A complex web of education policy borrowing and transfer: Education for All and the Plan for the Development of Education in Brazil

This article analyses how Education for All policies were transferred to Brazil and Latin America by means of ambitious educational strategic plans such as the Plan for the Development of Education and the National Education Plans – promoted by the Federal Government of Brazil, and the Latin American Educational Goals – promoted by the Organisation of Ibero American States (i.e. the international commonwealth of countries which belonged to the old Hispanic and Portuguese empires). The analysis highlights how a complex web of educational policy transfer and borrowing was fashioned by means of concatenate environmental, cognitive and relational mechanisms.


Introduction
The Education for All Programme (EFA), coordinated by UNESCO and a consortium of international donors, has induced a large number of countries to launch wide-ranging educational plans addressed to foster enrolment, completion, performance, equity and gender parity in primary education. In Latin America, a regional organisationthe Organisation of Ibero American States (OEI, in Spanish)is also leading another multi-national plan, in close alliance with UNESCO, which sets benchmarks for a socially inclusive education at both compulsory and upper educational levels. A federal country, Brazil has also implemented its Plan for the Development of Education (PDE) and National Education Plans with analogous goals and a very similar understanding of coordination between sub-national educational authorities. Remarkably, these two initiatives expect their final goals to be achieved some years after the EFA deadline in 2015 (SITEAL 2010).
In Brazil, Education for All partially coincides with the Ibero American project of international regionalisation and ongoing changes in Federal coordination. Thus, in the country education policy transfer and borrowing has followed a very complex circuit as far as agents, issues and scales of policy-making are concerned. 1 The recent research findings on policy transfer and borrowing processes which are taking place internationally (Steiner-Khamsi 2004 are particularly helpful to make sense of this case study, and eventually shed light on the national appropriation of EFA goals (King and Rose 2005).
The first section of the article will describe the establishment of Brazil's national plan and its convergence with the Ibero American 2021 Educational Goals. While the second part argues for a conceptualisation of three mechanisms of policy transfer, the following sections report on the influence of each mechanism in the making of Brazilian educational plans. The analysis notices how the EFA Programme set the scope of the available policy instruments (environmental mechanism), how the political actors interpreted them (cognitive mechanism) and how the Federal government managed to build a wide alliance of national and supra-national agents who supported the initiative (political mechanism) Borrowing strategic educational plans in a large federation In 1988, the Brazilian parliament passed a democratic constitution that consolidated its political transition from authoritarian to democratic rule in many ways, not least by universalising social rights such as the right to education. This commitment was so strong that the constitution required the government to establish 10-year plans, supported by federal acts regularly reviewed by the parliament. In the nineties the main principles were concretised in the first National Educational Plan for the period from 2001 to 2011. This one is the country's EFA plan according to the Planipolis database created by the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (2012). So far the official Index of Basic Education Development (INEP 2014) records improvement in students' learning, grade progression and graduation rates. However, although the actual trend in other dimensions of EFA remains unclear due to lack of up-to-date data, persisting poverty in slums and remote rural areas has probably hindered further advancement in early childhood education and care, (reduction of) out-of-school children, literacy and foundational skills (UNESCO 2008;EFA Global Monitoring Team 2013).
In the 1990s, Brazilian educational policies were the subject of sharp tensions that transformed relations between educational authorities within the federation, and linked the actors who intervened in the national arena with the agendas, ideologies and potential allies that were being formed in international contexts. Due to its external debt and consequent monetary weakness, the federal government had to accept a Structural Adjustment Plan as a condition to apply for World Bank loans. This condition restricted the priorities of educational expenditure to expanding net enrolment in primary education. The Bank also supported the FUNDESCOLA programme in order to improve school management in the deprived North Eastern states, thus fostering promotion and graduation of students in primary education in the most vulnerable territories (World Bank 2012).
By means of a multi-level scheme (FUNDEF), the federal government attempted to redistribute public resources among the different levels of government: federal, provincial and municipal. The Fund for Fundamentalprimary -Education (FUNDEF) was aimed at equalising the budget per capita allocated for compulsory education in all the municipalities. Local governments had to show significant improvement in net enrolment rates in order to be eligible for this federal support.
At that time, the main teachers' union attacked this policy on the grounds that it neglected teachers' working conditions, conveyed too restrictive a view of basic education, and therefore, contradicted the spirit of EFA as proclaimed in Jomtien in 1990. Unionists and activists blamed the government for undermining the initial enthusiasm that EFA had triggered in the country, where the launch of the worldwide plan had coincided with a democratic transition after 24 years of military dictatorship (Frigotto and Ciavatta 2003). Along these lines, in 2000 the Brazilian teachers' union (Confederação Nacional de Trabalhadores da Educação) joined other unions, INGOs and social movements in order to create the Global Campaign for Education, a global coalition that vindicated and monitored this broader understanding of EFA.
When the left-wing government led by Inácio Lula da Silva took office in 2003, it decided to respond to these shortcomings by means of a more ambitious policy addressing the whole education system. In 2006 the new administration substituted FUNDEF with the Fund for Basic Education (FUNDEB). FUNDEB gained the support of the Global Campaign for Education because, instead of looking at primary education exclusively, the conditions of this new fund applied to early childhood, primary and lower secondary education, thus requiring sub-national authorities to widen their commitment to education. After a second victory in the elections, in 2007 the Lula government gathered all the programmes run by the Ministry into an encompassing PDE that took early childhood, compulsory and post-compulsory secondary and tertiary education into account (Ministry of Education BR 2006a, 2006b. Following this, it promoted local and provincial conferences that eventually led to a National Conference for Education (CONAE 2010) convened in Brasilia in 2010. This participatory meeting issued a long white paper that reviewed the former national plan as well as the wider PDE approved in the interim, and outlined the grounds for the new National Educational Plan for the next decade.
At more or less the same time, between 2008 and 2010, the Organisation of Ibero-American States (OEI 2010) drafted, consulted on and finally established the Ibero American 2021 Educational Goals for all Latin American countries. The OEI is funded through Spanish and Portuguese official development aid. Remarkably, this initiative emulated the thematic scope of all the educational programmes that the Brazilian PDE had already considered. The OEI 2021 Educational Goals envision massive schooling and increased equity at all levels by the time the second centenary of the independence of most Latin American countries is commemorated. In addition to these grand objectives related to education strictu senso, the 2021 Educational Goals also aim at creating an Ibero-American research space where academic exchange would flourish.
In Brazil, two political coalitions were constituted in the arena of education politics. On the one hand, UNESCO, OEI and the federal government collaborated with the main civil society organisations to gather support for and to monitor their educational plansnamely, EFA, OEI 2021 Educational Goals and the PDE. The teachers' union changed its former opposition to the official policy into a qualified but explicit collaboration. Many governors and mayors from a variety of political parties joined this collective project. And the national branch of the Global Campaign for Education provided international legitimation. On the other hand, although they shared this mainstream consensus, some right-wing governors opposed the minimum salary for teachers, a policy supported by both the federal government and the teachers' union. The association of local educational authorities demanded management systems that controlled teachers more tightly. Furthermore, a network of firms interested in stressing their corporate social responsibility (named All for Education, TPE in Portuguese) started a widely disseminated campaign to promote education based on economic competitiveness and school effectiveness. Shortly after, TPE began collaborating with the Partnership for Educational Revitalisation in the Americas (PREAL), another initiative for a Latin American education policy, funded by USAID, the World Bank and private corporations.
Nowadays, these two sectors share the expectation that each Brazilian school will respond to institutional, local, provincial, federal (PDE), Latin American (OEI) and world (EFA) educational goals. Education is a crucial axis of multi-level government in the country. All schools are required to elaborate and implement their own PDE following a model inspired by the school improvement projects piloted in the 1990s (FUNDESCOLA). In addition, they are committed to the benchmarks which are established for all municipalities, provincial states and the whole country, and measured by the Institute for Educational Research through the Index of Development of Basic Education (INEP 2012). Thus, each Brazilian school must contribute to Education for All by 2015 as well as to Ibero American and National goals by 2020-2021.
The aforementioned ideological differences notwithstanding, so far both the federal government and the OEI have succeeded in imposing their own rationale and deadlines. Crucial to my analysis is the general acceptance of the causal beliefs embedded in both the logical framework of the PDE and the 2021 Educational Goals, because all the parties involved expected that significant synergies will be fostered between initial, primary, secondary and higher education. Doubtless, the validity of this claim will be revealed through the research and public policy analyses that universities and consultants will carry out in the following years. According to my interviews in Brasilia and Paris, difference in deadlines is neither a problem for UNESCO officers nor for the coordination and monitoring teams of EFA, but a welcome piece of news that reports on mutually beneficial cooperation with OEI (see note 1).

Borrowing and transferring education policies in different directions
By taking into account the ongoing transformations in international relations, a number of contemporary observers have convincingly noticed how intricate webs of education policy borrowing and transfer are being fashioned in many countries (Dale 1999(Dale , 2005Steiner-Khamsi 2004Dale and Robertson 2012). In contrast with the socalled Westphalian system where states have competed in war and peace since the seventeenth until the late twentieth century, the last decades have witnessed a new configuration of international relations established between heterogeneous social agents (states, corporations, NGOs, international organisations, social movements) with respect to a variety of topics including security, finance, health, trade, energy, climate change, international development, water management, and significantly, education. In this context, interests may be pursued simultaneously at varied scales of decision-making depending on the expected returns for local, national and/or supranational action. The agents may choose where they deploy their strategy, to what extent they adopt the ideas that have been proposed in many countries and forum, and which alliances they build within, across and above the borders of states.
My analysis draws on this strand of research altogether with a complementary conceptualisation of environmental, cognitive and relational mechanisms of policy diffusion (Tilly 2001;Jenson 2010). In the field of education studies, useful conceptualisations distinguish coercive and ideological (Dale 1999) as well as political and economic (Steiner-Khamsi 2010) ways of policy transfer. Similarly, systems theory (Schriewer 1989), political economy and network analysis (Steiner-Khamsi 2004), as well as political and cultural analysis (Rappleye 2012;Sobe 2012;Waldow 2012) have provided quite relevant clues to researchers involved in spelling out the processes of borrowing and transfer. By focusing on mechanisms I want to avail of this fruitful literature by taking into account both the environmental mechanisms which frame the opportunities for action and the cognitive and relational mechanisms directly enacted by social agency.
Environmental mechanisms enrich the array of available opportunities by setting the scope of the policy instruments which are available in a given place at a given time (Tilly 2001;Jenson 2010). Thus, when a set of political actors want to review the mainstream policies in a country, they often draw on the hegemonic images of other countries and the guidelines drafted by international organisations (Schriewer 1989;Takayama 2008;Meyer 2010;Rappleye 2012). The search of references from elsewhere is not only motivated by curiosity or by a cosmopolitan drive, but also by the remarkable consequences of this very exercise for reflexivity. International organisations, mostly the United Nations, have been particularly successful in disseminating institutional 'scripts' that define ways of policy-making in accordance with human rights. Although governments sometimes only pay lip service to these principles, the point is that certain requirements underpinned by these 'scripts' have become indispensable for political players to become full actors in a specific arena of debate and competition. These requirements normally consist of projections made of particular understandings of the allegedly best practices adopted elsewhere. By looking at their own reality through this lens, political actors have to reflect on their own position, shortcomings and challenges in order to either promote their proposals or question the prevailing policies.
In the end, a body of soft regulation is established so that governments become responsible for compliance with universal schooling, civic education, the universal franchise and the oversight of human rights violations. Whilst the international reach of these institutional arrangements correlated with socio-economic development some decades ago, recently these rules have been disseminated and accepted as soon as new countries signed international covenants and democratisation advanced throughout whole world regions regardless of other socio-economic characteristics (Meyer, Bromley, and Ramírez 2010;Ramírez and Boli 1987;Ramírez, Soysal, and Shanahan 1997;Ramírez 2006;Suárez, Ramírez, and Koo 2009). In this vein, Leftwing Brazilian civil society organisations attacked finance-driven educational reformswhich were only targeted to increase primary enrolment in response to the conditions of Structural Adjustment Programmes in the nineties, by claiming that decision-makers were misreading the broader notion of 'basic education' as stated in the principles of Education for All in 1990 (Frigotto and Ciavatta 2003;Gindin 2008). In the whole continent, governments and civil societies have been looking at the United Nations (Puntigliano 2007) and the European Union (Grugel 2004(Grugel , 2006)albeit in more or less rhetorical ways, so as to emphasise an alternative, assertive international stance in contrast with their former subordination to the United States.
Cognitive mechanisms mostly revolve around the reinterpretation of educational quality and development. When projecting external images over their closer institutional context, political actors also avail of certain knowledge of education policymaking. International statistics and quality assurance systems have triggered a sort of data revolution that produces growing amounts of information about education policies. These sources are used for both basic and applied research as well as evaluation, and very often become the grounds of official targets. The resulting corpus of reports, policy briefs, statistical monitoring bases and international comparisons are widely used to figure out the possible alternatives and the underlying dilemmas in decision-making. This knowledge is instrumental to the alignment of professional practices with official expectations, the selection of the salient information about foreign education systems, and the importation of management (e.g. Public-Private Partnerships) as well as social policy (e.g. assertive action) devices to the field of education (Ozga 2009;Sobe 2012;Steiner-Khamsi, 2009;Waldow 2012).
Commentators of policy studies define these sets of ideas as a 'theory of change' or a 'programme ontology' (Pawson 2006). Actually, these theories are embedded in social and educational programmes. Their hypotheses entail causal beliefs on what changes are likely to take place if a policy is implemented. In a more general sense, these beliefs make quite formal assumptions about the nature of social reality and the ontology of schooling and education. So, in the same way as the Education for All programme relies on some empirical claims about the construction of educational quality, the overcoming of inequalities and conflicts, the generation and transmission of skills, and the organisation of teaching and learning (EFA Global Monitoring Report Team 2005, it is plausible to notice that the Brazilian Plan for the Development of Education and the Ibero American Educational Goals take for granted a number of assumptions about the synergies of encompassing educational policies simultaneously addressed to several educational levels (Ministry of Education BR 2006a, 2006bOEI 2008OEI , 2010. Finally, relational mechanisms are enacted by means of both economic and political processes (Steiner-Khamsi 2010). A well-known economic process has consisted of conditioning international loans to the application of packed sets of reforms in a country. This was a common practice of the assistance provided by the World Bank when external debt afflicted many Latin American countries in the eighties and nineties, but has significantly declined afterwards. In fact, it is not welcome at all by most of the incumbent governments nowadays.
Coalition-building is a relational, purely political mechanism of policy transfer. In addition to the traditional pattern of negotiating who is in charge of government, recently coalitions are often built through networks of actors who are interested in particular areas of policy-making. Moreover, some actors are able to establish these alliances in a particular layer of governance while engaging in conflict in other layers. Thus, oppositional groups may look for international support to attack governments, but governments may also avail of international certification to underpin their preferred policies (Steiner-Khamsi 2010).

Setting the scope of policy instruments
Both the Brazilian Plan for the Development of Education and the National Educational Plan(s) as well as the Ibero American Educational Goals have been designed and implemented in a favourable environment where similar policy frameworks were circulating internationally. After taking office, in 2003 the first priorities of the new Brazilian administration had to do with expanding and consolidating the previous schemes of conditional cash transfers and regional equalisation funds, but in a few years' time official interests broadened to include pedagogies, school improvement and clearly defined benchmarks that insisted on the need to increase net enrolment rates across the school yearsspecially in secondary education, and committed official goals to improving material facilities, guaranteeing quality assurance and strengthening academic performance.
Although the federal government reformed education in this way due to its understanding of the main problems, and availed of the very reform to take political advantage, in fact this policy shift followed mainstream international guidelines. It was not only coherent with the almost contemporary launch of the Ibero American Educational Goals but also with messages that UN agencies were sending at the same time.
To start with, ambitious educational planning reflected a wider concern with the alignment of quantity and quality. If public expenditure and enrolment can be roughly referred to as quantity issues, those other aspects which are more deeply intertwined with teaching and learning have been labelled as quality issues for the last three decades. Among them, in 2005 the EFA Global Monitoring Report was already reminding governments of a 'quality imperative' essentially consisting of several policy dimensions including learner characteristics, context, enabling inputs, teaching and learning dimension, and outcomes dimension (Global Monitoring Report Team 2005, 35-36). Remarkably, in Brazil policy-makers and experts could easily download and read these ideas while they were discussing the Plan for the Development of Educationwhich was launched two years later. The OEI staff had also access to these ideas when drafting, circulating and discussing the blueprints of the Ibero American Educational Goals between 2008 and 2010.
In a similar vein, the UNESCO Regional Programme for Latin America and the Caribbean (PRELAC) gathered all the governments in the region in summits where the role of the teaching profession as well as pedagogic innovation, opportunities for lifelong learning and the social responsibility with education were discussed (PRELAC-UNESCO 2007, 2). Remarkably, the drafting of the Brazilian programme and the ulterior discussion of the National Educational Plan in the National Conference for Education (CONAE) were coherent with these recommendations. These ideas also contributed to the core of the Ibero American Educational Goals.
The UNESCO International Bureau for Education also posited a policy framework aligned with Brazilian and Ibero American endeavours when convening the 2008 International Conference of Education. That conference extended the notion of inclusive education from an interest in educating students with special needs due to their disabilities to a commitment to cater to students with all kinds of specific need caused by social inequalities. At the level of single schools this international organisation proposed a method of both pedagogic innovation and educational change ultimately based on overcoming social and cultural barriers to learning (Booth and Ainscow 2002). But the official initiative aimed at scaling up a similar method to the whole of an educational system (Acedo, Ferrer, and Pàmies 2009). Once again international guidelines strongly resonated in the aforementioned reforms.
Finally, in Brazil since 2003 first the Lula da Silva administration, and then the current administration of Dilma Rousseff have underpinned their comprehensive reforms with a further vindication of Anti-Racist education which is also actively sponsored by the UN. Remarkably, for these years the Brazilian authorities have attempted to transform the prevailing ethnic order, whose origins date back to Atlantic slave trade, on the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action on Racism (United Nations 2009). Besides inviting Afro-Brazilian educators to have a say in the development of the school curriculum, these administrations have also used positive discrimination to increase the proportion of Afro-Brazilian students who enrol in higher education institutions.
In a nutshell, the ideas which inspired the main developments in Brazilian education policies had been actively disseminated by international organisations at the same time as the PDE was designed, and were received by the Brazilian authorities in quite a positive way. The Ibero American Educational Goals set an analogous but tentative method of international coordination in that world region.
Interpreting educational quality and development When they were designed, both the Brazilian and the Ibero American educational programmes shared a handful of empirical expectations about the alleged virtuous causal circles that their very enactment may eventually trigger. According to the promoters, the PDE should trigger powerful synergies between early childhood, primary, secondary and tertiary education (Ministry of Education BR 2006a, 2006b), while the OEI (2010) plan should contribute to the making of a knowledge society by matching educational with social reforms. These were not only statements on the mission of programmes but also causal beliefs about the likely outcomes of policies.
By making these claims, the federal authorities and OEI managed to fashion a political consensus across the board. The government of Brazil introduced these ideas even before the official launch of the PDE in 2007 (Ministry of Education BR 2006a, 2006b, then insisted on their validity in proposing a white paper that the National Conference for Education (CONAE 2010) eventually approved as a draft outline of the National Education Plan for the decade between 2011 and 2021. At the same time, the Organisation of Ibero American States (OEI 2010) opened its own consultation process on the grounds that a very important power in the region such as Brazil had already taken a similar approach into account, then discussed analogous tenets with many governments, academics and civil society organisations, and finally condensed the whole package in a widely disseminated white paper.
A rapid reading of excerpts from Brazil's PDE and the OEI white paper shows how the belief in a large virtuous circle was worded in terms of teachers building on schools' 'internal and external factors' and 'educational changes' advancing the 'two (economic and social) agendas'.
Institutional evaluation makes reference to the process whereby schools analyse and reflect on their own practice so that they engage with both internal initiatives and interventions in other areas of the (educational) system in order to promote a high-quality basic education for all the population ( … ) Individual schools evaluate themselves to improve their own efforts; then, educational agents build systems to monitor schools that take diverse issues into account, mostly goals and outcomes, and the internal and external factors that condition decision-making and actions (Ministry of Education BR 2006b: Vol I, 161).
Latin American education (...) has to face the challenges of the 21st century so that an education which is attentive to technological changes, information and knowledge systems, scientific development and innovation, and new ideas in the culture, eventually achieves a balanced economic development that ensures the reduction of poverty, inequalities and other threats to social cohesion. How can we face these challenges successfully? If educational progress and reforms reproduce the patterns of the last decades, a qualitative leap that bridges the current distance with developed countries is unlikely. Diverse approaches to the existing gaps are necessary. New actors, institutions and strategies must enter the arena so that educational changes allow us to advance these two (economic and social) agendas in an integrated but innovative manner (OEI 2010, 83). These ideas were conveyed by means of 'apparent statements of fact' (Fairclough 2003). If decision-makers (at different levels) and teachers were expected to think that 'internal and external factors' and the benefits of 'educational changes' for the 'economic and social agenda' were real, the recipients of the message were actively encouraged to modify their practices so as to avail themselves of this potential. The concrete recommendation was to implement the multi-level PDEs in Brazil, and as far as the OEI was concerned, to design an ambitious national plan. The leap from fact to recommendation is an indicator of hegemony to the extent that this rhetorical movement totally overlooks any hint of discussion about the empirical validity of a specific claim (Fairclough 2003).
The cognitive side of policy transfer also endowed the Brazilian government and the OEI with new tools of time management. Basically, it strongly suggested that the final appraisal of either success or failure should be postponed until the total series of data would be available in 2021, when both planning periods would expire. This argument was really useful in responding to the doubts of UNESCO (2008) with regard to certain difficulties about the effective possibility of achieving EFA goals in Brazil by 2015.
Since the main problems were truly universalising literacy and enrolling children who resided in the poorest urban slums and rural zones, the new deadline anticipated a sound reaction to potential critiques in the regional and global conferences that would evaluate EFA. At the same time, a trend of increasing average scores in the official index measuring the effects of PDE was producing good news (INEP 2012), and PISA data also confirmed some signs of advance (OECD 2010). In addition, for both the federal government and the OEI the open questions about the possible effects of the plans also extended the period for re-defining the goals and, if necessary, tackling any shortcomings.

Building alliances
The initiative of the Brazilian federal government transformed the field of relevant social relations because it built a pluri-scalar coalition gathering together international (UNESCO) and regional (OEI) organisations as well as provincial and local governments and wide sectors of the regional, national and sub-national civil society. In doing so, it strengthened the leadership of both federal and Ibero American reformers. In fact, the federal government managed to lead policy change at the same time as its political project became the very framework for educational debates in the country.
The Brazilian government emulated many other contemporary campaigns in education and social policy by carefully crafting the discourse that disseminated the objectives of its educational policy (Fairclough 2003). Particularly, the Ministry coined and disseminated several catchwords that made reference to the outline of the general consensus. The similarity of these catchwords defined a common discourse, whose core was a multidimensional view of education closely associated with human rights. All the involved voices supported a wider understanding of education than just universal school enrolment, thus taking autonomy, diversity and a comprehensive reading of basic education into account. Across the ideological spectrum, a heterogeneous array of political actors including the left-wing Ministry of Education, a few centrist regional governments such as that of Minas Gerais (MG) and the regional project promoted by the OEI to the business-friendly All for Education, altogether supported a set of shared beliefs on the right of students to this multidimensional education.
The notion of education that inspires the Plan for the Development of Education (PDE) ( … ) aims at building autonomy, that is, educating individuals so they are capable of adopting critical and creative worldviews (Ministry of Education BR 2006b, 5).
Since the 1920s and 1930s, integral education, a wide-ranging view of school education including social and cultural tasks, was adopted by a number of political projects (SEDUC-MG 2009, 3).
An integrative approach is necessary. In this approach all cultures in their diverse manifestations are present in the schools. Research and science must be a part of the curriculum and teachers' concerns. The wealth of cultural and linguistic diversity must be recognised. Everyone must be committed to innovation, above all through networks and work teams. This endeavour must be rooted in the region's identity; its capacity for imagination and innovation (OEI 2010, 97).
Integral education has to do with the complete flourishing of the human being. This notion broadens the concept of education provided by the school, the family and the whole society. ( … ) In this vein, integral education embraces competencies such as learning to live together, to participate in public life and to respect the environment (TPE 2011, 113).
On the other hand, the discursive underpinning of these encompassing educational plans was expressive of a very general consensus in which diverse, partially contradictory parties could participate. In linguistic terms, a variety of hortatory styles conveyed this very general common ground that allowed for alternate agreement and discrepancy (Fairclough 2003).
Brazilian authorities addressed their messages to the nation in order to use the plans as an opportunity to broaden public debate. In their view, the PDE was to construct the scaffolding of truly national educational policies that guaranteed the right to education in its broadest sense. But the teachers' union repeatedly signalled at further contentions by complaining about the official acceptance of the business-friendly All for Education (TPE) campaign. In the view of the union, this campaign not only might erode popular support for the PDE but mostly could threaten the public delivery of education.
The PDE offers a conception of education in line with the constitutional objectives of the Federal Republic of Brazil. This entails building a national system out of diverse educational systems, that is, the objective is multiplicity instead of uniformity (Ministry of Education BR 2006b, 6).
However, an extremely worrying aspect is the collaboration of the Ministry with All for Education (TPE), a lobby with no relation to the government's electoral platform but powerful enough to have influence. The Teachers' Union is concerned about changes in the Plan's principles, particularly the use of public resources to fund private schools and networks, which provides incentives for a market-centred view of education (CNTE 2008, 3-4).
The reference of the Ibero American Educational Goals was the will to construct a community of the nations which had been part of the Portuguese and the Spanish empires some centuries ago. Educational and academic cooperation between these governments, as regularly stated in ministerial summits, eventually was to contribute to the making of democratic societies. This initiative should not only reinforce education in national political agendas but also strengthen the cohesion of the Ibero American community based on common objectives to build just and democratic societies (OEI 2008, 16).
In a different vein, the Programme for the Educational Revitalisation of the Americas (PREAL), actively supported by the World Bank and US Aid, as well as the business-friendly All for Education coalition issued quite a contrasting discourse to the extent that they mentioned private institutions as a key component of the public sphere. However, these voices were cautious enough to frame their controversial claims within a general concern for broad social involvement in education and support for cooperation.
PREAL ran a continent-wide programme to foster corporate social responsibility in the area of education. In its own terms, this goal was a part of a wider social movement.
The best-performing countries in education show that improvement is possible (...) and that quality does not exclude equity, as they show it is feasible to achieve excellent results for almost all students ( … ) The first essential step of successful systems consists in defining a limited list of clear, measurable objectives, real priorities that target students' results. These objectives become the focus of attention and reference for further progress ( … ) Successful systems recognize the need to involve all stakeholders in generating improvement (PREAL 2012, 1-3).
All for Education (TPE) stood for networks of public and private actors who were equally interested in civic participation associated with education and equity in the school system. Social organisations led by professionals from the private sector ─notably entrepreneurs, represent a relatively new model. These organisations are concerned with education. They work with non-governmental programmes and put pressure on local authorities to improve the quality of education in their countries (...) While some of them work on programmes, others are more interested in political action. All of them share a common focus on improving quality with equity in education. These organisations were invited to join our network provided (...) they prioritised the mobilisation and involvement of the common citizen in the educational agenda of their countries, and they were able to plan long-term actions to improve education (TPE 2011, 149-150).
The ability to build coalitions around the Plan for the Development of Education (PDE) also endowed the federal government with a new instrument to foster cooperative federalism. As a federal state, Brazil is exposed to both competitive and cooperative patterns of coordination, but since the democratic transition a trend toward cooperation has been prevailing in regard to many fiscal and social policies. While a so-called unified system has been designed and implemented in the areas of public health and welfare, the combination of the Fund for the Development of Basic Education (FUNDEB) and the Plan for the Development of Education (PDE) is helping to enact a similar scheme in education. The former has succeeded in inducing provincial and local governments to pay for school enrolment instead of diverting part of their budgets to alternative uses. The latter has created a set of benchmarks and indicators concerning school facilities, enrolment and academic performance (Arretche 2010). Significantly, some provincial and municipal governmentsnormally those run by Centre and Right-wing parties, have been implementing educational plans which depart from the Federal goals, but nonetheless, despite some rhetorical distances, these alternative policies eventually rely on an extremely similar logic of multi-level cooperation in order to achieve common objectives (e.g. Sarmiento 2005;OECD 2010;Ramos and Giorgi 2011;SEDUC-MG 2012).
Policy learning and 'political capabilities' In short, by concatenating a set of environmental, cognitive and relational mechanisms a few years after the millennium a heterogeneous configuration of political players wove a web of educational policy borrowing and transfer around 10-year educational plans in Brazil and the whole of Latin America. Apparently, these initiatives were supported by a large political consensus. In doing so, their main promotersthe Brazilian Federal government and the OEI, were easily endowed with convenient concepts and recommendations inspired on the global framework of Education for All (environmental mechanism). But their actions were also crucial to pursue their interests in the midst of this international favourable conjuncture. They managed to diagnose the main problems and deploy the main strategies so that they were able to delay final considerations for a significant time lag (cognitive mechanism). And they also managed to build a complex coalition embracing local, regional, national and international political actors. Although certain conflicts opposed some members of this coalition, the political actors who led the initiatives were able to instantiate a general consensus that was not altered by contentious episodes (relational mechanism). This analysis of policy borrowing can be helpful for educational studies insofar as it highlights common patterns in varied areas of public policy (Tilly 2001;Jenson 2010). But its relevance is particularly significant in underlining the context rather than the content of borrowing and transfer. Even though the diversity of ideas that circulate the world of educational policy-making are supported by heterogeneous groups of experts, the introduction of policy studies in the field of education has convincingly proved that whether borrowing takes place, and in what form it does so, depends on the borrowing context, not the place of origin of what is borrowed (Waldow 2012, 417).
The intervention of political players in these contexts responds to a common pattern widely documented by the social sciences. These social agents are simultaneously enabled to act and constrained by their environmental conditions. To be precise, the presence of some political ideas contributes to put some issues high in the agenda, but it also empowers those players to deploy some specific strategies. Thus, whereas the debt crisis favoured the role of financial institutions between the eighties and the nineties, later on Education for All has underpinned the strategic salience of the political actors who are able to settle complex arrangements of multi-layered coordination.
These political actors have not only dealt with a given environment but have also asserted their own agency by elaborating on two critical 'political capabilities' such as expertise on education policy and coalition-building. If expertise is a cognitive mechanism of policy transfer, coalition-building is certainly a relational mechanism. 'Political capabilities' depend on the environmental, structural conditions created by the historical conflicts and competition that fashion a given institutional context over time. However, social agents endowed with new political capabilities may eventually become the crucial instruments of social change. These capabilities are created in a relational system where they function, but they can contribute to originate a new form of this system. In Saskia Sassen's words, these capabilities are collective productions and drivers of social transformation: Capabilities are collective productions whose development entails time, making, competition, and conflicts, and whose utilities are, in principle, multivalent because they are conditioned on the character of the relational system within which they function. That is to say, a given capability can contribute to the formation of a very different relational system from the one it originates in (Sassen 2006, 7-8).
The environmental triggers of educational policy transfer often enact a reflexive stance on a given country through externalisation and the configuration of specific social conditions of government, i.e. governmentality (Schriewer 1989;Takayama 2008;Rappleye 2012). By looking outwards and then back home again when appraising the pros and cons of an educational system, political players face particular challenges. Simultaneously, the very connection between national and international conditions is crucial to fashion some specific opportunities for action, that is, shapes some types of agency.
Expertise on educational policy travels throughout the world by means of a constant projection of national realities over global references defined by standard data bases and best practices (Ozga 2009;Sobe 2012;Waldow 2012). These cognitive routes of policy diffusion, transfer, travelling or migration are extremely variable depending not only on who wants to adopt a policy but also on how this political actor does so, and whether she is completely or partially successful.
Policy transfer has an economic and a political face inasmuch as key political players draw on financial conditionality, networking or coalition-building (Steiner-Khamsi 2010). Once again the context is the determinant of empirical variations, and a political capability paves the way to the final outcomes. The capability to pattern social relations in certain ways such as coalitions between business, unions, subnational and national governments and international organisations has been crucial for the reception of EFA in Latin America.
The prior analysis of 'political capabilities' takes into account the methodological importance of relationships within case studies. These relationships have clearly shown that case studies cannot be automatically identified with homogeneous units allegedly containing a nation-state. Conversely, researchers have to be aware of the coexistence and co-evolution of states and other units of governance (e.g. international organisations and networks) and processes of territorial (inter-and sub-national) transformations. With this complexity in mind, they have to scrutinise crucial connections occurring within each case (Steiner-Khamsi 2012, 12).

Final remarks
This article introduces a case study in the politics of education which has important implications for the analysis of the instruments and the rationales used by the main political actors to underpin their wide-ranging plans for educational development. In Brazil, not only international agencies and the federal government have invested a great deal of energy in these plans, but the civil society has also been very active in campaigning for Education for All (Verger and Novelli 2011, 165). Although right now it is not possible to know whether this equilibrium will remain, or the underlying conflict will shift the direction of change, so far it is apparent that progress is significant at the same time as a new pattern of political alliance has been established.
The Ibero American (OEI) and the Brazilian plans for educational development posit another issue for evaluation and scientific enquiry. Since both of them rely on social synergies between the main educational programmes, it is also reasonable to ask whether these expectations are being met. Whatever the political consensus and conflict regarding the prevailing opinion in the coming years, the validity of results will nevertheless depend on the rigour of evaluations, and eventual findings will likely impinge on the causal beliefs of political players. Thus, the contribution of the Education for All programme to educational development cannot be only assessed with regard to the statistical trends that approach countries to benchmarks, but also has to be appraised with regards to the social changes triggered by the circulation of policy frameworks from international organisations to countries and world regions, as well as from countries to international agencies.