Policy theatre and transnational VET: institutional misalignment in Australia-India skills engagement

Australian Government policy has framed India as a major opportunity for transnational vocational education and training (TNE VET) across more than two decades of bilateral engagement. The empirical record diverges sharply: negligible Australian TNE VET enrolments in India, with very few registered training organisations delivering any offshore VET. This article examines the institutional conditions accounting for this sustained underperformance. Drawing on 75 semi-structured interviews across two fieldwork phases (2017, 2022 to 2023) and policy document analysis, and informed by new institutionalism, institutional logics theory, and a typology of strategic responses, the paper compares Australian engagement with selected foreign, multilateral and industry-backed models. This study finds that Australian underperformance is not a contingent matter of implementation difficulty but a structural consequence of misalignment between commercial market logics and India’s socially embedded, state-centred skills ecosystem. Sustained foreign engagement in India is consistently institutionally anchored, through foreign-government investment, government-to-government partnership, multilateral support, or industry-led coordination. The Australian commercial provider-led model is a comparative outlier. The recurring framing of India as a commercial VET opportunity is reconceived as policy theatre: a pattern of institutional decoupling whereby formal instruments perform bilateral commitment while displacing the operational conditions of its substantive realisation. Although developed through the Australian case, the policy theatre concept is potentially applicable to other national providers and to international agencies engaged in transnational VET, identified here as a direction for future research.