ABSTRACT
Introduction ere is a growing concern about the autonomy of national policy making and implementation within the turbulent global context. Globalisation, it is argued, reinforces the tendency for national economies to be increasingly interconnected, and for national policies to be shaped not only by national actors but also by global dynamics. e eects of globalisation hold true not only for economic relations but also for contemporary educational systems (Schriewer & Martinez, 2004), and the dialectic of the global and the local in education has been the focus of much research and debate in recent years (Steiner-Khamsi, 2004; Zajda, 2005; Rust, 2000; Sahlberg, 2008). At the heart of this debate are the complex issues of policy borrowing and policy lending (Phillips, 2005), which are of particular relevance to the educational reform movements that we see taking place across the Arab region.
