Crossing borders and boundaries by borrowing education policies: Lending, learning or just cherry picking?

This paper aims at linking two discourses in educational research, i.e. educational policy borrowing and learning predominantly discussed by the Anglosphere community and policy transfer activities in the field of VET (vocational education and training) dominated by the perspective of a German-speaking community. The paper reviews past and present initiatives by the Germany government that aim at “exporting” elements of VET to numerous regions including e.g. Mediterranean, Northern Africa, Latin America and South-East Asia countries. Referring to the theoretical framework of policy borrowing developed by Dolowitz & Marsh (2001), Phillips & Ochs (2003) and Phillips & Schweisfurth (2011), the paper examines three issues considered important to sustainable policy learning and borrowing, i.e. a) the role of ownership and internalisation, b) the level of coercion indicating the conditions under which the transfer was developed, and c) the relation between borrowing/lending, mutual learning processes, and cross-national attraction.