This chapter will return to some of the issues signalled in Chapter One as we attempt to visualise and actualise policy networks, to get inside them and examine how they work. As noted, one of the key issues in research on policy networks is the exercise and effects of ‘influence’. That is, how do we map and specify relations of power in policy networks? How do we capture asymmetries of power within networks? This chapter will concentrate on the actors and interactions within and across a set of philanthropic networks and look at ‘opportunities’ within them for influence on the policy process. In particular we address the work of boundary spanners and the examples of the KPMG Foundation and the Every Child a Chance Trust in an attempt to explore the dynamics of networks, the ‘networking’.

The chapter will also consider policy networks as discourse communities. Philanthropies and corporate philanthropies, in particular, are integrated in education policy networks and are being invited to work with government or agencies or in partnerships of various kinds in attempts to solve intractable and ‘wicked’ social and educational problems. Participation in these policy networks structures and enables the circulation of ‘new’ policy ideas, while at the same time working to simplify the policy process by limiting actions, problems and solutions. Such networks, as indicated in previous chapters, are part of a move, albeit halting and partial, towards a more interactive, fragmented and multi-dimensional form of policy making, involving the participation of a new mix of state and non-state actors. Across the terrain of education policy activity there is now a ‘coexistence of multiple cross-cutting networks of varied length and durability’ (Whatmore and Thorne, 1997, p 302), within which there is a recurrence of particular companies, organisations and people, related to particular kinds of education policies and discourses.

Multiple points of access, opportunities and their Limits

As discussed in Chapter One, the central logic of the shift from government to governance is a reframing and rescaling of the state (Jessop, 2002 ) that involves a more interdependent, deconcentrated and flexible form of policy making (Stoker, 1998) done through network relations.