Externalisation and legitimacy in policy transfer: a case of standards for school leaders.

There has been a transnational policy convergence in introducing professional standards for school leaders, and it constitutes a dominant discourse on school leadership. Focusing on the adoption of external references in policy transfer, this article presents a case in which the global leadership discourse was transferred to China, and the Chinese leadership policy was in turn used by the World Bank to promote the dissemination of its agenda. Proposing three types of external references (the dominant, comparison, and excellence), I conclude that policy actors strategically select the types of references depending on their self-positionalities and relationships with others. Driven by discourses that are embedded in specific contexts, comparative rankings are interpreted differently to justify respective policy agendas. This article also highlights the way in which a leadership policy from China was referenced by the World Bank to produce legitimacy as an unexpected consequence of policy transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]