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For international organisations in the global education policy field, legitimacy is based in large part on the supposed techno-rational basis of these organisations and their ability to credibly produce knowledge and policy expertise. However, as the present article demonstrates, there are clearly a range of macro-micro organisational dynamics driving the production of knowledge and the policy ideas that are advanced. By revealing the way that a particular policy emerged and was promoted "within" the World Bank, this article seeks to expose the way that policy innovation is produced by the iterative interplay of agentic activity and particular organisational circumstances -- and how this process is used to maintain and extend the influence of international organisations and the individuals who represent them. By drawing on Stewart Clegg's 'circuits of power' approach, we seek to theorise the internal dynamics of international organisations, and, in so doing, to move beyond the dominant coercive and normative perspectives.

This paper explores the relationship between the emergence of global education policies and conflict-affected contexts by analysing the trajectory of community-level education decentralization within and beyond El Salvador from the 1980s, during the country's civil war, to the 2000s, by which point this approach to education governance was being widely promoted and adapted around the world. The findings--based on two years of data collection--demonstrate not only the way these contexts can be particularly susceptible to intervention by foreign governments and international organizations but also how, in certain historical-structural moments, those contexts can be transformed and leveraged to experiment with and to entrench certain policies.

Plan 2021 is a national education strategy released by the Salvadoran Ministry of Education (MINED) in March of 2005 to guide education policy through 2021. According to the policy itself, preparation for Plan 2021 began in June 2004 and was the product of four disparate inputs. These include: (a) review of existing research on education produced between 2002 and 2004, (b) creation of a Presidential Commission to offer recommendations, (c) inclusion of commitments made by El Salvador to international agreements (e.g., Education for All and the Millennium Development Goals), and (d) execution of a series of consultations at the local level throughout the country (MINED 2005b). Thus, according to the policy document itself, not only were each of these four inputs given equal weight, but, additionally, there was no involvement by international actors, with the MINED alone managing the process. However, even a cursory search for information related to Plan 2021 indicates that a range of international actors was involved, thus raising questions about how official accounts of the policy’s formation diverge from the process as it actually happened. The case of this policy likewise raises questions about how to investigate and interpret such processes. The present paper not only reveals how Plan 2021 was actually made but also attempts to make a contribution by suggesting the relevance of multi-perspective analysis, in addition to applying multiple perspectives—namely, rational, organizational, and political perspectives—to the interpretation of this case. The content of this analysis is particularly relevant at this point in time to the field of international education policy as scholars are grappling with how to understand and investigate processes of education policy formation characterized by involvement and influence from external (i.e., international) actors. The article concludes by underscoring the utility of this framework while also recommending that it be used in conjunction with insights from recent scholarship on the global governance of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]