Abstract
Book Review: Global Education Policy and International Development: New Agendas, Issues, and Policies
Highlights
In such contexts, Verger, Novelli and Altinyelken emphasise international organisations’ capacity to promote policies through high profile launch events, briefs and reports, in which policies are framed in technical, ostensibly neutral terms within the ‘common sense’ neo-liberal discourse of costeffectiveness and efficiency gains (p. 20)
Common to both cases is the illusory nature of democratic stakeholder participation at the local level, and the fact that “what was devolved to the school was the need to raise funds to supplement state resources” (p. 115, my italics). These issues are explored further in Poppema’s (Chapter 8) fascinating study of school-based management in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the first countries in the global South to adopt this GEP. Poppema situates this policy within broader US political and economic interventions in Central America
When the right wing National Opposition Union came to power in 1990, USAID and the World Bank supported the decentralisation and privatisation of the state school system through school-based management, introducing school fees for teachers’ salaries and learning resources which amounted to roughly half the cost of sending a child to school
Summary
Verger, Novelli and Altinyelken emphasise international organisations’ capacity to promote policies through high profile launch events, briefs and reports, in which policies are framed in technical, ostensibly neutral terms within the ‘common sense’ neo-liberal discourse of costeffectiveness and efficiency gains (p. 20). The book offers engaging case studies of specific GEPs in Turkey, India, and a number of African and South American countries. Stenvoll-Wells and Sayed (Chapter 5) explore how ‘the same’ decentralisation policy of democratic school governance assumes markedly different forms in South Africa and Zimbabwe in line with their socio-historical contexts.
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