This paper  addresses how school leadership education, constituted as a field of professional knowledge, has evolved into a new policy space that serves governance purposes while simultaneously facilitating learning among current and future leaders. By examining globalization and learning as prominent features, we show how the development of school leadership programs enables a borderless policy space through problem statements and strategies that individuals and organizations share. At the same time, we find that the solutions to these problems are both country-specific and locally defined, bordered by the limitations of the national providers who share knowledge and decide upon curriculum content and processes.

In total, 20 policy papers were analyzed, including OECD and EU documents, white and green papers, and strategy documents and curriculum frameworks for school leadership education produced by state authorities in Sweden and Norway. Inspired by how Schmidt (2011) articulates her epistemology for studying the dynamics of change and how she conceptualizes ideas and discourses to connect theory with data, we utilize an ideational approach to research leadership education as a policy field (Béland & Cox, 2011). Following a discursive-institutionalist approach, we argue that the ways in which social and educational questions become intertwined in globalizing reforms are dependent on cognitive and normative ideas in the public sphere and the interactive discursive processes and argumentation by which these ideas are produced, conveyed, and potentially led to collective action (Schmidt, 2012). Based on foreground discursive abilities, which comprise actions through the ways in which people distance themselves from everyday institutional activities and discuss and reflect upon school leadership education is developed and designed as an institution, the paper show on a more general level, how school leadership education changes from an “outside” perspective. Thus, globalization can be explained by foreground discursive abilities that provide the basis for a coordinative discourse that is characterized by the creation, elaboration, and justification of a certain policy across the nation-states programs for educational leaders.

By comparing two sets of country-specific policy texts about school leadership development at the national level in Norway and Sweden, the paper identifies how state authorities within two neighboring countries in Scandinavia act within a globalizing discourse while approaching their shared problems differently. We argue that a discursive-institutionalist approach helps identify how globalization emerges and how interactive power relations between the providers and the users play a role in decision courses on curriculum issues within leadership education. Finally, by addressing curriculum theory to clarify how ideas and policies connect with education reform in the selected countries (Uljens & Ylimaki, 2015; Wahlström & Sundberg, 2017), we demonstrate how policies about school leadership development connect with local practices that are partly transformed by researchers as change agents.

The paper is based on an ongoing study of transnational policy transfer within the Nordic countries. It extends the authors’ analysis of an article (Sivesind & Wahlström, in press).