Understanding the Last, Slow Mile from Global to Local – reflections on the value of a critical discursive framework to narrate the mediation of policy at local levels

This Section is based on the observation that policymaking is shaped by conflicts and crises that influence public policy directly or indirectly. We fully agree. However, not all conflicts and crises are ‘sudden onset’ and, at the very least, even aspects of policy work in the shadow of conflict and crisis remain incremental and tropic. For us this raises interesting challenges in understanding the mediation of crisis-driven policy at local levels – the ideologies, agentive activity, and discourses that shape policy processes in the longer view. It also foregrounds “…the power of narratives in the policy process” (Schlaufer et al., 2022; p.249) in researching this. In this paper we focus on Appadurai’s notion of policy vernacularisation along what we term the last, slow mile from global to local. We consider the determinants that shape how public policy in education is pursued and legitimised through the actions of ‘local’ policymakers, and how the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) can help explore this. We propose that the values and discourses which frame and underpin policy work are increasingly shaped by such determinants and that insight rests in exploring the complexity of policy-making with particular emphasis on deeply-contextualized vernacular action and the shaping of policy by ‘local forces’ (Akiba, 2017; Robertson, 2012; Tatto & Menter, 2019; Lingard, 2021). Drawing from recent and ongoing empirical work (Revyakina, 2021; Revyakina & Galvin, 2022), we consider how globalised policy initiatives come to influence the ideas, ideology, and imaginary anchoring national policy action and how the national / local (re)mediates these – and the research value of systematically narrating the nuanced outcomes of the inevitable tensions involved. NPF analysis is not as widely used in the field of education policy as it deserves to be. We suggest that this is, in part, due to the difficulties of modelling the particularities of the social and cultural determinants that characterise education policy work. These include what Savage (2020) terms its relations of exteriority, what Maroy & Pons (2019) term local logics of action, and what Cairney (2019) calls the legacy of past policies. To address this challenge, we have developed a dialogical framework to help explicate the complexity and dynamics of the processes of vernacular globalization. This is based on exploring the narrative by interrogating the major social and cultural determinants of policy through a critical discursive lens. The framework embodies many of the concerns noted by Fischer et al (2015) and Cairney & Weible (2017) in relation to the critical stance that policy analysis requires. It also borrows from Krzyzanowski (2020) who emphasizes context-specific discursive shifts as a key to understanding policy impact. Through this, we have had some success explicating narratives of the vernacularization processes in policy-making – recognizing that policy ‘endstates’ are significantly crafted and determined by the specific historical, social and cultural contexts of the local. Its NPF ethic proved useful in drawing-out accounts of what Kuenzler (2021: p.407) describes as the “several, detailing relationships between them” and the social construction of policy mediation.