The Politics of Scale in Policy: Scalecraft and Education Governance 9781447343868

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Directly elected mayors are political leaders who are selected directly by citizens and head multi-functional local government authorities. This book examines the contexts, features and debates around this model of leadership, and how in practice political leadership is exercised through it.

This book will be a valuable resource for those studying or researching public policy, public management, urban studies, politics, law and planning.

Natalie Papanastasiou

The book draws on examples from the Europe, the US and Australasia to examine the impacts, practices and debates of mayoral leadership in different cities and countries. Themes that recur throughout include the formal and informal powers that mayors exercise, their relationships with other actors in governance – both inside municipalities and in broader governance networks – and the advantages and disadvantages of the mayoral model. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are used to build a picture of views of and on directly elected mayors in different contexts from across the globe.

The Politics of Scale in Policy

“A timely and important book on a significant development in city governance and regional leadership; everything you need to know about directly elected mayors.” Keith Grint, Professor of Public Leadership, Warwick Business School, UK

The Politics of Scale in Policy Scalecraft and education governance

Natalie Papanastasiou Foreword by John Clarke

David Sweeting is Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Bristol, UK.

www.policypress.co.uk PolicyPress

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22/08/2018 14:11

THE POLITICS OF SCALE IN POLICY Scalecraft and education governance Natalie Papanastasiou

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Policy Press North America office: University of Bristol Policy Press 1-9 Old Park Hill c/o The University of Chicago Press Bristol 1427 East 60th Street BS2 8BB Chicago, IL 60637, USA UK t: +1 773 702 7700 t: +44 (0)117 954 5940 f: +1 773-702-9756 [email protected] [email protected] www.policypress.co.uk www.press.uchicago.edu © Policy Press 2019 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 978-1-4473-4385-1 hardcover ISBN 978-1-4473-4387-5 ePub ISBN 978-1-4473-4388-2 Mobi ISBN 978-1-4473-4386-8 ePdf The right of Natalie Papanastasiou to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Policy Press. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the author and not of the University of Bristol or Policy Press. The University of Bristol and Policy Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Policy Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design by Clifford Hayes Front cover image: iStock Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Policy Press uses environmentally responsible print partners

Contents About the author Foreword by John Clarke Preface and acknowledgements 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

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Policy, scale and the importance of space Problematising scale in the study of policy Exposing scale hegemonies Knowledge, policy and scale Hegemonies of statecraft and scale Spatial entrepreneurs and scalecraft The practice of scalecraft

References Index

1 15 35 47 69 89 107 129 153

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About the author Natalie Papanastasiou is a postdoctoral researcher of public policy and governance. Her research interests focus on the practices of policymaking and the politics of education governance, which she explores by drawing on theories from policy studies, political geography and public administration. Her work has been published in journals that include Public Administration, Journal of Education Policy, Critical Policy Studies and Environment and Planning A, and she has secured competitive research grants from the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. She is currently based in the Globalisation, Education, and Social Policies (GEPS) research group at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona’s Department of Sociology.

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Foreword This book presents a long overdue encounter between policy studies and critical work on questions of scale (from geographers, anthropologists, political sociologists and others). Scale, as Natalie Papanastasiou argues compellingly, is central to the political and intellectual landscape of policy studies. It is present everywhere and almost always taken for granted as the terrain on which policy takes place  –​whether that be the role of global organisations (such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund) in shaping policy or the local as the site of policy implementation (where the ‘front line worker’ meets the ‘service user’). Between these two levels is the apparently fixed point of the nation –​the place where policy and politics meet, in the offices, corridors, debating chambers and legal drafting departments of the nation-state. Both space and scale matter for policy and policy studies. It has taken a long time to loosen the grip of methodological nationalism on policy studies which has conventionally treated policies as exclusively national phenomena, attached to a particular place and polity, and being devised, directed and enacted by a nation-​state. Such a view enabled a comparative studies approach centred on looking for the similarities and differences between national systems (and attending to their evolution through time). However, this conception of the national space of policy has been increasingly challenged and there has been a growing attention to new domains and dynamics of policy, in particular, those associated with perceived processes of globalisation, regionalisation and Europeanisation. These processes are understood to have unsettled the assumed unities of place, people and policy associated with methodological nationalism. At times, there has been a risk of substituting a methodological globalism in its place, projecting a flat world of policy travel and transfer. What is more important, however, is that much of this emerging scholarship has been framed by a taken for granted conception of the scales or levels at which policy comes into being –​the local, national, European, global and so on. This book takes on this scalar framing directly and aims to enhance and deepen the work of critical and interpretive policy studies, not least by inciting a conversation with critical geographers and others. Critical geographers have done those of us working in policy studies a great favour by undoing such ways of thinking about space and scale –​ both conceptually and politically. For me, my former colleague Doreen Massey (2004; 2005) provided the opening to the relational constitution

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of place. For example, in an interview with Andrew Stevens, she gave a crisply compressed version of her view of the relational character of place making: For me, places are articulations of ‘natural’ and social relations, relations that are not fully contained within the place itself. So, first, places are not closed or bounded –​ which, politically, lays the ground for critiques of exclusivity. Second, places are not ‘given’ –​they are always in open-​ended process. They are in that sense ‘events’. Third, they and their identity will always be contested (we could almost talk about local-​level struggles for hegemony). (Massey, nd) Scale, too, however, is relationally constituted –​even as specific scalar orderings aspire to be seen as natural and normal. My first practical encounter with the problem of scale came at a long-​ago workshop comparing local government in the UK and Germany. The event was supposed to be a classic academic comparison of organisation of government in the two countries. However, the plan came unravelled when it became uncomfortably clear that ‘the local’ was not referring to the same thing in the two countries. So we had a different comparison on our hands: how were both space and scale being ‘made up’ in the government systems of these two places –​the territory, its relationship with other ‘scales of government’, its imagined relationship to the population and more. Scale –​or more precisely what Engin Isin (2007) called ‘scalar thinking’ –​proved profoundly unreliable and unhelpful in this case. It has continued to be so in a variety of forms, whether in the strange juxtapositions of levels (the local and the global) or trying to map scalar hierarchies (as in the idea of multi-​level governance). Scale is ‘made up’ –​both in the sense of being imagined or invented and in the sense of being assembled or composed. This question of the local is central to this book’s exploration of the relationships between scale and policy. In Chapters 5 and 6, Natalie Papanastasiou explores the local in its different incarnations, institutionalisations and inflections. Her tracing of the shifting construction of the local in English education policy (away from its old association with the local authority) through a new political drive for ‘localism’ illuminates just how scale can be effectively re-​imagined –​ and reveals the links between what she calls statecracft and scalecraft. Escaping from the naturalising implications of scale demands a challenge to what Isin calls scalar thinking: ‘the scalar thought that

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underlies our understanding of modern political entities (cities, regions, nations, states…) assumes exclusive, hierarchical and ahistorical relations among and between these entities, and conceals their multiple, fluid and overlapping forms of existence’ (Isin, 2007, 211). To underline Isin’s argument, scalar thinking treats the ‘levels’ of social and spatial organisation as distinct and separate entities that exist in only external relationship to one another –​juxtaposition rather than imbrication or interrelation. Their ordering  –​and the structure it implies  –​is hierarchical, such that each level subsumes, contains or even commands the one(s) below it. Thus, the local is subordinate to the national, which is, in its turn, subordinate to (and subsumed by) the global (see also Freeman’s (2001) reflections on the subordination of local to global). Finally, the ahistorical character of scalar thinking conceals the spatial and temporal conditions of its construction (and the variation of scales) by projecting them as universal –​and thus, a set of conditions that we must inhabit, rather than challenge or change. In parallel with Isin’s comments, the earlier critique by James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta (2002) points to the depoliticising effects of a particular way of thinking about scale –​both in everyday thought and in the social sciences. Indeed, geometrical and spatial metaphors of ‘up there’, ‘grassroots’, ‘bottom-​up’ and ‘top-​down’ are plentiful in the social sciences, in both conventional and critical modes. Writing about ideas of the state, Ferguson and Gupta argue that: Two images come together in popular and academic discourses on the state: those of verticality and encompassment. Verticality refers to the central and pervasive idea of the state as an institution somehow ‘above’ civil society, community, and family. Thus, state planning is inherently ‘top down’ and state actions are efforts to manipulate and plan ‘from above,’ while ‘the grassroots’ contrasts with the state precisely in that it is ‘below’, closer to the ground, more authentic, and more ‘rooted.’ The second image is that of encompassment: Here the state (conceptually fused with the nation) is located within an ever widening series of circles that begins with family and local community and ends with the system of nation-​ states. This is a profoundly consequential understanding of scale, one in which the locality is encompassed by the region, the region by the nation-​state, and the nation-state by the international community. These two metaphors work together to produce a taken-​for-​granted spatial and

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scalar image of a state that both sits above and contains its localities, regions, and communities. (Ferguson and Gupta, 2002, 982) This critique implies a double analytical challenge –​to grasp scales as specific socio-​political inventions (rather than universals) and as constructions with material effects or consequences. The crystallisation or reification of particular scalar formations into normalised and naturalised architectures has to be understood as the outcome of political-​cultural work, producing the arrangements of power, authority and rule inscribed within these architectures. But the resulting orderings are specific to places and times, even when the same vocabulary seems to apply generically. For example, the ‘local’ as a designated space of governing differs widely between nations –​in its spaces, scales and articulation with other levels of governing. Massey has described this conception of scale as resembling ‘a nested set of Russian dolls’ (2004, 9) –​precisely the sense of encompassment that Ferguson and Gupta highlighted. Such a conception of scalar ordering refuses the sort of relational understanding developed in this book. For example, Papanastasiou explores how the European level has come to play a decisive role in educational (and other) policy making as the European Union extended its reach through practices of scalecraft –​making up the scale and investing it with policy making capacities, institutions and relationships. She highlights a fascinating dynamic that contrasts the ‘particular’ character of national policy and practice with the more abstracted or generalised quality of European level reflection and development. Here, the European level appears ‘above’ the politicised, particular and partial quality of national policies: the European level is, she suggests in Chapter 3, characterised by a sense of ‘placelessness’ that transcends the ordinary geography of the various national spaces. This is reminiscent of the strange spatial and scalar qualities attributed to the global by celebrants and theorists of globalisation: the sense that the global is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in particular (but see Cameron and Palan, 2004). With ‘scalar thinking’, we encounter the reification of particular levels and specific ensembles or configurations of levels as the natural or normal order of things. These acquire institutional form and also an aura of institutionalised permanence as they achieve political, journalistic and even academic recognition in acronyms (the EU is surrounded by such things as the EEA, EFTA, ECHR and so on), specialist naming (Schengen/​non-​Schengen; the euro-​zone) and reified technical terms, such as multi-​level governance (for example, Bache

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and Flinders, 2004; Scharpf, 1997; see the critique by Stubbs, 2005). However, the tendencies to which Ferguson and Gupta and Isin refer are only tendencies: the naturalisation and de-​historicisation of scalar thinking is vulnerable to moments of de-​naturalising and historicising counter-​discourses –​in what Papanastasiou calls ‘dislocatory moments’. Challenges to both Europeanisation and globalisation have often drawn on a sense that the ‘proper’ or ‘natural’ scalar order –​centred on the nation-​state –​has been distorted or deformed. For example, the United Kingdom’s political struggles to leave the EU (aka Brexit) rested on arguments about the unnatural and artificial character of the EU as a scalar relation –​one that deformed the proper scalar order of sovereign nation-​states and the inter-​state system. Similarly, the encompassment and verticality that Ferguson and Gupta attribute to state imaginaries proved vulnerable when they were attached to the supra-​national forms of the EU. There, encompassment has been resisted as excessive, while the verticality of European multi-​level governance has been resented as an oppressive force (on re-​imaginings of space, scale and sovereignty in Brexit see, inter alia, Clarke, forthcoming). These refusals do not escape from spatial imaginaries or scalar thinking. Rather, they rest on a juxtaposition of normal–​natural–​ proper configurations of scale, space and sovereignty with artificial, unnatural and excessive configurations. So, the verticality and encompassment enacted in the EU was not experienced as neutral but as a scalar formation that was articulated to economic, political and social projects that have proved contradictory and crisis-​r idden. It was also felt as a mechanism for distributing the costs of failure (especially on fiscal management, see the case of Greece). This is clearly not an end of scalar thinking (nor state imaginaries that are expressed in encompassment and verticality). Rather, the campaign for Brexit rested on a distinction between artificial and natural orders of things in which the national level reclaimed all the naturalising aura of scalar thinking. But what is at stake here is an important reminder about the complicated relational entanglements –​or, perhaps better, articulations  –​of the politics of scale and space. They are commonly entangled, at least in the sense that scalar thinking –​or scalar imaginaries often (usually, always?) invoke senses of place: the intimacy of ‘home’; the attachments of community; the felt density of the local; the ‘imagined community’ of the nation (Anderson, 1991), or the elsewhereness of the global. But we also have to attend to the fact that the ‘material and discursive’ politics of scale always take place in socio-​spatial formations (even as they might attempt to reorganise them and their scalar relationships).

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Rather than focusing on what political scientists have called the multi-​level character of governing, we might want to think about the ways in which political or governmental projects (as well as practices by other actors) bring new spaces into being, or make new framings of space and scale visible, such as ‘South East Europe’ (Stubbs, 2005) or the ‘local health economy’ in the UK (Aldred, 2007). Both South East Europe and the ‘local health economy’ had to be imagined, mapped and produced  –​made into a reality  –​by the very institutions that name themselves as governing the area. Allen and Cochrane (2007) have explored these processes of ‘assembling’ in a study of regional government in England. They make clear the ways in which these are ‘regional’ assemblages, rather than geographically tiered hierarchies of decision-​making, produced through a tangle of interactions and capabilities within which power is negotiated and played out. There is, as the authors show, ‘an interplay of forces in which a range of actors mobilise, enrol, translate, channel, broker and bridge in ways that make different kinds of governing possible’ (2007, 1171; emphasis in original). Such a perspective stresses the political processes by which scales are created and assembled, rather than being pre-​existing sites that become the focus of new mechanisms of governing. ‘Making up’ scales is a social and political practice –​and one with no necessary guarantee of success. Only when the particular ordering of scale becomes established, institutionalised and acted upon can such a politics of scale be called effective. Policy, then, is interwoven with scale in multiple ways. It is created and enacted at specific scales; it creates, adjusts or reinforces particular scalar hierarchies; and it constantly reinforces the significance of scales. In the process, it borrows from the authorisation of existing scalar levels (the placelessness of the European; the weight of the national; the implied membership or sharing of the local, for example). It then reciprocally enhances the authority of those levels –​and the agencies and agents who people them. In Chapter 6, Natalie Papanastasiou takes up the significance of the ‘front line’ in policy work (sometimes known as ‘street level bureaucrats’, Lipsky, 1980). We inherit the idea of the front line from ‘hierarchically integrated’ organisations, particularly the military and state bureaucracies. The front line, in this sense, work at the end of a ‘chain of command’ with a clear scalar structure. In the processes of state reform that have dominated the last 40  years, such vertically integrated organisations have become less common (replaced in part by networks, partnerships, contracting relationships, outsourcing and so on). As a result, the front-​line is somewhat harder to find and front-​line workers may take on new

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forms –​sub-​contracted domiciliary care workers, charity volunteers, or the ‘co-​producing’ users of services. Such front-​line workers are, at least, more distant organisationally from the ‘commanding heights’ of policy and strategy and may be only loosely connected by a variety of organisational devices (contracts, targets, performance management techniques and so on). As a result, the ‘dispersed state’ (Clarke and Newman, 1997) creates a proliferation of front lines and multiplies varieties of front-​line workers. In sum, contemporary policy movements make the spaces and scales of policy both more visible and more problematic (as we argue in Clarke et al, 2015). We should not assume that the inherited vocabulary of policy studies  –​particularly nation-​states and global institutions on the one hand, and the hierarchical modelling of scale on the other –​ can provide adequate or productive analytical resources for studying policy. What is more important is that they were never appropriate to that challenge. Instead, Papanastasiou invites us to consider how policy moves, means and makes things –​including scales themselves. Such entwined projects of policy making, statecraft and scalecraft are, in this view, always unfinished, even when apparently naturalised as necessary and inevitable. John Clarke The Open University (UK) References Aldred, R. (2007) Governing ‘Local Health Economies’:  The Case of NHS Local Improvement Finance Trust (LIFT). PhD thesis, Goldsmiths College, University of London. Allen, J., Cochrane, A. (2007) Beyond the territorial fix: Regional assemblages, politics and power. Regional Studies, 41(9), 1161–​75. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Bache, I., Flinders, M. (eds) (2004) Multi- ​ l evel Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cameron, A., Palan, R. (2004) Imagined Geographies of Globalization. London: Sage Publications. Clarke, J. (forthcoming) Imagining scale, space and sovereignty: The United Kingdom and ‘Brexit’. In D. Nonini, I. Susser (eds) Unsettled States, Movements in Flux, Migrants out of Place: The Tumultuous Politics of Scale. New York: Routledge. Clarke, J., Bainton, D., Lendvai, N., Stubbs, P. (2015) Making Policy Move: Towards a Politics of Assemblage and Translation. Bristol: Policy Press.

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Clarke, J., Newman, J. (1997) The Managerial State: Power, Politics and Ideology in the Remaking of Social Welfare. London: Sage Publications. Ferguson, J., Gupta, A. (2002) Spatializing states:  Towards an ethnography of neo-​liberal governmentality. American Ethnologist, 29(4), 981–​1002. Freeman, C. (2001) Is local: global as feminine: masculine? Rethinking the gender of globalization. Signs, 26(4), 1007–​37. Isin, E. (2007) City.state: Critique of scalar thought, Citizenship Studies, 11(2), 211–​28. Lipsky, M. (1980) Street-​level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Massey, D. (2004) Geographies of responsibility. Geografiska Annaler, 86 B(1), 5–​18. Massey, D. (2005) For Space. Cambridge: Policy. Massey, D. (n.d) The future of landscape: Doreen Massey. Interview by Andrew Stevens. 3:AM Magazine, www.3ammagazine.com/​3am/​ the-​future-​of-​landscape-​doreen-​massey/​ Scharpf, F.W. (1997) Introduction: The problem-​solving capacity of multi-​level governance. Journal of European Public Policy, 4(4), 520–​38. Stubbs, P. (2005) Stretching concepts too far? Multi-​level governance, policy transfer and the politics of scale in South East Europe. Southeast European Politics, 6(2), 66–​87.

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Preface and acknowledgements We live in political times where practitioners and scholars of policy alike are acutely aware of the deeply interconnected and fluid nature of political space. It is no longer possible to make distinctions or delineate clear boundaries between traditional hierarchies of the local, national and global, and policymakers instead need to make policies which reflect the networked and mobile nature of the political world. Despite this widely-​understood political dynamic, scale continues to be the central concept used by policymakers to communicate and make sense of their work. This book explores the political implications of scale holding a privileged position in the toolkits of policymakers and by doing so aims to make a novel contribution to understandings of policymaking practices. I think it is significant to stress that the ideas developed in this book did not originate from a specific research interest in scale. Rather, they began from a more general inquiry into the practices of policymaking through an engagement with critical policy scholarship. This involved seeking to understand the work of policymaking not as consisting of rational actors, causal mechanisms and clearly defined ‘stages’ or ‘cycles’, but instead adopting a lens which studies policy through problematising webs of language, meanings, knowledge and actions. While considering how to make a contribution to this literature, I was researching England’s academy schools policy which was (and continues to be) a policy aiming to reconfigure the relationship between the state, local authorities and schools. An important feature of the agenda of the academies policy was that it advanced a particular idea of who and what were included and excluded from definitions of ‘local’ schools and communities. Engaging with this empirical example made it increasingly clear to me that scale was a major piece of the puzzle in understanding the political implications of policy, and this conviction only intensified during interviews with policy actors whose understandings of scale directly reflected their response to the academies policy. I considered the critical policy studies literature to be the obvious area to look for clues as to how to begin to understand the significance of scale in advancing readings of policy. However, despite the literature being a rich resource for illustrating how to explore policy through a discursive lens, it provided very little guidance for how to make sense of the relationship between

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policy and political orderings of space. This explains my turn to the work of poststructuralist political geographers which proved to be invaluable for highlighting how scale can be conceptualised as a social practice. From this perspective, instead of scales being ‘natural’ features of the social world the book understands scales as being policymakers’ privileged way of describing and ordering political space. Integrating this perspective with a branch of critical policy studies concerned with political discourse theory has allowed the book to develop the concept of ‘scalecraft’ and present it as a new dimension of hegemonic practices of policymaking. The ‘craft’ of scalecraft intentionally draws attention to the techniques and creativity involved in articulating policy using particular representations of scale (Fraser 2010), and by linking this to political discourse theorists’ study of hegemony the book highlights how representations of scale are key to the production of ‘common sense’ in society (Griggs and Howarth 2008). Examining a diverse number of policy issues has enabled the book to highlight multiple dimensions and techniques of scalecraft; its chapters explore issues that include powerful forms of policy knowledge, practices of statecraft and frontline work. Its empirical focus centres on the field of education governance which the book highlights as a particularly fascinating area through which to examine scalar politics, due to education being intimately bound to the production of statehood, meanings of local communities, and more recently to achieving the goals of transnational policy governance. Drawing on detailed interview, observation and document data related to England’s academy schools policy and the European Commission’s Education and Training 2020 framework, the book is able to draw on rich empirical material to examine the importance of scalecraft from multiple angles and to present a novel analysis of how scalar politics play out in the field of education governance. The concept of scalecraft presented here has benefited greatly from being tested and reviewed by academic colleagues in a range of seminars, conferences and workshops over a number of years. These forums have been invaluable in shaping, modifying and extending the conceptualisation of scalecraft. I have been particularly fortunate to present my work on scalecraft as an invited speaker at a number of seminars. These events provided me with a valuable opportunity to present the concept of scalecraft in detail to new audiences, to engage in lengthy discussions, and to identify particular areas that had potential to be developed further. In relation to these events I would like to

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thank Marleen Brans at KU Leuven’s Public Governance Institute (  July 2015), Kirsten Sivesind and Jorunn Møller at the University of Oslo’s Faculty of Education (September 2017), and Janne Varjo at the University of Helsinki’s Sociology of Politics and Education research group (September 2017) for hosting these seminars, and to the audience members for engaging with my work. I am also grateful to Eric Mangez at the School of Political and Social Sciences, Université Catholique de Louvain for hosting me for two seminars (April 2016 and November 2017), which in addition to helping me refine my arguments relating to scalecraft were also key to supporting my analysis of European education governance (including the arguments found in Chapter 4 of this book). The work presented in this book has also benefited from participants at a number of international conferences, but I would particularly like to highlight the importance of two panel series which I co-​convened with Andreas Öjehag-​Pettersson (Karlstad University) at the Interpretive Policy Analysis conferences in Hull (2016) and Leicester (2017). These were especially valuable occasions for developing the ideas in this book and proved to be important opportunities for receiving audience feedback on the relationship between scalecraft and statecraft (Chapter  5) and understanding how politics of scale played out in European expert group meetings (Chapter 4). Moreover, the collective ideas of the paper-​g ivers participating in these panels contributed to my arguments around the spatial dimensions of politics (Chapter 1). I am also grateful to Sadiya Akram, John Boswell, Jack Corbett, Jennifer Thomson and James Weinberg for providing feedback during a workshop on a paper that developed the idea of scalecraft as a practice of frontline work. I thank them for their comments, which directly improved the arguments presented in Chapter 6. The ideas in this book have also benefited greatly from my involvement as a co-​convenor of the Political Studies Association’s (PSA) Space, Governance, and Politics Specialist Group which was formed in 2017. The Group is a joint endeavour with Neil Barnett (Leeds Beckett University), Steve Griggs (De Montfort University) and Colin Lorne (University of Manchester) and I would like to thank them, as well as the wider network of colleagues associated with the Group, for the inspiration they continue to provide in this new platform for exploring the connections between political science and political geography. Conversations with Colin and Steve around the links between theories of governance and space have been a particularly valuable source of learning for me. The Specialist Group’s launch event at the PSA’s 2018 General Conference included a roundtable

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discussion that featured John Allen (The Open University), Sarah Ayres (University of Bristol), Martin Jones (Staffordshire University) and Julie MacLeavy (University of Bristol); their presentations and the subsequent audience discussion during this event posed important questions that helped to frame Chapter 1 of the book. The ideas presented in this book originate in the work that I initially developed in my doctoral thesis, which was supervised by Richard Freeman and Sotiria Grek at the University of Edinburgh. In an academic world that is still dominated by disciplinary silos I consider myself very lucky to have started my academic career alongside Sotiria and Richard, whose openness to cross-​disciplinary thinking was a great support to me. Their scholarly work has been an important influence on the book’s interest in policy practices and education governance, and I continue to admire the kindness and generosity that Richard and Sotiria bring to the profession and to the experiences of early career researchers in particular. By far the biggest thanks for this book are owed to Steven Griggs (De Montfort University). Steve was responsible for suggesting the synergies between scalecraft and political discourse analysis which have become the theoretical bedrock of the book, and his scholarly writing has been one of the major influences of the book’s theoretical orientation. He has provided invaluable feedback on the book’s content, challenging me to consider the wider implications of scalecraft, and this ranged from when it was being developed as a proposal to when its draft chapters were being finalised. I often sought out this feedback at difficult points in the writing process, during which Steve’s insightful comments and suggestions, as well as his humour, were always extremely appreciated. I consider myself very privileged to have him as a colleague, and his advice and mentorship have had a considerable impact on my academic career to date. Thank you, Steve. I am delighted that the book’s foreword has been written by John Clarke, and I sincerely thank him for agreeing to engage with my work in this way. I have long been inspired by how John has been a key force in shaping the field of policy studies, especially by the way he draws on disciplines across the social sciences to understand the puzzles of policy and governance. It is therefore of particular significance to me that this book includes a contribution from him. The majority of this book was written while I have been working in the supportive environment of the Globalisation, Education, and Social Policies (GEPS) research group in the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona’s Department of Sociology. As well as thanking the wider research group I  would particularly like to thank Toni Verger for

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welcoming me into this academic environment and for his mentorship since my arrival. At Policy Press I  would like to thank Laura Vickers for being a consistently helpful and reliable editor who has been extremely easy to communicate with about all aspects of the book’s production. I am also very grateful to the anonymous reviewers of the book proposal and manuscript for their suggestions and critical feedback which helped to further refine the book’s arguments as well as to improve the overall narrative by suggesting changes to the chapter structure. This book was written while I was in receipt of a research grant by the Leverhulme Trust. It is difficult to envisage how the book would have been written without this award, which allowed me to extend my work on scalecraft further by considering how it played out in an empirical study of European education policymaking. The Trust plays a pivotal role in the current research funding landscape, particularly for supporting interdisciplinary projects, and its award has been crucial to advancing my early career development. I would like to express special thanks to Bridget Kerr at the Trust for assisting me with all the administrative aspects of the award and project fieldwork. I would also like to thank the UK Economic and Social Research Council which generously funded my doctoral studies that generated the data on England’s academy schools policy. While all the individuals and events described here have shaped the arguments presented in this book for the better, I  would like to emphasise that I  alone am responsible for any of the book’s shortcomings. Finally, outside the academic environment I  would like to thank my family and particularly my parents for their love and support. And finally, to David, for unwaveringly cheering me on throughout the writing of this book, and reminding me to celebrate the small milestones along the way.

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Policy, scale and the importance of space Succeeding in the art of policymaking in contemporary politics involves designing policies which reflect the deeply interconnected nature of political space. And yet, while the fluid and networked nature of political space is undisputed, policy continues to be articulated through the age-​old categories and hierarchies of scale. Indeed, it is difficult to understate the importance of scale for giving order and clarity to our understandings of policy. If we were for a moment to imagine a world without the vocabularies and metaphors of scale, thereby eliminating categories such as the local, national, or global, we would quickly find our abilities of expression and comprehension to be profoundly stunted. For social scientists, dichotomies such as ‘micro versus macro’, ‘local versus global’, and ‘bottom-​up versus top-​down’ reflect how metaphors and categories of scale remain at the heart of social inquiry. This book asks why scale occupies this enduring position of privilege in the work of policymaking. By highlighting how scales are far from ‘natural’ features of policy and that they are instead essential to the armoury of policy practice, the book presents ‘scalecraft’ as a new dimension of policymaking. Engaging with diverse empirical material enables the book to not only demonstrate the importance of scalecraft but to also build on understandings of how hegemony is produced, challenged and sustained. The book explores its central puzzle by adopting a cross-​disciplinary theoretical lens which integrates critical studies of policy with political geography. This opening chapter establishes why such a cross-​ disciplinary lens is necessary to understanding the politics of scale in policy. Specifically, the chapter argues that for policy studies to critically engage with scale as a political concept, the study of policy needs to engage in a cross-​disciplinary dialogue with human geography literature on ‘space’. The chapter demonstrates that a space-​sensitive approach to policy analysis would involve being receptive to the idea that spatial concepts and categories are crucial to shaping the practices of policymaking.

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The discussion which follows introduces what the study of space implies for the interests of social scientists, suggests a number of issues which have contributed to the lack of engagement with space in the field of policy studies, and then turns to describing the exciting potential for theoretical engagement with space for enriching understandings of politics and policy. The chapter ends by outlining the book’s forthcoming chapters which develop the novel conceptual approach of scalecraft which aims to extend policy studies through a critical engagement with scalar politics.

The book’s approach to space and policy On the final day of a European meeting in Brussels, the participating national representatives were asked to reflect on ‘horizontal messages’ relating to governing school systems across Europe. A presentation by a European Commission coordinator described the meeting as ‘testing our ideas out in a learning laboratory, and placing them in our European context.’ The coordinator went on to characterise the uniqueness of the group as possessing an ‘understanding of the European context and all our national contexts’, and described how the group was fostering a ‘multi-​level culture of learning’. Participants were given a final task to complete in small groups, which was to discuss the common principles of governing school systems that the group had generated in previous meetings. The small group I observed entered into a debate about whether the voices of parents and pupils should be included in discussions about governing school systems. No consensus was reached, and when asked to summarise their discussion one member simply stated, ‘we discussed that each of the principles are interpreted differently in different contexts’. (Observation notes) This vignette is from a political ethnography I conducted and focuses on a European meeting of national policymakers working to develop best practice policies for governing school systems. It connects very clearly to multiple issues such as the role of knowledge and expertise in policy, decision-​making practices, multi-​level governance and policy learning, which lend themselves to well-​established theories of policy analysis. But underpinning all these issues, I propose, is an expression of policy actors’ profound preoccupation and anxiety that relates to making sense of ‘the spatial’. For example, it is clear that the European

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Commission is framing the meeting as being ‘multi-​level’ and ‘European’ which helps to reinforce the legitimacy of constructing horizontal best practices about governing school systems. Acknowledging the importance of national contexts also reflects the delicate balancing act performed by European policymakers where, on the one hand, they encourage the production of ‘European’ knowledge but, on the other hand, they cannot be seen to be dismissing the specificity of national contexts. The responses of the national representatives also reflect their struggle over the spatial dimension of policy. The debate between participants reveals how some consider the voices of parents and pupils to be concealed in the discussions of generalised European policies, and their lack of consensus demonstrates how the complexity of ‘context’ has prevented them from reaching an agreement over common principles for governing school systems. In other words, the vignette makes clear how questions around the spatial are central to understanding policy. It brings sharply into focus how struggles over making sense of the spatial are a defining feature and challenge of all policy work. Policy actors wrestle with spatial concepts and are constantly challenged to bridge the seemingly intractable divide between acknowledging the specificity of place and creating policies that are generalisable across space. While this book is preoccupied specifically with how scale occupies a privileged position in the spatial discourses of policymaking, it is essential to propose a theoretical basis from which policy scholars can begin to unpack and conceptually develop concepts of spatial politics. Human geography is undoubtedly the discipline which holds the greatest potential for gaining insights about the role of the spatial in policy. The geographical discipline holds a long history of scholarly debates relating to the relationship between space and society and has approached this issue by developing rich and wide-​ranging literatures. It is therefore important to clarify the chosen approach to space that this book considers the most useful for its overarching interest. The policy vignette presented above and the subsequent justification for why space is key to understanding the politics at play in policymaking have already revealed to the reader the key tenets of this book’s approach to space. For the purposes of this chapter, I wish to highlight two important features of the book’s chosen approach to space: relationality and sense-​making. This is an approach that moves away from assuming that there is anything natural or fixed about space, and argues that the production of space will always be political and underpinned by power struggles. It rejects a ‘Euclidian’ view of space which focuses on its measurable dimensions and which tends

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to analyse how separate entities are ‘contained within discrete and very often homogeneous social spaces’ (Law and Urry, 2004, 398). By contrast, an approach which emphasises relationality understands space as the product of interrelations which range from ‘the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny’ (Massey, 2005, 9). The book draws on Doreen Massey’s conceptualisation of relational space, which also highlighted space as heterogenous, and always under construction (Massey, 1992; Massey, 2004). The implications of this is that the relationship between space and society is co-​constitutive and impossible to prise apart (Massey and Allen, 1984). This is a key argument put forward by human geographers to justify why they consider it imperative and crucial to study the social through a consistent engagement with space. The second important part of the book’s approach to space is that it understands it as a powerful epistemology which is central to sense-​ making practices (  Jones, 1998). In other words, the spatial categories which social actors constantly rely on in order to make sense of their worlds –​the local, the border, the urban –​are used as an analytical entry point to understanding the spatial (Moore, 2008). The book takes a particular interest in the language and categories assigned to space in the discourses and practices of policy. This is not to imply that space is only what is seen or expressed. Instead, I argue that a focus on how policies and policymaking practices are articulated in spatial terms provides an analytical starting point for teasing out the relationship between politics and space. The strength of focusing on space as a sense-​making device is that it offers an analytical solution to the ‘slippery’ and elusive concept of space, which outside the geographical discipline can often be considered vague and confusing to engage with. For readers who wish to know more about the spatial theories I have briefly alluded to here, I encourage them to refer to the work I have cited above. The book bridges this approach to space with an interest in policy that takes inspiration from the critique articulated by scholars associated with the expansive ‘critical policy studies’ literature. This literature includes a theoretically diverse set of scholarly voices, who use a number of approaches and methods to analyse policy (for example, Fischer and Forester, 1993; Yanow, 1996; Howarth et al, 2000; Wagenaar, 2011; Fischer and Gottweis, 2012b; Fischer et al, 2015b). However, these approaches are broadly united by their rejection of traditional scientific paradigms that have been established in political science and public administration and which have, until recently, been the dominant influence in the field of policy studies. These scientific paradigms have led to the study of policy through a positivist lens that stresses

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Policy, scale and the importance of space

the importance of identifying causal mechanisms and making accurate measurements and predictions. Critical policy scholars have produced a diverse body of work that conceptualises the narratives, practices, frames, and logics of policy (to name a few) to offer an alternative to law-​like explanation in policy studies (Griggs and Howarth, 2013). A basic assumption of this approach is that policy is socially constructed and its meaning is fluid and emergent due to being constantly subject to processes of re-​interpretation. The book specifically bridges an understanding of relational space with the work of policy scholars drawing on political discourse theory (Howarth et al, 2000; Glynos and Howarth, 2007; Griggs and Howarth, 2013). This approach to policy analysis can be summarised as one which is committed to understanding how systems of hegemony are established, sustained and replaced. It is an approach which studies the discourses and practices of policy in order to reveal the discursive struggles involved in the construction of hegemony, and considers the social world to be one characterised by radical contingency. It is clear from this brief description of the book’s approach to policy that it is highly compatible with a relational approach to space developed in human geography. Both emphasise the heterogeneity and instability of social meanings, and explore processes of co-​constitution and emergence. Chapter 2 reviews the literatures associated with ‘critical policy studies’ in greater detail and also elaborates on the specific analytical approach of political discourse analysis of which the book makes use. The book’s forthcoming chapters will elucidate more about how exactly an approach which conceptualises space and policy in this way is vital to exploring the political significance of the privileged position occupied by scale in the practices of policymaking. Before turning to these issues, it is important to first reflect on the possible reasons why discussions relating to the politics of space have remained overwhelmingly absent from the field of policy studies.

Lost in space: the difficulty of engaging with the spatial Conceptualising and analysing space is without doubt the defining characteristic of human geography. This way of characterising the distinctiveness of geographers has been constructed from both within the geographical discipline as well as from other disciplines observing geography from the outside. On their part, geographers have long argued that their distinctive contribution to the study of society is to take seriously the role of space and find ways ‘to think spatially about the social world’ (  Jones, 2012, 3). Many have called this the ‘geographical

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imagination’ which places an interest in the spatial at the centre of social inquiry rather than considering it as a single element or variable for analysis to consider (Agnew and Duncan, 1989). Human geography has been the disciplinary field which has developed the most sustained, advanced and plural conceptualisations of the spatial dimension of society and politics. Geographers have been at the forefront of theorising that ‘the spatial is socially constructed; [and] the social is spatially constructed too’ (Massey, 1984, 6). They have developed multiple approaches for investigating the relationship between society, politics and space, by drawing on diverse theoretical concepts that include political economy, feminism, Marxism and culture (  Johnston and Sidaway, 2016). Indeed, human geographers have consistently emphasised their commitment to disciplinary plurality, which is something which has often made it difficult for geographers’ to articulate the distinctiveness of their discipline to those operating outside geography (Blij, 2012). However, geography’s apparent inability to be ‘disciplined’, choosing instead to continually bring together concepts from across different disciplines is an argument that many geographers have embraced, by arguing that it adds to geography’s distinctiveness (Thrift and Whatmore, 2004). The development of expansive and pluralist theorisations of space has also led to geographers developing an increasingly diversifying language for discussing ‘the spatial’. This language of the spatial includes highly specific terms and descriptions that have very often evolved to become the exclusive language of geographers. Terms such as ‘time–​space compression’ (Harvey, 1989), ‘spatio-​temporal fix’ (for example, Jessop, 2000), ‘scalar structuration’ (Brenner, 2001) and ‘phase space’ (  Jones, 2009) exemplify how geography has developed a highly specialised language to reflect its in-​depth engagement with space. While these terms will be familiar to a human geography audience, they are often unknown and confusing to scholars working in different disciplines. Moreover, these terms are underpinned by important ontological differences for the analysis of space, which are difficult to identify by those outside the discipline who lack a deep understanding of the debates in which they are situated. Without casting any doubt whatsoever over the value or richness of this geographical vocabulary, one of its side-​effects appears to have been that it has constructed a barrier for other disciplines to engage with geographical scholarship. And it would appear that in the case of political science and public administration –​the disciplines which have been most influential to policy studies –​it has been especially challenging to recognise common lines of inquiry that scholars may be

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pursuing across the disciplines (Marsh and Savigny, 2004). I argue that the highly specialised spatial language of human geographers has made it easier for the political science and public administration literature to designate –​and, at worst, entirely dismiss –​debates about space as ‘something that geographers do’. The solution to this would not be to advocate for a simplification of spatial concepts and processes. On the contrary, the very power of space as a concept lies in its plurality of meaning and approaches, reflecting the complex and diverse nature of society. However, the issue of language is something that needs to be directly understood as an important barrier if we are to foster greater dialogue about what kinds of spatial concepts might be relevant to the study of policy. Moreover, recognising the challenges of engaging with geographical language on space will also be one of the first necessary steps for scholars from different disciplines to collectively identify common lines of inquiry that are largely taking place in parallel to each other but under different names. The issue of scholarly language is closely related to the phenomenon of defining and defending disciplinary boundaries that occurs across the social sciences (Leftwich, 1984). Human geography has a particularly difficult and complex history that relates to justifying its unique offer and worth in relation to other social science disciplines, which can be partly attributed to the especially diverse spectrum of approaches that are included under the umbrella of ‘human geography’ (see Livingstone, 1992). Similarly, political science and public administration also have a long history of ‘protecting’ their disciplinary borders and defining what kinds of scholarship do or do not belong within their scholarly spaces (Hay, 2002). A notable example of this has been the way that political science has been particularly resistant to challenges to its positivist roots from interpretivist and poststructuralist scholars, who have often borrowed from other disciplines to re-​think the study of politics. Although there is now a wealth of critical scholars working in the discipline who use critical theoretical approaches, they continue to be in the minority (Finlayson et al, 2004). In sum, defending disciplinary borders and academic tribalism have played an important role in obscuring possibilities for policy scholars and human geographers to identify common research pathways. The lack of dialogue between policy studies and human geography can also be explained by the historical inconsistency of geographers’ interest in engaging with policy. For example, the late 1990s and early 2000s saw a number of papers published by highly influential geographers which highlighted geography’s ‘missing policy agenda’ and which called for this to be addressed (for example, Martin, 2001;

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Massey, 2001; Dorling and Shaw, 2002; Peck, 2004). While these papers attracted significant reflection and debate within the discipline (for example, James et al, 2004; Beaumont et al, 2005; Burgess, 2005; Eden, 2005; Johnston and Plummer, 2005; Owens, 2005; James, 2006), a few years later ‘papers in this area slow[ed] to a trickle’ once again (Ward, 2007, 696; Ward, 2006). The last decade has seen a new wave of resurging interest in the geographies of policy. This is largely driven by the ‘policy mobilities’ literature which broadly seeks to conceptualise the movement of policies across space as well as to understand how policies become embedded in situated places (McCann, 2011; McCann, 2008; Prince, 2012; McCann and Ward, 2013; Temenos and McCann, 2013; Peck and Theodore, 2015). While the policy mobilities literature has attracted some attention from parts of the political science community (Dolowitz, 2017), what remains clear is that geographers’ engagement with policy has been one of ‘ebb and flow’ rather than one of sustained, long-​term engagement. This lack of a continuously evolving geographical literature on policy is highly likely to have affected the (lack of) cross-​disciplinary dialogue with the political science and public administration literature, which continues to dominate the area of policy studies as well as being the main influence on policymaking arenas. I have briefly reflected on the possible reasons and barriers for a lack of disciplinary dialogue between geographical conceptualisations of space and policy studies because this appears to be a particularly persistent disciplinary silo. While political science and public administration remain the dominant disciplines framing the field of policy studies, there is now a rapidly growing dialogue between policy studies and other disciplines which include sociology, science and technology studies, and social psychology (for example, Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2007; Fischer, 2000; Hermann, 2014). On the other hand, human geography has also demonstrated long-​term dialogues with other disciplines, most notably with (but not restricted to) sociology, anthropology and cultural studies (for example, Agnew and Duncan, 1989; Cvetkovich and Kellner, 1997; Cieraad, 2006; Clarke, 1984). The intensification of geographers’ dialogues with other disciplines has resulted in the theories and language of space becoming well-​ integrated in many research areas outside human geography –​what many areas of the social sciences have branded the ‘spatial turn’. Indeed, in their edited volume on the ‘spatial turn’ Barney Warf and Santa Arias (2009, 1)  describe human geography’s ‘profound conceptual and methodological renaissance’ making an impact across multiple

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Policy, scale and the importance of space

disciplines of the social sciences. While this may be the case in some areas of the social sciences, this ‘renaissance’ has been distinctly absent in political science and public administration (Howarth, 2006; Ethington and McDaniel, 2007; Papanastasiou, 2017a). In light of these significant and challenging barriers to fostering a meaningful dialogue between policy studies and human geographers’ focus on space, the book sets itself the task of demonstrating what a space-​sensitive critical policy analysis might look like. The chapters which follow aim to clearly convey what the implications of relational space are for conceptualising the relationship between scale and policy, and to clarify what these spatial politics imply for the politics of policymaking. By delineating the relevance of space to the field of policy studies in this way, the book also demonstrates very clear pathways for identifying common research avenues and theoretical interests shared by policy scholars and political geographers. Imperative to achieving this is to conduct in-​depth, empirical analysis from which the book builds important conceptual insights about the politics of scale in policy.

A focus on education policy and governance This book grounds its conceptual arguments in the empirical area of education policy and governance. Education policy and governance is an area which has received little attention in both policy studies and human geography. In political science in general, education policy can be characterised as making periodic ‘guest appearances’, but on the whole, it remains a strikingly neglected area of policy (  Jakobi et al, 2009). A number of critical scholars are demonstrating that a focus on education policy and governance is just as important as any other empirical focus for making contributions to theories of international organisations (for example, Martens and Balzer, 2007; Grek, 2014), the role of knowledge in policymaking (for example, Grek and Ozga, 2010), frontline work (for example, Papanastasiou, 2017b), and policy networks (for example, Williamson, 2016). For the large part though, education continues to be relegated to the domain of the education sciences or a sub-​section of sociology rather than being of central interest to political science and public administration. As a result, education remains a relatively neglected empirical focus in the key debates of policy studies. An emerging literature on ‘critical geographies of education’ has successfully placed the study of spatial politics on the agenda for education policy scholars (for example, Helfenbein and Taylor, 2009;

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Pini et al, 2017). This has involved a group of critical education scholars arguing that by engaging with the relationality and multiplicity of spatial politics, their work can ‘disrupt understandings in, and posit new possibilities for, “mainstream” education policy studies’ (Gulson and Symes, 2007, 2). This book shares a similar outlook with these education scholars when it comes to arguing about the potentials of engaging with the politics of space as a way of extending critical understandings of education policy. However, this book does not wish to single out education as holding a unique or exceptional type of spatial politics, nor does it aim for its contribution to resonate exclusively with education scholars. This book instead uses education as an empirical case for considering questions being asked by all scholars and researchers of policy, regardless of their empirical field of study. This is reflected in how the book will consistently link its analysis of education policy and governance to larger questions that relate to issues such as the role of knowledge in policy, strategies of statecraft, practices of frontline work, and the study of hegemony. The focus on education policy and governance is deliberately emphasised to convey that the book does not limit itself to an analysis of age-​based or specific forms of institutionalised education. Instead, education policy is understood to be constructed and circulated through processes of governance, which include complex policy networks, the circulation of knowledge and technologies, in addition to the continued importance of hierarchical relationships and institutional structures (see Wilkins and Olmedo, 2018; Sørensen and Torfing, 2018). The book explores the scalar politics of policy by drawing on empirical data from two research projects. The first project was a three-​year PhD project (2011–​2014) funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (grant number ESIO1943X/​1) which explored the implementation of England’s academy schools policy in two local authority case studies. Data collection involved conducting 30 semi-​structured interviews with local authority officers, academy principals, academy sponsors, and academy chairs of governors across the two case studies between September 2012 and April 2013. The case studies revealed two contrasting responses to the academies policy, and the project explored the practices which enabled policy actors working in local authorities and schools to respond to the policy in contrasting ways. The project analysis also drew on national and local authority policy documents related to the academy schools policy, although, in the interests of protecting the identity of the participating institutions, local authority documents are not directly quoted.

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Policy, scale and the importance of space

The project chose to anonymise all participating institutions, which included giving synonyms to the two local authorities (calling them ‘Northwestern’ and ‘Eastshire’). The local authorities were anonymised to protect the individual identity of interviewees. This was deemed essential because there was only a limited number of local authority officers involved in shaping the response to the academies policy and naming the authority risked quotations being attributable to individuals. The participating academy schools were also anonymised for a similar reason: in each academy the principal and chair of governors were the key actors making decisions related to the academies policy and this made them easily identifiable individuals if their school was not anonymised (for more information see Papanastasiou, 2015). The book also draws on empirical data from a two-​year postdoctoral research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust (grant number SAS-​2016-​048). This project explored the knowledge practices of a European expert group called the Working Group on Schools which focused on developing best practices for the governance of school systems. The Working Group was coordinated by the European Commission and primarily consisted of country representatives from ministries of education across Europe, and the project aimed to unpack how country representatives shared knowledge about their national school systems to subsequently generate universal best practices. To explore this aim, I conducted a political ethnography of the Working Group by acting as a non-​participating observer of meetings held between December 2016 and November 2017. I observed a total of five meetings (the length of each ranged between two and four days) which amounted to approximately 100 hours of observation. The project also involved conducting semi-​structured interviews with 15 policy actors who were either country representative participants or European Commission coordinators in the meetings. While these interviews have informed the analysis presented in this book, the analysis presented here engages most directly with the observation data. Observation data was documented using field notes. Fieldwork access to observe Working Group meetings was granted on the agreement that I would anonymise all participants –​including the countries they represented –​in my research analysis and writing. In each meeting a single country was only represented by one or two individuals (usually the same person over the course of different meetings), so this degree of anonymisation was essential for protecting participants’ individual identities. The research aims focused on the process of developing best practices as a collective policy activity, and therefore it was not necessary to trace the individual contributions of each country representative.

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By drawing on empirical data from these research projects and by adopting an understanding of space as being co-​constitutive of society and politics, the remaining chapters of this book problematise and explore the politics of scale in policy. Collectively, this enables the book to use a cross-​disciplinary lens and develop ‘scalecraft’ as a key concept for enabling policy studies to integrate a critical approach to scale into their analytical frameworks.

Outline of the book This chapter has clarified the overarching approach to space required for policy studies to begin to problematise the political implications of scale. The focus of Chapter 2 turns to unpacking the concept of scale in greater detail. The chapter details how the field of policy studies consistently reifies scales by using them to describe and analyse the social world. In order to present the possibilities for a different reading of scale, the chapter reviews the political geography literature on scale, and identifies the work of poststructuralist scholars in this field who understand scale as a type of social practice to be particularly valuable for extending understandings of policy. The chapter outlines how the book integrates poststructuralist political geographers’ arguments with political discourse theory to argue that scale needs to be understood as a set of practices which are inextricably linked to the production of hegemony. It also introduces ‘scalecraft’ as the book’s guiding concept for capturing the fundamental political practices embedded in the guiding logics of policymaking, and outlines how the empirical chapters draw on the ‘logics of critical explanation’ approach (Glynos and Howarth, 2007) as a way of conceptually building the concept of scalecraft to shed new light on understandings of hegemony. Chapter 3 opens with a brief review of the critical education literature  that has focused on exploring the area of ‘education governance’. By examining the key approaches to education governance, the discussion highlights how it has largely neglected to problematise scale and outlines how education governance is a field that is teeming with scalar politics. The second part of the chapter aims to present an analytical entry point for policy scholars seeking to explore possible practices of scalecraft in policy contexts. It does so by outlining the key tenets of a genealogical perspective which draws on political discourse theory, paying particular analytical attention to the ‘dislocatory moments’ of policy and it applies this perspective to explore the empirical case of European education governance. Analysis traces how education policy has become an increasingly important

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Policy, scale and the importance of space

field in the governance of Europe, and particularly focuses on how this political transition was only made possible through changing the meaning of European and national scales. In this way, the chapter illustrates the importance of a genealogical perspective for identifying scale hegemonies, revealing their contingency, and understanding how the crafting of scale dynamically shifts in relation to wider political framings of policy. Having demonstrated the instability of scale hegemonies over time, the book then turns to examining the relationship between scale, knowledge, and policy in Chapter 4. It presents an empirical analysis of the European Commission’s Education and Training 2020 (ET 2020)  strategic framework, exploring the practices of scale which co-​constitute the logics of benchmarks, best practices and peer learning. Analysis focuses on the official narratives of ET 2020 as well as studying the case study of the European Commission’s Working Group on Schools by presenting observation data of policy practices taking place during the group’s meetings. The empirical analysis develops the argument that hegemonic knowledge regimes are sustained by distinct practices of scalecraft. In particular, analysis reveals how scalar practices profoundly shape powerful knowledge narratives and dominant ‘ways of knowing’ in policy, and sheds light on how hegemonic knowledge regimes order and classify the world through crafting scale. Chapter 5 shifts its focus to argue that scalecraft helps to shed light on the hegemonic techniques and strategies of statecraft. The chapter explores this argument by outlining how education has long been the traditional focus of statecraft, and that this has involved struggles to distribute the roles and responsibilities relating to education policy across local, regional and national scales. The key focus of the chapter are the statecraft strategies which are linked to the ‘localism’ agenda, whose narrative promotes the devolution of greater responsibilities to local institutions and communities. By focusing on how the localism agenda has played out in the governance of England’s school system, the chapter illustrates how this form of statecraft has relied on hegemonic practices of scalecraft which construct ‘the local’ in relation to greater freedoms and choice. Furthermore, analysis shows how these scalecraft practices are instrumental to disguising alternative political dynamics associated with the localism agenda; in the case of England’s school reforms (particularly through the academy schools policy) scalecraft is helping to disguise the advancement of market logic. Chapter 6 turns to consider how scalecraft can shed light on understandings of the frontline work of policymaking. By doing so, it reveals how scalecraft practices can be instrumental to facilitating

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The politics of scale in policy

frontline actors’ attempts to resist hegemonic strategies of statecraft. It presents an analysis of a case where key tenets of England’s national academies policy were resisted by a local authority, and examines the accounts of local authority and academy school actors involved in this policymaking context. Analysis reveals how frontline work involved consistently reconfiguring the national academies policy narrative by rejecting how the policy made a distinction between the local authority and local schools. Policy actors instead crafted the local scale in a way that placed the local authority at the centre of local meanings. The chapter thus points to how scalecraft can also become a counter-​ hegemonic practice when it is used to reconfigure the scalar narratives of dominant statecraft strategies. Reflecting on the insights from the empirical analysis presented in Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6, Chapter 7 presents the key conceptual tenets of ‘the practice of scalecraft’. The chapter outlines the key conceptual features of scalecraft for the study of policy, which include three key techniques of scalecraft and how scalecraft is related to processes of politicisation and depoliticisation. The discussion also outlines the book’s methodological contribution to the ‘logics of critical explanation’ approach, and describes the key contributions to critical policy studies, political geography and studies of education governance. The final part of Chapter 7 returns to one of the overarching arguments of this opening chapter: that the field of policy studies has much to gain from engaging with human geographers’ conceptualisations of space. By presenting and developing the concept of scalecraft, and demonstrating how scalecraft practices are integral to understanding the practices and politics of policy, the book concludes that it has offered one way forward for ‘making space’ for spatial politics in policy studies. The book ends by suggesting how policy studies might be further enriched and extended by considering how other forms of spatial politics –​beyond scale –​are of central importance to making sense of contemporary political dynamics. I close this chapter with an observation by Jonathan Murdoch (2006, viii) who points out that, ‘[f]‌rom a post-​structuralist perspective, books, even those that are single-​authored, constitute “collectives” ’ in that they bring together different and disparate literatures, theoretical interests and ‘ways of seeing’ the world. This book’s approach wholeheartedly embraces this post-​structuralist outlook, and the following chapters aim to show how this perspective holds exciting possibilities for developing new readings of the politics of policymaking.

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Problematising scale in the study of policy Actors use scale categories not just to interpret spatial politics, but to frame and define, and thereby constitute and organize, social life. (Moore, 2008, 218) As the above quotation by the political geographer Adam Moore describes, scale is fundamental to interpreting and ordering social life. This chapter argues that recognising the role of scale in this manner has been almost entirely absent in the field of policy studies, and that this overlooks an essential dimension of policymaking practices. The first section of the chapter shows how the concept of scale is fundamental to how policy scholars have approached making sense of the actors, processes and structures shaping policy, but that this involves scale being used descriptively rather than its political dimensions being recognised. The second section illustrates the possibilities for a more critical approach to scale by reviewing the political geography debates on scale. In particular, the poststructuralist political geography literature on scale which conceptualises scale as a social practice is considered to hold the greatest potential for enriching the study of policy. The chapter’s third section then turns to identifying how a poststructuralist approach to scale is highly compatible with the broad literature on ‘critical policy studies’. Despite critical policy studies scholars advancing powerful critiques of positivist political science and promoting an engagement with the multiple meanings and practices of policymaking, the discussion shows that the meanings and practices of scale remain under-​conceptualised and under-​studied. Having established the lack of engagement with the political dimensions of scale in policy studies, the chapter’s final sections introduce the concept of ‘scalecraft’ as a hegemonic practice and strategy of policymaking that reflects how meanings of policy are co-​constituted by the metaphors and language of scale. The chapter concludes by outlining how scalecraft is explored through a lens that integrates poststructuralist political geography with political discourse

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theory, and which draws on the ‘logics of critical explanation’ approach (Glynos and Howarth, 2007).

Assumptions of scale in the study of policy The field of ‘policy studies’ is an area of study which is characterised by significant diversity and plurality. It ranges from traditional, technocratic policy analysis which focuses on processes such as different stages of the policy cycle, to discursive approaches to policy studies that include drawing on interpretive and practice-​based theories (Fischer et  al, 2006). Despite this diversity, when it comes to dealing with scale policy scholars rely on, and reproduce, very similar assumptions. Namely, they base their analysis of policy on the notion of the world being ordered according to a vertical scaffolding, something which is reflected by how the vocabulary of policy analysis features constant references to different ‘levels’, hierarchies and dualisms such as ‘micro’ versus ‘macro’. This section elaborates on this argument by considering in greater detail how the concept of scale has been used to support the study of the actors, processes, and governing architectures of policy. Studying the actors of policy involves a number of assumptions about scale. On a basic level, scale is one of the key identifying labels given to policy actors, with actors typically being classified as local, national and global. These labels are used to highlight how there is something significant about a policy actor’s position along the scalar hierarchy, and suggests that an actor’s position in scale implies different kinds of roles, responsibilities and power. This is particularly clear in the policy literature which discusses the agency and discretion exercised by policy actors by constantly highlighting the importance of the position policy actors occupy along different levels of policymaking. For example, the concept of a ‘street-​level bureaucrat’ (Lipsky, 1971) is underpinned by the assumption that an actor’s position at the level of the ‘street’ has direct implications for the kinds of agency they can exercise. Coalitions or communities of policy actors are also studied through the lens of scale. Delineating whether coalitions of policy actors work within a particular tier of government, a locality, or even across different scales is considered an essential focus for studying policy processes. This point can be highlighted by the example of the advocacy coalition framework (ACF), which is a highly influential concept of policy studies (Sabatier, 1988). When studying an ACF that involves policy domains which are intergovernmental in character, a key question that emerges is: ‘does one put all of the actors –​irrespective of governmental level –​ into a single (undifferentiated) subsystem, or does one assume that each

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territorial level is a separate subsystem?’ (Sabatier, 1998, 115). What this question illuminates is that the classification of actors according to scales is an essential part of understanding the actors involved in policy processes. In sum, policy scholars use scale as a standard entry-​point for establishing the key characteristics of the policy actors whom they study, and associate policy actors’ position on the scalar hierarchy to have particular implications for their professional position, agency and community membership. In addition to this, scale is also a central category for understanding the processes of policy. The study of implementation is a primary example of this, whereby scholars’ debates have been articulated in strikingly scalar terms. The debates of implementation scholars have included whether to conceptualise implementation as a ‘top-​down’, ‘bottom-​up’, or ‘hybrid’ process (Barrett, 2004; Hill and Hupe, 2002). This has also included debates centred on either analysing implementation through ‘backward mapping’ (Elmore, 1980) –​which involves the policy analyst beginning from the ‘lowest’ level of administration and progressively moving their study focus ‘upwards’ to the highest administrative layer –​or whether the reverse should take place through conducting ‘forward mapping’ (Elmore, 1985). The concept of scale also appears as a pyramid in typical accounts of policy processes, with the formulation of official policy concentrated at the top and the diverse practices of implementation at the bottom (for example, Lipsky, 1971; Pressman and Wildavsky, 1973). These debates have also taken central stage in relation to conceptualisations of the ‘policy cycle’ (implementation is a key ‘stage’ of the cycle), which is one of the most well-​known concepts of policy studies (  Jann and Wegrich, 2006). In other words, classic attempts to conceptualise the processes of policy have used scale as a central category and conceptual structure. Another major, enduring focus of policy scholars has been to conceptualise the process by which policy travels from one place to another, and this has been largely explored in the burgeoning literature on policy transfer (for example, Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000; Evans, 2004; Stone, 2004). While this literature contains extremely diverse conceptualisations of the process through which policies move, all approaches share a common reliance on scale to structure their analysis. For example, policy transfer processes are explored through metaphors of ‘vertical’ movement, when policies move up and down different scales, as well as ‘horizontally’ in the case of policies moving along the same scale but across different contexts. A further example is how the policy transfer literature argues that the higher up the scalar hierarchy a policy can reach, the more mobile and more powerful it can become.

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Once again, the conceptual scaffolding of scale serves as an essential analytical frame for studying policy processes, including the ways in which policy moves. Finally, as well as relying on scale for guiding the study of policy actors and processes, policy scholars also conceptualise the wider governance architectures of policy in scalar terms. For example, studies of centralisation and decentralisation explore the diverse ways that administrative and political powers can be distributed either towards or away from the national level (for example, de Vries, 2000; Hutchcroft, 2001; Porter and Olsen, 1976). By conceptualising the distribution of power as being concentrated within or away from the national level to different degrees, scale is a fundamental analytical framework for this literature to study how (de-​)centralised governance structures produce different policy outcomes. An interest in understanding how policy is interrelated to the wider architectures of the state has been explored through the concept of statecraft. Statecraft reflects the way that the state ‘seeks to unify the activities of different branches and departments across its different sites, scales and fields of action’ (  Jessop, 2016, 85). A  particularly long-​standing focus of policy scholars has been to explore statecraft efforts relating to the local scale. A clear example of this is how the question of whether ‘small is beautiful’ has produced an enduring line of inquiry in the work of local government scholars (for example, Allan, 2003; Boyne, 1996; Craig and Manthorpe, 1998; Newton, 1982). Studies relating to this question have explored how the size of local government affects policy outcomes, and whether targeting policy at the local level can lead to greater degrees of participation and democracy. These questions have most recently re-​emerged in analyses of ‘new localism’ (Pratchett, 2004), described as ‘the devolution of power and/​or functions and/​or resources away from central control and towards front-​line managers, local democratic structures, local institutions and local communities, within an agreed framework of minimum standards’ (Evans et  al, 2013, 405). Ongoing work on localism includes characterising its various forms and strategies, and exploring how localism is a key feature of statecraft (for example, Hildreth, 2011; Hodgson and Spours, 2012; Lowndes and Pratchett, 2012; Parvin, 2009). In short, statecraft theories, and particularly studies of the ‘local’, reflect policy scholars’ enduring approach to understanding governing architectures and the effects of these on policy through the frameworks of scale. Multi-​level governance has had a major impact on the policy literature which focuses on transnational governance architectures, such

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as that of the European Union. According to multi-​level governance, policy needs to be understood as being part of a nested hierarchy of levels in order to convey how different scales are interrelated and entangled (for example, Hooghe and Marks, 2001; 2003; Scharpf, 1997). Vertical dimensions (relations between different levels) and horizontal dimensions (interactions across the same level, for example between two municipalities) are both significant in understanding how policy is produced in multi-​level governance settings. Once again, multi-​level governance illustrates policy scholars’ reliance on scale as a fundamental structure of politics. This brief review has not aimed to simply point out that scales are an integral part of the vocabularies and theoretical assumptions of policy analysis –​its intent has also been to highlight what the above reveals about how scales are used in the study of policy. Two key observations can be made in relation to the latter point. First, scales are used descriptively in policy studies and are not themselves subject to analytical critique. Scale categories function as illustrative features of analysis, or as a ‘backdrop’ to the main focus of analysis. The meaning of scale is not problematised, rather, it is only considered relevant for scales to be briefly defined (if at all) in order to contextualise the specific policy area under investigation. Second, the review demonstrates how scale is a malleable concept that has been moulded to fit the diverse focus of policy studies. Scale can be used to refer to level, size and/​or territory and the chosen use or definition of scale will depend on which meaning of scale can best support the overarching conceptual framework or on which meaning best fits the empirical focus of a study. The malleability of scale in the policy literature can therefore be understood to be a result of scale being considered a supportive feature of policy analysis. What is the importance of these observations to the study of policy? And how are they essential to understanding the privileged role scale occupies in the practices of policymakers? To answer these questions, we need to consider how studies of policy might approach scale differently, and how a critical engagement with the meaning of scale could contribute to extending understandings of political dynamics and explanations. To do so, the discussion which follows looks outside the disciplinary boundaries of political science and public administration. It identifies important potential in the field of human geography, where political geographers have developed a burgeoning literature that directly problematises the concept of scale. The chapter now turns to reviewing this literature.

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Rethinking scale in policy: a turn to political geography While critically engaging with the concept of scale has remained outside the interests of policy studies, the field of political geography has taken a different approach. This approach has involved directly questioning the ontological status, conceptualisations and political effects of understanding the social world as being comprised of a scalar architecture. These questions have yielded a rich and theoretically diverse literature, but one whose debates have remained largely absent from the field of policy studies, similarly to other geographical literatures dealing with the politics of space. This section outlines the key debates developed by political geographers’ examinations of scale to enable the discussion to subsequently highlight the central relevance of these to the study of policy. The political geography literature on scale can be broadly divided into two theoretical fields:  political-​economic and poststructuralist (MacKinnon, 2010). The concept of scale emerged as a focus of study in the 1980s when it was problematised in Marxist geographers’ investigations of the social production of space and the spatial dimensions of social inequalities being produced under capitalist systems. Authors such as David Harvey (1982) and Peter Taylor (1982) turned to scale as a way of making sense of how the uneven distribution of wealth in a capitalist system needed to be understood by considering global, national, regional and local relations. Neil Smith’s (1993; 1984) seminal work built on Marxist analyses of uneven development and proposed the notion of a ‘politics of scale’ which referred to how geographical scale ‘defines the boundaries and bounds the identities around which control is exerted and contested’ (Smith, 1993, 66). To highlight this point, Smith developed the concepts of ‘scale jumping’ and ‘scale bending’. Scale jumping characterises how actors, groups or organisations frame their activities so that they shift to a ‘higher’ point in the scalar hierarchy (for example, from the local to the national) in order for their political agenda to have greater impact or legitimacy (Smith, 1992). The related concept of scale bending is used to describe processes through which ‘entrenched assumptions about what kinds of social activities fit properly at which scales [such as foreign policy being the domain of the national scale]’ (Smith, 2004, 193) become challenged and destabilised. The work of Eric Swyngedouw (1997; 2004) has also been highly influential in developing the concept of scale, in particular by focusing on its relational nature. He advocates understanding scales as being part of wider processes, such as state regulation, and argues

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that ‘scalar configurations’ are nested within each other rather than being exclusively either ‘local’ or ‘global’. An enduring feature of Swyngedouw’s approach is that local–​national–​global hierarchies of political economy remain guiding principles for his analysis of state restructuring and capitalist production. Kevin Cox’s work (1998) also introduced an influential theorisation of the politics of scale by making a distinction between ‘spaces of dependence’ and ‘spaces of engagement’. Spaces of dependence are characterised as localised social relations which are place-​specific; Cox argues that these spaces will always be intertwined with global relationships and dynamics, and that the latter pose a constant threat to spaces of dependence. As a result of these tensions, actors and institutions attempt to protect their localised spaces by engaging with alternative sources of power, such as the national press or government institutions. The latter is conceptualised as a ‘space of engagement’, and studying the interaction between spaces of dependence and engagement constitute Cox’s proposal for analytically unpacking the politics of scale. Neil Brenner (2001) sought to narrow the conceptualisation of scale in the geographical study of political economy by arguing that the term had become overly stretched. He argued that the meaning of scale has become unhelpfully blurred with other spatial concepts such as place, territories and locales. His theory of ‘scalar structuration’ proposes a narrower research agenda for exploring the politics of scale so that scale remains distinct from other concepts of space. Scalar structuration describes ‘relations of hierarchization and rehierarchization among vertically differentiated spatial units’ (Brenner, 2001, 603) and Brenner proposes that it is these vertical, relational relationships between scales which should constitute the focus of analysis. While the political economic literature on scale consists of multiple and diverse arguments, an overarching feature is that its authors tend to focus on scales as having material features by relating scales to real processes and spatial formations (Moore, 2008). The literature also has a common focus on the hierarchical, vertical nature of scales and regards the ‘fixed’ appearance of space (‘spatial fixes’) within this hierarchy as the product of capitalist production and capital accumulation. This early work of political economic geographers was undoubtedly innovative in that it was the first to explore and discuss the socially constructed nature of scales. Today this is a taken-​for-​g ranted theoretical assumption of political geographers, however it is important to highlight the pioneering nature of this scholarship in the context of the time when it was being developed.

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The debates around scale by political economic geographers gave rise to a critical response by a different set of political geographers, many of whom were influenced by poststructuralism. These scholars articulated a poststructuralist critique which argued that scales were continuing to be reified in political economic approaches, despite their conceptualisations underlining scales as being socially constructed. In a brief piece reflecting on Kevin Cox’s (1998) spaces of engagement and dependence, Katherine Jones (1998) put forward an argument that would become the cornerstone of poststructuralist critiques of scale. Jones interprets the ‘scale jumping’ activities of the actors featuring in Cox’s empirical examples as a form of strategic representational practice. She argues that a group aiming to shift understandings of a ‘local’ struggle into one that is of a ‘global’ nature reflects how scale is ‘situated relationally within a community of producers and readers who give the practice of scale meaning’ (  Jones, 1998, 26). Jones went on to explain that understanding scale in this way re-​constitutes it as an epistemological concept, one which is used by social actors to make sense of the world, rather than scale having an ontological existence. Jones’ argument that scale needs to be understood as an epistemological rather than an ontological concept forms the basis of poststructuralist theorisations of scale, and is regarded as the central factor which distinguishes poststructuralist approaches from geographers drawing on perspectives from political economy. Adam Moore has made an influential contribution to this debate by building on Jones’ arguments. He states that despite political-​economic approaches emphasising the fluid and contingent nature of scale categories, once scales are identified as being socially constructed this literature treats them ‘every bit as real and fixed as ontological givens’ (Moore, 2008, 208). For example, from a poststructuralist perspective Neil Smith’s conceptualisation of scale jumping separates scales from social practices by describing how actors transfer between various (albeit socially constructed) spatial levels (Herod and Wright, 2002). Indeed, some authors have pointed out that the Marxist ontology of the political-​economic literature necessarily means that there is an emphasis on materiality which, in turn, translates to a ‘structuralist understanding of social construction as a process which produces solid, relatively stable constructs’ (Kaiser and Nikiforova, 2008, 540). Thus, the ontological basis of political-​ economic understandings of scale are fundamentally incompatible with exploring the contingent and representational role that scale categories play in the social world. A major intervention in the poststructuralist critique of scale was articulated in an article by Sallie Marston and a number of her

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colleagues (2005), which was controversially named ‘Human geography without scale’. This article set out the argument that using scale in social analysis makes it impossible to overcome its implied distinction between the ‘micro’ and the ‘macro’. Marston et al (2005) argue that this is due to the micro–​macro dualism being inextricably linked to ‘local–​global’ scalar binaries. The authors go further to argue that scale is an inherently problematic category because ‘local–​global’ distinctions lead to the reinforcement of other theoretical binaries that include ‘agency–​structure’ and ‘concrete–​abstract’, due to these being automatically mapped onto scalar binaries. In light of their critique, Marston et  al put forward the radical proposal for scale to be completely removed from the language and categories of social analysis. Their proposed alternative is to understand the social world as a ‘flat ontology’ which involves ‘studying humans and objects in their interactions across a multiplicity of social sites’ (Marston et  al, 2005, 427). Drawing on the work of Theodore Schatzki (2002), Marston et  al argue that this alternative approach overcomes the spatial hierarchy that scale imposes on understandings of the social world. Instead, a flat ontology can help to generate a type of analysis which focuses on the assemblage of social sites and reflects the poststructuralist condition that all social phenomena are in a constant state of emergence. In short, Marston et al (2005) reject scale by maintaining that the concept will always be problematic due to encouraging hierarchical and layered understandings of space, which leads to the reification of scale. Despite sharing a common criticism of the political-​economic literature on scale, other poststructuralist scholars have defended the use of scale in social analysis and criticised Marston et al’s proposal to replace scale with a flat ontology approach. The core argument of scholars who advocate continuing to study scale is that scalar concepts and categories are one of the most common discursive constructs used by social actors to describe and make sense of their worlds. Thus, if scale were to escape direct analysis this would mean overlooking a fundamental social practice and would leave its associated political effects unexamined. Adam Moore (2008) has presented a powerful poststructuralist agenda that directly engages with the concept of scale while also containing clear analytical strategies for avoiding its reification. He builds on pre-​existing critiques of scale by authors such as Brenner (2001) and Marston et  al (2005) but argues that he captures the more fundamental problem as to why scale has been reified in social analysis. Moore draws on the work of sociologists Brubaker and

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Cooper (2000) and in particular focuses on their distinction between ‘categories of practice’ and ‘categories of analysis’. Categories of practice refer to ‘categories of everyday experience, developed and deployed by ordinary social actors’ (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000, 4). In contrast, categories of analysis are ‘experience-​distant categories used by social scientists’ (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000, 4). Brubaker and Cooper illustrate this difference by using the example of the term ‘nation’. They argue that ‘the nation’ can be used as a category of practice when social actors make sense of their worlds and that it also functions as a category of analysis for social scientists exploring nationalism. What is problematic about this is that there is a blurring of these categories in social science. Namely, sociologists tend to ‘take a category inherent in the practice of nationalism –​the realist, reifying conceptions of nations as real communities –​and make this category central to the theory of nationalism’ (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000, 5, emphasis in original). Thus, this is problematic because while nations are perspectives on the world, they are being treated by social scientists as real and objective. Brubaker (1996) describes how analysis might overcome the trap of reifying the nation: ‘We should not ask “what is a nation?” but rather: how is nationhood as a political and cultural form institutionalised within and among states? How does a nation work as a practical category, a classificatory scheme, as cognitive frame?… What makes the nation-​evoking, nation-​invoking efforts of political entrepreneurs more or less likely to succeed?’ (Brubaker, 1996, 16). In the above quotation, Brubaker effectively conveys how instead of using the nation as a category of analysis there is potential for social analysis to focus on nationhood and practices of ‘nation-​ness’ which would reveal how the concept intersects with social relations, meanings and their politics. Moore identifies clear parallels between Brubaker and Cooper’s arguments and political geographers’ debates around scale. He argues that considering the uses of categories of analysis and practice helps to identify the problematic reification of scale as well as pave a possible way forward for overcoming this. The first part of Moore’s argument is to highlight the conflation of categories of practice and analysis in political-​economic approaches to scale. He articulates this by stating, ‘the tendency to partition the social world into hierarchically ordered spatial “containers” is what we want to explain –​not explain things with’ (Moore, 2008, 212), and that this is a distinction which political-​ economic approaches to scale have overlooked. Inspired by Brubaker’s (1996) vision for an analysis which focuses on exploring the nature of categories of practice, Moore argues that this can be achieved in studies

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of scale if scales are approached as ‘powerful and institutionalised sets of practices…rather than concrete things’ (Moore, 2008, 213). In this way, an exploration of the political functions of scale does not necessarily need to involve their reification. Having established that scale needs to be studied as a category of practice, Moore goes on to suggest how future research might explore scale in this way by suggesting several research avenues. His suggestions include exploring how scale epistemologies shape what is ‘known’ about the world and how they operate as a classificatory system of society (see Ferguson and Gupta, 2002). Another proposed research focus is to explore how scalar classifications are constructed, reproduced or dissolved, and how they are narrativised (see Kaiser and Nikiforova, 2008). Moore also suggests engaging with the spatial reasoning dimension of scales: how scale metaphors ‘affect people’s courses of action, the strategies political actors employ and social power relations’ (Moore, 2008, 217) (see Cresswell, 1997). A more critical approach to scale would also be promoted by research which explores how scale representations are linked to political projects. This engagement with the projects and practices of scale would help to reveal the underlying political strategies that underpin the mobilisation of scales (Agnew, 1997). Finally, Moore also advocates exploring the differing degrees to which scalar practices intersect with social relations and institutions. Questioning the degree of ‘scaleness’ is an important question to pose in order for the role of scale in shaping social life to be ‘an open question to be addressed empirically, rather than treated as a starting point of any research’ (Moore, 2008, 218). The aim of this section has been twofold. First, by reviewing the debates in political geography that relate to the conceptualisation of scale and by highlighting the arguments made by poststructuralist geographers, the discussion has further illustrated the degree to which scale is a taken-​for-​g ranted category in political science and public administration and as a result in the field of policy studies. Second, this section has aimed to introduce the book’s chosen poststructuralist approach to scale as a way of engaging with the political implications of space. Moore’s agenda in particular highlights the potential for the spatial dimension of politics to be developed through an engagement with scale as a category of practice. However, there has yet to be a convincing case made for this in the field of policy studies. Instead, the debates on the political nature of scale have remained relatively confined as an issue examined by human geographers, the implication being that scale has limited explanatory power for understanding the processes and politics of policy compared to classic concepts

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from political science and public administration. This book seeks to challenge this framing of scale as an exclusive focus for geographers by demonstrating how critically engaging with practices of scale can shed light on the politics of policymaking. The next section examines how the growing literature on critical policy studies shares a commitment to understanding the practices and meanings of policy, and that this literature holds the greatest potential for bridging a critical approach to scale with the study of policy.

Critical policy studies and scale Poststructuralist geographers’ calls to analyse scale as a category of practice demonstrate a commitment to engaging with social practice, processes of sense-​making, and systems of meaning. With this in mind, the literature on critical policy studies provides an ideal bridge between poststructuralist political geography and the study of policy. Although encompassing a broad umbrella of approaches, the body of work that has come to be called ‘critical policy studies’ shares a common interest in communication and argumentation, and seeks to analyse the ‘processes of utilizing, mobilizing and assessing communicative practices in the interpretation and praxis of policymaking and analysis’ (Fischer and Gottweis, 2012a, 1–​2). There is thus a clear commitment to problematising the very distinction underlined by Moore (2008) –​ between the categories of analysis and practice  –​ in contexts of policymaking. Critical policy studies emerged as a response to classic approaches to policy analysis which were underpinned by positivist, rationalist assumptions about the policy process. A unifying assumption across the diverse critical policy studies literature is that policymaking and policy analysis can never be neutral or free from interests, values and politics. Rather, it is the role of analysis to expose the normative political positions which underpin all aspects of politics and public administration (Fischer et  al, 2015a). This marks a clear departure from analyses that seek to provide the ‘right answers’ (Dunn, 1981), law-​like explanations, or causal predictions and instead advocates a position where ‘multiple meanings and multiple interpretations are anticipated as the norm rather than the aberrant exception’ (Yanow, 1993, 55). This exposes a relativist ontology whereby interpretative and communicative practices are inherently unstable over space and time, and the task of analysis becomes focused on understanding the practices of policymaking and revealing their political effects.

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Understanding the specificity of context and place is a vital part of this approach, with interpretations and the construction of meaning being embedded in and contingent on the specifics of space and time (Forester, 1993). The discursive underpinnings of the critical policy studies literature are captured particularly well in the title of Dvora Yanow’s (1996) influential book, which posed the distinctive question: ‘How does a policy mean?’ Through posing this question, Yanow emphasises that the study of policy should not only identify ‘what’ policy means, but also reveal the processes through which policies become associated with particular meanings, ways of knowing and political agendas. A number of books and articles provide an overview of the varied theoretical and methodological approaches which are included under the critical policy studies umbrella (Fischer et al, 2006; Fischer et al, 2015b; Howarth et al, 2000; Orsini and Smith, 2007). For the purposes of this discussion, what is striking about critical policy studies is the extent to which its authors have looked beyond the fields of political science and public administration and gained inspiration from a number of other disciplines. For example, critical policy scholars have drawn on work from science and technology studies to conceptualise the construction of expert knowledge, knowledge translation and policy communities (for example, Barry, 2012; Hajer, 1995; Law and Singleton, 2014; Strassheim, 2015). Others have borrowed analytical tools from the field of linguistics as a way of studying the discourses and narratives of policy (for example, Czarniawska, 2010; Fairclough, 2013). In addition, a particularly powerful contribution has been made by political discourse theorists applying Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) Gramscian theorisations of discourse and hegemony to the study of politics and policy (Glynos and Howarth, 2007; Griggs and Howarth, 2013; Howarth, 2000). Furthermore, concepts from social psychology and psychosocial methods have enabled policy scholars to explore the role of affect and psychological dynamics in the practices of policymaking (Fischer, 2010; Durnová, 2013; Newman, 2012). Finally, critical scholars of policy have also gained significant inspiration from anthropology, particularly by adapting anthropological methods of ethnographic observation to develop a deeper understanding of the ‘life worlds’ of policymakers (for example, Boswell et al, 2018; Dubois, 2009; Yanow and Schwartz-​Shea, 2014). These interdisciplinary dialogues have been central to enabling the critical policy studies literature to problematise the positivist assumptions of traditional political science and to extend the theoretical boundaries

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of policy studies. Despite an openness towards engaging with other disciplines, this cross-​disciplinary dialogue contains one important and persistent absence: political geography. As the introductory chapter of this book discussed, analysing the concepts and categories of space –​and particularly scale –​continues to be considered peripheral to the study of policy. This means that the opportunity for progressing understandings of policy through engaging with space as relational, socially constructed and embedded in power relations is continuing to be overlooked. By setting this new agenda for a policy analysis which is sensitive to the political nature of scale, the book seeks to extend the scope of Yanow’s pertinent question of ‘How does a policy mean?’ Namely, the book challenges critical policy scholars to extend their analytical insights by also asking, ‘How does scale mean?’ (Papanastasiou, 2017a). A small number of scholars associated with critical policy studies have begun to directly engage with the concept of scale rather than exclusively using it to describe and explain their analysis. One such example is the work of van Lieshout and colleagues’ (2011; 2012) work on ‘scale framing’. They draw on the work of Kurtz (2003, 894), who defines scale frames as ‘the discursive practices that construct meaningful (and actionable) linkages between the scale at which a social problem is experienced and the scale(s) at which it could be politically addressed or resolved’. This concept is used to identify and compare ‘scale frames’ of policy actors and understand how constructions of scale include or exclude particular actors and arguments in policymaking processes. The main theoretical influence of this work stems from ecological economics and therefore takes a very different approach to political geographers’ understandings of scale. For example, Kurtz makes clear distinctions between ‘levels’ and ‘scales’ whereas poststructuralist political geographers would reject the ability to make this distinction, instead choosing to focus on the practices of (re)producing representations of scale. While the work of scale framing has been highly significant in highlighting the political mobilisation of scale categories in policy, the conceptualisation of scale as an essential dimension of policy practices remains underdeveloped. The work of Steven Griggs and Helen Sullivan is that which comes closest to engaging with scale as a social practice. In their conceptualisation of centre–​local relations, they argue that there is a need to conceptualise these relations in such a way which ‘rejects any pre-​determined categories of “centre” and “local”, preferring to examine the political construction of such spaces in practice’ (Griggs and Sullivan, 2014, 510). This argument directly maps onto Moore’s argument which discusses the need to examine how scale operates as a

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category of practice, and indirectly points to how scale is problematically reified through the use of ‘pre-​determined’ scale categories. Griggs and Sullivan also deploy a similar argument in a different article they have co-​written with Ismael Blanco. In this article, the authors explore what they refer to as the ‘logics of the local’ which involves going beyond reducing the local ‘to the institutions and practices of the local state’ (Blanco et al, 2014, 3134) and instead analysing the wider narratives that co-​produce what it means to be ‘local’, such as proximity, community and citizenship. These arguments demonstrate how unpacking the discursive practices of scale is highly compatible with revealing the political nature of taken-​for-​g ranted categories of policymaking. In particular, they speak to the book’s interest in uncovering the political implications of how policymaking shapes, mobilises and privileges particular orderings of space. Having highlighted critical policy studies as an area ripe with potential to engage with the politics of scale, let us now turn to the proposed conceptual framework for putting this type of analysis into practice.

Scalecraft: a critical approach to scale in policy studies By bridging perspectives from the political geography and critical policy literature reviewed previously the book develops an original concept for a scale-​sensitive study of policy. It builds on poststructuralist political geographers’ arguments that scale is political, to argue that scale needs to be understood as a set of practices which are inextricably linked to the production of hegemony. This perspective is bridged with critical policy scholars’ understandings of ‘policy as practice’ and extends this by arguing that ‘practices of scale’ are an integral part of policymaking. The result of combining these perspectives is to propose ‘scalecraft’ as a new concept for policy analysis. This section introduces the concept of scalecraft, and outlines how the book specifically uses political discourse theory to empirically explore and theoretically develop scalecraft. This book proposes that scalecraft is a fundamental political practice embedded in the guiding logics of policymaking, and that this is firmly rooted in the establishment and reproduction of hegemony. In other words, scalecraft is proposed as a new conceptual lens for addressing the scalar ‘blind spot’ of critical policy analysis. Scalecraft is a concept which points to the skilled work involved in constructing scales, but, what is most important, is that it enables policy analysis to go beyond arguing that scale is political by pointing to how the mobilisation of scale reveals specific political strategies and logics. ‘Scalecraft’ is a term that has already been coined in the political geography literature by a

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handful of authors. It has been used to either convey the ‘craft’ of scalar practices and to explore the relative ‘success’ of scalar projects (Fraser, 2010), or to characterise the structures and processes of state re-​scaling from a political economy perspective (Pemberton, 2016; Pemberton and Searle, 2016). This book uses ‘scalecraft’ in a new and distinctive way and for the novel purposes of developing a new conceptualisation of the relationship between policy and scale. Political discourse theory: key features A key distinguishing feature of the concept of scalecraft presented here is that it is firmly integrated with the study of hegemony and political practices. The book adopts a discursive approach which has been specifically developed by scholars of political discourse theory. This literature is based on the poststructuralist theory of Laclau and Mouffe (1985) and has become a major approach in the broader critical policy studies literature (Glynos et  al, 2015; Griggs and Howarth, 2008; 2011; 2013; Howarth, 2000; Howarth et al, 2000; Howarth and Torfing, 2005). A key focus of political discourse theory is how ‘policy change and policy stasis are linked to the ideas of political contestation and struggle, highlighting the radically contingent and incomplete character of social practices’ (Glynos et al, 2015, 395). According to this approach, the notion of ‘practice’ encompasses both meaning and action. Discourses are considered ‘a constitutive dimension of social relations’ (Griggs and Howarth, 2011, 219), and referring to ‘practices’ emphasises the impossibility of prising apart meaning and action. Problematising and understanding the architecture of ‘hegemonic practices’ is a central aim of political discourse theory. Drawing on Gramsci, this understanding of hegemony involves understanding the achievement of ‘intellectual and moral leadership’ (Gramsci, 1971, 57–​8) rather than exclusively focusing on ‘domination’ or political power. The establishment of hegemony specifically refers to ‘the production of “common sense” in a particular site or sphere of the social, or indeed in society as a whole’ (Gramsci, 1971; Griggs and Howarth, 2008, 130). The task of political discourse theory is to identify hegemonic regimes of practice which have become taken-​for-​granted in order to understand how their status has been established and maintained, as well as to consider how counter-​hegemonic practices might destabilise hegemony (Torfing, 2005). The study of hegemony is directly related to policy in that specific policy suggestions and outcomes are major drivers for reinforcing the norms and ‘common sense’ of hegemonic practices (Griggs and Howarth, 2008).

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What is important is that the agency of actors is also theorised as playing a key role in regimes of practice. In particular it is at moments of ‘dislocation’ that actors’ agency is understood to come to the fore. Dislocatory moments refer to critical points where the contingency of hegemony becomes exposed, which leads to its normalised status of power and meanings being called into question (Howarth, 2010). It is thus during dislocation that the greatest opportunity for actors to exercise their agency presents itself. The result of dislocation can lead to the destabilisation or replacement of actors’ hegemonic practices, and it can also result in the re-​establishment of pre-​existing regimes of practice by actors working to re-​conceal the contingency of hegemony. The book’s empirical analysis utilises the ‘critical logics of explanation’ approach developed by Jason Glynos and David Howarth (2007). The approach represents a major development in the field of political discourse analysis which sets out an analytical framework consisting of five interrelated steps which are aimed to ‘characterize, explain and criticize social phenomena’ (Glynos and Howarth, 2007, 7). Drawing on Foucault (1985), the first step of the approach is the problematisation of a regime of practice. Problematisation is an approach which recognises that the ‘problem’ of an object of study is constructed, and the analyst seeks to understand how a plethora of problems and solutions can be constructed around a single issue. The second central feature of the critical logics approach is that it provides retroductive (rather than inductive or deductive) explanations. This process begins with observing a phenomenon which is then explained through a particular hypothesis holding true. The key feature of this type of explanation is that hypotheses are not developed until they are present in the phenomenon being problematised; in other words, retroductive explanation makes problematised phenomena more intelligible (Glynos et al, 2009; Hanson, 1961). The third feature of the approach is that explanations are pursued by drawing on the notion of ‘logics’. Logics can broadly be described as ‘the rules that govern a practice or regime of practices, as well as the conditions that make such rules possible and impossible’ (Griggs and Howarth, 2011, 222), and Glynos and Howarth (2007) argue that there are three types of logic. The first type consists of ‘social logics’, which characterise ‘the overall pattern or coherence of a discursive practice’ (Glynos and Howarth, 2007, 139). Identifying social logics enables analysis to understand what guiding rules or norms underpin the process through which particular practices emerge in specific contexts. The second type of logic is that of ‘political logics’ which are key to understanding how social logics become established, maintained

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or weakened. Political logics are expressed through equivalence and difference. An equivalential logic operates by attaching chains of meanings or identities to a common discourse, whereas a differential logic fragments equivalential chains by emphasising complexity and heterogeneity. Political logics thus enable analysis to trace ‘the emergence and formation of a practice or regime by exploring how different practices and regimes draw antagonisms between groups and demands’ (Griggs and Howarth, 2011, 222). By highlighting the contingent and changing nature of social norms and guiding rules, political logics help to reveal possibilities for alternative social logics and forms of social organisation. Indeed, there is significant overlap between political logics and Foucault’s (1984) methods of genealogy, which Foucault used to trace the complex history and emergence of identities and forms of rule, in addition to then going on to suggest alternatives to these (Griggs and Howarth, 2011). The third and final type of logic identified by Glynos and Howarth (2007) is that of ‘fantasmatic logics’. The key role played by fantasmatic logics is that they disguise the radical contingency of the social world and therefore enable a hegemonic discourse to establish and maintain its grip. Fantasmatic logics are significant for understanding how hegemonic practices and unequal power relations become naturalised and accepted as ‘given’ features of the social world. A key feature of fantasmatic logics is that they mobilise beatific or horrific scenarios which, respectively, evoke positive or negative affective reactions and serve to reinforce the social and political logics of a discourse. The fourth step in conducting a critical logics approach is ‘articulation’, which conveys how ‘the researcher draws on her or his theoretical expertise to make particular judgements as to whether something counts as an ‘x’, and must then decide upon its overall import for the problem investigated’ (Howarth, 2010, 332, emphasis in original). By constructing a narrative about what constitutes being ‘important’ to understanding the problem being investigated, the concept of articulation points to how the researcher combines individual judgement with theoretical insights and empirical data. The fifth and final step is that of ‘critique’ which involves making ‘visible the contingent character of a practice, policy or institution by showing the role of power, exclusion and closure in its formation and reproduction’ (Foucault, 1984; Griggs and Howarth, 2011, 223). The practice of critique is particularly focused on political and fantasmatic logics because their identification leads to revealing the contingency of hegemony. Critique is important for shedding light on the political, which becomes evident when analysis shows how regimes of practice

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rely on processes of inclusion and exclusion, and how social relations are characterised by the exercise of power. By presenting this analytical framework for practising a critical logics of explanation approach, Glynos and Howarth (2007) argue that analysis can shed light on how regimes of practice function, their political effects, and the possibilities for challenging hegemony. Overall, this approach can be characterised as one which ‘seeks to steer a course between the search for law-​like explanations and the production of purely particularistic interpretations which self-​consciously reject all general theoretical concepts and logics’ (Griggs and Howarth, 2013, x). In other words, the concepts of logics, practices and hegemonies provide the language and conceptual tools for analysing empirical data through a theoretical lens, which avoids homogenising complexity and allows space and flexibility for exploring ‘messy’ problematisations and practices. Scalecraft and the study of hegemony The theoretical approach offered by political discourse theory offers a valuable lens through which to conceptualise the practices and politics of scale in a way that engages with questions at the heart of studying policy and politics. Drawing on political geographers’ conceptualisation of scale as a set of practices, and adopting this to the political discourse, a theoretical position leads to re-​casting scale as a set of hegemonic practices in policymaking. As this chapter has shown in its earlier discussion, the analytical frameworks and everyday vocabularies of policy scholars and practitioners demonstrate how it is ‘common sense’ to think about the social world as consisting of hierarchically ordered spatial containers. In order to engage with ‘how scale means’ (Papanastasiou, 2017a) and how practices of scale contribute to the maintenance of hegemony, this book proposes the concept of scalecraft as a hegemonic practice of policymaking. There is particular significance in using the notion of ‘craft’ for understanding how practices of scale are central to understandings of hegemony. To talk of craft is to allow room for social actors’ creativity and agency in the construction of scale. Craft points to the significance of moments of dislocation, where the meaning and use of scale can be called into question and its contingency can be exposed, which presents an opportunity for actors to exercise their agency. Craftwork also implies that crafting is an activity whereby there are particular expectations about an outcome or product of craft, but that at the same time these products are not standardised or made out of the same

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mould or blueprint. This, once again, points to the opportunity for a craftsperson to put their own mark on what they create, but also that this takes place within the general expectations placed on their work. In this metaphor of craft, we can understand the expected products of craft to reflect an expectation of policy work to be expressed and done in particular ways, but simultaneously there being space for policy actors’ creativity within the wider limitations in which they work. In addition to pointing to the role of agency, craft also suggests work that is by its nature skilled, challenging and that has required a process of learning (Fraser, 2010). Learning a craft often involves a long process of apprenticeship that usually means learning from others who have already ‘mastered’ the craft. In this way, craft also points to the challenging, skilled work of policymaking which intersects with mobilising particular constructions of scale. Furthermore, understanding scalecraft as a process of learning can also point to policy actors’ practices of producing scale as a process of ‘trial and error’ and ‘muddling through’ to find how best to pursue a particular agenda. Within the book’s framework, ‘logics’ help to shape the techniques of scalecraft. Exploring the intersection between scalecraft and social logics holds potential for revealing how scales help to shape the guiding rules and norms of a regime of practice. In the case of political logics scalecraft can reveal how equivalence and difference are interrelated with the construction or destruction of scalar boundaries. And finally, the interaction between scalecraft and fantasmatic logics can help to shed new light on the possible ways beatific and horrific scenarios rely on scalar concepts to conceal contingency and produce convincing narratives. By proposing scalecraft as a hegemonic practice of policymaking and examining this through the lens offered by political discourse theory, this book provides a framework for policy analysis which takes seriously the political role of scale. This theoretical lens guides the empirical analysis presented in the forthcoming chapters which explore diverse examples of policymaking in the area of education governance. Through studying the hegemonic regimes of practice and how possible practices of scalecraft are co-​constitutive of these hegemonies, the empirical analysis further develops the conceptualisation of scalecraft presented here, before reflecting on these collective insights in Chapter 7.

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Exposing scale hegemonies

The focus of this chapter is twofold. First, it aims to present an introductory discussion to the book’s empirical focus on education governance and policy. By doing so, it aims to demonstrate that education governance is a field that is teeming with politics of scale and therefore constitutes an ideal focus for exploring the book’s overarching conceptual puzzle. The discussion briefly reviews the key concepts used by education policy scholars in their study of education governance dynamics, and illustrates how scale features in current analyses of education governance. By identifying how scale remains largely neglected in conceptualisations of education governance, the discussion clarifies the important contribution a critical approach to scale stands to make in this area of study. The second part of the chapter aims to present a useful entry point for policy scholars seeking to explore possible practices of scalecraft in policy contexts. It does so by outlining the key tenets of a genealogical perspective which draws on political discourse theory and pays particular analytical attention to the ‘dislocatory moments’ of policy. By focusing on the case of the evolution of European education policy, the discussion empirically illustrates how a genealogical perspective is an invaluable lens for exposing the contingency of scale hegemonies and that this serves as an essential starting point for problematising scalar politics.

Education governance and politics of scale There is little doubt that ‘governance’ has become a ubiquitous term in political science and public administration that has been associated with an ever-​increasing number of meanings and conceptual frameworks (Bevir, 2012). Discussions about governance have now gone well beyond the simplistic description of the ‘government to governance’ shift, and now include nuanced characterisations of the processes, institutions and actors involved in the shaping of policy and polity (Sørensen and Torfing, 2018). By drawing on the expansive and diverse governance literature, education policy scholars have also been active

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participants in developing multiple and wide-​ranging approaches and concepts for studying governance in the field of education (see Wilkins and Olmedo, 2018). While it is outside the realm of the chapter to provide an exhaustive review of the education governance literature, it instead focuses on what are among the three most popular concepts used to study ‘education governance’. These are: heterarchical governance, governing at a distance and metagovernance. Education scholars have heavily relied on the notion of ‘heterarchic governance’ (Kooiman, 2000) to understand and explore the governance of education policy. The concept of heterarchy refers to the coexistence of networks of actors as well as the enduring importance of hierarchical relations and institutional arrangements. An approach which draws on heterarchical governance understands education policy as being shaped by both the networked and the hierarchical nature of governance dynamics. Heterarchical governance has been used to understand a wide variety of education policy contexts, including the role of private actors and new partnerships (for example, Ball, 2010), the intensification of market logic (for example, Exley et  al, 2011), and the shifting role of the state (for example, Grimaldi and Serpieri, 2013). The concept of ‘governing (or steering) at a distance’ (Rose, 1999) has also been very popular among education scholars for characterising processes of governance. Governing at a distance is a concept which captures how the importance of proximity is in decline when it comes to understanding processes through which education policy is becoming reconfigured. It refers to how governments overcome the challenge of distance by mobilising governing technologies that ‘create locales, entities and persons able to operate a regulated autonomy’ (Rose and Miller, 1992, 173). The concept has been particularly useful for capturing how transnational institutions and mobile ideas are profoundly shaping education policies and practices across the globe through technologies that include quality assessment (for example, Ozga et al, 2011), standards (for example, Lawn, 2011), and comparisons (for example, Grek, 2013). Finally, the third major concept that has informed education policy scholars’ understandings of governance has been that of ‘metagovernance’ (  Jessop, 1998; Kooiman, 1993). Metagovernance can be characterised as drawing ‘attention to the many different ways in which government agencies seek to influence interactive governance processes without reverting too much to classical forms of hierarchical command and control’ (Sørensen and Torfing, 2018, 4). There are clear parallels between the concepts of heterarchy and

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metagovernance with some authors making simultaneous use of them. For example, Ball (2012a, 10) suggests that that heterarchical governance architectures that combine networks and hierarchy are ‘realised in and through the modalities of “metagovernance” ’. Metagovernance is thus used by education scholars to convey how government plays an enduring role in shaping education policy, but that it does not necessarily exercise its influence in a top-​down or direct manner. By relying on the concepts of heterarchy, governing at a distance and metagovernance, education policy scholars have developed a rich literature which explores the complex dynamics and constellations of actors, institutions, political agendas, mobile policies and power relationships which contribute towards the governance of education. Despite the expansive and multi-​faceted nature of this literature, it is argued here that the education governance literature has a ‘spatial blindspot’ which particularly relates to its lack of engagement with scale. Some education scholars have referred to the ‘rescaling’ of political authority (for example, Lingard and Rawolle, 2011) to describe governance shifts, however this work uses scales as categories of analysis (Moore, 2008) rather than the approach advocated here which involves engaging with the meanings and practices of scale. Discussions of education’s heterarchical gover nance and metagovernance have largely overlooked scale, however the enduring importance of hierarchy which is underlined in both concepts can be re-​framed as the significance of scalar imaginaries in the practice of governance. Whether it is the entrenched narratives of political economy and statecraft, or the necessity for actors and organisations to ‘locate’ their identity at a particular scale, the governance of education policy demonstrates the persistence of scale. It is imperative for education scholars to directly problematise the political dimensions of scale, as this risks being overlooked by the literature’s focus on the ever-​increasing power of networks. Similarly to heterarchy and metagovernance, the lens of ‘governing at a distance’ has pointed to important scale politics that have nonetheless remained neglected. Perhaps the most striking illustration of the significance of scalar practices is that which relates to investigations of transnational processes of education governance. If we consider the increasing capability of international organisations to ‘govern at a distance’ in light of possible scale hegemonies, it becomes clear that the logic of education policy being ‘international’ or ‘imported from abroad’ has become increasingly powerful. Understanding how these hegemonic narratives of scale are established and sustained in situated

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contexts of education governance is an under-​studied and under-​ conceptualised area of study. By briefly outlining three of the most popular conceptualisations of governance among education scholars, the discussion aims to highlight that education governance is a field of study that is teeming with scalar politics. However, this politics of scale remains overlooked and under-​conceptualised, and –​similar to the broader field of policy studies  –​scale is also used as a category of analysis in the study of education policy and governance. This is a key message that the book seeks to demonstrate through its empirical analysis of several contexts of education governance: that education scholars have much to gain from integrating a critical approach to scale with their conceptualisations of ‘education governance’. The second part of the chapter will now turn to establishing an analytical starting point for a scale-​sensitive study of education governance. Using the lens of political discourse analysis, the discussion seeks to illustrate the value of adopting a genealogical perspective of education policy and governance in how it can function as an important first step towards unpacking the co-​constitutive relationship between policy and scale. The discussion draws on the empirical case of European education governance to demonstrate the new readings of policy which can be generated by exposing scale hegemonies.

Revealing scale hegemonies: the case of education and the European project A genealogical perspective One of the core characteristics of a genealogical perspective is that it involves ‘a preference for denaturalising truth claims…taken to be timeless and rooted in a fixed and unchanging reality’ (Wilkins, 2016, 11). The distinguishing feature of analysis which adopts this perspective is that it is focused on mapping ‘the historical process of descent and emergence by which a given thought system or process comes into being and is subsequently transformed’ (Olssen, 2014, 29). In other words, by tracing the shifting meanings of social concepts that have the appearance of ‘common sense’, a genealogical perspective is an essential first step towards exposing the socially constructed and political nature of discourse. Applied to the study of scale, a genealogical perspective involves focusing on how particular constructions of scale become associated with hegemonic systems of meaning, and how this normalisation of

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scale becomes established and destabilised over time. In this way, a genealogical perspective can begin to highlight the socially constructed nature of scale as well as how scale is crafted and re-​crafted to support powerful systems of meaning. By emphasising a genealogical perspective, the discussion links to the process of problematisation in the critical logics approach (Glynos and Howarth, 2007) by focusing on revealing ‘that things are not as obvious as people believe, making it so that what is taken for granted is no longer taken for granted’ (Foucault, 2002, 456). While genealogy is traditionally associated with Foucauldian analysis and was one of the cornerstone concepts developed by Michel Foucault, the discussion intentionally refers to adopting a genealogical perspective. By referring to the importance of a genealogical perspective, the book emphasises that while it is conceptually rooted in political discourse (and not Foucauldian) theory, it nonetheless adopts a genealogical disposition for exploring hegemonic regimes of practice. Indeed, scholars of political discourse theory themselves have openly acknowledged the significant overlap between their analysis of the logics upholding hegemonic regimes and Foucauldian genealogy (for example, Griggs and Howarth, 2011, 222). The approach taken here integrates a genealogical perspective with an analytical focus on ‘moments of dislocation’. These are moments where a hegemonic regime of practice can no longer accommodate new meanings, which leads to the hegemonic system being modified in order to re-​establish its coherence. During periods of dislocation, agents are most likely to exercise their agency when they make ‘choices in terms of developing –​ and identifying with –​new subject positions’ (Leggett, 2017, 123). In other words, it is during dislocation that new political possibilities emerge, and the contingency of hegemony comes to the fore (Howarth, 2010) (see also discussion in Chapter 2). Furthermore, it is important to emphasise that dislocatory moments are not meant to be identified as isolated ‘turning points’ or ‘triggers’ of change. Despite dislocation involving distinctive or important moments of practice, they are understood to have come about as a result of the steady process of hegemony being subject to challenge and the constant efforts from counter-​hegemonic movements to destabilise its status. Case study: scale hegemonies in European education governance This section uses an empirical case study to demonstrate how analysis might use a genealogical perspective to identify scale hegemonies. The discussion traces how the policy area of education became increasingly

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co-​opted into the European project and offers a new reading of this shift by focusing on exposing the role of scale hegemonies. The policy field of education constitutes an important and well-​established area of European governance, however it is a field that experienced a great deal of change and political struggles to reach its current status. A central reason for education being a particularly sensitive policy area in Europe is that it has traditionally been a field that has been closely guarded as the domain of national policymaking. The enduring importance of having national control over education policy was demonstrated by education being protected by the principle of ‘subsidiarity’ which was introduced in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. The subsidiarity principle ring-​fences education as a field in which member states have full control over policy reforms related to their national education systems. Education initially entered the sphere of European governance during the 1950s. For decades, it remained a policy field that was framed in relation to the construction of a European identity, with Europeanisation efforts in this area being focused on cross-​European education collaboration and exchange. While the role of education in Europeanisation efforts slowly grew in importance from the 1950s onwards (Pepin, 2006), it was only until the 1990s that education emerged as a central feature of Europeanisation, despite remaining firmly linked to subsidiarity (Grek and Lawn, 2009). Scholars of Europeanisation understand the early 1990s onwards as a period whereby the field of education rapidly assumed a central position in the European project due to education being framed as the solution to a number of political agendas. The discussion which follows adds a new layer of understanding to this shift by bringing into focus the under-​studied politics of scale that co-​constitute European education governance. Analysis will examine three dislocatory moments of European education governance and consider how they point to shifting hegemonies of scale. During the 1990s one of the most important dislocatory moments in European education governance involved the rise of the ‘knowledge economy’ as a hegemonic discourse of the European project. This new hegemony articulated a coherent narrative by mobilising a fantasmatic logic that outlined how European society was at risk of failing to rise to the challenges of globalisation. These challenges included global technological shifts, the need for flexible and mobile ‘knowledge workers’, and the globalisation of trade (Pepin, 2006). One of the proposed solutions to the challenges posed by the knowledge economy was for member states to engage in greater European collaboration in the area of education and training. The suggested beatific scenario

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Exposing scale hegemonies

resulting from this closer collaboration would be a European society of lifelong learners. Lifelong learners were framed as being capable of responding to the challenges of globalisation, and in this way education systems were placed at the centre of policy responses to the knowledge economy. Important efforts to reframe education as a distinctly European priority included the publication of Delors’ 1993 White Paper which emphasised the role of education and training in achieving employment-​intensive growth. The European Commission’s 1995 White Paper was another example of a key document that signalled this shift; the document outlined the challenges faced by Europe’s education and training systems and emphasised the importance of lifelong learning as a way of overcoming these challenges. These examples illustrate how education progressively became established during the 1990s as an essential part of the European project. This new hegemonic regime of practice resulted in ‘an increasingly common approach to education and training issues [in Europe] in order to meet the need for permanent renewal of knowledge and skills’ (Pepin, 2006, 28). While this shift is widely cited in the literature studying the role of education in European governance, analyses have thus far overlooked the question of what these shifts imply about hegemonic practices of scalecraft. Many may argue that it is self-​evident to observe that a shift took place from emphasising education as an area of national policy to education being an area in which European coordination was also necessary. However, by understanding scale as a set of practices, this analysis can go further to recast the 1990s as a dislocatory window whereby the very meaning of Europe and its relationship with national member states was being re-​negotiated. Through this lens, one can argue that the fantasmatic threat of the global knowledge economy enabled the rapid normalisation of education as a ‘European’ policy field. The risks of Europe failing to rise to the challenge of the knowledge economy led directly to education being framed as a European priority, as well as this being accepted as a matter of national interest for member states. In other words, Europe was able to legitimise its role as the essential intermediator between the challenges of globalisation on the one hand and national education systems on the other. Europe’s role was thus reliant on scalecrafting a distinctive role for itself as an essential actor between national and global scalar dynamics. The 2000 Lisbon Treaty is the second key dislocatory moment that was of central significance to another hegemonic shift in European education governance. Indeed, the Lisbon Treaty is understood as a landmark moment for all areas of Europeanisation in large part

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because it was the platform in which a new type of ‘soft’ governance model was launched. This model was called the ‘open method of coordination’ (OMC) and became the central governing instrument of Europeanisation. The OMC aims to spread best practice as a means of facilitating greater convergence in member states’ approach to EU goals, and it also aims to develop key indicators, benchmarks and targets for common European policy goals (European Council, 2000). It is a governing instrument that is framed as enabling and guiding member states’ policy development through setting guidelines, timetables, goals, quantitative and qualitative indicators and benchmarks, and facilitating mutual learning processes through monitoring, evaluation and peer review (Prpic, 2014). Strong depoliticisation narratives are an integral part of the OMC process; official narratives describe how the OMC helps to guide member states through objective targets and best practices which are developed ‘outside’ national politics (Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2007). The OMC marked a particularly important turning point in the field of education. Namely, the setting of OMC targets and benchmarks was a ‘very new and bold step at the European level’ (Pepin, 2006, 208) compared to areas such as employment or economic policy and it revealed for the first time the convergence of education systems as a key aim of Europeanisation (Grek and Lawn, 2009). The launch of OMC targets and benchmarks were built on the hegemonic rise of new educational goals and data that were oriented towards the economic goals of Europe and which focused on creating a ‘Europe of learning’ (Grek, 2008). This process involved education being the central focus of new collaborations between international agencies (most notably the Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and Development), internal agencies and multiple Directorate-​Generals of the European Commission, as well as the development of new European data infrastructures (in particular through the work of Eurostat and Euridyce) (Grek and Lawn, 2009). In short, during the 2000s the role of education in Europeanisation progressively moved ‘from being a simple area of identity construction to a complex data-​ driven component of the new governance of Europe’ (Grek and Lawn, 2009, 35). This shift can also be understood as being shaped by distinct practices of scalecraft. By mobilising a powerful equivalential logic, the meaning of Europe became attached to fantasmatic logics of evidence and ‘what works’ that were embedded in the new data infrastructures of education policy. Thus, hegemonic practices of scalecraft were key to constructing the coordination and convergence of European education systems

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as a rational and depoliticised policy goal. An important shift in the political construction of the European scale was that, unlike the 1990s where Europe was framed as a ‘buffer’ between global dynamics and national member states, the rise of the global education infrastructure in the 2000s dissolved the boundary between ‘the global’ and ‘the European’. Europe’s reliance on international collaborations meant that Europe was now a partner in producing global networks of education governance. In this way, national member states were presented with two choices: the first choice being to govern their education systems in isolation, and the second choice being to engage with the global and European networks which are sources of best practice and evidence. The shifting hegemonic regime which governed European education governance thus involved the meaning of Europe changing. The changing meaning of Europe presented member states with the choice to engage with European agendas as a ‘self-​evident’ and necessary one. The third and most recent dislocatory moment of European education governance has taken place during the culmination of the political and financial crises faced by the European Union since the late 2000s. The post-​2008 financial crisis, the post-​2015 intensified flows of migration, the Brexit referendum, and the rise of anti-​European populist parties across the continent have undoubtedly presented major challenges to the legitimacy of the European project. The area of education has, once again, emerged as a central focus of European proposals for how to overcome the economic, political and social challenges which will enable Europe to overcome this period of crisis. Perhaps the most striking illustration of this shift was the momentous occasion of education being included in the agenda of a meeting of European heads of state in November 2017. This was an unprecedented event, and has been considered a landmark moment by the European Commission (European Commission, 2017). Including education on the agenda of this meeting strongly signals that it has, once again, shifted to an even more central position in European governance. The accompanying communication which was produced by the Commission for this meeting constructed European collaboration in the education field as being essential for the functionality and success of Europe’s ‘diversity’. For example, the Communication discussed the need to ‘harness the full potential of education and culture as drivers for jobs, social fairness, active citizenship as well as a means to experience European identity in all its diversity’ (European Commission, 2017, 2). It appears that education is increasingly becoming an all-​encompassing solution to Europe’s challenges and in particular to the success of a European identity that is framed according to principles of diversity.

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The most recent shift whereby education has become framed as the solution to Europe’s political and financial crises also points to an evolving practice of scalecraft. The response to the post-​2008 crises has strengthened calls for greater European cohesion, identity and coordination in the context of diversity. This is hardly a new European discourse, however, by crafting the European scale as both unified and diverse, scalecraft practices have been key to deepening the notion of education as a definitively European issue. The diversity of education systems as well as education being framed as a unifying, all-​encompassing policy solution is highly compatible with the scalar narratives of Europe’s agenda for addressing its recent crises. By revisiting three dislocatory moments of European education governance, the discussion has aimed to convey how governance shifts in this area have not only involved the reconfiguration of education, but they have also involved crafting and re-​crafting meanings of national, European and global scales. In other words, it is not enough for analysis to state that education has become an increasingly ‘European’ issue. Instead, the discussion highlights how this shift also needs to be understood as involving distinct practices of scalecraft which support shifting political agendas relating to education. Understanding the role of scalecraft contributes a new layer of analysis for understanding how European education governance now involves a situation whereby member states participate and make demands for European education platforms. Implications for conceptualising European governance By exploring the practices of scalecraft that feature in European education governance the chapter’s analysis also has implications for wider questions linked to conceptualising Europe’s policy spaces. The first conceptual area that the discussion contributes to is critical understandings of the multi-​level governance literature. Since emerging during the early 1990s, the concept of multi-​level governance has been by far the most popular concept for characterising attempts to achieve greater levels of European coordination and integration. Multi-​ level governance seeks to capture how local, regional, national and supranational levels cooperate in processes of European governance (for example, Hooghe and Marks, 2001; Scharpf, 1997). The burgeoning literature which draws on multi-​level governance frameworks typically focuses on how ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ levels of scale produce different policy outcomes and explores how policy actors can adjust the scale of governance to create particular types of political order. Multi-​level

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Exposing scale hegemonies

governance studies therefore assume that policies move vertically (‘up’ and ‘down’) and horizontally across the scalar architecture of Europe (Stubbs, 2005; Jessop, 2007; Papanastasiou, 2017b). In other words, scale is reified and used as a category of analysis (Moore, 2008) rather than being problematised. By adopting a genealogical perspective and identifying the de-​stabilisation and re-​establishment of scale hegemonies in the Europeanisation of education, the discussion exposes a major shortcoming of the multi-​level governance. Namely, how the literature neglects to consider the multiple and fluid meanings of scales, how scales might be used to strategically construct political agendas, and what the political implications of European scalecraft might be. This has implications that go beyond the education field: multi-​level governance is a major concept used to study all policy areas of European governance, as well as being used by European policymakers themselves to make sense of their work. The second literature that the analysis contributes to is the critical education literature which has chosen to replace the concept of multi-​level governance with the notion of a ‘European education policy space’ (Lawn and Grek, 2012). A ‘European education policy space’ is described as ‘a major discursive and normative space’ (Lawn and Normand, 2015, 1)  of education governance and it has been used to conceptualise the central role that education occupies in Europeanisation agendas. The concept refers to the mobile knowledge, policies, experts and technologies which facilitate the construction of ‘European problems’ and encourage member states to adopt common ‘European policy solutions’ (Lawn and Grek, 2012; Leitner, 1997). The education literature which conceptualises European education governance as a policy space has deliberately moved away from an assumption that politics is comprised of distinct hierarchies and ‘levels’, to one which embraces the fluid nature of space. By doing so, this literature has developed novel understandings of the fluid movements of actors, policies and capital whose movements are not necessarily captured through or limited by scales (Lawn, 2003). In other words, this literature has emphasised ‘space’ in order to break free from methodological nationalism and, indeed, to overcome the problematic use of scale as a category of analysis. This chapter’s analysis of Europe’s shifting hegemonies of scale points, however, to an important shortcoming relating to the literature on the European education policy space. Namely, an exclusive focus on ‘space’ leads to a type of analysis that adopts a type of flat ontology. The risk of this approach is that it moves towards replacing scales entirely with ‘space’, which leads to analysis overlooking a fundamental process

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The politics of scale in policy

through which the political world is ordered and given meaning. In other words, the literature on the European education policy space does not make conceptual room for exploring the scalar politics of European governance. An analysis which both acknowledged the fluid flows of people, capital and knowledge across Europe as well as considered how policy meanings are constituted through practices of scalecraft would generate a richer understanding of European education governance. To conclude, this chapter has aimed to provide the reader with an analytical entry point for exposing scale hegemonies. Put differently, the discussion has presented the reader with an initial insight into what approaching scale as a category of practice might imply for the empirical study of policy. The chapter which follows continues to focus on the empirical case of European education governance. Its analysis demonstrates the further possibilities that lie in exploring possible practices of scalecraft in policymaking by examining the co-​constitutive relationship between knowledge, policy and scale.

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4

Knowledge, policy and scale

The relationship between knowledge and policy is unquestionably a major line of inquiry for policy scholars, and it is a research area which has produced an expansive and diverse literature. The traditional dichotomy between knowledge and power  –​which suggests that knowledge is produced ‘outside’ the world of politics –​is now widely challenged in the policy literature (Radaelli, 1995) and approaching knowledge as an endogenous feature of policy is a well-​established theoretical position in policy studies. The wide range of approaches developed to examine the power and politics produced during the interactions between knowledge and policy  –​from studies of evaluation, epistemic communities, policy learning, policy diffusion and agenda-​setting to name a few –​continue to diversify, and serve to highlight how this continues to be a major issue of contemporary policy studies (Freeman and Sturdy, 2014a). This chapter draws inspiration from the body of work which understands knowledge and policy to be in a constantly evolving relationship of co-​production. This position has been particularly advanced by the pioneering work of Sheila Jasanoff (1987; 2004) who has problematised the distinction between science and policy and has shown that any apparent boundary between these two concepts is socially constructed and constantly subject to contestation. Jasanoff’s arguments have had a huge impact outside the area of science and technology studies, and have been adopted by a wide range of policy scholars focusing on the role of knowledge beyond the field of ‘science’ as a way of understanding the role of knowledge in policy (for example, Fischer, 2009; Freeman and Sturdy, 2014b; Hajer, 1997). Taking inspiration from this approach and integrating it with the political discourse theory perspective adopted in this book, knowledge and policy can be characterised as having a co-​constitutive relationship whereby the two are impossible to be prised apart. Political discourse theory takes a particular interest in hegemonies of knowledge, which it understands as being normalised, powerful ways of thinking about knowledge or taken for granted ‘ways of knowing’ in policymaking. Examples of hegemonic knowledge regimes in the

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The politics of scale in policy

practice of policy would include ‘evidence-​based policymaking’, the importance of learning from abroad, and isolating key variables to find out ‘what works’. These can be characterised as hegemonies of knowledge due to the manner with which they are ingrained in the practices and guiding logics of policymaking. Furthermore, a political discourse theory lens helps to illuminate how the dominant position of knowledge hegemonies is sustained through a range of powerful fantasmatic logics. Logics of fantasy mobilise narratives such as depoliticisation and the quest for universal truth to conceal the contingency and disputed nature of knowledge, thereby enabling hegemonic forms of knowledge to remain assumed and normalised features of policymaking. The aim of this chapter is to argue that critically engaging with scale can extend understandings of the co-​constitution of knowledge and policy, as well as develop further insights into how knowledge hegemonies are sustained in particular contexts of policymaking. By doing so, the chapter highlights the importance of considering two interrelated dynamics that have thus far remained neglected. The first is to explore how normalised epistemologies of scale –​knowing and understanding the world through scale categories and concepts –​ work to craft and limit the way knowledge itself is constructed. And the second dynamic which remains under-​explored relates to the ways that crafting scale is an essential feature of knowledge, and the need to understand how this functions as a major way of ordering, categorising and knowing the world. Considered together, exploring these dynamics will help to clarify and highlight the co-​constitutive relationship between knowledge, policy and scale. In doing so, the discussion aims to illuminate how scalecraft is a hegemonic regime of practice that is central to building coherent, powerful narratives of knowledge in policymaking.

European governance, knowledge and scale To explore the possible practices of scale which could be contributing towards reproducing and sustaining hegemonic regimes of knowledge in policymaking, the chapter uses the case of European governance in  the area of education. Chapter 3 used the evolving role of Europe  in  the governance of education to illustrate the genealogy of scalecraft, whereas this chapter focuses specifically on current dynamics of education governance in Europe’s open method of coordination (OMC) which has been the EU’s major governing instrument for the best part of two decades. The OMC was launched

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at the conclusion of the 2000 Lisbon Council and has since been a central part of European policymaking (Radaelli, 2003). It is a form of soft governance which instead of developing EU legislation ‘aims to spread best practice and achieve convergence towards EU goals in those policy areas which fall under the partial or full competence of Member States’ (Prpic, 2014, 1). The most popular mechanisms of the OMC include developing guidelines for policymaking, creating qualitative and quantitative metrics such as benchmarks and indicators, setting national and regional targets, and conducting peer reviews and evaluations (EUR-​Lex,  2018). The specific procedures, institutions and mechanisms of the OMC vary across different policy areas which has caused some scholars of European studies to refer to ‘multiple OMCs’ (Armstrong and Kilpatrick, 2007). The OMC has also evolved over time, for example, since 2010 the EU has been given greater power through the introduction of the European Semester which delivers country-​ specific recommendations to member states (Bauer and Becker, 2014). However, what has remained constant is the clear centrality of knowledge in the OMC instrument. Indeed, it is argued here that the OMC highlights how knowledge is a major hegemonic discourse in the articulation of the European project. The central role of knowledge is clear in the way that knowledge is consistently framed as being an integral part of finding a solution to the current and future challenges faced by European society. The need for greater European coordination and cohesion, as well as the necessity for more successful policy solutions to social problems are major challenges which the OMC governing instrument proposes to solve through knowledge. More specifically, the OMC emphasises the need to produce more knowledge about policy performance, to share knowledge about best practices, to learn from others about ‘what works’, and to find better ways of measuring countries’ progress towards reaching European targets. An important feature of the mechanisms of knowledge production proposed in the OMC is that it is characterised as a participative and bottom-​up process. Member states are framed as being important drivers of OMC outputs, and in this way the EU is emphasising its enduring respect of subsidiarity (in policy areas where this principle applies) and the overall political legitimacy of the OMC instrument (de la Porte and Nanz, 2004). In short, a guiding logic of European governance is that knowledge can provide the solution to Europe’s most pressing challenges, and a central guiding logic is that learning is an essential policy practice for creating and spreading knowledge.

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The politics of scale in policy

As with any hegemonic regime, some kinds of knowledge are more powerful than others and the area of European governance is no exception to this. This chapter explores how the OMC privileges benchmarks, peer learning and best practices as types of knowledge and ways of knowing, and it explores how these carry powerful scalar narratives. It is worth briefly outlining the key features of these three types of knowledge. Benchmarks are a form of knowledge which function as points of reference to indicate desired outcomes that policymakers ought to be aspiring towards. An important factor which supports the legitimacy of benchmarks is their simple and measurable message that sets out the minimum standards that implemented policies should be achieving. The EU has set up a large number of benchmarks across a number of policy areas which aim to represent the ‘shared policy goals’ and future policy directions towards which EU member states should be aspiring (de la Porte et al, 2001). What is important is that benchmarking makes it easy to assess how different member states are performing relative to each other and this logic of comparison is one of the key sources of power when it comes to this type of policy knowledge (Porter, 1996). Best practice broadly refers to a set of practices that have been selected from a number of options because they are most likely to lead to successful policy processes and outcomes (Andrews, 2008). The power and legitimacy of best practice is rooted in how this form of knowledge is formulated by drawing from practitioners’ experiences of what has worked or succeeded ‘on the ground’ (Pal and Clark, 2013). Best practices are framed as an integral part of OMC processes and are particularly emphasised in policy meetings that involve interactive exchanges between member states. For this reason, sharing and developing best practices is considered a key way of ensuring that the OMC creates policy knowledge in a ‘bottom-​up’ manner which takes into account the knowledge of member states. While benchmarks and best practices are distinct forms of knowledge that gain their legitimacy in contrasting ways, they also share strikingly similar logics. In particular, they are both underpinned by logics of comparison and hierarchy. Benchmarks would be impossible to produce without comparing the relative performance of countries’ achievement of the desired target, and a practice could not be deemed ‘best’ without comparing it to other practices that are judged as less effective. In addition, benchmarks automatically create hierarchies relating to the differing degrees to which countries have reached or failed to reach a specific target. Similarly, best practice creates hierarchy through identifying ‘the best’ versus ‘the rest’.

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This chapter also identifies learning to be a crucial knowledge discourse which is interrelated to the hegemony of benchmarks and best practices in European governance. Learning has become a universal expectation of policymakers working in any governing context (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000), and European governance is no exception to this. Indeed, the participative rhetoric of the OMC is especially focused on how member states need to learn from each other by sharing and developing ideas collectively. This emphasis on peer learning is consistently linked to policy transfer in the OMC’s governing narrative: by learning from each other member states will either export their policy solutions or import good ideas from abroad. Furthermore, the OMC narrative underlines that it is only through learning from others that benchmarks will be reached and that new best practices will be identified. In this way, learning is a hegemonic logic that underpins all aspects of the OMC’s narratives. Benchmarks, best practices and peer learning can thus be understood as major knowledge features of the hegemonic practices of European governance. They reflect taken-​for-​g ranted ways of knowing about policy and are widely accepted as being essential to finding the policy solutions which will shape future directions of European coordination. However, let us also consider what these forms of knowledge reflect about possible practices of scalecraft. Benchmarks involve collecting data from individual units (such as schools) and then amalgamating these to produce an overall benchmark (such as the national percentage of early school leavers). In this way, benchmarks craft scale in such a way that emphasises some scales and conceals others. A similar dynamic takes place in the case of best practice knowledge. Selecting a ‘best practice’ involves eroding boundaries of scale by suggesting that best practice solutions can be transferred to different policy contexts. Creating transferable best practices is thus underpinned by practices of scalecraft that undermine understandings of local, national or regional context. And finally, in a similar manner to best practice knowledge, the hegemony of peer learning works by constructing insights which are situated in particular places into transferable lessons which can move across and between different scales and sites. It is clear that knowledge hegemonies involve processes of crafting scale in particular ways, however these are themselves also constructed and limited by normalised scalar epistemologies. They all reflect our everyday vocabulary of levels and accepted ways of referring to horizontal or vertical movements across scales and spaces. Furthermore, the language of multi-​level governance which describes how knowledge and policies travel vertically and horizontally across

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The politics of scale in policy

different European policy fields also serves as a powerful scalar structure for understanding knowledge hegemonies. Expectations of how knowledge feeds into Europe’s multi-​level structure thus shapes and narrows the scalar vocabularies available to policymakers participating in OMC processes. In short, knowledge both crafts and is crafted by scalar concepts and epistemologies. An expansive literature from political science, sociology and international relations has extensively investigated the role of benchmarks, best practices and peer learning in the OMC. The literature has particularly explored what (if any) processes of policy transfer and learning have taken place. This work often focuses on the gap between OMC rhetoric and practice, and with some scholars suggesting how the EU could achieve ‘better’ policy learning and transfer (for example, Arrowsmith et al, 2004; Nedergaard, 2006; Tholoniat, 2010). A different part of the literature has sought to conceptualise the process of policy transfer and learning, and has questioned the role of benchmarks and best practices within this (for example, Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000; 2006). The discussion which follows breaks new ground by considering the possible practices of scale that co-​constitute the logics of benchmarks, best practices and peer learning in the case of Europe’s Education and Training 2020 (ET 2020) framework. It does so by examining how hegemonic knowledge regimes are constructed through the interrelated meanings of knowledge, policy and scale. By doing so it highlights how different types of hegemonic knowledge sustain their normalised status in European governance.

The politics of scale in the ET 2020 framework The ET 2020 framework was launched in 2009 and its function was to set out the key ambitions for European education and training systems to work towards by the year 2020. ET 2020 operationalises OMC working methods and governing practices through several different tools and mechanisms. These include setting seven benchmarks for member states to achieve by 2020 as well as outlining four common EU objectives for member states to consider in their policy reforms. Furthermore, the framework includes six themed Working Groups consisting of national representatives who meet to exchange and develop best practices, and the European Commission also offers ‘peer counselling’ sessions for individual countries seeking specific advice on a policy issue. European documents are key resources for communicating the official narratives of ET 2020 and are valuable sources of data for understanding the discursive features of the framework. The discussion

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which follows draws on a selection of key ET 2020 documents to reveal how they reflect a distinct politics of scale. Unsurprisingly, documents which outline the ET 2020 framework emphasise the importance of subsidiarity throughout their descriptions. For example, documents emphasise how OMC activities are conducted by ‘fully respecting Member States’ responsibility for their educational systems’ (Council of the European Union, 2009, C 119/​4) and underline the ‘voluntary’ involvement of member states (Council of the European Union, 2009, C 119/​4; European Council and European Commission, 2015, 14). An emphasis on subsidiarity points to a major political logic of difference which frames the ET 2020 framework as consisting of two scalar considerations: the national (member states) and European. A logic of equivalence is mobilised to some degree when the cooperation between both scales is emphasised as essential to the accomplishment of ET 2020, for example, describing how ‘the ambitious reforms needed [in the area of education and training] call for a strong joint effort from both the EU and Member States’ (European Commission, 2012, 16). Despite this, a logic of difference prevails, with official narratives underlining that member states have distinct needs and contexts, and that member states should engage with Europe out of their own volition. John Clarke’s (2005) characterisation of European governance involving ‘a dynamic of movement between unity and multiplicity’ (Clarke, 2005, 32) with the primary aim ‘to organise coherence out of multiplicity’ (Clarke, 2005, 18) clearly speaks to this interplay between equivalential and differential logics (see also Dale, 2004; Leontidou, 2004). Indeed, it is this interplay which lies at the heart of the distinctive meaning of ‘Europe’ (Leontidou, 2004). This interplay is problematised further in the discussion which follows by considering the meaning of scales in efforts to govern European policy spaces. Individual versus collective Analysing ET 2020 narratives reveals how they mobilise a social logic which constructs a dichotomy of the individual versus collective. This dichotomy emerges in discussions relating to benchmarks by typically emphasising the individual effort and responsibility required of member states to achieve ET 2020 targets. For example, country-​ specific recommendations (CSRs) are a set of personalised suggestions produced annually by the Commission with the aim of suggesting how member states can individually improve their performance in the ET 2020 benchmarks. CSRs highlight how ET 2020 focuses on individual

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The politics of scale in policy

policy efforts at the national scale and conveys these as central to the achievement of European targets. By contrast, when benchmarks are discussed in relation to the European scale, they are typically described by mobilising a fantasmatic logic of shared and cooperative policymaking, for example by referring to ‘the collective achievement of the European benchmarks’ (Council of the European Union, 2009, C 119/​6). In this way, benchmarks are conveyed as a European vision which is a solution to the challenges of education and training systems across Europe, while at the same time their achievement is framed as being dependent on the individual efforts of national member states. Narratives which emphasise the necessity of peer learning construct a similar dichotomy in the manner with which learning is associated with the national scale by referring to individual contributions by member state experts. Peer learning is overwhelmingly conveyed through the fantasmatic logic of a collective, European effort with typical descriptions including ‘mutual learning at European level’ (Council of the European Union, 2009, C 119/​6) and ‘policy learning exchanges’ (European Council and European Commission, 2015, 14). In this way, Europe is conveyed as the most important scale for enabling collective reflection and is framed as essential to facilitating learning processes and developing policy solutions. In sum, official narratives of ET 2020 consistently associate the national scale with individual efforts or contributions in contrast with the European scale which is linked to collective achievement or collective exchange. In this way, the European scale is more directly associated with creating knowledge relating to solutions and improvements in education and training systems whereas the national scale is tasked with taking individual responsibility for making use of this knowledge and learning. Context versus universal The second social logic which mobilises a discursive dichotomy in ET 2020 narratives is that of context versus universal. Benchmarks in particular help to produce this dichotomy by being framed as European targets that possess powerful equivalential properties but whose implications need to be applied to particular contexts. In other words, benchmarks are presented as being universally important and having implications that are relevant to all education systems. For example, benchmarks are described as helping ‘to measure at European level the overall progress made and to show what has been achieved’ (Council of the European Union, 2009, C 119/​3). When benchmarks are related to the national scale this is usually to refer to the country-​specific recommendations,

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which make use of benchmarking in relation to the individual context of each member state. As a result, the social logic of ‘context versus universal’ hinges on crafting a difference between universal, European knowledge and the contextual specifics of member states’ individual education systems. A similar dichotomy is produced in narratives about peer learning. Peer learning is primarily framed as the identification of universal lessons, practices or solutions which are produced through exchanges on European platforms. Descriptions that frame peer learning as enabling ‘Member States sharing similar policy challenges to work in clusters’ (European Council and European Commission, 2015, 13) are typical. On the other hand, peer learning is associated with contextual knowledge when national issues are mentioned, for example when European documents suggest that member states can ‘invite peers to an in-​depth discussion of specific issues in their country’ (European Council and European Commission, 2012, 1) or how peer counselling can ‘be used to support a particular national reform agenda’ (European Council and European Commission, 2015, 14). Mobilising a political logic of difference which consistently attaches the national scale to ‘contextual’ knowledge and the European scale to ‘universal’ knowledge has similar effects to the previously discussed individual/​collective dichotomy. While the importance of national context remains essential to the ET 2020 framework, the universal nature of European visions and knowledge gives great power and legitimacy to the European scale. In this way, practices of scalecraft are a core part of constructing narratives of ET 2020 and shed light on understanding how Europe crafts its role and exerts its influence in the governance of education. Experience versus learning The third social logic that characterises ET 2020 narratives is that which constructs a dichotomy of experience versus learning. This emerges most strongly in narratives relating to peer learning. For example, the 2016–​2018 Working Group mandates describe how meetings will facilitate ‘exchanges of information and experience on issues common to the education and training systems of the Member States’ (European Commission, 2016, 3). Here, knowledge about national education systems is equated with experience and exchange, with national actors being framed as being policy practitioners possessing direct understandings of education policymaking. When learning is described, however, it is consistently related to European encounters, for example by describing Working Group

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The politics of scale in policy

fora that generate ‘common principles and factors for challenges or success [which are] transferable’ (European Commission, 2016, 3). This demonstrates a fantasmatic logic which frames European fora as providing the conditions for transforming national experiences into universal policy learning. Once again, this policy narrative relies on crafting ‘experience’ and ‘learning’ as operating in distinct spaces. The implications of this are that by associating the European scale with learning outcomes and transferable lessons the role of Europe is legitimised as a powerful platform for facilitating learning about ‘what works’ in education. Reforms versus agenda-​setting The final social logic which reflects how benchmarks and peer learning sustain their hegemonic status in the official narratives of ET 2020 is one which constructs a dichotomy between reforms and agenda-​setting. ET 2020 benchmarks are framed as a vision for the future which all education systems should aspire towards –​in other words, a fantasmatic narrative promotes the idea that reaching the targets will lead to improvements for all education systems. By taking a closer look at how this fantasmatic logic operates, it becomes clear that its premises are supported by practices of scale. Namely, the agenda or future vision for education is located at the European scale whereas, by contrast, the necessary processes of reform and implementation are associated with the national scale. As a result, the individual performance of member states is framed as reflecting the relative success of reforms, which determine the extent to which European visions have come to fruition. The social logic emphasising a distinction between reforms and agenda-​setting is also present in ET 2020 narratives relating to peer learning. On the one hand peer learning is framed as being focused on developing new agendas or common principles during European exchanges, and on the other hand, the intended outcome of learning is to disseminate these agendas to national contexts. For example, this distinction is emphasised in a Joint Report by the European Council and European Commission which states that ‘the outputs of the [Working] Groups will be better disseminated so as to enable real knowledge-​sharing’ (European Council and European Commission, 2015, C 417/​31). National member states here are framed as being responsible for implementing reforms based on the knowledge generated at the European scale, whereas Europe is crafted as the

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scale at which universal learning and solutions are created. What is important is that these hegemonic practices serve to downplay the power of member states to effectively reform their education systems without relying on sources of knowledge that go beyond their national and local resources. Implications of scalar dichotomies in ET 2020 The overleaf analysis has focused on the official narratives of the ET 2020 framework and in particular has examined how benchmarks and peer learning operate as major hegemonic knowledge practices for governing education. By engaging with the logics underpinning benchmarks and peer learning, analysis has shown how ET 2020 narratives involve a consistent mobilisation of social logics which construct a series of discursive dichotomies. These are: individual versus collective, context versus universal, experience versus learning, and reform versus agenda-​setting. The discussion has outlined how these discursive dualisms mobilise powerful fantasmatic logics which help to normalise and legitimise Europe’s role in the governance of education. Analysis has demonstrated that distinct practices of scale are central to articulating the policy narratives of the ET 2020 framework and its series of dualisms. By considering how categories of scale feature in policy narratives, and what kinds of meanings they become associated with, the discussion has shown how scalecraft is a major practice for reinforcing the governance practices which mobilise European benchmarks and peer learning. The series of dualisms directly map onto the European–​national scalar dualism, and by doing so this is a scalecraft practice which naturalises Europe’s role as a key actor in the governance of education systems. The way that these dualisms are reproduced in the narratives of benchmarks and peer learning sheds light on why these have become such useful ‘ways of knowing’ about education in the context of European governance. In addition, the analysis points to a co-​constitutive relationship between knowledge and scale. The meaning of the discursive dualisms serves to craft particular meanings of scale, and at the same time the concept of scale gives greater clarity to the meanings of the dualisms. Hegemonic knowledge practices rely on scales to craft powerful narratives but simultaneously scales themselves are transformed through hegemonic practices of knowledge. To clarify this point further, Table 4.1 separates out the discursive dichotomies to illustrate how they are co-​constituted by practices of scalecraft.

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The politics of scale in policy Table 4.1: Logics of ET 2020 associated with different scales Scale

Social logics

Political logics

Fantasmatic logics

European

Collective Universal Learning Agenda-​setting

Equivalence

Collectively constructed knowledge and learning Powerful, transferable knowledge

National

Individual Context Experience Reforms

Difference

Benchmarks and learning can be applied to individual systems Learning as a way of improving national school systems

Analysis demonstrates that typical accounts of European governance, such as collaborations between Europe and member states, the principle of subsidiarity, and multi-​level governance, do not do enough to question the practices which underpin these descriptions. By considering the logics produced in official narratives of European governance, it is clear that Europe gains power and legitimacy through providing fora and platforms for ‘collective work’, and that these are projected as generating learning and knowledge which can go beyond context to have universal value. When compared to the construction of national scales which are associated with individual efforts and contextual knowledge or experience which are necessarily place-​specific, it becomes clear how scalar practices are essential to carving out an important role for Europe in education governance. What emerges is an underlying distinction between national member states facing place-​specific challenges in their education systems, and the solution to these challenges being located at the European scale which is able to mobilise narratives of collective knowledge and policy learning that are valuable to all. Furthermore, it is the placelessness of European benchmarks and general policy lessons generated in European fora which give power to these forms of knowledge, as they become more mobile and transferable. This is how Europe walks the fine line between subsidiarity and Europeanisation, and how it consistently mobilises discourses of ‘unity’ and ‘multiplicity’ (Clarke, 2005). Attaching different meanings and roles to the national and European scales has allowed Europe to make huge leaps in establishing itself as a legitimate actor in this policy field. The next part of the chapter extends these insights further by considering how practices of scalecraft reinforce the power of best practice knowledge in ET 2020 meetings.

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Scalar politics of best practices: ET 2020 Working Group meetings This section turns to analysing how best practice sustains its position as a hegemonic knowledge practice in the governance of European education, and questions what possible practices of scale might be co-​constructing this type of knowledge. It does so by empirically examining the meetings of an ET 2020 Working Group. Working Groups are coordinated by the European Commission and are described as ‘a forum for the exchange of best practices’ (European Commission, 2016, 3). Working Groups were introduced as part of the ET 2010 strategic framework and since then there have been several versions which have explored different themes and sectors of education and training over two-​year cycles (see Lange and Alexiadou, 2010). Working Groups largely consist of country representatives from member states (as well as some invited representatives from EU accession states), and since 2016 they have also featured a small number of representatives from stakeholder groups. The major working method of Working Groups involves quarterly meetings which are held in Brussels typically over two days, and these focus on exploring a particular theme. The Groups also run ‘peer learning activities’ (PLAs) which are meetings held less frequently in a host country. PLAs involve a smaller group of participants investigating a specific educational issue in greater depth over three or four days. The overall emphasis of Working Groups is that they aim to be a participative form of peer learning and policy development which relies on member states’ contributions, with the European Commission playing a coordinating role. In this way, Working Groups clearly reflect the overarching participative discourse of the OMC, which aims to emphasise the ‘bottom-​up’ process of European coordination. The analysis presented in this section draws on a study of the ET 2020 Working Group on Schools, focusing on its activities during the period between 2016 and 2018. The Working Group on Schools explored the governance of school systems, and its four key sub-​themes were: (i) teachers and school leaders in schools as learning organisations, (ii) continuity and transitions in learner development, (iii) networks for learning and development across school education, and (iv) quality assurance for school development (European Commission, 2016). The author studied the activities of the Group by conducting approximately 100 hours of observation fieldwork which involved being a non-​ participating observer for four meetings held in Brussels and for one

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PLA during the period between December 2016 and November 2017. Typical meeting agendas focused on one of the Group’s sub-​themes, and involved a range of working methods including participants discussing key questions and issues in small groups, small groups giving feedback to the whole group, formal presentations being delivered by invited speakers, and participants suggesting modifications for the Group’s emerging ‘universal principles’ which were eventually published as documents (see European Commission, 2018a; 2018b; 2018c; 2018d). The Commission and a small group of consultants (hired by the Commission) played a key role in the meetings by setting the agenda, taking meeting minutes, recording the general messages that emerged from group discussions, and drafting Working Group output documents in between meetings. The analysis which follows reveals the logics underpinning policymakers’ interactions during meetings in their pursuit of best practice, and highlights the role that practices of scalecraft play in co-​constructing this powerful way of knowing in policymaking. A depoliticised policy environment Observations of Working Group meetings revealed how three key social logics dominated the meetings, and these help to illuminate how best practice knowledge sustains its legitimacy. The first of these is that the Working Group operates in a depoliticised environment. During their discussions, Working Group participants consistently made a distinction between, on the one hand, developing universal principles relating to the governance of school systems and, on the other hand, their national contexts where ‘politics’ intervened in shaping educational visions and reforms. Furthermore, participants often discussed the difficulty of implementing the best practices outlined in the Working Group’s output documents, referring to barriers such as political pressure, government reshuffles, and the appointment of new Ministers. One example of a moment where the logic of depoliticisation emerged particularly clearly was when a representative from the Commission presented a definition of a ‘critical friend’ to participants of a PLA as a way of clarifying how participants should behave. The powerpoint slide listed a number of characteristics of this role, one of which was for critical friends to make ‘no value judgements’. In light of this, the social logic of depoliticisation was given coherence through a fantasmatic logic which constructed the Working Group as a platform where values and subjectivity can be put to one side in order for participants to develop reliable best practice knowledge on the governance of school systems. This fantasmatic logic also implies

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the threat of a horrific scenario which would occur in the absence of a depoliticised environment. This horrific scenario involves national representatives being unable to ‘escape’ their national spaces which are political and subjective, making the development of best practice unattainable. These observations clearly illustrate how the Working Group considers itself to be operating ‘outside’ politics, and that this relies on the notion of producing depoliticised best practice knowledge. Analysis can go further to understand this logic as relying on distinct practices of scalecraft. The European meeting is crafted as a depoliticised environment which is conducive to finding ‘what works’ in governing school systems, and whose value is underlined by contrasting it to political and subjective knowledge that is produced in national spaces. A political logic of difference draws a scalar boundary between two difference spheres of knowledge:  on the one hand, a depoliticised European platform, and on the other hand, national spaces where knowledge becomes politicised and fragmented. It is clear why the hegemony of best practice knowledge and the associated logics of depoliticisation make it a particularly useful discourse for European governing efforts in the policy area of governing school systems. School systems have historically been fiercely protected as an area of subsidiarity by member states (Lawn and Grek, 2012), making the separation between depoliticised European spaces and politicised national spaces a way of crafting a distinctive role for European policymaking in this area. Different contexts, common challenges The second social logic underpinning the Working Group’s aim of developing best practices is one which emphasises how country representatives come from different contexts but share common challenges across their school systems. This logic is fundamental for justifying the work of the Group which develops best practices by discussing the governance of school systems in a European context containing highly diverse school systems. This logic is also essential for legitimising the outputs of the Working Group which present general principles of best practice; general notions of best practice imply that countries share common challenges. This social logic was directly articulated in comments from country representatives. Typical comments from participants included, ‘we are looking for solutions for different contexts but the challenges are common’ (observation notes, November 2017) and ‘questions and challenges are similar but it’s important to dig into what contextual factors create these’ (observation notes, February

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2017). The power of best practice knowledge comes sharply into focus through this logic as it is framed to be universal enough for addressing the ‘common challenges’ of diverse school systems. The diversity of contexts was discussed most frequently during small-​group discussion tasks. These tasks involve participants being asked to discuss a particular theme or share examples of best practice among themselves. These discussions were characterised by a logic of difference when participants often compared and contrasted their different school systems. For example, during one meeting participants were asked to discuss in small groups ‘Which policies are needed for schools to develop a culture of professional learning?’ One group spent the majority of their time comparing and contrasting their individual country contexts. Comments from various country representatives included, ‘mentoring is financially reimbursed in my system’, ‘there is no induction or mentoring in my country’, and ‘in my context it is not in the culture to self-​report one’s needs [in relation to teacher training]’. The diversity of European school systems was consistently brought into focus during these small group discussions. Despite this, however, a powerful equivalential logic dominated the Working Group meetings. The coordinating practices of the Commission and the discussion tasks it sets are anchored in the idea of best practice, which is clearly reflected in participants’ summarising practices. Small-​group discussions were always followed by each group giving a brief summary of the discussion to the whole group, and small groups were sometimes asked to write this summary on a flip chart. While small-​g roup discussions are dominated by a differential logic, their summarising and feedback practices are characterised by equivalential statements. The previously highlighted example of a small-​g roup discussion involved participants discussing the issue of ‘Which policies are needed for schools to develop a culture of professional learning?’ While their discussion focused on the diversity of their national contexts, when asked to summarise their discussion this group wrote their recommended best practice policy on their flip chart, which was: ‘a policy of Continuous Professional Learning that is [based] on the needs of staff (school-​based) and should be compulsory’. This clearly illustrates how the working methods and expectations of the Working Group for developing universal best practices are clearly translating into participants’ knowledge practices. Once again, the practice of scalecraft plays an important role in sustaining this social logic. By consistently drawing an equivalence between context and national school systems, scalecraft practices enable the European platform of the Working Group to promote the narrative

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that it is addressing ‘common challenges’. In other words, context is acknowledged but ‘bracketed out’ of the Working Group’s main knowledge production, and this in turn legitimises the importance of developing best practices on governing school systems. Generalisability and transferability of best practice knowledge The final social logic which reflected the hegemony of best practice knowledge in the Working Group meetings was one which emphasised the generalisability and transferability of best practices. This was made clear by how the universal principles developed by the Group were framed as being suited to different national contexts. In a sense, this logic is a counter-​balance of the previously outlined social logic which focuses on common educational challenges of European systems. While the Working Group’s aims are focused on developing universal principles of best practice to address common challenges, this final social logic serves as a reminder of the diversity of school systems and their association with the principle of subsidiarity. Interestingly, the complex educational contexts represented by Working Group participants did not undermine the work of the Group, indeed, it was framed as an unequivocal strength. For example, the Commission coordinators often made comments such as: ‘the uniqueness of the group is the understanding of European context and all our national contexts’ (European Commission representative, November 2017). Furthermore, this logic emerged in the manner with which discussions of universal principles were always introduced and concluded by acknowledging the necessity for ‘national or organisational translation’. By mobilising this logic, the hegemony of ‘universal’ best practices developed by the Working Group is easy to defend from any criticism relating to the uniqueness of national or local educational contexts. While referring to both universal best practices and national contexts reflects the mobilisation of a political logic of difference and equivalence respectively, a logic of equivalence remains most powerful in the Working Group activities. The discussion tasks which are set for participants by the Commission reflect how an equivalential logic creates very particular expectations of what kind of knowledge participants are encouraged to produce. Examples of discussion tasks included exploring ‘How do networks feed into developing schools into learning organisations?’ and being asked to ‘identify horizontal themes across the Working Group’s four working themes’. In other words, this final social logic which emphasises national contexts is

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continually undermined by practices which work towards developing best practice knowledge. Extending this analysis further, we can also understand the hegemony of best practice knowledge to be co-​constituted by practices of scalecraft. Scalecraft practices draw a clear scalar boundary between universal best practices developed in European platforms and the contexts best practice needs to be applied to in levels ‘below’ the European. By doing so, the Working Group is in some sense constructed as ‘placeless’ –​ by being free from context it also becomes free from the specificity and subjectivity of place. Crafting the difference between Europe and national context in this manner serves to further legitimise the pursuit of best practice knowledge in European encounters. Fantasmatic logic of learning A key feature of all three social logics outlined overleaf is that they mobilise powerful fantasmatic logics. Logics of fantasy play an important role in constructing powerful and convincing narratives related to the hegemony of best practice. Observations of Working Group meetings reveal how meetings consistently produce a beatific scenario that involves mutual learning, identifying common challenges, and developing common values related to school systems. The following observations illustrate how this beatific scenario is articulated during meetings: This is essentially our multi-​level culture of learning. It consists of learning sub-​communities, trust, ownership and values. (Commission powerpoint slide) [I want] To deep [sic] my knowledge on how to face the challenging school of 21st century. (Written response of WG participant on why they are attending the meeting) This beatific scenario which frames the Working Group aspiring towards a ‘multi-​level culture of learning’ clearly links to the social logics discussed previously. Namely, it relates to the policy context being depoliticised, its participants sharing common challenges, and being sensitive to national contexts, and reflects an overarching political logic of equivalence. An underlying horrific scenario which is implied throughout the Working Group’s activities is that the alternative is a situation of countries being isolated and not looking beyond their own educational systems for inspiration. This horrific scenario would directly undermine

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the Group’s social logics –​particularly in the way it would involve policymaking that is at the whim of national politics  –​and would also restrict countries from identifying common challenges and solutions that transcend borders. In this way, the logic of fantasy constructs a cohesive narrative which binds together social and political logics to reinforce the legitimacy of best practice knowledge in the Working Group. The construction of clear scalar distinctions is imperative for these fantasmatic logics to be effectively mobilised and articulated. By describing the Working Group as a ‘multi-​level culture of learning’, it epitomises the clear politics of scale at play in European education policy. While reference to ‘multi-​level’ suggests the importance of all scales in developing education policies, the beatific learning scenario can in fact only take place in a European platform. This scalar narrative is reinforced by the horrific scenario which warns against a situation where policy actors are isolated within their national borders. The latter involves being incapable of moving up the multi-​level ladder, and hence being unable learn from or be inspired by other school systems. Knowledge and scale are crafted in relation to each other and the distinctive practices of scalecraft work to strategically construct Europe’s role as being uniquely placed to serve as a platform for developing best practices. By mobilising European and national scales in this way, the Commission and country representatives produce a narrative that Europe matters in education policy. The manner with which education has rapidly adopted a central role in European governance means that these scalar practices will continue to evolve and to have direct impacts on what kinds of knowledge and policy arenas influence the making of education policy.

Reflections on scalecraft, knowledge and policy This chapter has used the case of Europe’s ET 2020 framework to explore how hegemonic knowledge regimes are sustained by distinct practices of scalecraft. The opening discussion suggested that the co-​ construction of knowledge and scale in policymaking needs to be examined along two interrelated axes. The first was to explore how hegemonic scalar practices profoundly shape knowledge narratives and powerful ways of knowing in policy. By problematising how scale operates as a category of practice, the analysis has shed light on how powerful types of knowledge both conform to and are shaped by hegemonic practices of scale. Knowledge hegemonies in European governance are consistently articulated through the narratives of

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multi-​level governance which, on the one hand, constantly mobilise equivalential logics of European policy directions while, on the other hand, simultaneously walk the fine line between Europeanisation and subsidiarity. Benchmarks, peer learning and best practice are types of knowledge whose narratives reflect the dual emphasis on European and national scales. By highlighting this, analysis does not only point to how techniques of knowing are shaped by scale, but it also emphasises what these techniques are side-​lining. In the case of European governance in the area of education, the way that practices of scalecraft focus on the European and national scales emphasises the side-​lining of other knowledge, such as that of teachers, students and schools. The second and primary focus of the analysis was to reveal how hegemonic knowledge regimes order and classify the world through crafting scales in particular ways. Reflecting across both sets of empirical data presented in this chapter, some common practices of scalecraft emerge as being instrumental to sustaining hegemonic knowledge types and ways of knowing. In both the policy documents presenting the ET 2020 and the meetings of the Working Group on Schools, European and national scales were associated with particular knowledge narratives. On the one hand, Europe is constructed through equivalential logics whereby Europe produces knowledge that is universal and transferable by providing platforms for fostering policy learning and setting common agendas. On the other hand, the national scale is constructed through a logic of difference; national spaces are characterised by their production of contextual knowledge, which often draws on experience and understandings of specific places and distinct education systems. Crafting the meanings of European and national scales in this manner clearly points to how the practices of ET 2020 Working Groups construct Europe as holding significant power and legitimacy for producing knowledge for education policy. While it is widely understood how universality and generalisability are important characteristics for constructing powerful knowledge (for example, Rose, 1999), what this analysis has shown is that scalecraft is a key hegemonic strategy which delineates the powerful spaces of knowledge creation. Another striking theme that emerged across the two sets of empirical analysis relates to the relationship between scalecraft and depoliticisation. By attaching distinctive meanings to European and national scales as described above, scalecraft practices also constructed clear scalar boundaries between depoliticised and politicised spaces. Namely, European benchmarks, best practices and peer learning platforms are crafted in such a way that they become emptied of

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politics. Simultaneously, the national scale is synonymous with political spaces and is therefore associated with producing knowledge that is more politicised and less ‘objective’ than knowledge produced at the European level. Policy scholars have extensively studied the hegemonic practices of depoliticisation and highlighted why narratives that frame policymaking and knowledge production as being ‘outside’ politics draw such great appeal (see Flinders and Buller, 2006; Hay, 2007). The analysis presented here suggests that scalecraft contributes to explaining how the hegemony of depoliticisation is sustained, particularly in contexts of transnational governance. The empirical analysis has made clear that examining the relationship between knowledge and scalecraft can shed light on new political dimensions relating to Europe’s rapid rise to being a key actor the field of education governance. By adopting a critical approach to scale, the discussion has highlighted the distinct scalar politics that contribute to Europe gaining legitimacy through mobilising and producing powerful forms of knowledge. Specifically, scalecraft practices play a key role by linking particular types of knowledge and ways of knowing to European and national scales, with the former being constructed as having the most transferable and universal properties. Analysis can go a step further to suggest that these dynamics point to a process that involves scalecraft working to disempower place. Powerful ways of knowing in European governance emphasise the importance of place by referring to context and the specifics of national education systems, however the power of placelessness prevails. By emptying the European scale from place and context, and replacing it with notions of universality, transferability and depoliticisation, scalecraft practices result in the erasure of place. And by replacing place with metaphors of multi-​level governance and notions of universal policy learning, a unique role is carved out for Europe as fostering a unique platform for creating powerful policy knowledge for education. This highlights the importance of problematising the scalar categories that remain taken for granted in studies of multi-​level governance. The lens of scalecraft has highlighted how multi-​level governance narratives carve out political space in particular ways, as well as how it is used to allocate specific meanings and power to different political spaces. Having illuminated the political function of scalecraft in a context of multi-​level governance, the chapter which follows turns to examining how scalecraft is an overlooked dimension of statecraft.

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5

Hegemonies of statecraft and scale

Statecraft has become a fundamental concept in the field of policy studies which originates in the work of Jim Bulpitt (1983; 1986) who sought to understand how the political elite exercise power from the centre. Bulpitt’s notion of statecraft reflected the longstanding interest of political science in the exercise of power and its novel contribution was to extend this by focusing on the particular sets of skills and strategies deployed by governments. With the rise of the governance literature, the notion of statecraft has been broadened to refer to the ‘art of government’ by which the state ‘seeks to unify the activities of different branches and departments across its different sites, scales and fields of action’ (  Jessop, 2016, 85). This chapter argues that notions of statecraft serve as a reminder of the enduring importance of hierarchy when studying governance. In short, statecraft ‘highlights the motives and behaviours of states and governments and how politics and power –​as well as broader structural issues –​are important in shaping behaviour’ (Pemberton, 2016, 1308; Buller and James, 2012). By approaching statecraft as a hegemonic strategy deployed by the state, this chapter aims to reveal how practices of scalecraft are a key strategy of statecraft. The chapter takes a different approach to the small number of studies that have already begun to explore the relationship between statecraft and scale. These studies have focused on processes of rescaling as a form of statecraft and explore how ‘states seek to practice what they do partly through a scaling and rescaling of their activities’ (Pemberton, 2016, 1309; Pemberton and Searle, 2016). Rescaling is a concept which points to how the reconstitution of the state’s ‘scalar architectures’ are central foci of statecraft (Brenner, 2004; Jessop, 2002; 2016). The literature on rescaling has typically understood this as a process involving the state responding to capitalist restructuring. According to this approach, processes such as globalisation and neoliberalism require the state to adapt to new governance conditions by re-​allocating and re-​emphasising where different features of state authority are located across scales. The rescaling literature highlights the political nature of scale to some extent in terms of how political choices are articulated

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through the allocation of resources and responsibilities across the scalar architecture of the state. However, its theoretical assumptions are rooted in the political economic approach to scale, and it has been critiqued for reifying scale by using scales as a category of analysis (Moore, 2008). The analysis presented in this chapter offers a new reading of the relationship between scalecraft and statecraft. It does so by emphasising how a poststructuralist approach to scale can help to shed light on the concealed political dynamics and strategies of statecraft. In contrast to the literature that focuses on rescaling, the discussion explores the contingent and fluid meanings that scales are assigned during policy reforms, and explores how the crafting of scale is a co-​constitutive and powerful practice of statecraft.

Statecraft and education systems Education systems have indisputably been a core, longstanding focus of statecraft strategies, with education being central to the crafting of statehood. The very first form of what can be termed an ‘education system’ was found in Ancient Greece, where education emerged ‘as an incarnation of meanings and values associated with reasoned knowledge and democratic citizenship, and in general, with the culture of autonomy that characterized the Greek polis’ (Moutsios, 2018, ii). Creating an education system in the case of the Ancient Greek polis –​ a set of institutions which were geared towards the coordination of knowledge production and aimed to create a particular type of citizen –​ was considered absolutely necessary for the actualisation of one of the earliest forms of statecraft. The entanglement of statecraft and the institutionalisation of education systems is a relationship which echoes throughout history. When it came to the establishment of European nation states during the nineteenth century, it is no coincidence that this coincided with the rise of mass education systems (Green, 1990). In short, education systems have been a longstanding focus of strategies of statecraft and have been integral to the formation of states. The centrality of education systems to the strategies and techniques of statecraft also comes to the fore in dislocatory moments where competing sets of practices seek to de-​stabilise or defend a particular regime of statecraft. Education has consistently been a central battleground for contesting the meanings and practices of statehood and for (re-​)defining the boundaries of the state. Debates over the national nature of education systems are deeply entangled with other political questions over scale. These questions, for example, relate to how different roles, responsibilities and freedoms ought to be allocated

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to regions, localities, local authorities, individual school areas, and even individual parents and students. In other words, education policy reforms consistently clash with alternative visions of education that are articulated through normative arguments about scale. This relationship between statecraft strategies and practices of scale deserves further conceptual attention; the chapter empirically explores this by focusing on policy reforms claiming to make school education more ‘local’.

Statecraft and the local: the case of localism A highly significant statecraft agenda that has emerged since the late 1990s in Westminster-​style democracies has been coined ‘new localism’ (Pratchett, 2004). Localism is a broad term that has been used to describe a range of policies and governing arrangements. Evans et al (2013, 405) have offered a flexible definition of localism which summarises it as ‘the devolution of power and/​or functions and/​or resources away from central control and towards front-​line managers, local democratic structures, local institutions and local communities, within an agreed framework of minimum standards’. For decades, scholars and practitioners of policy have explored the potential that lies in local governance and politics. For example, one of the most enduring questions of local governance scholars has been to explore the ‘small is beautiful’ premise whose narrative suggests that the local scale is associated with greater democracy and participation (for example, Allan, 2003; Avellaneda and Gomes, 2015; Boyne, 1996; Craig and Manthorpe, 1998; Newton, 1982). Indeed, Mark Purcell has argued that there is a tendency for policy scholars themselves to assume that ‘the local is inherently more democratic than other scales’ (2006, 1921), something which he critiques and calls ‘the local trap’. Narratives of localism which locate the solution to policy problems at the scale of the local is thus by no means new in the study and practice of statecraft. ‘New localism’ can be regarded as the recent intensification of a political interest in the local. One of the contexts in which new localism has appeared with particular force is British politics where it ‘emerged as a policy mantra for the Blair/​Brown Labour government…, was subsequently embraced by the [2010–​2015] Conservative-​led coalition’ (Evans et al, 2013, 403) and continues to be a key part of political narratives in the post-​2015 Conservative governments. From a political discourse perspective, localism can be understood as a hegemonic regime of statecraft, involving constructing ‘the local’ through the mobilisation of fantasmatic narratives of participation, community and choice. An important part of this hegemonic practice is the antagonism

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which is constructed between ‘the local’ and ‘bureaucracy’ –​in other words, making policies more local is framed as directly decreasing ‘burdensome’ and ‘inefficient’ bureaucracies (Crowe, 2011). The political agendas of localism are well-​explored in political science and public administration literature (for example, Hildreth, 2011; Hodgson and Spours, 2012; Parvin, 2009), and some notable geographical work has also discussed the specific meanings localism allocates to ‘the local’ (see Clarke and Cochrane, 2013; Cochrane, 2016). The discussion presented here aims to build on these arguments further by understanding scalecraft to be a key political dimension of localism. Localism has manifested itself in diverse and changing ways across different policy fields; this discussion focuses specifically on how localism narratives have intersected with the governance of England’s school system (education is a devolved policy area in the UK). The analysis which follows centres on the narratives of localism that have been mobilised in policies relating to the governance of schools during the period 2007–​2017. As the discussion will illustrate, statecraft strategies related to ‘the local’ in England’s school system are impossible to disconnect from the ever-​dominant role of marketisation as a guiding logic of the system. In light of this, analysis aims to shed new light on the politics of localism and the market by showing how these hegemonies operate through constructing restrictive and exclusionary boundaries around what counts as ‘the local’ in the school system.

The politics of scale in localism: the governance of England’s school system By far one of the most important governance dynamics that has shaped England’s school system has been the establishment of a ‘quasi-​market’ (Walford, 2014; West and Bailey, 2013). A burgeoning literature by critical education scholars has studied the evolution of England’s school system by understanding how it is increasingly made sense of through market principles (for example, Gewirtz et al, 1995; Whitty and Edwards, 1998; Ball, 2003; Olmedo and Wilkins, 2017). Scholars have characterised the system as a ‘quasi’ market because schools are not operating on a for-​profit basis, however the system displays a number of distinct market dynamics and rules (Le Grand and Bartlett, 1993). The influence of market logic on the governance of England’s school system is clearly demonstrated by the fragmented and diversified nature of the school landscape, the consistent erosion of local authority responsibilities, and the normalisation of individual

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choice and parent ‘consumers’ as key principles underpinning the system. Critical education scholars have revealed how policy actors, particularly the senior management of schools, place great emphasis on making decisions that can ensure ‘that their institutions thrive, or at least survive, in the marketplace’ (Gewirtz et al, 1995, 2). In short, England’s school system is profoundly shaped by a market hegemony which normalises logics of competition, individual interests, individual choice and consumer–​producer relations as the guiding principles of the system (see Papanastasiou, 2018). The rise of localism as a key statecraft ambition has taken place alongside the development of a quasi-​market school system in the context of England’s education system. The discussion which follows will illustrate how these two political dynamics have developed in a highly compatible manner. The political construction of ‘the local’ will be examined by focusing on two highly influential policies  –​ academy schools and free schools –​which reflect the dual governance dynamics of the localism agenda and the deepening of the school system quasi-​market. Diversifying England’s school system: academies and free schools One of the most striking characteristics of England’s schooling landscape is that it is highly diversified in that it contains a variety of state school types. The school system became diversified at an accelerated rate following the Conservative-​backed Education Reform Act of 1988, which allowed for the creation of new types of schools. The introduction of City Technology Colleges and grant-​maintained schools started the process of diversification but other types of school soon emerged in the school system (Chitty, 2009). The number and range of school types reflects how England’s school governance has been understood as promoting the marketisation principles of individual self-​ interest, consumer choice and competition. The school landscape has been characterised as ‘messy, patchy and diverse’ (Ball, 2012b, 100) and a ‘systemless system’ (Lawn, 2013) and attempts to categorise it need to be ‘constantly revisited as new patterns of provision emerge’ (Woods and Simkins, 2014, 332; Courtney, 2015). Two of the most important policies at the forefront of recent deepening diversification of the school landscape are the ‘academies policy’ and the ‘free schools policy’. By examining the narratives of these policies, the discussion which follows will demonstrate how the localism agenda and marketisation politics are mutually supportive dynamics in the re-​shaping of England’s school system.

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In 2000, New Labour launched what was to become one of the most significant and controversial schools policies in the drive to diversify school provision. This was the ‘academies policy’ which was initially aimed at addressing educational failure by bringing solutions to ‘areas of greatest challenge’ (DfES, 2005, 2) and ‘high deprivation’ (DCSF, 2009, 22). The academies policy involved ‘failing’ schools being closed down and re-​opened as academies which would be run by private sponsors. Sponsorship arrangements involved ‘sponsors creating a private company with charitable status which then enter[ed] into a funding agreement with the Secretary of State’ (Papanastasiou, 2017c, 84). An important feature of academy status was that academies received funding directly from central government and that the accountability link between academies and the local authority was severed –​academies instead became directly accountable to the Secretary of State. The initially outlined scope of the academies policy was fairly limited, for example initial government proposals suggested 20 academies to be opened by 2005 (DfES, 2001). However, the policy quickly gained momentum, reflected by how the 2005 White Paper called for 200 academies by 2010 (DfES, 2005), and how a few years later the 2009 White Paper projected 300 academies by 2010 (DCSF, 2009). In 2010, a new Conservative-​led coalition with the Liberal-​ Democrat party replaced the New Labour government. The Coalition government’s policies have been understood as extending market logic in the school system by mobilising narratives of diversity, freedoms and localism, although this also meant extending what had already been put in place by the New Labour government (Bailey and Ball, 2016). A highly significant reform was made to the academies policy in 2010 when the Coalition passed the Academies Act. This piece of legislation made the academies policy available to all schools, regardless of their performance in their inspection reports. The 2010 White Paper articulated the new ambitions for the policy by stating that ‘Academy status should be the norm for all state schools, with schools enjoying direct funding and full independence from central and local bureaucracy’ (DfE, 2010, 52). The Academies Act led to a new type of academy called ‘converters’, which were schools that were able to convert to academy status due to performing well in their inspection reports. Converters do not require external sponsorship and in the first 19 months following the Academies Act there were substantial financial benefits to be received from converting. Schools were given a £25,000 grant to support them with legal costs associated with conversion, and the state also covered their insurance costs. And in addition to their normal grant, academies

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received an extra grant called the LACSEG (Local Authority Central Spend Equivalent Grant) which was designed for them to purchase the services they no longer received automatically from their local authority. During the first 19 months that followed the Academies Act, the LACSEG was calculated in such a way that meant it was 60–​70 per cent greater than the actual financial needs of newly converted academies. In short, there was a major financial bonus for becoming an academy during this period which many interpreted as an intentional financial incentive from the state (see Downes, 2011; Bassett et  al, 2012).The Academies Act led to a huge adoption of academy status by eligible schools, and at the time of writing 66.4 per cent of secondary schools currently hold academy status (DfE, 2018a). In addition to the radical extension of the academies policy, the Conservative-​led coalition also introduced a second policy which was the launch of the ‘free schools policy’. Free schools were introduced in the 2010 Academies Act and are officially an additional type of academy. The distinctive characteristic of free schools is that they allow ‘groups of parents, teachers or other sponsors…to start their own state-​maintained but officially “independent” schools’ (Walford, 2014, 9). The 2010 White Paper emphasises how free schools are the solution to parental demands for greater choice and alternative provision in schooling and that it is the role of local and central government to enable parents to set up a school if they wish. So far, 473 free schools have been set up (DfE, 2018b), despite the policy facing intense criticism and a number of controversies that have included claims that students from disadvantaged backgrounds are underrepresented in free schools (Morris, 2015), and criticisms relating to high levels of government spending being pledged to build new free schools (Syal, 2017). The post-​2015 Conservative government continued to emphasise the drive for academy status to become the norm for all schools. An important new modification to the policy was the introduction of Regional School Commissioners (RSCs) in 2015. RSCs marked a significant change in accountability arrangements in academy schools and were framed as the solution to the missing ‘middle tier’ that was perceived to exist between academies and central government (Foster and Long, 2017). RSCs are individuals who work in teams to oversee academy school performance over a specific geographical area (there are eight RSCs in total, spanning all areas of England). If an academy is underperforming it is the responsibility of the RSC to intervene, rather than the previous arrangement whereby the Secretary of State held this responsibility. The post-​2015 Conservative government has also declared an increasing investment in the free school scheme,

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and has pledged that at least 500 free schools will be opened by 2020 (DfE, 2016). Scalecrafting the local The discussion overleaf highlights how the academies and free schools policies mobilise three key social logics in their construction of ‘the local’. These logics are: (i) the policies give greater choice to schools and their communities, (ii) the policies allow schools to become free from local authority control, and (iii) the policies enable schools and communities to pursue their interests. These three social logics are mobilised by crafting very specific boundaries around the local, which also serves to reinforce and strengthen the quasi-​market dynamics of England’s school system. The development of the academies and free school policies reveals an ever-​increasing emphasis on the statecraft strategy of localism. Localism discourses have become particularly prominent in the post-​2010 period, when academies shifted to becoming an all-​encompassing solution to education and when the introduction of free schools took place. Examples of the centrality of the local in the policies’ narratives include: ‘the development of Academies and Free Schools…[should] reflect the local community’ (DfE, 2010, 62), free schools being framed as ‘alternative models that better deliver the type of education which parents and local communities want’ (DfE, 2016, 62) and academies being described as innovating in order ‘to meet the needs of their pupils or their local area’ (DfE, 2016, 90). The local is therefore central to the fantasmatic logics of academies and free schools, by framing them as schools that are better-​equipped to cater to the needs and demands of local communities, parents and pupils. It is clear how the scalecraft practices of the localism agenda are highly compatible with deepening the hegemonic grip of the quasi-​ market in the governance of the school system. The fantasmatic logic which frames academies and free schools as reflecting the needs and demands of parents and pupils demonstrates how the guiding rules of the school system are the pursuit of individual interests. Furthermore, this fantasmatic logic frames parents and pupils as ‘customers’ that should be able to choose between a variety of providers. Crafting academies and free schools in relation to the local scale thus sustains both the hegemony of localism as well as the hegemony of the market. The strategic crafting of academies and free schools as ‘local’ institutions also helps to reveal important political dynamics which are concealed by fantasmatic logics of ‘the local’. One of these dynamics relates to the massive implications of policies for the role of local

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authorities. Academies have had a dramatic effect on the capacity of local authorities in education, and the political drive to increase the number of free schools is also contributing to these effects. The manner with which funding for academies and free schools by-​passes the local authority has meant that local authority budgets for education services have significantly decreased (Mansell, 2011). An additional way that academies and free schools have sidelined local authorities relates to the issue of school accountability. Namely, academies and free schools are no longer accountable to their local authority but are instead accountable to RSCs (and, previously, central government). In this way, local authorities no longer have a role to intervene in schools that are facing challenges, which has marked ‘a “break” from roles and structures and relationships of accountability of a state education system’ (Ball, 2007, 177). This can be interpreted as a hegemonic scalecraft practice that enables the continued sidelining of local authorities in England’s school system and, crucially, it operates by progressively disconnecting local authorities from meanings of the ‘local’. Local authorities are consistently framed as being distinct from local communities in school reform descriptions, with statements such as ‘[the local authority should] seek sponsors and partners who will fit with the character of the local community’ (DfE, 2010, 63) being typical. The implication of this is to foreground individual schools in discussions about local communities and local needs, and to disengage local authorities from these meanings. Once again, scalecraft is working to normalise market dynamics –​the consistent erosion of local authorities has taken place as part of the advance of market logic. In particular, scalecraft reinforces a logic which equates local authorities with burdensome bureaucracy and thus presents the market as a more efficient alternative. By excluding local authorities from discussions of ‘local communities’ scalecraft strategies have played an important part in concealing the political implications of the localism agenda. A further political dynamic which scalecraft strategies of localism have helped to conceal relates to centralisation trends in the governance of the school system. England’s school system has been shaped by the statecraft agenda of localism, but it has also simultaneously been accompanied by a new centrism (Ball, 2007) which involves a centralisation of accountability and control. As argued by Shore and Wright (2011, 15), ‘the fragmentation or “agencification” of the state (Pollitt et al, 2001) and often “governing at a distance”…have often worked to increase centralised control’. The centralisation of school data banks (Broadfoot, 1996; Ozga et al, 2011) and the increasingly

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centralised control exerted over the area of school inspection (for example, Baxter and Clarke, 2013; Ozga et al, 2013) are among the key trends pointing to a new centrism in the governance of England’s school system. Following the 2010 Academies Act, the rapid academisation of the school landscape caused a huge increase in the degree to which the school system was centralised, due to academies all being accountable to central government. The introduction of RSCs in 2015 was considered a solution to the over-​burdened Department for Education which was becoming increasingly unable to deal with the volume and nature of academy requests. While RSCs have been framed as the new ‘middle tier’ in school governance, the presence of eight regional bodies still marks a dramatic centralisation of power compared to England’s 353 local authorities. Furthermore, RSCs are overwhelmingly guided by the recommendations and reports of the national inspectorate, the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), which further underlines how they reflect a school system which is highly centralised. In addition to this, a number of ongoing and growing concerns remain about a lack of transparency in how RSCs make decisions and monitor schools (House of Commons, Education Committee, 2016). Despite representing a high degree of centralisation, RSCs have been framed as part of the localism agenda, for example by being described as ‘build[ing] capacity in their local area’ (DfE, 2016, 112) and having ‘an important role to play in their local area’ (DfE, 2016, 58). Thus, hegemonic practices of scalecraft are constructing the local in accordance with the statecraft ambitions of localism with the effect of disguising the significant centralisation of accountability created by the academy schools and free schools policies.

Trapped in the local: experiences of academy school reform Having revealed the scalecraft strategies of the localism agenda in the case of the academies and free schools policies, the chapter now turns to understanding this issue through a different lens, by examining the perspective of policy actors tasked with implementing these policy reforms. Building on the previous section’s focus on England’s school system and the specific crafting of the local mobilised by the academy and free schools policies, the forthcoming discussion explores how policy actors made sense of the academies policy in a specific local authority case study. By engaging with the practices of policy actors tasked with implementing the academies policy, the discussion aims to

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reflect further on the hegemonic logics of localism and how they affect the work of policy actors. The discussion is based on a study of a local authority case study which was given the pseudonym of ‘Eastshire’. A brief context of Eastshire will first be presented before turning to the analysis of policy actors’ responses to the academies policy. Eastshire: a brief context Eastshire is a large, rural county in the East of England and ranks among the least deprived areas in England. The educational performance of its schools is also consistently above national averages according to Ofsted inspection reports. The political profile of the County Council has shifted over time, with no single political party playing a dominant role. During the fieldwork period (in 2010–​2011), the Conservative Party held political leadership of the Council, which also coincided with the passing of the 2010 Academies Act. Prior to 2010, academies were not considered to be relevant for the local authority due to the policy being exclusively centred on educational failure in schools. The Academies Act marked a huge shift for Eastshire’s schooling landscape because it meant that high performing schools became eligible to become ‘converter’ academies. Following the Academies Act the County Council announced that its official position towards academies was ‘neutral’: it stated that, regardless of whether or not schools chose to convert to academy status, the local authority’s role was to support all schools in their decisions. Despite the Council’s claim of neutrality, many interpreted its official position as unofficially encouraging Eastshire schools to convert. Eastshire had among the fastest uptakes of converter academy conversion in England, and within two years all of its secondary schools had become academies. The empirical study of academies in Eastshire focused on converter academies and sought to explore local authority and school responses to the Academies Act, as well as how actors navigated through the conversion process. Interviews were held with Eastshire local authority officers, as well as with academy principals and chairs of governors (who were the main school actors tasked with managing the academy conversion process). Logics of the local: greater choice When reflecting on their understandings of the academies policy, interviewees consistently articulated three key social logics. These

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logics link to the hegemonic meanings of localism and the associated politics of marketisation identified in the previous section. Namely, the academies policy was discussed in relation to (i) giving greater choice to local schools and communities, (ii) increasing local collaboration, and (iii) allowing the pursuit of local interests. Local authority officers reproduced the logic of school choice by consistently distancing themselves from the issue of academy conversion. Their stance towards converter academies in Eastshire was summarised as, ‘we feel it’s a school’s choice about whether to become an academy or not’ (Local authority officer 3), arguing that well-​performing schools are best-​placed to make decisions about their future. The official stance of the local authority towards the academies policy which framed it as an issue exclusively related to ‘individual school choice’ conveyed a disconnect between the local authority and schools. Officers underlined how this logic of difference was a longstanding feature of the relationship between Eastshire local authority and its schools. For example, officers described how ‘this authority’s position has always been [to emphasise individual school choice]’ (Local authority officer 1) and ‘our policy on school status has always been: schools are best placed to decide’ (Local authority officer 5). This points to how a longstanding situated ‘logic of the local’ (Blanco et al, 2014) in Eastshire coincided with the logics of localism as a statecraft ambition. This crafting of the local mutually reinforced the dominance of school choice and undermined the role of local authorities in governing schools. Academy principals and chairs of governors also reproduced the logic of individual school choice by describing their decision to convert to academy status as being an internal one. In other words, their overarching concern related to the interests of their individual institution. For example, one principal described how the bottom line for their decision to convert was that ‘it gives us the right amount of money that we should be spending on children in this school’ (Principal 1). The local authority was not considered relevant to academy actors’ decisions. Once again, the hegemonic practice in Eastshire is one which combines localism and the market by associating ‘local choice’ with individual schools and their catchment areas and sidelining the role of local authorities. Exploring how policy actors made sense of the academies policy also enables analysis to reveal how the social logic of ‘greater choice’ works to conceal tensions and contradictions in statecraft narratives of localism. The most striking contradiction relates to how many school actors articulated their choice to convert to academy status as one which

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involved very little choice at all. The following quotations illustrate this contradictory dynamic: When it became apparent that there was some financial advantage in the way budget  allocations would work in becoming an academy, we decided that we couldn’t afford not to join the bandwagon. (Academy governor 4) The government set it up this way, they set it up so that every individual school had [a]‌pretty strong incentive… to become an academy…If you set up the playing field in a particular way we’ll all rush like lemmings towards the corn. (Academy governor 2) These quotations make it clear that while school actors were given the choice over converting to academy status, many actors felt that they were being presented with very little choice. The financial advantages of conversion were interpreted as an intentional move by central government to make it almost impossible for schools to turn down. The second quotation is particularly striking in how it refers to schools as ‘rush[ing] like lemmings towards the corn’ –​it brings sharply into focus how schools operate according to the laws of the marketplace. The social logic of ‘local choice’ thus conceals how market logic restricts actor agency. Logics of the local: collaboration between schools Following the 2010 Academies Act and the rapid increase in converter academies, local authority officers in Eastshire pursued ideas of how to foster greater collaboration between schools. A large part of the reason behind this was the realisation of local authority officers that they increasingly lacked the resources to sufficiently support schools, and that there was a risk of academies becoming isolated as a result of their new status as ‘independent state schools’. Local authority officers focused on developing a policy model proposed by David Hagreaves which is called a ‘self-​improving school system’. This model received significant interest by central government at the time and its basic tenets involved ‘clusters of schools (the structure); the local solutions approach and co-​construction (the two cultural elements); and system leaders (the key people)’ (Hagreaves, 2010, 3). Hagreaves situated his model firmly within the statecraft ambitions of localism; for example,

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he sets out his model by suggesting that it is based on ‘mass localism’ which he explains by borrowing the following quotation: Despite support from across the political spectrum, genuine localism is something governments find difficult to achieve…Mass localism depends on a different kind of support from government and a different approach to scale. Instead of assuming that the best solutions need to be determined, prescribed, driven or ‘authorised’ from the centre, policymakers should create more opportunities for communities to develop and deliver their own solutions and to learn from each other. (Bunt and Harris, 2010, 5, quoted in Hagreaves, 2010, 9) This illustrates a clear and consciously strategic crafting of the local which defines it in relation to ‘communities’ and, in Hagreaves’ model, individual schools. It is clearly a model that is reproducing the statecraft strategy of localism to a significant degree by mobilising a fantasmatic logic of local communities and schools working together, which conceals the wider political context of sidelining local authorities as well as the broader impact of austerity policies on the school system during this period. Despite Eastshire local authority attempting to encourage schools to collaborate in an attempt to create a self-​improving school system, however, the narratives of collaboration were largely challenged by Eastshire principals and governors. These school actors consistently disputed the fantasmatic logic of a ‘self-​improving school system’ by arguing that it was fundamentally incompatible with their work being guided by the hegemony of the market. One principal articulated this in a particularly striking manner: Does Apple get on the phone to whoever its leading competitor is and say, ‘D’ you know what, we’re having difficulties with this little iPad we’re kind of working on, can you come and give us support and…?’ Well that doesn’t happen, does it? You know, and that, that’s the problem with, in a sense we’ve got tensions within a system. (Principal 2) What this quotation reveals is how school actors make decisions according to the rules of the school marketplace, which involves

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competing with other schools over students and resources. Logics of ‘local collaboration’ in the localism agenda are therefore exposed as being incompatible and impossible to put into practice due to the prevalence of market hegemony. In this way, the narrative of the localism agenda is thrown into question. By constructing the boundaries of the local around individual schools’ catchment areas, the scalecraft practices of the localism agenda restrict the opportunity for meaningful ‘local collaboration’ between schools. Another practice which contradicted the logic of local collaboration linked to the hegemonies of localism and the market was a counter-​ hegemonic attempt by local authority officers to include the local authority in the activities of academy schools. Local authority officers attempted to mobilise an equivalential logic which aimed to create new kinds of collaborative links that brought the local authority and academies into direct collaboration with each other. One area where this emerged was when local authority officers decided that, despite Eastshire being a largely academised landscape, they would ‘do an annual “keeping-​in-​touch” visit to every single school’ which they described as being part of their ‘duty of care for the children [of Eastshire]’ (Local authority officer 3). This demonstrates an attempt by officers to create an equivalential space across the local authority by emphasising their responsibility to all children in Eastshire, regardless of the type of school they are attending. However, instances where this type of equivalential logic was mobilised were rare. Logics of the local: pursuing the interests of the school The frontline work of policy actors developing and implementing academies in Eastshire revealed the social logic of pursuing individual interests as the guiding principle of the school landscape. The dominance of individual interests as a powerful shaper of policy practices came sharply into focus when school actors discussed the issue of academy status having a negative impact on other schools in Eastshire. This negative impact refers to how a school converting to academy status is no longer allocated funding through the local authority, but instead the newly converted academy receives these funds directly. The result of this has been that Eastshire local authority has been left with fewer resources. Moreover, the local authority has a reduced capacity to allocate funding to schools which would have normally received a larger proportion of funding due to being deemed as having greater needs. All interviews conducted with academy principals and governors

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in Eastshire touched on this issue, and the quotations below illustrate how two principals made sense of this: As a policy I think I’m fairly ideologically opposed to it… you know, ultimately, you know, I do have principles and it’s important that I stay true to my principles…So I felt that in making one decision [not to convert to an academy] I was going to disadvantage students at [name of principal’s academy] then of course that’s going to be…you know, that for me is a fundamental issue to deal with first and foremost. (Principal 2) Some of the money for our most needy children was never seen in this school. Because it was always allocated in lump sums to schools which hit certain postcodes. So, actually, we then got over that morally and said: well actually it [academy status] gives us the right amount of money that we should be spending on children in this school. (Principal 1) Both principals in the quotations above illustrate how their decision to convert to academy status ultimately came down to deciding what was in the best interests of their school. In addition, fantasmatic logics which mobilise horrific scenarios reveal fears about what the outcome would be if schools did not prioritise their individual institutions. The main horrific scenario was that choosing not to convert to academy status would be unfair and create disadvantage for students attending the particular school. Principals and governors emphasised how students from their school would suffer or, as one governor put it, become ‘sacrificial victims’, should the school leadership decide against converting to academy status. In this way, these policy actors framed conversion as the only option available to them. Interviews with principals and governors revealed more than a simple reproduction of the social logic of schools pursuing individual interests, however. If we re-​consider the quotations presented above, they also reveal an important affective dimension, namely, emotions of guilt and the articulation of personal moral dilemmas. School actors referred to how they thought about the academies policy in relation to their ‘principles’ and how they questioned the morality of their decision to convert. This points to how principals and governors were very aware of the possibility that their decision might have a negative impact on other schools and the wider local authority. In this way, the social logic of individual interests is in tension with a counter-​hegemonic

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logic that involves school actors going beyond considering their individual interests and considering the interests of other schools and the local authority area. An alternative scalecrafting of the local comes to light which, albeit fleetingly, exposes the contingency and socially constructed nature of ‘the local’ being promoted by the localism agenda. Despite school actors articulating the possibility of an alternative logic of the local, all interviewees made the decision to convert their school to an academy, regardless of whether they thought it was the ‘right’ thing to do. The rules of the competitive marketplace mean that school actors are restricted to pursuing the interests of their individual school, thus reproducing the logics of the local according to statecraft narratives of localism. The analysis of the logics reflected in the policy practices of actors tasked with implementing academies in Eastshire has revealed how the case is dominated by a regime of practice which largely supports statecraft. The academies policy has manifested itself in Eastshire in a way that mirrors the education governance vision of national policy. Overall, the case of Eastshire demonstrates scalecraft practices which involve the local scale being strictly defined as relating to individual schools and their catchment areas, at the exclusion of the local authority. Excluding the local authority from what it means to be ‘local’ is an integral feature of social logics which promote greater local choice, local collaborations and the pursuit of local interests. By exploring the experiences of policy actors the discussion has also showed how the social logics of localism are concealing important tensions and contradictions. The social logic of choice is contradicted by policy actors’ experience of having very little choice, the logic of collaboration is in tension with the competitive nature of the school landscape, and the logic of schools being free to pursue their individual interests is undermined by school actors experiencing moral dilemmas in relation to this principle. Despite these tensions, the hegemony of localism and the market are those which have shaped the implementation of the academies policy in Eastshire. These hegemonies craft the local in such a way that it restricts the agency of school actors and narrows the options available to them. In this sense, actors can be understood to be ‘trapped in the local’, in that they are unable to consider anything beyond their individual school catchment area. Localism can be characterised as a form of statecraft that leads to ‘scalar entrapment’  –​in contradiction to commonly associating ‘the local’ with greater freedoms and participation, scalar entrapment points to disempowerment that scale hegemonies (including that of the local) can generate.

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Scalecraft as a hegemonic strategy of statecraft This chapter began with the assertion that scalecraft is a key strategy of statecraft. This argument has been explored by presenting an empirical analysis of the localism agenda in England’s school system, examining both the official policy narratives and the implementation practices of policy actors in a local authority case study. The empirical analysis has made clear that localism is a statecraft strategy that relies on powerful practices of scalecraft which give ‘the local’ specific and exclusionary meanings. Scalecraft reflects how localism carves out the ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ of the local, which in the case of England’s schools policies has meant the continuing sidelining of local authorities and the increased responsibilisation of individual schools. The analysis of policy actors’ experiences in Eastshire serves to underline how hegemonic practices of scalecraft profoundly affect the practices of policymaking. By outlining the logics of the local in the academies policy, and revealing the contradictions between these and the experiences of policy actors, the discussion outlined how policy actors experienced a form of ‘scalar entrapment’. Feeling ‘trapped in the local’ is an effect of scalecraft whose significance goes well beyond identifying the exclusionary meanings of the local; scalar entrapment shaped the choices and decisions available to policy actors, and is therefore central to understanding the mass conversion to academy status that took place in Eastshire. A further insight developed in this chapter has been the relationship between statecraft and other hegemonies which mobilise common scalecraft strategies. In the case of England’s school system, the statecraft ambition of localism and the normalisation of quasi-​market dynamics were two hegemonies which shared a common scalecraft strategy. Both mobilise social logics of local freedoms, local needs and local communities by defining these in relation to individual schools and their catchment areas, at the exclusion of local authorities. A focus on scalecraft strategies of localism has thus shed further light on the mutually reinforcing relationship between statecraft and the market. The implications of this discussion go well beyond the case of England’s localism agenda. As Kalervo Gulson notes, ‘the local trap is a constant possibility in place-​based education that occurs as part of government-​funded schooling systems –​especially if the local is uncritically asserted as normative’ (Gulson, 2014, 422). In short, the local is a major hegemonic strategy of education policymaking and, indeed, in policymaking fields outside education (for example, Hammond et  al, 2017). Understanding scalecraft as a hegemonic

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strategy of statecraft offers a conceptual lens for critically analysing policies which evoke scale-​based narratives. By revealing the relationship between the ‘local trap’ and the advancement of market logic, the chapter also points to dynamics which have been identified in Nikolas Rose’s (1996; 1999) work on ‘government through community’. Rose argues that key techniques of ‘governing at a distance’ and instilling principles of ‘self-​governing’ within individuals involves governments encouraging individuals to consider their choices in relation to what impact they will have on their communities. Government through community has been understood as by-​passing the formal institutions of local government by instead placing full authority in the ‘non-​political sphere of civil society that is supposedly “free” to govern itself and take responsibility for its own future’ (Herbert-​Cheshire, 2000, 206). The agenda of localism can clearly be understood through the lens of ‘government through community’ in the ways that it has mobilised fantasmatic logics of community and participation and downplayed the role of local government. In the case of education policy, individual schools have become framed as the most relevant ‘community’ on which policy decisions need to be based. By exploring how practices of scalecraft are co-​constitutive of the localism agenda, this chapter highlights how government through community relies on constructing and giving exclusionary meanings to scales, and that this is central to understanding how this governing dynamic ‘intersects with markets, contracts and consumption in highly complex and surprising ways’ (Rose, 1996, 331). Finally, by introducing the concept of scalar entrapment this chapter adds a further layer of understanding to debates relating to the politics of scale. For example, scalar entrapment can work as a complementary concept to that of ‘scale jumping’ (Smith, 1992). While scale jumping can capture how actors gain greater power through relocating their political agendas to other scales, scalar entrapment captures an antithetical process. Namely, it draws attention to political dynamics that involve disempowerment due to actors’ inability to consider any other scale beyond that which they perceive themselves to be operating within. In this way, scalar entrapment is useful for problematising the relationship between politics, scale and agency by drawing analytical attention to moments where political actors are unable to locate an issue within a broader spatial perspective.

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Spatial entrepreneurs and scalecraft

Acts of normative improvisation by forgotten street wise workers sustain the state: they are acts of statecraft on which the institutions of governing depend. (Maynard-​Moody and Musheno, 2003, 165) This chapter focuses on the practices of frontline workers in policymaking processes. Instead of understanding frontline work as a discrete stage of the policy cycle which is separate to the formulation of policy, the discussion understands it to be a core practice in the making and re-​making of policy, and one which brings to the fore the complex interplay between a number of processes which include discretion, interpretation and statecraft. The chapter makes a key intervention in the literature by arguing that practices of scalecraft are an overlooked dimension of frontline work. It breaks new ground by exploring how frontline workers construct and strategically mobilise scale in their policy work, and by questioning what this can reveal about the skills and practices of policymaking. Questions around the importance of frontline work originate in a classic debate that took central stage in the field of policy analysis during the 1980s and 1990s, which was the stand-​off between scholars advocating ‘top-​down’ approaches to studying implementation and those supporting ‘bottom-​up’ approaches (Hill and Hupe, 2002). Top-​down approaches broadly approach implementation as ‘the hierarchical execution of centrally-​defined policy intentions’ (Pülzl and Treib, 2007, 89) whereas bottom-​up approaches study implementation from the perspective of street-​level actors tasked with implementing government policies. Reflecting on this debate, Susan Barrett (2004) identifies that it rests on two crucial questions. The first question is, ‘What are implementation studies trying to do?’ Top-​down approaches would argue that the aim of policy analysis is to be prescriptive and assist in closing the gap between policymakers’ goals and the outcomes of policy on the ground by identifying key conditions that need to be put in place to achieve this. Scholars advocating a bottom-​up approach on the

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other hand would argue that the main aim of studying implementation is to understand the complexities involved in the work of policy actors, particularly those working at the frontline. The second question central to the debate is, ‘What is meant by implementation?’ For this question, Barrett argues that the two approaches differ in relation to whether they understand implementation to be about ‘conformance’ or ‘performance’ (Barrett, 1981). Top-​down approaches regard successful implementation as reflecting a high degree of conformance with the policy goals identified at the policy formation stage. By contrast, bottom-​up approaches focus on implementation as performance by pursuing an interest in how policy is developed in particular environments, and does not regard the discretion of frontline workers as problematic. While the field of policy studies has largely moved on from the debate between top-​down and bottom-​up approaches, differences in approaching the two key questions of implementation studies persist. One of the lasting impacts of the debate has been that it fostered the growth of studies of frontline or street-​level work. For example, Michael Lipsky’s ground-​breaking accounts of street-​level bureaucrats and their daily practices of exercising discretion within the limits of bureaucratic structures was a major influence in the bottom-​up literature (1971; 1980). Since then, frontline work has been conceptualised with greater nuance and depth, taking account of complexities including those relating to shifting governance dynamics, contextual factors, agency and affect which shape the social worlds of frontline workers. Studies of frontline work have typically focused on local institutions, such as police departments, schools, fire services and local government offices (for example, Evans, 2011; Michael Lipsky, 1980; Maynard-​ Moody and Musheno, 2003; van Hulst et al, 2012). Studies focusing the practices of local government officials and civil servants have produced a particularly rich literature that demonstrates the diversity of frontline work. This literature has focused on exploring the social practices of actors involved in local governance which has shed light on understanding ‘what those we call “policy makers” actually do’ (Freeman et  al, 2011, 128; Maynard-​Moody and Musheno, 2000; Wagenaar, 2004), by analytically engaging with the ‘muddle and mess’ (Goss, 2001; Lowndes, 1997) of their day-​to-​day work. Critical scholars of local governance have developed new layers of understanding about the manifold demands made on frontline workers and the complex work involved in responding to these demands. The creative and innovative nature of frontline work has been highlighted by empirical studies of policy actors navigating the tension between agency

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and managerialist pressures (Goss, 2001), and understanding how they act as ‘institutional entrepreneurs’ who work within institutions to ‘adapt the “rules of the game” in order to respond to changing environments’ (Lowndes, 2005, 306). Conceptualisations of frontline work also include the centrality of ‘civic entrepreneurship’ which involves combining local knowledge and community engagement (Durose, 2011), and the instrumental role of frontline actors in creating and managing diverse local meanings of ‘community leadership’ (Sullivan, 2007). Recent work has also shed light on the complex ‘moral agency’ exercised by frontline workers, arguing against political science scholarship which has often portrayed them as indifferent public administrators (Zacka, 2017). These are just a few examples that illustrate how analysis which takes the practices of policy actors seriously can add new layers of understanding to conceptualisations of policy. The literature on frontline workers in local governance has greatly advanced understandings of the co-​production and re-​interpretation of policies through frontline work practices. By exploring how frontline workers construct and strategically mobilise scale in their policy work, this chapter seeks to add a new layer of understanding to the literature. Important questions that currently remain under-​explored include: how do frontline workers interpret the re-​scaling ambitions embedded within many policies? What meanings are assigned to scales by policy actors working in local governance contexts? And what does this reveal about the discretionary politics of frontline practices? By exploring these questions, the chapter proposes that frontline workers can be understood as ‘spatial entrepreneurs’ and that they perform this role by mobilising practices of scalecraft.

Implementing England’s academies policy: the case of Northwestern The chapter explores how practices of scalecraft are a constitutive part of frontline work by focusing on the frontline actors tasked with implementing England’s academies policy. The analysis focuses on a local authority case study that has been given the pseudonym of ‘Northwestern’. Analysis explores how this local authority responded to the academies policy as well as the process of setting up a group of sponsored academies. For an overview of England’s academies policy, including a description of sponsored academies, I refer the reader to the discussion in Chapter 5. Northwestern was selected as a case study due to being one of the earliest adopters of the academies policy under the New Labour

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government. Northwestern is a metropolitan authority which has among the highest social deprivation levels in England, and the educational performance of its schools persistently falls below national averages. Since the late 1980s the city has been the focus of intensive regeneration efforts in an attempt to address the serious urban deprivation that linked back to the demise of key industries in the 1950s. The City Council of Northwestern has a long tradition of being dominated by Labour Party councillors, and at the time of the fieldwork (during 2013–​2014), most councillors aligned themselves with the left-​leaning factions of the party which they emphasised was distinct from the New Labour movement. Due to Northwestern schools chronically receiving low performance results in their Ofsted inspection reports, Northwestern was one of the first places to be affected by the launch of the academies policy in 2000 (when the policy was only aimed at targeting ‘school failure’). The school performance profile of Northwestern led to the City Council being put under pressure from the New Labour government to be one of the early adopters of the academies policy. Sponsored academies are the type of academy school that was most influential in Northwestern due to the school landscape being one of educational under-​performance (according to reports from Ofsted, the national inspectorate). The empirical study explored how Northwestern responded to pressures to engage with the academies policy, and the frontline work involved in implementing the policy during the period 2000–​2013. Studies of frontline work which explore school education have typically identified teachers as the most important frontline workers. However, this study chose to study local authority officers, academy sponsors and academy principals as the key frontline workers (see also Papanastasiou, 2017b). These actors were tasked with responding and implementing the academies policy, and for this reason they were deemed the most relevant frontline workers for the policy process being investigated. The account which follows describes the development of academies in Northwestern, and serves to highlight further why the selected policy actors conducted highly significant frontline work in this context. The Northwestern Academies Model The launch of the academies policy by the New Labour government in 2000, and the subsequent pressure placed on Northwestern to be one of the early adopters of the policy was met with staunch opposition by the

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Labour councillors of Northwestern City Council. The main focus of councillors’ opposition was that they perceived the academies policy to be sidelining the role of local authorities in school governance and they opposed how academy status led to the removal of the accountability link between the local authority and schools. Furthermore, councillors rejected the policy on the grounds that they feared it would create inequalities in the school landscape, by only benefiting the individual schools that converted to academy status without bringing any wider benefits to other schools in Northwestern. The role of local authority officers is to support councillors by designing detailed strategies for the policy directions proposed by councillors. Local authority officers in Northwestern thus answered to councillors who were clearly opposed to the academies policy. Despite this, Northwestern officers were determined to convince councillors to agree to opening academies in Northwestern due to an additional opportunity linked to the policy. This opportunity came in the form of the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme, which was a scheme coordinated by central government which made capital investments in school buildings (see DfES, 2004; Mahony, Hextall, and Richardson, 2011). A key part of the BSF scheme was that applications for BSF funds were looked on more favourably if they were located in local authorities who incorporated the development of academy schools in their policy plans (Adonis, 2012). In light of this, Northwestern officers considered the academies policy to be an important opportunity because it had the potential to bring significant capital investment to all of the schools in the local authority area. Councillors’ opposition to the national academies model on the one hand, and the opportunities that were associated with engaging with the policy on the other, presented Northwestern officers with a dilemma that needed to be resolved. Their response was to design an alternative model of academies –​which they called the ‘Northwestern Academies Model’  –​that aimed to both address the concerns of Northwestern councillors about academy schools and also convince central government that they would still be engaging with the national vision of academies. The Northwestern Model proposed altering several features of the national policy in order to create a different type of sponsored academy school. The distinguishing features of this modified type of sponsored academy included academies having the City Council as a co-​sponsor (in addition to the lead external sponsor), academy boards of governors consisting of local authority representatives, and the sponsors of academies being selected by the local authority. A central

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tenet of the Northwestern Academies Model was to emphasise that the academies would share a common vision with all schools in Northwestern, and in this way their academy status did not remove them from what they termed the Northwestern ‘family of schools’. By proposing this altered model of academies, local authority officers were able to convince councillors that academies in Northwestern would be implemented in a way that would be compatible with their wider political agendas. Local authority officers were also able to convince national civil servants in the Department for Education and Skills that the Northwestern Model would still produce academies that reflected the key features of the national policy. Between 2005 and 2010 six sponsored academies were developed and opened as part of the Northwestern Model. The discussion draws on interview data to examine in greater detail the way in which local authority officers were able to develop an alternative model of academies; this includes considering the practices of scalecraft mobilised in their frontline work.

Scalecraft and spatial entrepreneurship in Northwestern Spatial entrepreneurship of local authority officers Developing the Northwestern Model involved local authority officers mobilising three social logics which worked to resist key tenets of the national academies policy to which councillors were in opposition. The first of these social logics is that local government has a key role to play in governing schools. This logic directly undermined the logic of the national academies policy which was that schools need to be ‘freed’ from local authority ‘control’, and which worked to erode the role of local authorities. Local authority officers conveyed this when they outlined the vision of the Northwestern Model, arguing that the local authority was a key actor in mediating the introduction of academies in the Northwestern school landscape. For example, the role of the local authority was summarised by one officer as being ‘the glue that tried to pull everything together…to try and get people committed to a citywide belief ’ (Local authority officer 5). As well as emphasising the key role of the local authority, this quotation illustrates how the Northwestern Model consistently used an equivalential logic to emphasise a common vision for school education across Northwestern. By emphasising this vision, the local authority was easily framed as playing a leading role in working towards the Northwestern-​wide ambition for school education.

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The second social logic of the Northwestern Academies Model is that local accountability rests with the local authority. This also directly contests the official policy narrative of academies which emphasises the removal of the accountability link between academies and local authorities. Northwestern officers emphasised that all schools –​regardless of their status  –​needed to be held accountable by the local authority. For example, one officer expressed this position by stating: We focus our efforts very clearly on our right to look at a school straight in the eye and say, ‘We believe that you could do better on behalf of our electorate, the people of Northwestern have elected us to look you in the eye and say…How could you contribute to wider aims of the City Council?’ (Local authority officer 3) This illustrates how the Northwestern Model constructed local accountability as completely interlinked with the local authority. All schools are considered to be accountable to ‘the people of Northwestern’ which emphasises how local accountability relates to the local authority-​wide scale, as well as how the differences between academies and non-​academies are downplayed. Finally, the third key social logic mobilised by the Northwestern Model was framing collaboration and coordination as the guiding principles of the school landscape. This served to undermine the national policy’s emphasis on academies being ‘independent state schools’ that should pursue their individual interests. Instead, the Northwestern Model emphasised that all Northwestern academies would be part of the local authority’s wider vision. Local authority officers described how they designed the Northwestern Model with the explicit aim of integrating academies with the City Council’s wider regeneration efforts and to address educational challenges across the whole of Northwestern. It was therefore essential for Northwestern Model academies to consider themselves as part of a collective effort which contributed towards achieving the aims of Northwestern City Council. For example, one local authority officer described the Council’s efforts as trying to encourage academies ‘to see themselves with other schools as a sponsor for all the youngsters [in Northwestern]’ and stated that the Model was ‘all about collaboration and cooperation’ (Local authority officer 6). Local authority officers clearly exercised creative discretionary practices to produce the Northwestern Academies Model whose social logics dislodged the logics of the national academies policy. What is important is that the social logics of the Northwestern Model were

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reproduced throughout the institutional hierarchy of the City Council, with the leader of the Council taking an unusually direct interest in education and consistently mobilising these logics. One local authority officer referred to this as:  ‘the leader of our Council in talking to Head Teachers is really not using the word “academies”, he’s using the word “schools” to be an inclusive thing, and embracing all schools’ (Local authority officer 2). These powerful discretionary practices can be understood as being co-​constructed by distinctive scalecraft practices. By strategically constructing academies as being part of the local authority-​wide vision, the Northwestern Model challenges the exclusion of local authorities from ‘local’ education. The local authority and schools (regardless of their status) are scalecrafted as belonging to a local authority-​wide scale, which rejects the rescaling narratives of the national academies policy. In light of these scalecraft practices, it is suggested here that local authority officers worked as effective ‘spatial entrepreneurs’ in their crafting of an alternative academies model. The spatial entrepreneurship of local authority officers was enabled by a strong and long-​term myth around the distinctiveness of Northwestern. By mobilising beatific and horrific scenarios, fantasmatic logics helped to reinforce the notion of the local authority being an integral part of ‘local’ schooling in Northwestern. Interviews revealed that the prevailing fantasmatic logic mobilised in frontline policy practices consisted of two, mutually reinforcing beatific and horrific scenarios. The vision of the Northwestern Model was the dominant beatific scenario articulated by local authority and academy actors alike. The local authority officers responsible for developing the Northwestern Model were particularly passionate about articulating this beatific scenario. The following quotation is by an officer who was one of the most influential actors in creating and promoting the Model: If we could embrace the academy thing rather than resist it we could then generate money for new buildings alongside this Building Schools for the Future agenda, renew the opportunities for children in the city and the whole scale thing…It was a case of trying to show people if we all worked on the same composite that we would get something better than if we only worked on our bit. (Local authority officer 5) The above quotation typifies how frontline policy actors crafted a powerful beatific scenario into their vision for the Northwestern Model: the Model combines the BSF scheme with academies in a way

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that benefits children and school buildings across Northwestern. The beatific scenario evokes positive affective reactions by mobilising the idealistic notion of everyone working together ‘on the same composite’ and the resultant benefits being enjoyed across the entire local authority area. Equality of opportunity and collaboration were key to creating the beautific scenario of the Northwestern Model. Descriptions of the beatific scenario of the Northwestern Model also intersected with frontline actors emphasising how their work was enabled by an emotional investment in Northwestern and a sense of community existing across the city. Comments such as, ‘there’s a spirit that, “we’re Northwestern” that you can build on’ (Local authority officer 5) and describing a ‘passion about Northwestern, you know, the belief that you can succeed in Northwestern’ (Local authority officer 6) were typical. Fantasmatic logics evoking positive affective reactions about a Northwestern-​wide community were therefore also key to supporting the spatial entrepreneurship underpinning the Northwestern Model. While the Northwestern Model was conveyed by constructing a beatific scenario, the fantasmatic logics of frontline policy practices also mobilised horrific scenarios. The latter were used to support the Northwestern Model by suggesting what the alternative situation would be if the academies policy had been implemented according to the visions of central government. These alternative situations were described as ‘a whole load of different bitty schools and areas, [where you] suddenly have, you know, [a]‌highly competitive [situation], with very unfair financial arrangements’ (Local authority officer 6). The prospect of an unfair, fragmented and competitive school landscape was a powerful horrific scenario which was in direct opposition to the principles of equality and collaboration in the beatific narrative of the Northwestern Model. Further to this, the horrific scenario also mobilises negative affective reactions by characterising relations between actors as suspicious, uncaring and distant. In other words, the implications are that in the absence of the Northwestern Model the academies policy would pose a direct threat to Northwestern’s community. The relationship between fantasmatic logics and the scalecraft practices of frontline work serve to reveal how affective dimensions of policy and space are co-​constitutive. Placing the local authority at the centre of the ‘local community’ of Northwestern, enabled local authority officers to mobilise powerful affective narratives that were inextricably linked to a particular configuration of space which supported their policy goals. By tapping into existing fantasmatic narratives of a ‘Northwestern community’, the Northwestern Model

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was powerful enough to convince Northwestern councillors that the Model prevented the local authority from being excluded from local education, and instead that it upheld and strengthened the local authority-​wide community. Expanding scalecraft visions beyond the local authority While the Northwestern Model successfully convinced councillors to accept the introduction of academies in Northwestern, local authority officers also needed to ensure that other key actors would adopt their policy vision. In the case of academies, the most important actors were the external sponsors and principals of the academy schools being set up under the Northwestern Model. These actors were selected prior to new academy buildings even being designed, and were expected to play a major role in planning and developing the academies. It was therefore imperative that they also adopted the policy vision of the Northwestern Model. The Model  stipulated that sponsors would be recruited by the local authority, and officers used this recruitment process as a way of ensuring that sponsors would commit to the principles of the Model. Indeed, officers were able to use existing networks and approached sponsors who had already established a working relationship with the City Council. Officers described the sponsor selection process as follows: We didn’t simply want someone flash, we wanted someone who had roots in the city. (Local authority officer 4) [The chosen sponsors] were committed to Northwestern… these were the people who had a long history of working in Northwestern…So they were people who were committed. (Local authority officer 6) After sponsors were selected, each sponsor recruited a principal for their academy school and all sponsors and principals subsequently followed an intensive training programme coordinated by Northwestern officers. Overseeing the recruitment and training of academy sponsors and principals clearly enabled Northwestern officers to ensure that these actors understood the policy vision of the Northwestern Model. The social logic of local authorities having a key role to play in the governance of schools was clearly articulated by sponsors and principals. A number of academy sponsors stated that the local

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authority’s involvement convinced them to take on their sponsor role. For example, one sponsor described how, ‘academies jarred with [our values]…Because it felt like they were being taken out of local authority control…getting Northwestern City Council involved I think pretty much swayed it for us’ (Sponsor 1). The central role of the local authority in Northwestern academies was also expressed by principals, who emphasised the importance of the City Council’s ‘good local knowledge’ (Principal 3) and how local authority officers link academies with the overall regeneration vision of Northwestern. Principals and sponsors also articulated the Northwestern Model’s social logic relating to a collaborative and coordinated school landscape. In their accounts of the process and the training involved in developing their academies, as well as when outlining their professional roles, sponsors and principals consistently referred to a collaborative school landscape. An example that really captures this is from a principal who stated, ‘Northwestern City Council have a vision for the future of Northwestern and education is part of that vision…The school is the first part of that jigsaw’ (Principal 3). Understanding their academy as part of the wider ‘jigsaw’ of Northwestern underlines how this principal is reproducing the logic of a coordinated Northwestern school landscape. When asked to reflect on the key contributions of their academy, sponsor representatives also consistently linked individual academies to the overall work of the local authority. For example, one sponsor described having a ‘joined-​up view’ which involved the academy being ‘a pivotal part not only in the education of a small group of children and in the community but also helping to inform policy of the local authority’ (Sponsor 1). A different sponsor emphasised the importance of ‘making sure that the academy isn’t just happily pottering along in its own way but that it is connected [to the local authority]’ (Sponsor 2). These quotations from sponsor representatives –​who are the Chairs of academy boards of governors –​once again emphasise how individual academies in Northwestern are governed according to an equivalential logic that creates the sense of a common, Northwestern-​wide vision for education. Academy sponsors and principals’ descriptions of working in a collaborative school landscape also reveal that they are emphasising a degree of being accountable to the Northwestern-​wide area. By emphasising that they are contributing to the ‘Northwestern community’, sponsors and principals suggest that their accountability goes beyond parents and students attending their individual academies. One indication that the social logics of the Northwestern Model were at risk of being challenged related to the existence of competition between schools. Principals and sponsors acknowledged that despite

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their efforts to make their academies part of a local authority-​wide collaboration, schools continued to perceive each other in a competitive manner. The following quotations describe a persistent sense of competition between schools: The principals certainly feel in competition. And they’ve always felt slightly more in competition than the sponsors…I do understand why, and we have tried to, broken [sic] that down. (Sponsor 1) We’ve tried to be collaborative. But yeah [sighs] being collaborative in a competitive world is a difficult balance. (Principal 3) The ‘competitive world’ described in the above quotations reflects how the quasi-​market rules of England’s schooling system are emerging in the practices of frontline work (Gewirtz et al, 1995). In this quasi-​ market, schools are in competition over scarce resources, and parents exercise choice over which school to send their children. In the case of the academies policy in Northwestern, existing schools became concerned that the introduction of new academies would lead to a fall in their student numbers (and hence the resources and funding that moves with individual students) –​something that did in fact take place. This reveals how a social logic of a collaborative school landscape is undermined by a competing social logic which underlines the market rules of the school landscape. This differential logic only emerged in relation to the work of school actors, and interviewees emphasised that they regarded this as a largely negative dynamic. However, it can be understood as an emergent risk for undermining the equivalential logic of the Northwestern Model which emphasises collective effort by all schools to contribute to a common educational vision for Northwestern. Academies in Northwestern: frontline work, scalecraft, and resistance What emerges from considering the scalecraft practices of local authority officers, sponsors and principals in Northwestern is that the policy practices involved in frontline work consistently sought to (re)define the boundaries of ‘the local’. A major practice which makes the social logics underpinning the Northwestern Model so convincing is the mobilisation of scalecraft practices which construct

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the ‘local’ as consisting of both the local authority and schools. It is only by constructing the local scale in this way that the social logics of the Northwestern Model become possible. The logics which relate school governance, local accountability and collaboration to a local authority-​wide scale are reinforced by scalecraft practices which define the local in relation to the local authority. For this reason, it can be argued that frontline work in Northwestern involved frontline practices of ‘spatial entrepreneurship’. Local authority officers in particular demonstrated how they creatively drew equivalences between the local authority and all schools to build on the existing spatial imaginary of a ‘Northwestern-​wide community’, and by doing so they were able to resist key parts of the national academies policy. By critically engaging with how concepts and categories of scale are mobilised in policy practices of frontline workers the analysis helps to explain how the national policy vision of academies was resisted in Northwestern. Policy actors working in the local authority and in academy schools all reflected a regime of practice which rejected the sidelining of local authorities from the governance of schools. Scale mattered here because the statecraft ambition reflected in the academies policy hinged on the dichotomy of ‘local schools’ on the one hand and local authorities on the other. Mobilising scalecraft practices which rejected this definition of the local was a key strategy that contributed to Northwestern actors successfully resisting statecraft, and which placed the local authority at the centre of their academy implementation plan. We can take this analysis one step further to argue that scalecraft practices of frontline work have helped to reveal two key political dynamics at play in the situated politics of the academies policy. First, the analysis of scalecraft practices featuring in social logics reveals important insights into how the academies policy has clearly forced local authority and school actors to confront questions relating to the role of the state in education governance. This is clear by how all actors mobilised social logics relating to the role of local government, the meaning of local accountability, and what kinds of principles should be guiding the local schooling landscape. The process of making sense of these questions about ‘state education’ involved consistently mobilising meanings of ‘the local’ and arguing what the role of the state ought to be in the context of situated understandings of local freedoms and demands. Situated meanings of the local and the role of the state in relation to this had a direct effect on whether the local authority played a central or peripheral role in the implementation and governance of academy schools. In the case of Northwestern, these situated meanings

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of the local were instrumental to resisting the national academies policy and generating the Northwestern Academies Model. Second, the analysis of political logics contributes further insights into existing arguments about the relationship between the academies policy and the marketisation of England’s education governance. Logics of difference and equivalence in the practices of frontline workers directly mapped onto strategies of resisting or enabling the governance of education according to market principles. Once again, the social construction of the local was embedded in how this political issue was dealt with by frontline actors. On the one hand, equivalential logics which included both the local authority and individual schools under ‘local’ meanings served to resist market principles. On the other hand, differential logics which were mobilised in the process of competition between schools posed the main risk for undermining the Northwestern Model’s notion of a cohesive schooling landscape. It is thus not enough to argue that the market principles of the academies policy have been implemented in contrasting ways in different contexts. Instead, this chapter demonstrates that the politics of the market has been one which has been resisted or supported through situated politics of scale, and in particular the local. Spatial entrepreneurship: a new dimension of frontline work The empirical analysis of the case study of Northwestern has focused on practices of frontline work and demonstrated how practices of scalecraft are a key feature and strategy of this work. The discussion has argued that this points to a new dimension of frontline work, and proposes that this is called ‘spatial entrepreneurship’. This final section of the chapter reflects on the features of spatial entrepreneurship and its implications for understandings of frontline work. The key practice that spatial entrepreneurship points to is how frontline workers’ discretionary work involves the creative and strategic use of scale. The importance of highlighting how frontline workers can work as spatial entrepreneurs is that it can help analysis to problematise the taken-​for-​granted ways that scalar practices can enable frontline actors to pursue particular agendas. In the case of Northwestern, spatial entrepreneurship involved frontline workers mobilising practices of scalecraft to strategically include the local authority in meanings of local schooling. Working as effective spatial entrepreneurs was instrumental to enabling frontline actors to mobilise a counter-​hegemonic strategy for resisting key dimensions of the national academies policy, and in particular to resist the exclusion of local authorities from school governance.

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Moreover, by identifying how spatial entrepreneurship in Northwestern centred on struggles to re-​define ‘the local’, analysis was able to identify one of the key discursive meanings of education which the academies policy has disrupted. By attempting to (further) disengage the local authority from the meaning of local school governance, the academies policy clearly triggered intense resistance in the context of Northwestern. The reaction of frontline workers in Northwestern exposed how situated meanings of ‘local education’ and ‘local schools’ were directly threatened by the national academies policy. Studying how the focus of spatial entrepreneurship shifts across different situated contexts of policymaking also holds potential for analysis to understand more about the uneven success and popularity of hegemonic regimes of practice. Spatial entrepreneurship also sheds light on how a key skill of frontline work involves finding ways of integrating pre-​existing with new spatial imaginaries. In the case of Northwestern, all frontline workers referred to the enduring myth of a ‘Northwestern community’ and underlined the existence of a strong identity that emphasised Northwestern ‘doing things differently’. Bridging this pre-​existing spatial imaginary with the new proposal for a Northwestern Academies Model –​which hinged on making academies part of a ‘Northwestern vision’ –​was central to the success of frontline workers’ strategies. Having the skills and knowledge of the situated policy context in order to integrate pre-​existing spatial imaginaries with new policy strategies is thus a key feature of being a successful spatial entrepreneur. The success of frontline work which mobilises spatial entrepreneurship will also rely heavily on having a wider policy coalition which produces the same type of scalecraft practices. The success of the Northwestern Model was enabled by local authority officers being able to train academy sponsors and principals so that they too could reproduce the key logics underpinning the Model. Indeed, the main risk to the Model was posed by some principals considering their schools to be in competition with each other, thus undermining the scalecraft vision of a local authority-​wide collaborative school landscape. In sum, the formation of policy coalitions which reproduce the chosen scalecraft strategy of frontline work is essential to the success of spatial entrepreneurship. As well as exercising creativity and taking advantage of ambiguity, spatial entrepreneurs who mobilise practices of scalecraft need to operate within the limitations of wider scalar epistemologies. In other words, entrenched ways of understanding the policy world through scale need to be adhered to if spatial entrepreneurs are to be successful

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in their scalecraft endeavours. In the case of creating a strategy for the academies policy, Northwestern officers needed to engage with the wider scalar narratives of the national academies policy in order for the Northwestern Model to be approved and accepted by councillors and central government. Spatial entrepreneurship therefore focused on constructing equivalences between schools and the local authority, and mobilising ‘the local’ as a local authority-​wide construct. Thus –​as with all types of frontline work –​there are important limitations to the scope for frontline actors to exercise discretion as spatial entrepreneurs. Reflecting on the discussion more broadly, understanding frontline workers as ‘spatial entrepreneurs’ contributes to the wider literature on frontline work which has sought to conceptualise the diverse techniques and strategies involved in frontline actors’ discretionary practices (for example, Durose, 2011; Lowndes, 2005; Sullivan, 2007; van Hulst et al, 2012). By identifying how the study of frontline work can point to distinct strategies of scalecraft, the chapter highlights how a critical approach to scale matters as well as how it can be incorporated into future studies. It is important to note that the analysis presented here does not suggest that frontline workers in Northwestern operated exclusively as spatial entrepreneurs. For example, local authority officers operated both as spatial entrepreneurs and institutional entrepreneurs. A key skill demonstrated by institutional entrepreneurs is that they ‘exploit emergent ambiguities in the “rules of the game” in order to respond to changing environments’ (Durose, 2011, 981; Lowndes, 2005). Northwestern officers certainly demonstrated institutional entrepreneurship. They did so by exploiting the ambiguities around the newly-​launched academies policy and by suggesting a modified academies model that was more suited to councillors’ political outlook, in the knowledge that central government was anxious for the policy to be seen as a success. Analysis that engages with the full complexity related to the skills and practices of frontline work thus requires analysing how different types of frontline roles and skills –​of which spatial entrepreneurship can be one –​work together to co-​constitute the policymaking process. The opening part of the chapter explained how the study of frontline work emerged from the ‘top-​down versus bottom-​up’ debates of policy analysis. The approach taken here has clearly aligned itself to a greater extent with the ‘bottom-​up’ approach by taking an interest in frontline work as well as being underpinned by the assumption that there is no clear-​cut distinction between policy ‘formulation’ and ‘implementation’ (see Pülzl and Treib, 2007). However, this chapter reflects a different perspective on the debate in that it does not necessarily consider characterising analysis as ‘bottom-​up’ to be

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the most appropriate category. By recognising the socially constructed nature of scale and the highly situated spatial imaginaries that co-​ constitute policy meanings, what matters to the study of frontline work is not characterising it as ‘bottom-​up’, but instead analysis has been open to engage with the scalar practices and spatial imaginaries that frontline actors themselves use to make sense of their work. By avoiding framing analysis as ‘bottom-​up’, the chapter has demonstrated how the discussion has identified what categories and hierarchies of scale matter to the policy actors themselves. In short, this chapter does not consider it necessary for studies of frontline work to focus on whether or not they are adopting a ‘bottom-​up’ approach; this risks their analysis possibly being guided by a scalar structure that may not necessarily be meaningful to the actors they wish to study. Going beyond the implications for understanding frontline work, this chapter has built on the preceding empirical chapters to shed light on how a critical approach to scale is of central importance to the study of policy as practice. If studying policy practices is about revealing what policy actors ‘do’ then the empirical analysis of this chapter clearly shows that mobilising, constructing and reworking scale is central to the everyday work of policy. If we accept that scale is an epistemology –​a core way of making sense of the social world  –​then this also translates to the lifeworlds of policy actors; policy is understood, categorised, operationalised and articulated through categories of scale. Furthermore, the empirical analysis has gone beyond this to argue that scale is an essential way that policy is strategically constructed to pursue particular political agendas. It is not by chance that scales are used in some ways and not others –​to assume so would be to dismiss a key dimension of the complex political work of policy. It is for this reason that the empirical chapters have characterised this work as a practice of ‘scalecraft’ as a way of capturing the skill, experience and challenging work involved in the strategic mobilisation of scale in policy. In its concluding chapter, the book reflects on the empirical insights that have been discussed in Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6. By doing so, it aims to develop the concept of scalecraft further, to clarify its capacity to generate new readings of policy, and to outline its key contributions to the fields of policy studies, political geography and studies of education governance.

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The practice of scalecraft

The book began by asking why, at a time when policy more than ever needs to reflect the deeply interconnected nature of political space, the privileged position of scale in the work of policymaking endures. A core part of exploring this puzzle has been to identify that despite the existence of a flourishing literature exploring the language and practices of policy, scale has remained unproblematised in the field of policy studies. As a result, the relationship between policy and scale, including the political dimensions of scale, have remained neglected. Focusing on the field of education policy and governance, the book has explored the political implications of scale in the armoury of policymakers by exploring a diverse range of empirical contexts. The empirical analysis has explored the relationship between hegemony, policy and scale from multiple angles that have included understanding powerful forms of knowledge, statecraft strategies and techniques of frontline work. Throughout its analysis, the book has integrated a critical approach to scale with the critical logics approach, and has developed the argument that ‘scalecraft’ is a powerful practice of policy which holds a central importance for establishing, sustaining and challenging hegemony. By understanding policymaking to involve practices of scalecraft, analysis has brought sharply into focus that scales –​far from having stable meanings or fixed material boundaries –​are strategically crafted in contexts of policymaking, and has demonstrated that scalecraft practices are a powerful and important dimension for understanding the production of policy. This chapter reflects on the collective insights the book’s empirical analysis has developed about the practice of scalecraft in Chapters 3 to  6. It will distil the core conceptual features of scalecraft and by doing so offer scholars of policy a clear framework for integrating a critical approach to scale in their analyses. The chapter also discusses how scalecraft contributes to the wider literatures of policy studies, political geography and education governance. The book concludes by outlining the potential that lies in future work engaging with conceptualisations of spatial politics that go beyond scale. Recognising the politics of scale in policy is one step towards addressing the spatial

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blind spot of policy studies –​interdisciplinary work which engages with other political manifestations of space is essential for understanding the full complexity and significance of spatial politics in policymaking.

Reflections on policy, scale and hegemony The book has demonstrated how the lens of scalecraft can help to generate new readings of policy which integrate the political practices associated with scale in their analyses. I will now briefly reflect on how scale played out in each of the empirical chapters, and in particular how analysis has shed light on the under-​examined relationship between policy, scale and hegemony. As a brief reminder to the reader, the book’s empirical analysis has drawn on the specific meaning of hegemony as identified by political discourse theory. This has involved going beyond understanding hegemony as synonymous with political power, but it has instead adopted an approach which seeks to understand how ‘common sense’ is produced in particular contexts or, indeed, across society (Griggs and Howarth, 2008). Furthermore, this approach to hegemony ‘assumes that the constitution of every identity, practice or regime involves a moment of political exclusion, and thus the exercise of power, so that every relatively settled set of social relations involves some form of hierarchy’ (Howarth et al, 2016, 101). The book’s empirical analysis has aligned itself with the core objective of political discourse theory which is to understand how hegemonic regimes are established, maintained and replaced in practices of policymaking. The first area that the book’s empirical analysis has contributed to relates to understandings of genealogical perspectives on hegemony. Chapter 3 presented an account of how the policy area of education shifted from being a peripheral part of European governance agendas to now occupying a central position in the European project. It specifically understood this by examining key shifts in Europe’s hegemonic framing of the education policy field, using a genealogical perspective. As well as providing an analytical entry point for exposing hegemonies of scale, the analysis in Chapter 3 highlighted how insights into moments of dislocation and changes in the meanings of hegemony can be extended by considering practices of scalecraft. In the case of European education governance, existing literature argues that education became increasingly co-​opted into the European project as a solution to the challenges of the knowledge economy, the introduction of the open method of coordination, and the onset of the financial crisis (for example, Lawn and Grek, 2012; Pepin, 2006). By

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considering dynamics relating to the genealogy of scale –​the shifting meanings of scale, and the political narratives to which scales became attached (and detached from) over time –​analysis argued that it is not only education policy that has changed. Rather, this process needs to also be understood to have involved changes in the very meaning of Europe and shifting articulations of Europe’s inter-​scalar relationship with national member states. In short, this case study demonstrates how the practice of scalecraft is an essential political dynamic that stands to deepen genealogical understandings of policy. Problematising scale can thus generate new readings of policy shifts by illuminating how changing policy meanings are entangled with and facilitated by shifts in the crafting of scales, which function as key concepts for articulating the meanings and architectures of policy and governance. Turning to Chapter 4, the book focused on the empirical case of Europe’s Education and Training 2020 (ET 2020)  framework and examined the logics underpinning powerful forms of knowledge in European education policymaking documents and meetings. Here, critically engaging with scale has helped to advance understandings of the relationship between hegemony and knowledge in contexts of policy. Analysis of documents and observations revealed logics which are widely understood to be a feature of powerful knowledge; these features included policy knowledge being framed as generalisable, apolitical and having universal value. Dichotomies that constructed contextual, individual and experiential knowledge on the one hand and universal, collective and learned knowledge on the other were shown to allocate greater power to forms of knowledge associated with the latter group of categories. A scale-​sensitive reading of the empirical case of ET 2020 documents and meetings demonstrated that practices of scalecraft were instrumental to constructing and sustaining the logics of powerful knowledge, and to reinforcing Europe as an important knowledge producer in the field of education policy. At the core of all the logics associated with powerful forms of knowledge was a scalecraft technique which allocated capabilities for knowledge production to either the European or the national scale. The process of co-​constructing knowledge through these scalecraft practices was instrumental to giving legitimacy to European policy activities relating to the production of best practices and standards, and to its ‘peer learning’ platforms. Knowledge beyond ‘the national’ has come to be regarded as essential to the governance of school systems –​the example of policy knowledge in Europe’s ET 2020 has demonstrated the distinct logics and practices of scalecraft that sustain this powerful knowledge hegemony.

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The empirical analysis of Chapter 5 explored the case of statecraft ambitions linked to the localism agenda and particularly its narratives relating to the governance of England’s school system. Here, the book’s conceptual lens brought out a different reading of policy which related to shedding new light on the techniques of statecraft. A small number of studies have already explored the possible implications of the language of scale for the articulation of statecraft ambitions. This has led to some authors arguing that rescaling –​the process of allocating and distributing particular tasks and responsibilities across different scales –​is a key strategy of statecraft (see Pemberton, 2016). The book has taken a different approach to focus on the practices of scalecraft involved in the articulation of statecraft ambitions. This enabled the analysis to highlight how in the case of England’s school reforms ‘the local’ was crafted in such a way that had important implications for exclusionary practices in policymaking. In particular, analysis illuminated how scalecraft practices of the localism agenda were instrumental to constructing the local scale in such a way that sidelined local authorities and advanced the rules of the market in England’s school landscape. Furthermore, Chapter 5 demonstrated how the specific crafting of the local had profound implications for the practices of actors working in schools. In particular, it highlighted how policy actors’ decisions and agency were restricted by the exclusionary meanings of ‘the local’. Policy actors in the local authority case study of Eastshire articulated a sense of having no choice other than to make their decisions based on the narrow definition of the local offered to them by statecraft narratives of the academies policy. In this way, Chapter 5 demonstrated that scalecraft functions as a strategic and exclusionary practice of statecraft by playing an important role in establishing and sustaining hegemonic policy meanings. A  critical approach to scale also shed light on scalecraft as a possible exclusionary practice of policymaking, which can work to restrict the agency of policy actors. The process of scalecraft narrowing the spatial horizons of policy actors and making them feel ‘trapped’ in a particular scale has been used to develop the notion of ‘scalar entrapment’. The book’s final case study presented in Chapter 6 explored the frontline work of policy actors who designed an alternative model of academy schools in the local authority case study of Northwestern. In this case, the empirical analysis revealed how scalecraft practices are a key feature of frontline work, and these insights were developed by engaging with how policy actors consistently used scales to make sense of and communicate their work. Analysis traced how creating a

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new academy schools model consistently resisted the national policy’s exclusion of local authorities by placing the local authority at the centre of meanings relating to ‘local schools’ and ‘local community’. Crafting the local in this way thus pointed to creative and resourceful practices of reconfiguring space in pursuit of a situated political agenda. As a result, analysis has identified a new type of frontline work by arguing that the frontline workers in Northwestern worked as ‘spatial entrepreneurs’. The case of Northwestern demonstrated how practices of spatial entrepreneurship served to resist the statecraft vision of the national academies model, and in this way analysis has contributed to understandings of counter-​hegemonic movements. Identifying the exclusionary meanings of the local scale which were embedded in the national academies policy, and re-​defining the scalar narrative of academies to align with the political agenda of the local authority was instrumental to successfully resisting key tenets of the national policy. Spatial entrepreneurship can therefore offer clues as to how counter-​hegemonic movements have been able to resist or reconfigure hegemonic regimes of policy and to realign them to fit with their own agendas. In other words, scalecraft has helped to illuminate how hegemony is co-​constituted by particular practices of scale, as well as how scalecraft can be mobilised to challenge and destabilise hegemonic regimes of policy. Collectively, the book’s empirical cases have adopted a critical approach to scale in order to engage with a number of major themes in the field of policy studies. This has generated analysis that has produced new readings of policy and developed understandings as to why and how scale occupies such a fundamental and privileged position in the discourses of policymaking. A unifying theme that cuts across the cases is that hegemonic regimes are articulated and produced spatially: they need to be sustained by accepted orderings of space, and scale is the dominant spatial form in the arena of policymaking. Framed by political discourse theory’s interest in identifying and understanding the dynamics of hegemony, the book’s empirical analysis has demonstrated how scale matters in different ways and to variable degrees in policy contexts. This has important implications for the type of policy analysis that this book promotes: one which gives consideration to exploring possible practices of scalecraft. The book proposes that a scale-​sensitive policy analysis that understands scale as a social practice, is one which aligns itself with the fundamentals of critical policy studies. The reason being that the analysis proposed here required the analyst to develop a sustained engagement with the situated meanings and politics of the

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policy contexts under study. To consider what the possible significance of scale may be –​and I very deliberately emphasise this as a possibility rather than assuming scale will always matter –​requires the policy analyst to consider the unique political dynamics which are contributing to the formation, establishment and/​or destabilisation of hegemony and to question what the scalar dimensions of these dynamics might be. By presenting multiple case studies and discussing how scale mattered to these in contrasting ways, the book demonstrates how future critical studies of policy might go about taking scale seriously in their analysis. Having reflected on how the empirical cases have shed light on the relationship between policy, scale and hegemony, the discussion will now turn to outlining several key features of the practice of scalecraft.

The practice of scalecraft: key features Techniques of scalecraft Reflecting on the book’s analysis, three key techniques of scalecraft have emerged, and these are: fusing scales, constructing boundaries between scales, and weaving scales together. Building on previous work that has begun to conceptualise these three techniques (Papanastasiou, 2017b; 2017d), the book’s empirical analysis has demonstrated that these have been practised in diverse contexts of policy, and they are central to the practice of scalecraft. Fusing scales together is the first technique and is a practice which involves previously distinct scales being crafted as occupying one, all-​ encompassing space. Drawing on the lens of poststructuralist discourse analysis, the practice of fusing scales mobilises equivalential logics by attaching scalar constructs along the same chain of meaning. The main political value of this scalecraft technique is that it serves to simplify political space and therefore create the appearance of political consensus or cohesion (Howarth, 2006). Chapter 6 illustrated how fusing scales together was crucial to the articulation of the Northwestern Academies Model. Constructing the local authority and individual schools as one all-​encompassing ‘local’ scale was essential for resisting the national academies policy in such a way that allowed a continued role for the local authority. Understanding how political space is simplified through the fusing of scales constitutes a powerful scalecraft technique which can help to expose how the roles and responsibilities of governance are (re-​)articulated. The second scalecraft technique proposed here involves constructing boundaries between scales. This technique mobilises a political logic of

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difference which has the effect of constructing scales as distinct and different from each other. Political value is derived from the way this scalecraft technique fragments political space. The book’s empirical analysis points to two cases which demonstrate this form of scalecraft. The analysis in Chapter 4 which focused on the statecraft agenda of England’s localism agenda presents a clear example of boundaries being constructed between different scales. Namely, the localism agenda relies on a boundary being drawn between ‘local communities and schools’ on the one hand, and bureaucratic state structures of local authorities and the central state on the other. Drawing the boundaries of the local in this way has been an essential dimension for supporting the statecraft agenda of localism in the area of school policies. Scalecraft practices facilitated the further sidelining of local authorities in school governance, and also helped to support the further entrenchment of market logics as the guiding rules of the school system. A clear technique of constructing scalar boundaries also emerged in the analysis presented in Chapter 6 which focused on the implementation of academies in Eastshire. School and local authority actors reproduced the scalar narratives of statecraft by consistently crafting the local authority as distant and separate from local schools and their communities. The power of this scalecraft technique came sharply into focus when actors articulated a sense of being ‘trapped’ in the local. This involved school actors arguing that they had no option other than to narrowly consider their individual interests when it came to deciding whether to engage with the academies policy, and felt unable to consider any other issues beyond this narrow boundary of the ‘local’. In this case, the technique of constructing scalar boundaries had a profound impact on the decisions of policy actors. Building boundaries of scale not only fragments political space to advance exclusionary political agendas (which in the case of localism excluded local authorities), but it can also limit the degree to which policy actors can exercise their agency. Moving to the third scalecraft technique, this lies somewhere in between the two that have already been outlined: it involves weaving scales together. The distinctive nature of this technique is that scales are crafted as being closely interconnected and yet they remain distinct from each other. One might use the image of weaving together a basket to capture this scalecraft technique; the basket can only exist through the interconnected nature of individual strands, nonetheless the individual strands remain clearly distinguishable from each other. As a result, political logics of difference and equivalence both exert similar

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influence in this scalecraft technique in that there is a dual emphasis on the interconnectedness and distinctiveness of scales. The articulation of the European project outlined in Chapter 3 and the powerful forms of European knowledge in Chapter 4 are prime examples of this type of scalecraft. The empirical account of European education narratives in Chapter 3 illustrated how the European project relies on treading a fine line between subsidiarity and carving out an essential role for Europe, which explains the reliance on scalar dichotomies of ‘national’ versus ‘European’. Chapter 4 revealed how powerful forms of knowledge in European education policymaking also relied on scalecraft techniques which underlined the essential nature of Europe while continually highlighting the distinctiveness of ‘national contexts’. Taking this analysis further, European governance can be interpreted as an archetypal example of scalecraft which weaves scales together. In the narratives of European education governance, the national scale (like the individual strands of a basket) is brought together to create European visions and best practices for education, however the national scale never ceases to remain distinctive due to subsidiarity and unique educational contexts. The scalecraft technique of weaving scales together can therefore be the backbone of political projects which face the dual challenge of creating a unified political space (like Europe) while also ensuring that they do not appear to threaten or impose on other spaces of governance (such as national policymaking). In describing these three techniques of scalecraft, it is clear that practices of crafting scale involve skilled work. Using scale to describe statecraft ambitions, forms of knowledge and frontline work can appear a natural, routine description of political work, however this book shows that scalecraft –​like all social practices –​should be considered a practice which requires experience, skill and know-​how (Fraser, 2010). An awareness of situated fantasmatic logics, and the potential these hold for co-​constituting scale, is a particularly important type of skill that can enable policy actors to pursue a successful scalecraft strategy. Chapter 6, in particular, illustrated how frontline actors in Northwestern worked as spatial entrepreneurs by creating an alternative model of academies whose scalecraft practices complemented the long-​ standing fantasmatic narratives of a ‘Northwestern-​wide community’. A critical approach to scale highlights how there is nothing ‘natural’ about the meanings assigned to scales, which means that crafting scale to suit the specific contexts of policy needs to be practised and learned by all political actors.

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Scalecraft and affect The practice of scalecraft also points to an important, and under-​ explored, relationship between affect and space in the production of policy. The role of affect as a key dimension of policy practices has been a peripheral area of research but has recently been increasingly gaining the attention of policy researchers. Questions relating to how emotions contribute to the co-​constitution of policy and how emotional responses are central to understanding how policymakers make decisions are among the research avenues which have been recently pursued (see Durnová, 2015). Reflecting on the empirical chapters, it appears that scalecraft can also help to shed light on the role of affect in the practices of policymaking. In particular, the empirical analysis has pointed to the affective power of the local scale. The fantasmatic power of the local has been indirectly alluded to by many scholars, such as Purcell (2006, 1921) who argues that policymakers and scholars alike have assumed the local ‘to be inherently more democratic than other scales’. One can re-​read this argument as one which highlights how the local is typically co-​constructed through the mobilisation of beatific scenarios. However, what an analysis of scalecraft practices helps to underline is that the process of crafting scale is inextricably linked to the affective power of policy. In other words, a focus on scalecraft goes beyond existing arguments that refer to the beatific scenarios associated with the local, and instead problematises the diverse possibilities for what ‘the local’ might mean and how it might be discursively constructed. Furthermore, by illuminating how fantasmatic logics of scale gain greater power when they coincide with other, complementary logics of fantasy, the book points to possible explanations for why policies that mobilise ‘the local’ are convincing in some places and not others. If we compare how the statecraft strategy of ‘localism’ was accepted in Eastshire versus how it was contested in Northwestern, it is clear that the affective power of the local is patchy and unstable. By considering practices of scalecraft, analysis pointed to fundamental differences in the meanings of the local in each local authority case study. This translated to meanings of the local being compatible with those in the local authority of Eastshire, but incompatible with that of Northwestern which, in turn, contributed to localism narratives being accepted and contested respectively. The specifics of the policy field in question will inevitably be an important shaper of the relationship between scalecraft and affect. In

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the case of this book it is important to underline that the affective power of the local has particular meanings in the context of education governance. Notions of ‘local spaces’ have long been integral to communicating the shifting governing arrangements of school systems. Kalervo Gulson (2014, 417) alludes to this by observing how, ‘[t]‌he ideas of neighborhoods and relation to place have been central to the construction of comprehensive schooling…and this place-​based democratic project has been reconfigured through markets’. This speaks directly to the book’s empirical analysis which has demonstrated how school systems have consistently been constructed by appealing to local scales and places, as well as how a politics of the market has typically played a key role in co-​constituting the meaning of ‘local education’. By problematising the multiple meanings of the local in school policies, scalecraft adds greater nuance to understanding the affective power of the local in education governance. There is scope for future studies to explore in greater depth how the local is a contested signifier in political struggles to define the meanings of education. Politicisation and depoliticisation The empirical chapters also reveal how scalecraft practices can work to reinforce policy narratives of politicisation and depoliticisation. Politicisation can be characterised as ‘exposing and questioning what is taken for granted, or perceived to be necessary, permanent, invariable, morally or politically obligatory and essential’ (  Jenkins, 2011, 159). Politicising a policy issue can be a strategy for both reinforcing and resisting hegemonic regimes. For instance, a hegemonic regime can maintain its position by highlighting the contingent meanings and political strategies of competing discourses. Similarly, politicisation can also be used as a counter-​hegemonic strategy because it focuses on unequal power relations and antagonisms that are often concealed by hegemonic regimes. In other words, highlighting the clear ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of a hegemonic regime makes politicisation a highly effective counter-​hegemonic strategy. The empirical case which exemplified the mobilisation of a politicisation strategy was the analysis presented in Chapter 6 involving the implementation of academies in Northwestern. In this context, the national academies policy was politicised by Northwestern councillors who argued that academies would lead to increased inequality across the school landscape and that academies were part of a political strategy to sideline local authorities from school governance. As a result, the alternative Northwestern Model of academies directly

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responded to these concerns. By crafting the local authority as an essential part of the ‘local’, scale was essential for presenting academies as a political issue whose key tenets needed to be resisted. Scalecraft practices thus played a central role in framing the national academies policy in relation to local political priorities and agendas, in particular by arguing that the role of the local authority was under threat. Politicising the national academies policy reinforced the hegemonic regime of practices in Northwestern and enabled the local authority to implement a modified policy model. In a similar manner, scalecraft practices can work to co-​construct the depoliticisation strategies of policymaking. Depoliticisation can broadly be defined as ‘the denial of political contingency and the transfer of functions away from elected politicians’ (Flinders and Wood, 2014, 135). There is a large literature in political science and public administration which explores how the hegemonic grip of depoliticisation stems from its power to make policy issues appear empty of politics (for example, Flinders and Buller, 2006; Hay, 2007). The empirical case of Eastshire presented in Chapter 4 illustrated a process of depoliticisation, particularly in the manner with which Eastshire County Council argued that they were ‘neutral’ towards academies. The argument which followed from this statement of political neutrality was that choosing to engage with the policy was a ‘local’ decision that should be made by schools and their communities. By conceptualising these arguments as practices of scalecraft, analysis has demonstrated that crafting the ‘local’ in relation to freedoms and communities meant that the pursuit of individual school interests became highly powerful and difficult to dispute. Crafting the local was thus a key element of the depoliticisation process as it helped to conceal the political implications of the academies policy, such as the way the policy undermines the role of local authorities. The practice of scalecraft can therefore directly reinforce hegemonic practices of depoliticisation by allocating roles and responsibilities across different scales and making this seem ‘natural’ and ‘common sense’. Exploring the powerful forms of knowledge in European education policy in Chapter 4 also illustrated depoliticisation processes being facilitated through scalecraft. In particular, the Working Group on Schools was underpinned by a social logic that the Group was working in a depoliticised policy environment. This depoliticisation narrative was co-​constituted by the distinctive scalecraft practice which distinguished between, on the one hand, the European platform that was ‘empty’ of politics and, on the other hand, national scales in which political agendas for school governance played out. Furthermore,

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the dichotomy between national scales which are characterised by specific contextual factors versus a European scale that was ‘above’ these specificities pointed to the power of placelessness in policy. Crafting the European platform of the Working Group as ‘placeless’ thus served to bolster the logic of depoliticisation. Scalecraft practices worked as powerful hegemonic strategies for constructing a convincing depoliticisation logic for the Working Group which, in turn, gave the best practice knowledge produced by the Group greater legitimacy. In sum, the book has revealed how scalecraft practices are part of the political processes that produce narratives of politicisation and depoliticisation. Studies of policy thus stand to be enriched by considering the possible practices of scalecraft that might shed light on the spatial politics of politicisation and depoliticisation. Doing so would be a step towards addressing the conceptual gap identified by David Featherstone who has urged scholars working in this area ‘to think in more nuanced and generative terms about the spatial practices through which politicisation and depoliticisation happen’ (Featherstone, 2015, 194). Scalecraft practices and the role of agency An important part of conceptualising scalecraft is that it draws on a specific meaning of ‘practice’ which has particular implications for understandings of agency. By situating its theoretical approach within political discourse theory, the book has understood practice as consisting both of discourses and actions, due to the two being impossible to empirically distinguish from each other. Furthermore, political discourse theory acknowledges the dual role of structure and agency. By focusing on ‘dislocatory moments’ –​when a hegemonic discourse can no longer accommodate new meanings and instead needs to change in order to conceal its contingency in a different manner –​ political discourse theory identifies these moments as opportunities for actors to exercise their agency. Nevertheless, actors’ discretionary practices in (re-​)shaping hegemonic meanings will always take place within wider limitations; in this way, structure and agency are mutually constituted and in constant dialogue (see Glynos and Howarth, 2008). In light of this, we can understand the practice of crafting scale to be limited by wider discourses of political economy. Political economy in this sense is understood through a poststructuralist lens and refers to ‘established ways of understanding the structures of the state, with scale constituting one of these imagined structures’ (Papanastasiou, 2017d, 1063). In order for governing projects or policy work to gain broad

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support, practices of scalecraft need to link to the wider discursive frameworks of political economy. In other words, the narratives of political economy function as overarching political structures of meaning which give legitimacy to political projects and the scalecraft strategies which they contain. To use a metaphor, the work of a craftsperson will always reflect the limitations of the tools at their disposal and expectations around what the basic features of their product ought to be (Papanastasiou, 2017d). For example, a carpenter who is expected to produce a staircase may well have the freedom to exercise discretion over a number of its features, for instance by choosing to create a straight, spiral or L-​ shaped set of stairs. However, the product will still need to conform to established meanings over what a staircase is, and it will need to display key features such as being a connection between two different levels of a structure or containing a hierarchically structured set of stairs. The same principle applies when it comes to scalecrafting governing narratives and frontline work: the crafting of scale necessarily needs to mirror ways of talking about the political world, thus reflecting wider scalar narratives of political economy. While scalecraft can only take place within these limitations, the book has demonstrated how actors exercise agency by taking advantage of the ambiguity of scale meanings in a way that supports them in their pursuit of political goals.

Contributions of scalecraft By conceptually developing the practice of scalecraft through adopting a cross-​disciplinary theoretical lens the book has made a number of contributions. Scalecraft has made a methodological contribution to the ‘critical logics of explanation’ approach and also has wider implications for the fields of critical policy studies, political geography and education governance studies. The discussion now turns to outlining these contributions in greater detail. Methodological contribution to the critical logics approach The book conducted its empirical analysis and built its conceptualisation of scalecraft through a lens which integrated Glynos and Howarth’s (2007) ‘logics of critical explanation’ approach with poststructuralist human geographers’ conceptualisation of scale. By doing so, the book has extended the critical logics approach so that it is now an analytical framework which can also engage with the scalar politics of hegemony. By considering scale as a social practice the empirical

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analysis of diverse contexts of education policy has shed light on how practices of scale contribute to the social, political and fantasmatic logics which sustain hegemonic regimes. First, analysis has shown that scalecraft practices work to support social logics in their function as the guiding rules and norms of a discursive practice. Scalecraft practices do this by conveying specific meanings of scale as well as constructing particular relationships between scales. By articulating the spatial parameters and spatial relations of social logics, scalecraft practices can serve to support social logics by making them appear more coherent and robust. The book has also shown how scalecraft practices can play a key role in the mobilisation of political logics of difference and equivalence. Furthermore, the three techniques of scalecraft outlined overleaf are useful for shedding light on the relationship between political logics and space. In the case of the logic of equivalence which works to incorporate multiple meanings under a common discourse, scalecraft practices can reinforce equivalential processes by incorporating disparate meanings under a common scale. Here, the scalecraft technique of fusing scales together has particularly important equivalential effects. Scalecraft practices have also been shown to co-​produce the effects of political logics of difference by facilitating the fragmentation of space. The scalecraft technique of drawing boundaries between scales is the most important for understanding spatial practices of differential logics. What is significant is that the scalecraft technique of weaving scales together –​emphasising the interconnections between scales but also their enduring distinctiveness –​provides a useful analytical perspective for understanding how logics of equivalence and difference can simultaneously exert influence in a hegemonic regime. This links to David Howarth’s (2006) existing arguments about the spatial effects of political logics, and the book has built on this by tracing how particular techniques of scalecraft can be instrumental to the co-​production of political logics. The practice of scalecraft also contributes to understandings of the third and final type of logic in the ‘critical logics’ approach: fantasmatic logics. This book has shown that the beatific and horrific scenarios mobilised by fantasmatic logics are often inextricably linked to scalar narratives. In other words, mobilising spatial identities and associations to create affective reactions is a key dimension for understanding fantasmatic logics and their ability to conceal the contingency of hegemonic regimes. Studying fantasmatic logics is important for understanding the process through which hegemonic practices and unequal power relations become normalised. A  critical approach

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to scale can extend the analysis of fantasmatic logics further by understanding scalar narratives as a powerful way of making sense of social phenomena. One can understand the taken-​for-​g ranted narratives of scale to be key to the articulation of hegemonic orders, and the normalised construct of scale to play an important role in concealing contingency and normalising unequal power relations. The book’s approach also has implications for the process of ‘articulation’ that is part of the critical logics of explanation approach. Articulation is a key analytical process for operationalising the critical logics approach. Glynos and Howarth (2007) characterise articulation as an analytical process involving the researcher using theoretical perspectives as well as their judgement in order to determine the importance of what they observe for understanding the overarching problem being investigated. What, therefore, does conducting an analysis that is open to the possibility of practices of scalecraft imply for the process of articulation? The book has demonstrated that critical policy scholars need to expand their theoretical perspectives to also consider poststructuralist geographers’ understandings of scale as a social practice. Furthermore, understanding how and why scales matter will also require researchers to exercise their judgement. This will, first, involve an epistemological commitment to engaging with the language and metaphors of scale that feature in policy, as a way of understanding how scale is being crafted and, second, deciding whether this matters in the particular policy context being studied. Similarly to all social practices, the researcher should not expect to find ‘closure’ in struggles to define scale because scalecraft practices will be contingent and constantly contested. In sum, the book has presented the first attempt to analyse a range of empirical case studies by integrating a critical approach to scale with the critical logics of explanations approach. By doing so, the book has made a methodological contribution to the critical logics approach, which is a key framework of political discourse theory. The critical logics approach has been shown to be an ideal approach for bridging poststructuralist political geography with a critical analysis of policy, and the book can act as a guide for future studies of hegemony which also wish to engage with the political nature of scale. Contribution to critical policy studies The book has also made a contribution to the broad field of critical policy studies by being one of the first attempts to integrate critical studies of policy with political geography. In this way it has extended the

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interdisciplinary dialogues which have enriched the diverse literature of critical policy studies. Chapter 2 discussed how critical studies of policy have engaged with the normative meanings, language and categories of policy, but that scale –​one of the fundamental categories for describing and analysing policy –​has continued to be overlooked. Through empirically examining a diverse set of policy contexts and identifying how these are co-​constituted by distinct politics of scale, the book has demonstrated why the ‘spatial blind spot’ of critical policy studies matters and how the concept of scalecraft provides one way of overcoming this oversight. During the period in which critical policy scholarship was still an emergent and scarcely-​populated area of study, one of the most pertinent questions which challenged the field of policy studies was to not only ask ‘what a policy means’ but ‘how a policy means’ (Yanow, 1996). This book has shown that an integral dimension to addressing this question is to also ask ‘how does scale mean?’ Arguments about the socially constructed and relational nature of space are highly compatible with the theoretical orientations of critical policy scholarship, which takes as its starting point the normative and fluid nature of policy meanings and the rejection of positivist models of politics. However, for critical studies of policy to truly incorporate a relational approach to space in their analyses a crucial step is to re-​conceptualise scale as a category of practice, rather than consistently using it as a category of analysis (Moore, 2008). By developing the argument that practices of scalecraft are key hegemonic strategies of policymaking, the book demonstrates that the crafting and re-​crafting of scale is a major feature of policy processes and it has also clarified why this matters to understanding the politics of policymaking. Integrating an attention to possible practices of scalecraft with the wider focus of critical policy scholarship will enable this literature to engage more directly with the spatial politics of policymaking. The latter continues to be overlooked in the broader field of policy studies; adopting a critical approach to scale thus represents a further possibility for critical policy studies to continue to make an innovative impact in the field. Contribution to political geography The book’s theoretical approach to scale and its premise that scale needs to be considered as a social practice will not be a particularly novel concept to readers from political geography. As Chapter 2 outlined, political geographers have been at the forefront of developing the rich and diverse literature on scale which has formed a central part

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of this book’s approach. Nonetheless, by integrating poststructuralist geography’s approach to scale with policy analysis that draws on political discourse theory, the book offers fresh insights into political geographers’ interests in the politics of scale. The conceptualisation of scalecraft presented here both builds on and departs significantly from the term’s usage in the political geography literature. Scalecraft was first coined in an article by Alistair Fraser (2010) who used the term to extend geographers’ discussions of scale by arguing that there is a need to go beyond stating that scales are socially constructed. He used scalecraft to convey that constructing scales involves challenging and skilled work and that actors mobilising scalar practices need to be understood as producing creative and innovative scalecraft projects. Fraser’s work has recently been built on by Simon Pemberton and Glen Searle who have explored the relationship between scalecraft and statecraft in the study of rescaling agendas (Pemberton, 2016; Pemberton and Searle, 2016). Pemberton and Searle integrate geographers’ discussions of rescaling with Fraser’s description of scalecraft to bring sharply into focus how scalecraft is an integral part of statecraft, and how this involves a range of actors attempting to influence rescaling agendas. The book builds on Fraser’s arguments by introducing ‘spatial entrepreneurship’ as a new dimension of frontline work, outlining three possible techniques of scalecraft, and proposing how the relationship between structure and agency can be conceptualised in studies of scalecraft. Analysis has also built on Pemberton and Searle’s work by revealing further dimensions of the relationship between scalecraft and statecraft. The book, however, can largely be understood as a major departure from understandings of scalecraft in the existing geographical literature. By presenting a diverse empirical analysis that has studied multiple dimensions of policy (such as forms of knowledge, frontline work and statecraft), the book has forged new dialogues between a broad and cross-​disciplinary range of policy literature to demonstrate the exciting possibilities that lie in scalecraft. Indeed, the cross-​disciplinary dialogue fostered in this book has not only resulted in new readings of policy but it has also produced new readings of scale. For example, developing the new concept of ‘scalar entrapment’ as a way of capturing how hegemonic practices of scale can limit the agency of social actors develops complementary conceptual insights to the geographical literature on ‘scale jumping’ (Smith, 1992). While the ability of actors to gain political legitimacy through framing their demands according to a ‘higher’ scale is widely understood, the process through which

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scale can work to restrict the agency of actors is under-​conceptualised. In this way, the book has also shed light on new dimensions of scale which will be of interest to the wider political geography literature, as well as political geographers specifically interested in policy. The range of data sources from which the book’s discussions of scalecraft have built on  –​including documents, interviews and observations –​have meant that policy practices have been approached from multiple angles, allowing the book to consider and develop multiple dimensions of scalecraft. Furthermore, by developing scalecraft through the theoretical lens of political discourse theory the book demonstrates how scalecraft can help to shed light on the study of hegemony and the co-​constitution of space, hegemony and policy. By situating its theoretical and analytical approach in the field occupied by policy scholars who draw on political discourse theory, the book demonstrates the important possibilities that lie in this theoretical perspective for the political geography literature. The tools of political discourse theory, particularly those of the logics of critical explanation approach, offer a valuable lens for bringing sharply into focus the relationship between scale, politics and hegemony in the study of policy. The book’s approach to scalecraft therefore stands to contribute to tackling the ongoing concern among human geographers about the discipline’s lack of engagement with policy, by suggesting how the politics of scale can be situated directly within this area of study. Contribution to education governance literature Finally, by developing the concept of scalecraft through an empirical focus on diverse contexts of education policy, the book also makes an important contribution to critical scholarship on education governance. The book demonstrates that by adopting a critical approach to scale the field of education emerges as one which is teeming with scalar politics. Education’s age-​old association with the creation of statehood, as well as the contemporary condition of education policy being inseparable from global governance processes, have meant that education policies can simultaneously be characterised as local, national and transnational. In relation to the actors and institutions of education governance, there is also an endurance of the ‘old’ (such as the hierarchies of statecraft and local and national government actors) intersecting with the ‘new’ (such as the role of European institutions and the increasing importance of mobile policy actors). Critical education scholars have tackled these complex and contradictory themes head-​o n by drawing on rich conceptual

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repertoires that borrow from theories of governance and globalisation. However, an enduring challenge remains about how to conceptualise the networked and political nature of the spatial in these discussions. Education scholars clearly allude to the spatial politics of education governance by drawing extensively on the language of networks, space, levels and hierarchy. Scale, however, has for the most part remained absent from these discussions, been replaced by ‘space’, or been left unproblematised by being used exclusively to describe and explain policy. The book therefore builds on the emergent education literature which engages with geographical concepts of space (for example, Gulson and Symes, 2007; Pini et al, 2017) and places the importance of scalecraft practices at the heart of understanding the complex governance dynamics of education. By interpreting the spatial politics of education through the lens of scalecraft, this book offers education scholars a new concept which can complement existing analyses of education policy and governance. The epistemology of scalecraft is one which can guide scholars to identify the diverse possibilities for why and how scale matters in education policy contexts by requiring the analyst to engage directly with the language and categories of scale and to understand how scale works as a social practice. In this way, scalecraft can function as a tool for understanding and unpacking a key tension in the spatial politics of education which involves, on the one hand, the enduring narratives of the state and place in education, and on the other, education as an increasingly global goal and product of transnational political influences. By acknowledging the socially constructed and relational nature of space, while also engaging directly with the narratives of scale, scalecraft can play an important part in developing analyses which engage with both the fluidity of space as well as the ways that hegemonic narratives ‘fix’ education to particular scales.

Beyond scale As a final reflection, I would like to return to the broader discussion on integrating the study of space with the study of policy which was presented in the book’s opening chapter. While this book has argued that scale occupies a privileged position in articulating the spatial dimensions of policy and it has developed the concept of scalecraft to reflect this, there are important possibilities that lie beyond a focus on scale which involve engaging with other forms of spatial politics. Achieving this would involve finding ways of deepening the cross-​ disciplinary dialogue between policy studies and human geography. To

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illustrate the exciting potential that lies in such a dialogue, I conclude by outlining some possibilities for how an engagement with spatial politics stands to enrich some of the pressing questions which are challenging our understandings of contemporary politics. One major issue of contemporary political debate relates to understanding the nature of ‘populism’. This has been one of the most prominent issues featured in recent conferences in political science and beyond, not only due to the 2016 Brexit referendum and the US election of Donald Trump, but due to populist discourses becoming increasingly mainstream in political systems of western democracies (Mudde, 2004). While much of political scientists’ debates have focused on re-​theorising conceptualisations of populism and making sense of the diversity of movements which have been labelled ‘populist’, a turn to spatial politics would shed light on the co-​constitutive relationship between populism, policy and space. From using public squares for the enactment of populist movements, to the role of social media as a key outlet for populist political parties, understanding how populism is distinctly spatialised would extend the debates of political scientists and help to make greater sense of the current political juncture (see Featherstone, 2015; Kaika and Karaliotas, 2016). Making sense of the relationship between ‘the nation’ and ‘the transnational’ has been another challenge for policy studies in the contemporary political dynamic. Once again, unpacking the spatial politics at play stands to make an important intervention in these debates. For example, the post-​2008 financial crisis has seen the rise of anti-​austerity politics being articulated through translocal (such as collaborations between cities) and transnational (such as pan-​ European movements of Diem-​25 and Plan B) political movements (see Featherstone and Karaliotas, 2018). Traditional understandings of political movements being largely restricted by local and national political structures therefore need to be reconsidered, and the implications for what kinds of policymaking these new spaces might foster is an area that urgently needs to be developed. The continuing development and ever-​increasing capabilities of digital technologies demonstrate a further need for studies of policy to critically engage with the relational nature of space. The European Union’s growing digital single market that introduced important changes such as the abolition of roaming charges in 2017 is one illustration of how digital technologies are driving the re-​imagination of borders, as well as how they are re-​aligning the boundaries which separate ‘insiders’ from ‘outsiders’. On the other hand, while some policy areas are experiencing the formation of new border imaginaries,

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others are seeing a resurgence of age-​old narratives of borders as protective barriers against ‘the Other’ (Said, 1978). The response of many European states to the post-​2014 ‘migrant crisis’ has included building physical walls (also echoed in US President Donald Trump’s pledge to ‘build a wall’ on the US–​Mexican border) or creating insurmountable administrative barriers for migration, in what can be understood as textbook examples of ‘protecting’ national frontiers. Scholars of policy stand to benefit greatly from critically engaging with the ways that old and new bordering techniques are being used as simplistic policy solutions to complex political problems (for example, Amilhat-​Szary and Giraut, 2015; Squire, 2015). Contemporary political dynamics also point to how policy studies need to challenge traditional concepts of distance and proximity, and to explore their political implications. The Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, which revealed how the firm mined the Facebook data of approximately 87 million users, illustrated how ‘big data’ is not somewhere ‘far away’ or related to ‘macro’ processes. Instead, as John Allen (2018) has described, Cambridge Analytica ‘reached in’ to claim individuals’ highly personal micro data, which highlights how traditional notions of ‘physical distance’ urgently need to be re-​thought. With the increasing data-​ification of all areas of social policy –​including education (for example, Williamson, 2017) and health (for example, Lupton, 2014)  –​it is clear that the political implications of this cannot be understood through the lens of traditional separations of ‘micro’ and ‘macro’. The power of data has distinctive topologies that do not operate according to mathematical laws of distance, and we can no longer afford to ignore this re-​configuration of distance in politics (see Allen, 2006; 2009; Allen and Cochrane, 2010). These are just some of the contemporary political challenges of our time that demand new theoretical work from policy scholars. What I have tried to make clear is that these challenges for the study of policy will require us to consider how different spatial forms and dynamics are a constituent part of these political shifts. The study of policy can no longer afford to treat space as a measurable category of analysis, as a ‘surface’ on which politics plays out, or as a synonym for ‘contextual variables’. Instead, what contemporary political dynamics are demonstrating is that understandings and categories of space are co-​ constitutive of social practice, and that the configuration and deliberate manipulation of space is inseparable from the politics of policymaking.

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152

Index A Academies Act (2010) 74, 75, 78, 79, 81 academies policy 74–​5, 76–​7, 78, 79–​81 accountability 77 case studies Eastshire (pseudonym) see Eastshire (pseudonym) case study Northwestern (pseudonym) see Northwestern (pseudonym) case study conversion 74–​5, 79–​81, 80, 84, 85 and local authorities 77 national 94 parents and pupils as customers 76 politics of 101–​2 advocacy coalition framework (ACF) 16–​17 affect, role of 115–​16 agency 31, 34, 118–​19 Allen, J. and Cochrane, A. x Allen, John 127 Ancient Greece 70 anti-​austerity politics  126 articulation 32, 121 austerity policies 82

B backward mapping 17 Ball, S.J. 37 Barrett, Susan 89 beatific scenarios 32, 34, 40–​1, 64, 65, 96–​7, 115 benchmarks 50, 51, 52 ET 2020 framework 52, 54–​5, 56, 57 hierarchies 50 best practice 42, 50, 51, 52 see also Working Groups (ET 2020) big data 127 borders 127 bottom-​up approaches to policy analysis 89–​90 boundaries, scalar 112–​13 Brenner, Neil 21 Brexit ix, 43, 126

Brubaker, R and Cooper, F. 24 Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme 93, 96 Bulpitt, Jim 69 bureaucracy 72

C Cambridge Analytica scandal 127 capitalism social inequalities 20 state restructuring and production 21, 69 uneven distribution of wealth 20 categories of analysis 24 categories of practice 24 centralisation 18 choice 79–​81, 85 City Technology Colleges 73 civic entrepreneurship 91 Clarke, John 53 Coalition government 74 collaboration 81–​3 collaborative school landscape 99, 100 collective work 58 common sense xiv, 30, 33, 38, 108 community 87, 103 community leadership 91 competition 99–​100, 103 conformance 90 Conservative Party 79 constructing boundaries between scales 112–​13, 120 counter-​hegemonic movements 39, 84–​5, 111 counter-​hegemonic strategies 30, 102, 116 country specific recommendations (CSRs) 53–​4 Cox, Kevin 21 craft 33–​4 critical education literature 45 scholars 124–​5 critical logics approach 31–​3, 39, 119–​21

153

The politics of scale in policy critical policy studies 4–​5, 121–​2 definition 26 interdisciplinary dialogues 27–​8 and scale 26–​9 theoretical and methodological approaches 27 critique 32–​3

D decentralisation 18 Delors’ White Paper (1993) 41 Department for Education 78 Department for Education and Skills 94 depoliticisation 60–​1, 117–​18 relationship with scalecraft 66–​7 differential logic 32 digital technologies 126 discourse 38 dislocation 31, 39, 118 dispersed state xi diversity 43, 44

E Eastshire (pseudonym) case study 110 collaboration between schools 81–​3 context 79 conversion 79–​81 greater choice 79–​81 localism 85 marketisation 85 pursuing school interests 83–​5 scalecraft practices 85 education 40 change and political struggle 40 diversity 44 European governance see education governance, European national control over policy 40 rise of global infrastructure 43 spatial politics of 125 subsidiarity principle 40 education governance centralisation 77–​8 European 48–​52 changing meaning of Europe 43 characterisation of 53 conceptualising 44–​6 Delors’ White Paper (1993) 41 entering the sphere of 40 European Commission’s White Paper (1995) 41

Europeanisation of 40, 42, 58 knowledge economy 40–​1, 49 Lisbon Treaty (2000) 41–​2 partners in global networks 43 political and financial crisis 43–​4 scalar practices 58 governing at a distance 36, 37 heterarchical governance 36, 37 market logic 72–​8 metagovernance 36–​7 and politics of scale 35–​8 and scalecraft 124–​5 transnational processes 37 see also school systems education policy and governance 9–​12 Education Reform Act (1988) 73 education systems 70–​1 encompassment vii, viii, ix equivalential logic see logic of equivalence ET 2020 framework 52–​8, 109 benchmarks 54–​5, 56 country specific recommendations (CSRs) 53–​4 dichotomies context versus universal 54–​5 experience versus learning 55–​6 individual versus collective 53–​4 reform versus agenda-​setting 56–​7 scalar, implications of 57–​8 European documents 52–​3 fantasmatic logics 58 function 52 national context 55 peer learning 54, 55, 55–​6, 56–​7 political logics 58 practices of scalecraft 55 scalar politics of best practices 59–​65 social logics 52–​8 subsidiarity 53 Working Groups see Working Groups (ET 2020) EU (European Union) ix benchmarks 50 Europe of learning 42 European Commission 2–​3, 56 Communication (2017) 43 and education 43 participation in Working Groups 60 peer counselling sessions 52

154

Index White Paper (1995) 41 see also Working Groups (ET 2020) European Council 56 European data infrastructures 42 European education policy space 45–​6 European governance see education governance, European European policy solutions 45 European problems 45 European Semester 49 Europeanisation 40, 42, 58 Evans, et al. 71 evidence-​based policymaking  48

F fantasmatic logics 32, 34, 42, 48, 56, 58, 60–​1, 120–​1 academies and free schools 76 Working Groups (ET 2020) 64–​5 Featherstone, David 118 Ferguson, James and Gupta, Akhil vii–​viii, ix financial crisis, European 43, 44 flat ontology 23 forward mapping 17 Foucault, Michel 32, 39 Fraser, Alastair 123 free schools policy 75, 76, 77 accountability 77 parents and pupils as customers 76 frontline work 89 conceptualisations of 90, 91 questions around 89–​90 scalecraft practices 101–​2 spatial entrepreneurship 101 studies of 90, 92 see also Northwestern (pseudonym) case study frontline workers 89 beatific scenario 96–​7 demands made on 90–​1 literature on 91 moral agency 91 as spatial entrepreneurs 91, 102, 103, 104 see also Northwestern (pseudonym) case study funding 83–​4 fusing scales 112, 120

G genealogical perspectives 32, 38–​9, 45, 108, 109 geographical imagination 5–​6 geography see human geography; political geography globalisation 40, 69 governance 35–​6 see also education governance; education policy and governance; multi-​level governance; OMC (open method of coordination) governance at a distance 36, 37 government through community 87 governors guilt 84 individual school choice 80 market influences on decision-​making  82–​3 moral dilemmas 84 negative impact of academy status 83–​4 Gramsci, A. 30 grant-​maintained schools  73 greater choice 79–​81 Griggs, Steven and Sullivan, Helen 28–​9 Gulson, Kalervo 86, 116

H Hagreaves, David 81–​2 hegemonic regimes 116–​17 hegemonies of knowledge 47–​8, 49–​50, 52 and scale 57 hegemony 29, 108 contingency of 31, 39 practices of 30 regimes of practice 39 relationship with policy and scale 108–​12 and scalecraft 33–​4 heterarchical governance 36, 37 hierarchies 50, 69 horizontal movement 17 horrific scenarios 32, 34, 61, 64, 84, 96, 97 Howarth, David 120 human geography 3

155

The politics of scale in policy conceptualising and analysing space 5–​6 dialogues with social science disciplines 8–​9 disciplinary plurality 6 lack of dialogue with policy studies 7–​8 specialised language of the spatial 6, 7 see also political geography

I implementation 89–​90 study of 17 institutional entrepreneurs 91 institutional entrepreneurship 104 Isin, Engin vi–​vii, ix

J Jasanoff, Sheila 47 Joint Report 56 Jones, Katherine 22

K knowledge 48–​52, 65–​7 benchmarks 50, 51, 52 best practice 50, 51, 52 hegemonies of 47–​8, 49–​50 and the OMC 49 peer learning 51, 52 and policy 47 and power 47 and scale 57 and scalecraft 67 knowledge economy 40–​1 knowledge workers 40 Kurtz, H.E. 28

L LACSEG (Local Authority Central Spend Equivalent Grant) 75 learning 51, 52, 54, 55, 55–​6, 56–​7 fantasmatic logic of 64–​5 Leggett, W. 39 levels, scales and 28 lifelong learning 41 Lipsky, Michael 90 Lisbon Council (2000) 49 Lisbon Treaty (2000) 41–​2 local authorities 77, 80 and academies 77

attempted collaboration with academies 83 funding 83–​4 lacking resources 81 role of 93 sidelining of 77, 82 and state entrepreneurship 96 undermining of 80 see also Northwestern (pseudonym) case study local collaboration 83 local education 116 local-​global distinctions  23 local governance 90 local health economy x local spaces 116 local, the vi–​vii, viii affective power of 115–​16 hegemonic strategy 86–​7 logics of 29 and practices of scalecraft 13, 101 scalecrafting 76–​8 and statecraft 71–​2 localism 110 agenda of 87 and bureaucracy 72 collaboration between schools 81–​3 definition 71 democracy of 71 governance of schools 72–​8 greater choice 79–​81 insiders and outsiders 86 political agendas 77 politics of scale 72–​8 and scalecraft 76–​8, 83 school interests 83–​5 and statecraft 71–​2, 72–​8, 81–​2, 85, 86 see also new localism logic of equivalence 32, 42, 120 academies case study 83 Working Groups (ET 2020) 63 logics 31–​2, 34 logics of the local 29

M Maastricht Treaty (1992) 40 marketisation of education 72–​8, 80, 83, 100 Marston et al. 22–​3

156

Index mass localism 82 Massey, Doreen v–​vi, viii, 4 materiality 22 Maynard-​Moody, S. and Musheno, M. 89 metagovernance 36–​7 methodological globalism v methodological nationalism v micro-​macro dualism  23 migration 127 moments of dislocation 39 Moore, Adam 15, 22, 23–​4, 24–​5 Moutsios, S 70 multi-​level governance 18–​19, 44, 51–​2 definition 44 literature 44–​5 Murdoch, Jonathan 14

N nation-​state, the vii, ix nation, the 24, 126 national contexts 63–​4 nationhood 24 neoliberalism 69 New Labour government 74, 92 new localism 18, 71 British politics 71 definition 71 Northwestern (pseudonym) case study 91–​2, 110–​11 academies policy 92 City Council 92, 96 aims of 95 opposition to academies policy 93 community 103 expanding scalecraft visions 98–​100 local authorities 93, 94, 95, 96, 97–​8 Northwestern Academies Model 92–​4, 93–​4, 111 beatific scenario 96–​7 challenges the exclusion of local authorities 96 horrific scenario 97 local authority narratives 97–​8 principals 98–​100, 103 social logics 94–​8 accountability and collaboration 95 local accountability 95 role of local government in governing schools 94

sponsors 98–​100, 103 vision 96, 98 Northwestern family of schools 94 resistance to statecraft 101 scalecraft 98–​101 social deprivation 92 spatial entrepreneurship of local authority officers 94–​8, 103–​5 spatial imaginary 101, 103, 105 sponsors 93–​4

O OECD (Organization for Economic Co-​operation and Development) 42 Ofsted 78, 92 OMC (open method of coordination) 42, 48–​9 benchmarks 51, 52 best practice 50, 51, 52 evolution of 49 and knowledge 49 mechanisms of 49 participative and bottom-​up process 49, 50 peer learning 51, 52

P parents, as customers 76 peer learning 51, 52 ET 2020 framework 54, 55, 55–​6, 56–​7, 57 peer learning activities (PLAs) 59 Pemberton, Simon and Searle, Glen 123 Pepin, L. 41 performance 90 phase space 6 placelessness viii, x, 58, 67 place(s) vi erasure of 67 power of 67 policy x, 65–​7 affective power of 115 hierarchy of levels 19 and knowledge 47 and meaning 27 relationship with scale and hegemony 108–​12 and scale 1 and science 47

157

The politics of scale in policy and space 2–​6 and the spatial 3 policy actors agency of 31 coalitions of 16 identifying labels 16 policy analysis 111–​12 bottom-​up approaches  89–​90 classical approaches to 26 top-​down approaches  89–​90 see also scalecraft policy cycle 17 policy knowledge 109 policy mobilities literature 8 policy studies v, xi assumptions about scale 16–​19 identifying labels given to policy actors 16 diversity and plurality 16 governance architectures 17 lack of dialogue with human geography 7–​8 and scalecraft 29–​34 see also critical policy studies policy transfer 17–​18 policymaking 1, 48 depoliticisation strategies 117–​18 and education 40 evidence-​based  48 and knowledge 46–​7 and policy actors 16 and scalecraft 29, 33, 34, 46 political agendas 20, 27, 40, 45 political crisis, European 43, 44 political discourse theory 30–​3, 39, 48, 108, 111, 118, 124 and hegemonies of knowledge 47–​8 localism 71 political economy 118–​19 political geography 20–​6, 122–​4 literature on scale political-​economic 20, 22, 23 poststructuralist 20 and poststructuralism 22 political logics 31–​2, 34, 58, 61 political science 7, 8 politicisation 116–​17 politics of scale 20, 21 and education governance 35–​8 in the ET 2020 framework 52–​8

and localism 72–​8 populism 126 poststructuralism 22 poststructuralist discourse analysis 112 power 47, 69 practice 30–​1 as a category 24, 25 notion of 30, 118 principals accountability 99 guilt 84 individual school choice 80 market influences on decision-​making  82–​3 moral dilemmas 84 negative impact of academy status 83–​4 Northwestern Academies Model 98–​100, 103 problematisation approach 31 public administration 7, 8 Purcell, Mark 71, 115

Q quasi-​market school system 72–​8, 80, 83, 100

R Regional School Commissioners (RSCs) 75, 77, 78 relationality 3, 4 rescaling 69–​70, 110 Rose, Nikolas 87

S scalar boundaries 112–​13 scalar entrapment 85, 86, 87, 110, 123 scalar structuration 6, 21 scalar thinking vi–​vii, viii scale v, vi–​viii, 48–​52 assumptions in the study of policy 16–​19 descriptive use 19 as a malleable concept 19 processes of 17–​18 as a category of analysis 24 as a category of practice 24, 25 constructing boundaries between scales 112–​13 and critical policy studies 26–​9

158

Index as an epistemological concept 22 genealogy of 109 and knowledge 57 and policy 1 and political geography 20–​6 and political projects 25 reification of 24–​5, 45 relationship with policy and hegemony 108–​12 relationships between 120 and social relations and institutions 25 socially constructed nature of 21, 38–​9, 105 scale bending 20 scale framing 28 scale hegemonies 39–​46 scale jumping 20, 22, 87, 123 scalecraft viii, xiv, 1–​14, 29–​34, 48, 57, 62–​3, 65–​7, 107–​25 and affect 115–​16 and agency 118–​19 and benchmarks 51 contributions to critical logics approach 119–​21 to critical policy studies 121–​2 to education governance literature 124–​5 to political geography 122–​4 depoliticisation 117–​18 European education governance 41, 42–​3, 44 frontline work 101–​2 as a hegemonic strategy of statecraft 86–​8 and hegemony 33–​4 and knowledge 67 and localism 76–​8, 83 case study 85 normalising market dynamics 77 and political discourse theory 30–​3 politicisation 116–​17 practice of 107–​27 relationship with depoliticisation 66–​7 social construction of 123 and spatial entrepreneurs 89–​106 techniques of 112–​14 constructing boundaries between scales 112–​13, 120 fusing scales 112, 120 weaving scales together 113–​14, 120

Working Groups (ET 2020) meetings 60–​5 scholarly language 7 school systems 110 centralisation of 77–​8 choice 80 competition between schools 99–​100, 103 diversity of 63, 73 funding 83–​4 governance 2, 3, 72–​8 politics of scale in localism 72–​8 pursuing individual interests 83–​5 as a quasi market 72–​8, 80, 83, 100 self-​improving  81, 82 sidelining of local authorities 77, 82 subsidiarity 61, 63 see also academies; academies policy; free schools science, and policy 47 self-​improving school system 81, 82 sense-​making  3, 4 shared policy goals 50 situated fantasmatic logics 114 Smith, Neil 20, 22 social analysis 23 social deprivation 92 social logics 31, 52–​8, 58, 79–​81, 120 academies and free schools 76 of choice 85 depoliticised policy environment 60–​1 different contexts, common challenges 61–​3 generalisability and transferability of best practices 63–​4 of localism 85 South East Europe x space v and critical education literature 45 difficulty of engaging with 5–​9 Euclidian view of 3–​4 importance of 1–​14 plurality of meaning and approaches 7 and policy 2–​6, 125–​6 relationality 3, 4 sense-​making  3 spaces of dependence 21 spaces of engagement 21 spatial entrepreneurs/​ entrepreneurship 111

159

The politics of scale in policy definition 103 frontline work 102–​5 new dimension of 102–​5 frontline workers 91, 102, 103, 104 local authorities 96 Northwestern (pseudonym) case study 94–​105 and scalecraft 89–​106 spatial imaginaries 101, 103, 105 spatial politics 3, 9–​10, 125–​6 spatial, the 2–​3 spatial turn 8–​9 spatio-​temporal  fix  6 sponsors 93–​4 accountability 99 Northwestern Academies Model 98–​100, 103 state, the encompassment vii–​viii, ix formation of 70 scalar architecture of 69, 70 verticality vii, ix statecraft 18, 69–​70, 110 and education systems 70–​1 governance of schools 72–​8 and local scale 18 and localism 71–​2, 72–​8, 81–​2, 85, 86 resistance to 101 and scalecraft 86–​8 statehood 69, 70 street-​level bureaucrats  90 subsidiarity 58 ET 2020 framework 53 principle 40 school systems 61, 63 Swyngedouw, Eric 20–​1

T time-​space compression  6 top-​down approaches to policy analysis 89–​90 translocal political movements 126 transnational political movements 126 transnational, the 126

Trump, President Donald 127

V van Lieshout et al. 28 vertical movement 17 verticality vii, ix

W ways of knowing 13, 27, 47, 50, 51, 57, 65, 67 weaving scales together 113–​14, 120 White Paper (DCFS, 2010) 74, 75 White Paper (DfES, 2005) 74 Wilkins, A. 38 Working Groups (ET 2020) 52, 55–​6, 65–​7 best practice 60, 61, 63–​4 different contexts, common challenges 61–​3 logic of equivalence 63 logics of fantasy 64–​5 meetings 11, 59–​65, 60 agendas 60 beatific scenarios 64, 65 format of 59, 62 horrific scenarios 64–​5 multi-​level culture of learning 64, 65 peer learning activities (PLAs) 59 purpose of 59 representatives on 59 scalecraft 62–​3 schools 11, 59–​65 social logics depoliticised policy environment 60–​1 different contexts, common challenges 61–​3 generalisability and transferability of best practices 63–​4 universal principles 60, 63 working method 59

Y Yanow, Dvora 27

160

“Conceptually rich and empirically tempered, this book combines insights spanning different academic disciplines to offer up a new and exciting vantage point through which to theorise the messy relationship between space, place and policy making. The proposed vantage point – ‘scalecraft’ – is an essential toolkit to thinking through the dilemmas and problematics shaping policy translation and implementation both nationally and globally.” Andrew Wilkins, University of East London

Natalie Papanastasiou is a postdoctoral researcher of public policy and governance with a particular interest in exploring practices of policymaking and the politics of education governance.

www.policypress.co.uk PolicyPress

@policypress

Natalie Papanastasiou

Succeeding in the art of contemporary policymaking involves designing policies which reflect the deeply interconnected nature of political space. Nevertheless, policy continues to be articulated through age-old categories and hierarchies of scale. This book asks why scale occupies this enduring position of privilege in policymaking, highlighting how scales are far from ‘natural’ features of policy and that they are instead essential to the armoury of policy practice. Drawing on empirical data from the field of education governance, the book traces how scales are crafted and mobilised in policymaking practices, demonstrating that ‘scalecraft’ is key to understanding the production of hegemony.

The Politics of Scale in Policy

“Weaving together novel insights from critical geography, political discourse theory and interpretive policy analysis, Natalie Papanastasiou advances an innovative conceptualisation and reading of scalecraft, one that challenges policy analysts to take space seriously.” Steven Griggs, De Montfort University

The Politics of Scale in Policy Scalecraft and education governance

Natalie Papanastasiou Foreword by John Clarke