Network governance in education: the experiences and struggles of local governments in Chinese school turnaround

While network governance in education has been widely discussed in the literature, research focusing on the behaviours of and interactions between pluralist actors is rare, and the power exercised by China’s local governments in network governance is under-researched. This study uses school turnaround, a networking process that involves multiple actors, as a research window to explore the complexity of local governments’ role in network governance. With empirical data from document analysis, observation, and interviews, this study found three patterns of local governments’ interactions with schools and third-party actors in school turnaround in Shanghai–acting as dominator, accommodator, or facilitator–in different networks. The analyses of the findings reveal that, different from symmetric and asymmetric power models of network governance, network governance in Chinese school turnaround is a differentiated practice involving local governments’ different extents of power exercise over other network actors and different degrees of unequal power relations among them (i.e., hierarchical, diffused, or democratic), resulting from the interplay of factors related to tripartite actors.