Governments in all OECD countries are facing the challenge of governing increasingly complex
education systems. There is a growing need for governance structures that can handle this complexity and
which can provide actors with the knowledge they need to make decisions. This working paper asks the
question: How do governance and knowledge mutually constitute and impact on each other in complex
education systems? It provides an answer through a state of the art literature review and original theoretical
argumentation. It breaks new ground by combining different schools of academic and policy thinking
which traditionally look at various aspects of the relationship between governance and knowledge
separately. Research in public management, political science and public policy, sociology, institutional
economics, and organisational management (particularly the knowledge transfer literature) is augmented
with work from education and other social sciences, including healthcare, law, and social justice. This
working paper argues that just as knowledge is crucial for governance, governance is indispensible for
knowledge creation and dissemination. It proposes an analytical framework that combines models of
governance with modes of learning and types of knowledge, and provides preliminary empirical examples
to support this framework. In the context of diverse social, economic and political environments of OECD
countries, the interaction between these two focal points – models of governance and types of knowledge –
has become increasingly relevant to researchers, policy makers, and education stakeholders more
generally.
