Advocacy Coalitions and Education Policy Transfer: Lessons from School Board of Trustees Policy in Georgia.

The article examines the relationship between education policy change and policy transfer through the case of Georgia’s School Board of Trustees (BOT), focusing on how Western education governance models have been implemented in post-Soviet contexts. Using qualitative case studies and interviews, the study integrates the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) with policy transfer theory, showing that advocacy coalitions evolve into policy transfer networks that strategically adopt foreign policies to drive reform. The Georgian BOT policy, modeled after the U.S. system, ultimately failed to decentralize school governance as intended, instead leading to re-centralization influenced by political interference. The findings highlight the importance of considering local political, cultural, and institutional contexts in policy transfer and suggest that successful education reform requires broad coalition-building, effective policy brokerage, and sustained institutional support.