Abstract

Competency-based learning and transversal skills have become central themes in global education policy discourse, promoted through international organizations and transnational policy networks. Yet the integration of these reform agendas raises important questions in education systems historically structured around centralized governance and high-stakes examination regimes. Rather than assuming straightforward policy convergence, this study examines how competency-based reform agendas are negotiated within institutional contexts shaped by inherited governance architectures and assessment structures.

Focusing on Estonia, Kazakhstan, and Türkiye, the paper analyzes how these systems have engaged with competency-based reform in compulsory education between 2005 and 2025. Drawing on historical institutionalism (Mahoney & Thelen, 2010; Pierson, 2000) and policy mobility scholarship (Ball, 1998; Steiner-Khamsi, 2014), the study conceptualizes reform as an institutionally mediated process in which global policy scripts encounter historically embedded governance arrangements. The analysis examines national curriculum frameworks, reform strategies, and assessment policies to trace how reform agendas are articulated and incorporated within existing institutional structures.

To capture these dynamics, the study adopts a multi-layer institutional framework that distinguishes between discursive, assessment, and governance dimensions of reform. The discursive layer reflects the circulation and reinterpretation of global competency-based policy narratives within national curriculum discourse (Anderson-Levitt & Gardinier, 2021), while the assessment layer examines how examination regimes function as governance technologies that mediate reform trajectories (Evans et al., 2019; Ozga, 2009). The governance layer addresses the institutional arrangements through which reforms are enabled, constrained, or layered within historically embedded systems.

The findings suggest that competency-based reform does not simply replace established institutional arrangements. Instead, reforms are selectively adapted and layered onto existing governance and assessment infrastructures, producing hybrid trajectories in which global policy agendas coexist with established institutional practices. By examining how reform agendas interact with historically embedded systems, the paper contributes to debates on education governance, policy diffusion, and institutional transformation in Central Eurasia.