Territorializing Education Policy: Theoretical and Methodological Foundations for Comparative Inquiry

Beyond nation-state frameworks organizing comparative education scholarship, policy becomes embedded in consciously constructed spatial arrangements whose territorial logics shape educational opportunity and equity. Drawing upon four intersecting theoretical traditions, relational space, social production of space, spatial governmentality, and deterritorialization, this chapter contends that the “spatial turn” in education policy remains fragmented and methodologically underdeveloped. Portugal's governance architecture, nominal unitarism coupled with constitutional autonomy for island regions and progressive municipalization of mainland educational administration, exemplifies multi-scalar dilemmas confronting jurisdictions. The compound tensions between centralized equity guarantees and localized responsiveness, between administrative efficiency and democratic participation, and between resource concentration and territorial coverage expose fundamental irresolutions in how education policy operationalizes justice across uneven geographies. Four analytical lacunae structure the inquiry: the irreconcilability of equity and autonomy claims, optimal scale indeterminacy, inadequate measurement of territorial impacts, and systematic exclusion of peripheral regions from policy knowledge production. Methodologically, this chapter proposes an integrative framework synthesizing geographical information systems, policy network cartography, and multi-sited ethnography, approaches that, in concert, render visible relational processes through which territorial arrangements crystallize, circulate, and remake educational possibilities.