Historically, there is nothing new about the movement of policy ideas and ideologies across national borders and systems of education. Indeed, the basic architecture of colonialism was only sustainable through the movement of policy ideas and ideologies, with directives coming from the metropole on how systems of education should be developed and managed to cultivate compliant colonial subjects. At the same time, some ideas and innovations of policy and practice in the colonies made their way back to the metropole, though they became authoritative only with the metropole's imprimatur. Similarly, the Catholic Church has long acted as a supranational organization, seeking to implement its policies and practices through its systems of Catholic schools and universities around the world.

During most of the 20th century, educational policies continued to move from the West to the Rest, shaping the policy priorities of educational systems everywhere, based on the assumptions of the inherent superiority of the Anglo- American norms. These assumptions were legitimized through the invocation of such ideologies as modernization, industrialization and, more recently, globalization. As new nations came into existence, they continued to subscribe to these ideologies. Their reliance on overseas aid, technical expertise and other resources they needed to forge their own systems of educational governance invariably meant adopting ideas that were developed elsewhere. Moreover, the idea of “educational development” in the image of the West played a key role in constituting and defining “new” nations and their perspectives on education.

However, as reliant as the newly independent nations were on policies designed elsewhere, there were always “slippages” in the implementation processes, between the grand designs and the practices on the ground. A great deal of literature has pointed to the unintended consequences of policies unsuited to local conditions, disconnected from local traditions and often oblivious or insensitive to local resistance. Implementation processes have clearly been shown to be a great deal more complex than expected, demonstrating the limits of technicism and instrumental rationality in a field of practice as contingent and complicated as education. Policies, it is now widely recognized, cannot be implemented by edict and instructions alone.