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The present article addresses the production and global dissemination of 'policy relevant knowledge'. It not only unpacks the methodological assumptions of a particular type of knowledge production – known as impact evaluations – but also analyses the issue of knowledge mobilisation within the political economy of the global education policy field. Having a critical understanding of impact evaluations is crucial because they are widely regarded as the most valid informational basis from which to make policy decisions. The importance of grasping the methodological limitations and political-economic dynamics that afflict knowledge production and mobilisation is demonstrated through the case of Colombia's well-known charter school programme. By employing a strategy that has been labelled bibliographic ethnography, this article not only takes a critical look at the knowledge base that has been produced on this programme but also maps the way that evaluations of this charter school programme, despite their limitations, have been cited and invoked in academic and organisational publications to project this programme internationally. The article concludes by offering a theoretically-informed discussion of how we should understand the trajectory of impact evaluations (and other knowledge products) as they cross multiple personal, organisational, political, and discursive contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of global education policy, it is common for scholars to reflect on the progress made toward internationally agreed-upon agendas, such as Education for All (EFA). However, scant research has turned the gaze back on the major multilateral institutions that commit to taking the lead in meeting these agendas in order to ask, what implications do such agendas have for these organizations? We respond in this article by investigating the way in which UNESCO used its position as the coordinator of EFA to help it regain some of the legitimacy it lost in the preceding decades. To do so, the article first elaborates a tripartite conceptualization of organizational legitimacy and then applies it to the two prongs of UNESCO’s strategy—EFA coordination and the production of the Global Monitoring Reports (GMRs) during a key period, 2000–2014, that were at the forefront of UNESCO’s efforts to rebrand and reposition itself in the context of multilateralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses multiple perspectives to frame international processes of education policy formation and then applies the framework to El Salvador's Plan 2021 between 2003 and 2005. These perspectives are policy attraction, policy negotiation, policy imposition, and policy hybridization. Research reveals that the formation of Plan 2021 was the product of both policy imposition by international actors and policy negotiation by national policy makers. This article further extrapolates three phenomena from the findings on Plan 2021-termed here percolation, reverberation, and structural legitimization- that help to explain the way in which international influence manifests in national education policy formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]