Steiner-Khamsi, G. Time in education policy transfer: The seven temporalities of global school reform. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025, 242 pp, Open-access eBook (CC BY 4.0), ISBN (print): 978-3-031-82523-1; ISBN (eBook): 978-3-031-82524-8

Steiner-Khamsi reframes a familiar question: how education reforms travel and settle, by insisting that the decisive variable is not where ideas move but when they take shape, accelerate, and congeal. The book’s central contribution is a seven-part temporal grammar: the present conditions that make a reform plausible, the future promises that mobilize support, the sequence in which instruments are introduced, the timing of windows for change, the lifespan of reforms, their institutional aging, and the tempo of diffusion. This lens does more than rename familiar stages; it provides an operational vocabulary for comparing reforms across systems without collapsing them into a single diffusion story. The book anchors its argument mainly in a single travelling script, School Autonomy with Accountability (SAWA), and follows it across countries and decades. SAWA functions as a running probe rather than a case study in isolation; it allows the author to repeatedly and concretely demonstrate how global scripts are assembled (often by international organizations), exported, selectively translated, and partially institutionalized. Crucially, the temporal lens is not used alone. The interpretive framework also integrates the instrument approach, treating fundamental reforms as bundles of policy tools (by legislation, budgeting, incentives, persuasion, and performance measurement), with policy-borrowing research, which distinguishes among discursive borrowing, selective policy borrowing, and instrument borrowing, and highlights how translation is filtered through local institutions, politics, and professional cultures. Together, these strands illuminate why partial, pick-and-choose adoption often fails to deliver the promised causal chain. Empirically, the book draws on the World Education Reform Database (WERD) to map the wave of reform over time. The quantitative arc is striking: reform activity surges in the neoliberal era with two peaks, around 1989 and 2006. The first aligns with New Public Management (NPM) across the public sector; the second captures its education-specific translation as SAWA. The post-2008 decline is read not as a reversal but as saturation: once a critical mass of systems adopted key SAWA elements, volume tapered while datafication and selective institutionalization advanced. This macro portrait sets the stage for the book’s finer-grained claim. Where the analysis becomes most persuasive is in its treatment of sequence and role shifts of the state. Across many early adopters, autonomy-side measures, such as school-based management, per-capita funding formulas, and enabling non-state provision, tend to precede accountability-side measures, such as national curriculum frameworks, learning standards, phased large-scale assessments, public reporting, external evaluation, and performance-based pay. Read temporally, SAWA’s evolution looks less like a stable recipe and more like a pendulum: the state initially delegates authority, then re-enters through standards and performance technologies. This sequencing claim is testable and practically useful. A further strength is the differentiated discussion of global carriers. The OECD and the World Bank both move ideas and instruments, but they do so differently. The OECD organizes horizontal, peer-learning processes and circulates comparative indicators that encourage convergence by emulation. The World Bank assembles vertical reform packages, coupling financial instruments with toolkits of “best practice,” and often operates with more self-referential feedback loops. These distinct organizational logics matter: reception is not only a local choice; it is structured by how scripts are curated, delivered, and legitimized. The book, therefore, avoids a simple centre-periphery story and replaces it with a more subtle politics of who moves what, how, and at what speed. Methodologically, the book’s contribution is twofold. First, the seven temporalities are not a metaphor; they guide concrete research design. “Sequence” invites process-tracing of instrument order; “timing” directs attention to political windows and fiscal cycles; “lifespan” to resistance and the compensation of losers; “aging” to institutionalization; “tempo” captures acceleration once networks and infrastructures exist. Second, coupled with the …