Performing a global learning crisis: citizen-led assessments, social accountability, and directing democracy

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes how the citizen-led assessment (CLA), which measures and publicises learning levels in education, triggers bottom-up reform. Drawing on science studies and political theory, the paper examines the performative effects of the CLA in Kenya, showing how it (1) produces a crisis by projecting poor learning outcomes, (2) mobilises feelings to spur action, and (3) enacts a global education reform strategy. The paper discusses how the performance of the CLA’s egalitarian politics foregrounds human actors while backgrounding the work of the sociotechnical practices that script their actions. Moreover, the analysis reveals a paradox, highlighting how the CLA projects educational inequality as the pre-political backdrop for egalitarian development, locating efforts to empower citizens within a knowledge-power nexus of global educational governance. The paper calls for closer scrutiny of how social accountability tools choreograph education reforms by protecting the sociotechnical mechanisms that project inequalities, and the manner these practices direct democracy.