Not everything that moves must converge: evidence from global policy and practice on performance-based accountability

Policy convergence is an often-assumed outcome of transnational policy movement. However, different scholars have recently drawn attention to the need to unpack and critically interrogate such assumptions – going beyond the policy adoption stage and paying greater attention to sources of policy variation. This chapter engages with these debates by examining implementation patterns of performance-based accountability (PBA), a model that has expanded globally over the last few decades. Drawing on analyses of the Program for International Student Achievement (PISA) dataset of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) spanning 55 countries and seven cycles (from 2000 to 2018), our study relies on different convergence tests to assess, first, how and to what extent PBA policies have advanced across different educational systems over time, and, second, the explanatory power of two theoretically plausible sources of variation that might contribute to explaining divergence patterns – namely, administrative regimes and partisan politics. The chapter shows first that there is not a single pattern of convergence in practice around PBA, for while many countries might adopt similar discourses and policy instruments, the uses of such policies and their penetration in schools are very uneven. Second, our study shows that PBA patterns in practice are, to some extent, contingent on administrative regimes, whereas partisan politics appear to have a more limited explanatory power.