Making educational policy under influence of external assistance and national politics — a comparative analysis of the education sector policy documents of Ethiopia, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia (original) (raw)
Related papers
Schooling in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2017
For educational goals to be realised, they have to be made more concrete and specific in the form of government policy. Thus, in this chapter, we examine educational policy making in Africa and, in particular, where it comes from. Policy can be understood as the 'authoritative allocation of values; policies are the operational statements of values, statements of prescriptive intent' (Kogan 1975 cited in Ball 1990: 3). But policy is the outcome of an essentially political process because it is about the power to determine what is done and therefore, in its formulation, involves disagreement, conflict, power and control. Elsewhere, the nature of politics was described thus: Disagreement is a marked and inevitable feature of all human groupings. This is true whether it is a family, a group of friends, an institution, a state or an international organisation. Disagreement occurs because people have different attitudes and values, both because they are diverse as individuals and because they differ according to social identities based on factors such as culture, social and economic status, gender, region and religion. There is therefore a need to manage and resolve disagreement and conflict (not necessarily the same as violent conflict) through a decision-making process which provides the rules by which we live. Some have the authority or recognised legitimacy to make decisions on behalf of others while others can influence decisions through the possession of power of some sort-the CHAPTER 2
2004
The paper examines, with particular reference to education, the way in which the donor agenda has shifted over the years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Two of the key elements in the shift have been the adoption by the development community of the so-called international targets and millennium goals, as well as new modalities for delivering aid through sector-wide approaches and direct support to national budgets. These developments on the donor side have coincided with a powerful discourse about country ownership of their own national agenda, and the critical importance of the government being in the driver’s seat. It is argued that what is missing or much less evident in the debates about targets, aid modalities and country ownership is an analysis of sustainability, and especially in those countries where dependency on external aid in the recurrent budget is running at 50%. It ends by wondering if we are in fact witnessing the emergence of states that will be dependent on the...
International Journal of Educational Development, 1997
This article is based on the premisethat the globalisation of education impacts directly on the development of education policy in developingcountries. Internationally, in both developed and developingcountries, the focus within policydevelopment in education has shifted over time.It seemsobvious that these shifts in focuswould havea direct impact on educational planning in developing countries and on the flow of donor aid. This assumption was analyzed in a study that was conducted in eight African countries
The Politics of Education in Developing Countries
Oxford University Press eBooks, 2019
This manuscript brings together the findings and analysis from a project entitled 'The Politics of Social Provisioning' that was undertaken within the Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre (ESID) between 2011 and 2016. ESID is based at the Global Development Institute, The University of Manchester, and consists of researchers located across the global North and South. Since 2011, its aim has been to identify the political conditions under which elites become committed to, and states become capable of, delivering inclusive development. ESID has examined the politics of development across several different policy domains, including growth, natural resource governance, social protection, gender equity, urban governance and health, as well as the topic of education that we focus on here (www.effective-states.org). Undertaking comparative research and publishing the results in an edited collection relies heavily on a great deal of teamwork and goodwill, and we have been fortunate to find these qualities in abundance amongst the colleagues we have worked with on this study. As editors, our first and foremost round of thanks goes to the stellar cast of researchers and authors who contributed such fascinating country case studies to the collection. From the initial meetings in Buxton and Manchester, where the ideas were set in place, through the research design workshop in Nairobi and sharing of initial drafts in Cape Town, the research team has been a pleasure to work with. In addition to the chapters produced by the ESID-education research team, we are delighted to include chapters from two leading authorities in the field, namely Merilee Grindle and Lant Pritchett, both of Harvard University. Our decision to engage with the 'learning crisis' as a critical problem facing countries in the global South owed much to Lant's groundbreaking work on this topic, whilst our decision to do so from a political perspective that focused on the critical role of coalitions owed a great deal to Merilee's landmark (2004) text on the politics of educational reform in Latin America. We were grateful and honoured when both agreed to contribute critical commentaries to help close the book by identifying what the collection contributes, what it misses and where work on the politics of the learning crisis should move to next. Our thanks to them both for taking on this challenge and delivering in such style. We have accumulated many other debts along the way, and are particularly grateful to the ESID research associates who have provided outstanding support at different stages of the project. Early on, Sophie King produced an excellent literature review on the politics of education that saved us priceless time and identified the gaps in the field to take aim at. Towards the end, David Jackman helped us to convert the last of the extensive working papers into much shorter and sharper book chapters, ensuring integration between the chapters, liaising with the publishers, and the many other time-consuming tasks required to bring a book project through to completion. So swift and incisive was his grasp of our material that he joined us as co-author for the closing chapter, much improving the product in the process. The ideas within this book have been sharpened by many fruitful intellectual exchanges along the way, at seminars, conferences, and workshops. These include seminars at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and the World Bank in Washington DC, at the German Development Institute in Bonn, and at academic conferences in Bath, Oxford, San Diego, and Barcelona, all of which encouraged us to take this work forward and think harder about how to frame the findings. Our thanks go to the many anonymous reviewers who gave their time to offer peer review comments on our early working papers, and in particular to Professor Leon Tikly of Bristol University who offered insightful comments on early versions of all of the country papers. Samer Al-Samarrai provided valuable insights into the policy debates about the learning crisis, and on indicators and data sources. The ESID network has provided many opportunities for this work to be pored over, critiqued and sharpened, and we thank our colleagues for their critical comments and encouragement, including Kunal Sen, David Hulme, Pablo Yanguas, Sohela Nazneen, Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai, Badru Bukenya, and Fred Golooba-Mutebi. The initial framing of the project flowed directly from the (2013) ESID Working Paper on 'Researching the Politics of Social Provisioning' produced by Brian Levy and Mike Walton, to whom we owe a significant intellectual debt. We have also benefitted from the guidance of the Centre's Advisory Group, including David Booth, Barbara Harriss-White, Duncan Green, Margaret Kakande and Peter Evans (at Brown University) as well as Peter Evans (at the Research Department in DFID). Our thanks to these esteemed colleagues and to those who also acted as critical discussants and participants at our various workshops, including Nic van de Walle, Heather Marquette, Anu Joshi, and Merilee Grindle. An initial discussion with Steve Kosack at Harvard in 2011, just before his own excellent book on the politics of education was published, helped to orientate the project in the very early stages. At Manchester many people have assisted with the management of this project. They have facilitated our meetings, organized workshops, handled budgets, viii Preface and Acknowledgements and done all the other administrative work without which research-especially international collaborative and comparative research-would not be possible. In particular, we are grateful to Kat Bethell, Julia Brunt, Clare Degenhardt, Julie Rafferty, and Anna Webster. Finally, our thanks to Adam Swallow at OUP for supporting the project from the outset and to his colleague Katie Bishop for guiding it through contracting and production.
Education sector programs in developing countries : socio-political and cultural perspectives
2007
A second trend, of a more recent origin, is the gradual shift from the project mode towards sectoral development programs that has taken place particularly in the education and health sectors from the mid-1990s onwards (e.g. Gould & Takala & Nokkala 1998). Traditionally, donor agencies have provided project-based support to development. Over time, the project approach has come under growing criticism and self-criticism for being parallel with the operation of developing country governments and eroding the capacity of the latter. Poor sustainability of projects' results is also a recurrent finding of evaluations. Admitting the weaknesses of the project mode, donors have collectively adopted the Sector-Wide Approach (SWAp) to development from the mid-1990s onwards. An often-quoted definition characterizes SWAp as follows: "…all significant funding for the sector supports a single sector policy and expenditure program, under Government leadership, adopting common approaches across the sector, and progressing towards relying on Government procedures to disburse and account for all funds" (Foster 2000, 9). Earlier comparative and case studies of the context and the preparation processes of Education Sector Development Programs in different countries (Takala 1998; Gould & Takala & Nokkala op.cit.; Martin & Oksanen & Takala 2000; Buchert 2002; Takala & Marope 2003) were another basis for the design of the research project reported in this book. The evolving new mode of development cooperation-support to sector development programs-is intended to bring about national ownership of these programs and coherence among the different actors within them. Paradoxically, however, aid-dependence has been a catalyzing factor in those developing countries that have devised and adopted sector programs. Lavergne (2004) refers to different degrees of aid-dependence as an explanation to the fact that SWAp is much more commonly adopted in Africa and the aid-dependent Asian countries such as Vietnam and Bangladesh than in most of Latin America or in large Asian countries such as China and India. Consenting to SWAp has enabled countries to gain access to debt relief, increased grant funding and preferential credit arrangements from donor agencies. By contrast, less aiddependent countries have more autonomy to assert their own policy choices Tuomas Takala TAKALA, Tuomas (ed.) each sector and are related to conditions attached to financial support from donor agencies. For countries participating in the Education for All Fast-Track Initiative, technical-economic rationality has recently become tangible in the "indicative framework" which defines target parameters for resource allocation and cost-efficiency in the education sector. Another example are the assessments of the (expected and ex-post facto) impact of ESDPs on poverty reduction that follow from the requirement that sector development programs be aligned with the PRSPs (e.g. Foster & Mackintosh-Walker 2001). In the development cooperation relationship, external funding agencies, in particular the World Bank, are the prime proponents of technical-economic rationality, whereas local technocratic elites of developing countries can often be seen to act in alliance with the external agencies (Gould & Ojanen 2003). By contrast, both the local and expatriate education professionals who participate in the preparation of ESDPs are not necessarily very competent to relate their planning work to the macro-level parameters, and may even be unaware of the latter. As Seppälä (2000, 188) has pointed out, the technocratic approach which has been predominant in the design of sector programs is problematic in that it sidelines the institutions and processes of political democracy-which again contradicts the emphasis otherwise given in development cooperation to the importance of promoting representative democracy as a fundamental precondition of development. On the other hand, the required national ownership of and long-term commitment to the ESDPs are vulnerable to the inherent unpredictability of national politics, which is due to inter-party competition in electoral campaigns, changes of Ministers or entire Cabinets, and to the legislative and budgetary powers of Parliaments. The mainstream thinking about sector programs is also very unclear about the possible and preferable roles of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the sector program context, and the variety of NGOs in this respect is seldom acknowledged (Seppälä op.cit., 171). At the same time, there is also evidence that education projects supported by NGOs may operate detached from the larger ESDP and PRSP context, and an atmosphere of mutual suspicion Tuomas Takala TAKALA, Tuomas (ed.
The Political Economy of Educational Reform and Learning in Ethiopia (1941-2021)
This report analyzes the trajectory of reforms to improve learning outcomes in Ethiopia across three regimes (HSI, Derg, and EPRDF) since 1941. It employs a political settlements approach to trace the motivations, interests, and actions that led to certain policy choices, and draws on primary and secondary data sources to assess impacts on the education sector. The analysis focuses on three themes in particular: the politics of educational (learning) policymaking; national (regional) examinations and teacher career paths. Ultimately, the report argues that improving learning outcomes would require professionalization of education policy-making along with an impetus to improve policy continuity.