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Research on policy borrowing is a well-established research area of comparative education. Over the past 20 years or so it gained prominence among globalization scholars. Of great interest is not so much the question of which reforms ''travel'' internationally, and which ones are homebound, but rather why traveling reforms resonate in a given context and at a specific moment, and how they are subsequently translated or locally adapted. In addition to issues of reception and translation, questions on the politics and economics of policy transfer are central to this research area. Empirical studies have shown that borrowing reforms from other countries, from other sectors within a country, or from ''international standards'' broadly defined often help coalition-building in a country. Policy borrowing also helps to mobilize financial resources, especially when it is preceded by political talk of falling behind some international standards or ''best practices.'' Therefore, the methods of inquiry used, the type of research questions asked, and the conclusions drawn in this body of research tend to address political and economic aspects of educational reform. Arguably, a transnational perspective is indispensable to carry out this kind of intellectual project. The academic preoccupation with policy borrowing has helped to formulate the contours of comparative policy studies. The article provides a brief overview of the main tenets of policy borrowing research and then focuses specifically on three aspects: policy reception, policy projection, and the rise of the global education industry as a new actor and beneficiary of global education policy.

This article critically examines how 'what-went-right' analyses are used to subsequently justify the transfer of reform packages or 'best practices' from one country to another. Similar to evidence-based policy planning, the what-went-right approach needs to be criticized for being presumptuous. There are three fallacies of the what-went-right analysis that the article dismantles: rationality, precision and universality. The article focuses on the façade of universality and examines how the claim to universal solutions is methodologically sustained. First, the author shows how standardized or normative comparison has in recent years overshadowed the other two types of comparison: comparison across time (historical analyses) and comparison across contexts ('simple comparison'). Then, she elaborates on why the what-went-right approach requires policy analysts to downplay differences between educational systems in order to establish comparability between cases. The emphasis on comparability and similarity of cases is a prerequisite to importing 'best practices' from vastly different educational systems. But what if transfer occurs regardless of difference? There is a curious phenomenon that the article addresses in greater detail: the retrospective definition of a local problem. Given the worldwide circulation of 'best practices' and traveling reform packages, policy analysts sometimes are under pressure to align their analyses of local problems with already existing global solutions. The article ends with a reflection on policy borrowing and lending research and situates the what-went-right approach in the broader question of why and how policy analysts 'buy' or 'sell' reform packages that worked well in one context for transfer into another. In this article I examine the reasons why the 'what-went-right' approach has become so popular, the methodological assumptions upon which it depends, as well as its impact upon agenda setting and policy formulation. This approach often leads to the erroneous assumption that what went right in one educational system will inevitably work well in another. Because it is associated with policy borrowing and learning, the approach has drawn the attention of comparative education researchers. The what-went-right approach is related to two other practices in policy studies: evidencebased policy planning and lesson-drawing. The latter is nowadays more commonly defined as learning from 'best practices.' If we were to place the three terms on a continuum ranging from analytical to prescriptive, evidence-based policy planning would be considered the most analytical, lesson-drawing the most prescriptive, and the what-went-right approach would fall somewhere in between. Evidence-based policy planning is, at least in its intention, an instrument for evaluating and understanding the effectiveness of a reform. At the other end of the continuum are 'best practices' that organizations export or import, lend or borrow or, more generally, transfer from one context to another.