During the past decades, scholars have increasingly focused on the role of networks in education politics and policy. The research literature points to the importance of policy networks constituted by relationships among public agencies, advocacy groups, non-profits, and for-profit organizations. Attention has been drawn to tensions between the more neoliberal organizations in policy networks and traditional bureaucratic institutions of governance. From a Nordic and Scandinavian point of departure, reformpolicy emphasizes state-centered solutions while at the same time acknowledging the mix of governance mechanisms and institutional complexity that characterizes the public sector (Sivesind & Karseth, 2022). Our study focuses on a rather mundane part of the policy process, namely the production of white and green papers. These type of papers are produced when the government demands fundamental or incremental policy reforms. Our point of departure is the authors of the references used in the papers behind the most recent school reforms in Norway and Sweden. We use social network analysis (SNA) as it offers one approach for understanding the politics and power relationships embedded within policynetworks. The study is guided by the following research questions:

1. What are the authors co-citation networks in Norway and Sweden?

2. Which authors are co-cited frequently in policy documents? Which actors are more central in the network?

3. To what extent do authors co-citation networks (in policy documents) vary between Norway and Sweden?

As a theory of policy formations, discursive institutionalism (Schmidt, 2008, 2011) has emerged as a productive perspective for understanding how institutional change can be explored and understood. The focus in our analysis is on the “coordinative” discourse. We also draw on literature on meta-governancestrategies. For both countries, the government as well as central educational agencies unsurprisingly stand up as the most influential authors. Additionally, there are also two international authors that are co-cited frequently in both countries. One is the organization OECD and the other is the individual author John Hattie. The results also show important differences in the co-citations networks between the two countries that reflect how policy-making are orchestrated and coordinated in the two countries.

References: Sivesind, K. & Karseth, B. (2022). Introduction: A comparative Network Analysis of Knowledge Use inNordic Education Policies. I Karseth, Berit; Sivesind, Kirsten & Steiner-Khamsi, Gita (Red.), Evidence andExpertise in Nordic Education Policy. A comparative Network Analysis. Palgrave Macmillan