This open access book investigates a topic underexplored in policy transfer: time. Drawing on well-known theories from comparative education, public policy studies, political science, and sociology, but written in an easy-to-understand language, the author discusses seven temporalities of policy transfer: historical period, future, sequence, timing, lifespan, age, and tempo. The temporal dimension helps us understand when the current school reform, known as the school-autonomy-with-accountability reform, developed into a global script, why it conquered the globe, and how it was selectively adopted and translated into each local context. Also, for the first time in this book, the author demonstrates what exactly diffused and what “stuck,” that is, which features of the reform were eventually institutionalized. Internationally renowned for her seminal work on policy borrowing, the author systematically applies a comparative, transnational, and global perspective to capture the role of the OECD and the World Bank in advancing and accelerating the reform’s worldwide diffusion.

Gita Steiner-Khamsi is the William Heard Kilpatrick Professor of Comparative Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, USA, and the Honorary UNESCO Chair of Comparative Education Policy at the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. She published fourteen books (two monographs, twelve edited volumes) and numerous peer-reviewed journal articles on policy transfer/policy borrowing, school reform research, qualitative comparative policy studies, and global governance. She is co-editor of the Qualitative Comparative Policy Studies section of the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice, Past President of the (US) Comparative and International Education Society, and former series editor of the World Yearbook of Education (Routledge).