ABSTRACT
Robert Cowen (2009) coined the phrase ‘as it moves, it morphs’ to summarise the changing features of global education policies which travel from one country to the next. This insight also applies to global reforms that have been borrowed. Two, five, or ten years after the policy is implemented it morphs into several localised versions. As a result, coalition building among groups with divergent interests that the act of policy borrowing tends to enable (see Steiner-Khamsi 2010) is short-lived. Soon after the adoption of a global education policy local interest groups pursue independent interests, pulling in different directions. Thus the discursive power of a global education policy dissipates at the very moment it is imported.
