Comparative and international studies of education that focus on policy borrowing and transfer must be expanded to account for aspects of what Terence Halliday and Bruce Carruthers call "global norm-making". Such an approach examines how global policies are refracted within divergent but interrelated sociopolitical and economic contexts, how researchers influence each other and the people and places they study, and how context matters but not in ways that devolve infinite possibility to all cases. Drawing on a review of gender-mainstreaming literature and field research in northern Pakistan, this article shows how various actors' arguments about girls' schooling are made in relation to intertwined but contrasting frameworks for understanding the necessity and value of education. Such an approach neither endorses nor condemns world culture theory but instead draws as empirically warranted on various approaches to the comparative study of education to demonstrate how global networks reflect and enable particular manifestations of indeterminacy and human ingenuity.