Borrowing

The term borrowing has for a long time been a central focus of research in the field of comparative and international education. Due to this disciplinary anchoring, the topic of borrowing has typically been studied in a cross-border manner with a focus on how countries and their governments borrow from the tried-and-tested policy arrangements of other countries. There are two strands of borrowing research worth mentioning here. There is, on the one hand, the normative and applied strand of borrowing research that focuses on studying evidence of ‘best practice’ and the effective transfer and implementation of those practices to other contexts perceived to be in need of reform or improvement. Steiner-Khamsi (2014) argues that the goal of applied research is to provide solutions to identified problems, namely the optimal class size or the optimal frequency for prescribing student tests that enhance the quality of education. On the other hand, there is the analytical strand of borrowing research that situates borrowing as a phenomenon in-and-of-itself worthy of critical attention. Here the focus shifts towards studies that concern how and why borrowing occurs within and across particular spaces and times (Steiner-Khamsi, 2014). The focus of this entry concerns the latter strand of borrowing research.

Different generations of borrowing researchers have focused on distinct topics, from early research that investigated the choice of reference societies in national policy reforms, to more recent studies that analyse, among other things, harmonisation processes facilitated by international organisations such as the European Union. In these studies, the term borrowing is typically accompanied by another term, namely lending, used here to refer to the policy influencer rather than its opposite, the policy recipient. Such binary distinctions may be considered too simplistic to capture the complex realities of borrowing, however, including the actions of those who facilitate or impede such processes. Educational borrowing can also be used to denote a specific mechanism of deliberate and often linear education (policy) transfer (Perry and Tor, 2008) (see entry on ‘Transfer’). Additional terms can be used to represent or stand in for such processes, including the terms reception and translation (Steiner-Khamsi, 2014).