Community Schooling in Nepal: A Genealogy of Education Reform since 1990

Abstract

Community participation in schooling is seen by policy makers and practitioners alike as essential for the achievement of efficient, accountable, and sustainable education. The shift in many developing countries to policies promoting decentralized provision is emerging increasingly in the form of programs in which parents and local groups play prominent roles in decisions about school finance, staffing, and overall educational “quality.” While scholars acknowledge the complex and contested nature of “community” and accept that participatory activities take many different forms (e.g., Bray 2001), there is also broad agreement that educational reform must engage stakeholders if it is to have any chance of overturning historic patterns of underinvestment, low relevance, and marginal usefulness. Whether participation is “genuine” (i.e., stakeholders play a significant role in decision making and governance) or “pseudo” (i.e., citizens are kept informed, often for the purposes of contributing resources), a guiding principle of the “post-Washington consensus” (Stiglitz 2002, 20) has been to encourage processes that deal concurrently with concerns for democracy, poverty alleviation, and sustainability. Recent developments in Nepal are no exception to the global trend of elevating the role of local communities in education. In 2003, as part of a renewed drive by the government to shift service delivery to the local level, the World Bank was invited to support project work to prepare the country for large-scale “transfer” of schools to local community stakeholders (World Bank 2003, 2). Known as the Community School Support Project (CSSP), the initiative aimed to elevate the role of parents on school management committees (SMCs) and empowered these organizations to appoint and supervise teachers locally. To encourage school transfer, a substantial initial incentive allowance/payment was provided. Unlike unaided or private community school models, however, the approach implemented in Nepal trans-