a result, studies offer a decontextualized mapping or following policy rather than generating knowledge about the complexity and the socio-cultural, socio-political, and historical dimensions of analysis of education policy mobilities in federal systems. For example, one aspect often overlooked in studies about global influences in federal systems is the significant differences between subnational entities within federal systems. Differences in geographical conditions, such as the size of territories and populations and access to infrastructure or territorial isolation, can influence how a given subnational state relates to global and federal influence.
Similarly, not all states within a federation have the same level of economic, political and technical resources to develop their bureaucracies, education policies, and infrastructures. For example, Rhoten (2000) showed that in Argentina, variations in material capacities and symbolic identities affected the development of education policies in different provinces. Based on these variations, she developed a typology of three types of provinces-central, peripheral and remotebased on their "varying degrees of geoeconomic distance-literally and figuratively-from Buenos Aires" (p. 609). Furthermore, variations between subnational states also influence the development of educational markets and involvement of non-state actors in education. Taking Argentina as an example again, while 51% of enrollments in the City of Buenos Aires are in private schools, only 10% of students attend private schools in the poorer and less populated provinces in the north of the country (Beech, 2019). Finally, it is important to consider how power imbalances between subnational states affect relations and the flow of educational discourses and policies between them. For example, the rich and powerful states of the south of Brazil, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, have historically designed their own idiosyncratic education policies (often based on global influences). These then became models followed in other states in Brazil, generating certain national consistency without formal involvement of the federal government. Similar trends can be seen with New South Wales and Victoria in Australia and Buenos Aires in Argentina. Thus, although we acknowledge that contextually sensitive comparisons can be both time consuming and difficult, we still contend that the analysis of global policy mobilities in federal education systems should address the nuances and contextual complexities of federal education systems, including the specific legal arrangements, the ways in which scales are constructed and reconstructed and the historical and cultural aspects that shape imaginaries about the nation and subnational states.
The aforementioned tensions are prominent within the contributions included in this special issue. The papers collectively help to delineate a relevant vocabulary for the study of global policy mobilities and their dynamics, with various articles engaging concepts of assemblage, mobilities, scalecraft, space, and time. The articles also provide multiple perspectives on federalisms, including new perspectives on the shifting and reshuffling of arrangements of power and authority of subnations, nations, and regions with respect to global forces. Particularly useful is the geographic crosssection of systems included in these articles, including Spain, Russia, Buenos Aires, Germany, Australia, and a regional focus on federalism as it relates to the EU and Caribbean.

Overview of Special Issue Contributions
In Regional Policy Trajectories in the Spanish Education System: Different Uses of Relative Autonomy, Xavier Bonal, Marcel Pagès, Antoni Verger, and Adrián Zancajo focus on Spain's decentralized educational system and the push-pull dynamics between Spanish regionalism and global policy agendas that have promoted private provision, accountability, school autonomy, and school choice. The paper focuses on educational governance shifts in Madrid and Catalonia, and their differentiated privatization reform, being particularly mindful of the complex intersections of the historical Spanish context of regionalism, the construction of regional political profiles within the national Spanish context, and global agendas of privatization. The paper well illustrates the diversity of actual federalisms and how they affect and are affected by supranational and global policy discourses and flows in different ways.In Taming the Time Zone: National Large-Scale Assessments as Instruments of Time in the Russian Federation, Nelli Piattoeva and Nadezhda Vasileva focus on cross-border policy mobility through a case study of nationwide large-scale assessments in Russia. They examine the compulsory Unified State Examinations and how this national policy instrument-strongly influenced by global developments-is shaping and in turn shaped by both temporal and spatial dynamics at play across the multiple time zones of the Russian Federation. They focus theoretically on both logistical power and sociological perspectives on time to illustrate how time zones are "tamed" in order for this particular national large-scale assessment to become an agent of centralization and power. In so doing, helping to constitute the post-Soviet Russian nation.
Elisa Di Gregorio's Imagining National Funding in the Australian Federation: The Gonski Review and the Schooling Resource Standard focuses on the schooling context of Australia to illustrate the scales of policy formation and movement that emerged in the Gonski Review, a major review of federal school funding. Through this case study, the Review acted as a centralizing force that at the same time positioned national goals against federal constitutional and policy arrangements guiding responsibility and practice regarding school funding across the Australian federal structures. This analysis probes the singularity of definitions of national and scale, as subnational governments play mediating roles in global policy dynamics. As Di Gregorio demonstrates, despite the national agreement on a School Resource Standard and a mechanism for distributing such funds to the states and territories, these jurisdictions as well as Catholic and independent school systems have their own mechanisms for the distribution of the federal funds to their schools, which limit a national approach and its equity intentions. Here we see quite clearly the mediating effects of federal political structure on the implementation of a national funding policy. This national funding policy was motivated by equity concerns as well as anxiety over Australia's declining international comparative performance scores and the nation's future global competitiveness.
In Analyzing (and Comparing) Policy Mobilities in Federal Education Systems: Potentials of a Topological Lens, Sigrid Hartong and Christopher Urbas focus on the utility of topology as an approach and framework for understanding policy mobilities in federal education contexts. Looking at the specific case of Germany, they argue that topology as a relational approach can help to elicit understanding of temporal aspects of policy as well as what they refer to as digital/data space-times. By framing policy in this way, issues of power, authority, agency, positionality, and movement are illuminated to understand how global policy flows have influenced the German federation.
Felicitas Acosta and Tomas Esper's article, Policy Mobilities in Federal Systems: The Case of Proyecta tu Futuro, a Social Impact bond for Education and Employment in the City of Buenos Aires, presents an education policy example in an understudied subnational context. Focused on the city of Buenos Aires, they study of the effects of privatization in a particular subnational jurisdiction that stands in political opposition to the federal government and its educational and economic policies. Authors examine the emergence of the first Social Impact Bond in 2010 and its rapid circulation and diffusion, and the ways in which it is entangled with privatization and public-private dynamics, connecting the city of Buenos Aires with global actors bypassing, not without tensions, national regulations. Through this focus, they reveal the powerful role of global-local policy entrepreneurs as agents who circulate, adopt, and translate the Social Impact Bonds within the context of their own entrepreneurial interests.
Finally, tavis jules and Florin Salajan in Regionalization and Policy Mobilities in Comparative Perspective: Composing Educational Assemblages in Quasi-Federal Polities use policy assemblage, mobilities, and mutation to examine the geographies of trans-regional level education policy development. The authors define the trans-regional level as the transcendence of national territorial borders, interests, and political authorities. Comparing two quasi-federal policy spaces in education, the European Union and the Caribbean Community, this study adds new perspectives on quasi-federalism as an assemblage, comparative regionalisms, and the architecture of multilevel governance.
Collectively, the articles in this special issue provide interdisciplinary insights into the set of four analytical tensions outlined above. In their analyses of global policy mobilities, they provide insights into the diverse political and policy forms, structures, and technologies that shape federal governance architectures in different contexts and the different ways in which they engage with global influences. They also help to rethink and rearticulate how these architectures are shaped by the real and imagined politics, cultures, histories, and path dependencies of different contexts. And in doing so, this issue points to new directions and opportunities for theoretical and methodological developments in the study of global policy mobilities within such complex multi-scalar political and policy arrangements of federal systems.

Bob Lingard
Australian Catholic University and The University of Queensland r.lingard@uq.edu.au Dr. Bob Lingard is a Professorial Fellow at Australian Catholic University and Emeritus Professor at The University of Queensland. His most recent books include, Exploring education policy through newspapers and social media (Routledge, 2023), co-authored with Aspa Baroutsis, and Global-national networks in education: Primary education, social enterprises and Teach for Bangladesh (Bloomsbury, 2022), co-authored with Rino Wiseman Adhikary and Ian Hardy. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4101-9985 Readers are free to copy, display, distribute, and adapt this article, as long as the work is attributed to the author(s) and Education Policy Analysis Archives, the changes are identified, and the same license applies to the derivative work. More details of this Creative Commons license are available at https://creativecommons. About the EPAA/AAPE Editorial Team: https://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/about/editorialTeam Please send errata notes to Audrey Amrein-Beardsley at audrey.beardsley@asu.edu Join EPAA's Facebook community at https://www.facebook.com/EPAAAAPE and Twitter feed @epaa_aape.