Policy borrowing through the translation of global inclusive education frameworks in Finland and India, 2000–2025

Global frameworks, including the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and Sustainable Development Goal 4, have made inclusive education a near-universal commitment, yet how institutional architectures shape its translation remains underexamined. This study compares Finland and India through critical policy analysis of laws, curricula, programme frameworks, and official statistics, 2000–2025. Finland absorbs the global script by renaming: inclusion becomes a right to “sufficient support”, decided by professionals, and layered incrementally. India codifies the script explicitly: inclusive education is a statutory right, accessed through medical certification, and legislated within a compressed window. We theorise these configurations as translation regimes, show that reform tempo signals whether systems absorb a script's practices or its language, and that the regime shapes where policy and practice decouple and how visible the gap is to international monitoring, with implications for the North–South critique of global governance.