World Yearbook of Education 2012

Policy Borrowing and Lending in Education

Gita Steiner-Khamsi, Florian Waldow, Gita Steiner-Khamsi, Florian Waldow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136489426
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Lehrpläne

The phenomenon of "travelling reforms" has become an object of great professional interest and intensive academic scrutiny. The fact that the same set of educational reforms is transferred from one country to another made scholars wonder whether policy transfer has increased as a result of globalization. But also the fact that policy makers increasingly import "best practices "and international standards and use them as a tool to accelerate reform has captured the imagination of many that deal with policy studies. An international comparative perspective is key for understanding why reforms travel from one corner of the world to another. Not surprisingly, the study of policy borrowing and lending constitutes one of the core research topics of comparative policy studies; a new area of research that links comparative education with policy studies.

The World Yearbook of Education 2012 brings together a diverse range of perspectives on education policy through contributions from internationally renowned authors. It reflects on the way policy borrowing and lending is reconfiguring the world of education and offers a new collection of insights into the changes occurring across the world. It particularly focuses on:

• The political and economic reasons for policy borrowing,

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• The agencies, international networks and regimes that instigate policy change,

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• The process of borrowing and lending

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• The impact of these systems, agendas and institutions on indigenous settings.

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This book will prove invaluable to researchers of globalization and to policy experts, especially those interested in comparative and international educational studies. It is also essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students and anyone involved in the sociology, economy or history of education.

Gita Steiner-Khamsi is Professor of Comparative and International Education at Teachers College Columbia University, New York, US.

Florian Waldow is Research Director at the University of Münster, Germany.

1 Understanding Policy Borrowing
and Lending

Building Comparative Policy Studies

Gita Steiner-Khamsi

This book deals, in a broad sense, with globalisation in education. More narrowly, it provides critical analyses of ‘travelling reforms’, that is, reforms that surface in different parts of the world. Globalisation is commonly viewed as an act of deterritorialisation. By implication, globalisation studies investigate the transnational flow of money, communication, beliefs, or, as is the case with comparative educational research, the travel of educational reforms from one cultural context to another.

Is the global circulation of reforms good or bad? The opinions on whether the transnational flow of reforms should be a cause for concern, or for celebration, are deeply divided. Some authors fear that we are abandoning our idiosyncratic conceptions of ‘good education’, and are gradually converging toward an ‘international model of education’. They interpret the proliferation of policy borrowing and lending as proof that global players not only record and monitor national developments, but also impose their own portfolio of ‘best practices’ on governments. At the other end of the spectrum are authors who applaud travelling reforms, because they supposedly represent ‘best practices’, or ‘international standards’, that have been transferred successfully from one country to another. These analysts regard policy planning as a rational undertaking, and view policy transfer as proof of lesson-drawing, and thus one of the more desirable outcomes of evidence-based policy planning. No doubt, the discussion on policy borrowing and lending research is saturated with strong opinions. However, the authors of this book move beyond simplistic normative judgments (good or bad questions), to describe, analyse, and understand policy borrowing and lending in an era of globalisation.

Linkages between Comparative Education and Policy Studies

The contributions which follow are intended to advance comparative policy studies. The preoccupation with travelling reforms has, perhaps more than other research topics, helped to illustrate the substance of, and justify the need for, comparative studies. Methodologically, any cross-national investigation of reforms is, by default, comparative. Nested in the intersection of two large and ever-growing academic fields – comparative education and policy studies – the study of travelling reforms draws on both research traditions. These two research traditions are interdisciplinary in orientation, and typically attract scholars in comparative political science and comparative sociology, who have invigorated research on globalisation and policy transfer.

At the same time, there is a significant gap separating comparative education from policy studies. Two distinct features of each field are particularly relevant for our research topic: while comparative education is transnational in orientation, policy studies is transsectoral. In other words, the focus on understanding local policy contexts against the backdrop of larger transnational or global developments should be considered a prominent feature of comparative education.

Openness towards debates in other policy sectors (social policy, environmental policy, etc.), as well as in the profit and non-profit/non-governmental sectors, is an important characteristic of researchers affiliated with policy studies. An intellectual cross-fertilisation is very much needed. Interaction between the two fields is mutually beneficial, and helps to compensate for some of the conceptual shortcomings of research traditions in each. One positive result would be for debates in comparative education to become more open towards theories concerning the policy process. These theories typically draw from numerous sectors, and are neither confined to government-issued policies, nor restricted to the education sector alone. In turn, there is also much to be gained for policy studies, because the comparative perspective challenges the nationalist – at times parochial – outlook that policy analysts tend to display.

The pace with which reforms currently circumnavigate the globe is truly astounding. Unsurprisingly, there is heightened interest in understanding why, and how, policy makers draw inspiration from a limited number of knowledge banks – OECD, IEA, the World Bank, and UNESCO – in particular. The resemblance between reforms across all levels of the system, and all aspects of education policy, is striking. Across a wide variety of nations and despite vastly different levels of social, political, and economic development, one finds talk of per-capita financing in schools, quality assurance in higher education, lifelong learning, and student-centred teaching (to name just a few), at all levels of the education system. From Ulaanbaatar to Berlin, from Anchorage to Cape Town, the similarities have grown to the extent that policy makers unscrupulously refer to these reforms as ‘best practices’, or ‘international standards’, in education, as if there existed a clearly defined set of standards, policies, and practices that are universally shared. Nevertheless, imagined globalisation in education has affected agenda-setting as significantly as the real pressure to harmonise or align the education systems with systems in the same region, or in the same ‘educational space’ (Nóvoa and Lawn 2002).

A Commitment to Understanding Local Policy Context

Naturally, the group of authors presented in this book shares more than merely a joint interest in comparative policy studies. They also have in common a similar interpretive framework and method of inquiry, that enables them to draw attention to the local meaning, adaptation, and recontextualisation of reforms that had been transferred or imported. They have systematically adopted a lens that lends explanatory power to local policy contexts, and makes it feasible to explore the contextual reasons for why reforms, best practices, or international standards, were adopted. For these authors, reforms from elsewhere are not necessarily borrowed for rational reasons, but for political or economic ones. Such an interpretive framework categorically refutes the commonsense, yet naïve, assertion that reforms are imported because they have proven to be good or – even worse – because they represent best practices.

Emphasis on local policy context as the analytical unit for examining policy transfer places greater weight on the agency, process, impact, and timing, of policy borrowing. Very often, an investigation into policy borrowing and lending is triggered by a phenomenon that initially appears to be irrational or contradictory. These inconsistencies end up making sense once we apply an interpretive framework that pays attention to the ‘socio-logic’ (Schriewer and Martinez 2004) of cross-national policy attraction, or acknowledges the political and economic rationale for policy borrowing. The terrain under scrutiny should be the local policy context. It is this context that provides the clues for understanding why a borrowed reform resonates, what policy issue it pretends to resolve, and which policy actors it managed to mobilise in support of reform.

The interpretive framework used by many of the authors in this book relates to the political, as well as economic, dimensions of policy transfer (see Steiner-Khamsi 2010). Politically, borrowing often has a salutary effect on protracted policy conflict, because it builds coalitions. It enables opposed advocacy groups to combine resources to support a third, supposedly more neutral, policy option borrowed from elsewhere. ‘International standards’ have become an increasingly common point of reference in such decisions.

Economically, policy borrowing is often a transient phenomenon, because it only exists as long as external funding – contingent upon the import of a particular reform package – continues. Policy borrowing in poor countries is to the education sector what structural adjustment, poverty alleviation, and good governance, are to the public sector at large: a condition for receiving aid. As a requirement for receiving grants or loans at the programmatic level, policy borrowing in developing countries is coercive, and unidirectional. Reforms are transferred from the global North/West to the global South/East.

Interest in exploring the political, and economic, reasons for policy borrowing and lending is relatively new. For a long time, policy-transfer researchers focused on the politics of policy borrowing mainly because they were concerned with transatlantic transfer (United States and Europe), transpacific transfer (Asia and North America), or intercontinental transfer. The economic gains that drive policy borrowing and policy lending were ignored. Clearly it is time to study both, and pay attention to policy transfer within, and between, both world-systems: the wealthy, and the impoverished.

From a historical perspective, however, one needs to acknowledge that policy transfer between the two world-systems is not new. In fact, it constituted one of the key research areas for scholars immersed in the study of colonial education. One example is the study of ‘adapted education’ in early twentieth-century British colonial education policy. This model was disseminated to over thirty former British colonies and dependent territories (Steiner-Khamsi and Quist 2000). Interest in understanding the lending or export of policies, and the economic gains associated with disseminating, exporting, or lending ‘best practices’ and ‘international standards’ is, upon closer examination, a revitalised, rather than novel, area of colonial education research. Nowadays, those scholars in policy transfer research who live or work in developing countries, and who have adopted a postcolonial or post-developmental research paradigm, hold a keen interest in understanding the political, as well as the economic, dimension of imported reforms.

Something Borrowed, Something Learned?

Twenty years ago, policy exchange between the United Kingdom and the United States peaked, with the busy transfer of neoliberal reforms between the two countries (see Whitty, in this volume). The transfer was well documented, and led one group of researchers to wonder whether anything was learned from the proliferation of choice, standards-based, and quasi-market reforms (Finegold et al. 1993). It may be an opportune moment to reflect, two decades later, on the meaning of policy learning, and its relation to policy borrowing.

The authors that have been assembled for this volume have chosen the term ‘policy borrowing and lending’ deliberately, so as to situate their work within the broader field of comparative policy studies. In contrast to related terms such as ‘policy learning’ and ‘policy transfer’ (produced in political science), or ‘diffusion’ or ‘reception’ (generated in sociology, social anthropology, and history), the term policy borrowing and lending emerged in the field of comparative education, and underwent a revival of noticeable magnitude in the past decade. This new interest was the outcome of debate on how global governance affects national educational systems, beliefs, and practices, and was fuelled by the controversy over whether the international convergence of educational systems should be interpreted as a direct result of cross-national lesson-drawing, or other, more coercive, forms of policy transfer. Arguably, new policy instruments such as the adoption of ‘best practices’, or the alignment of national educational systems with ‘international standards’, could be viewed as transnational policy transfer, and thus add credence to what David Dolowitz and David Marsh prescribed ten years ago (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000: 14): ‘When we are analysing policy change we always need to ask the question: is policy transfer involved?’ Authors in comparative education have studied different types of transfer, ranging from voluntary transfer (lesson-drawing, emulation), to coercive transfer (harmonisation, imposition). As mentioned above, scholars have traditionally directed their attention to the study of travelling reforms. It is with good reason that comparative education has been traditionally enamoured with the study of reforms that travel from one country to another. One must be familiar with two or more educational systems to notice that the same reforms pop up again and again in different parts of the world. Above all, one needs to compare.

Today, scholars in comparative education investigate the international dimension that surfaces at various stages of the policy cycle, starting from the stage of problem definition and agenda setting, to policy implementation and evaluation. It has been noted, for example, that the pre-existence of global reform packages disseminated, and sometimes funded, by global actors such as the OECD, the World Bank or the regional development banks, suggests a sequence that is at odds with what is typically assumed in policy planning: local problems are sometimes created in line with packaged global solutions, rather than the other way around. Another recent phenomenon that has drawn considerable attention is the proliferation of international knowledge banks containing statistics on national educational systems. Set up by global actors to monitor national progress, these banks promote evidence-based or knowledge-based regulation as a tool to justify the adoption of global reforms.

The educational focus notwithstanding, we find the scholarship produced in public policy (e.g. Sabatier 2007) and comparative social science – particularly comparative political science, sociology, and history – extremely useful for the study of travelling education reforms. In comparative political science, for example, the term ‘policy learning’ is closely associated with the seminal work of Peter A. Hall (1993), and has been expanded over the past few years to include a fascinating, and interdisciplinary, array of analytical work that deals with the actors, processes, and effects of policy change. Hall frames policy change as social learning, i.e. a ‘deliberate attempt to adjust the goals or techniques of policy in response to past experience and new information. Learning is indicated when policy changes as the result of such a process’ (Hall 1993: 278).

Hall distinguishes between first-, second-and third-order changes. Incremental or first-order changes represent the most common type of policy learning. The instruments and goals of the policy are preserved, but the policy is pursued with greater vigour, efficiency, and effectiveness. In second-order changes, the policy instruments are altered, but the policy goals are maintained. Finally, third-order changes signal radical or fundamental policy alterations. Comparable to Kuhnian ‘paradigm shifts’, these third-order changes often result from policy failure and, as a consequence, replace not only the instruments, but also the goals of policy making with new ones. Indicative of second-and third-order changes is the broad range of actors and organisations involved in the social learning process. Known for his analyses of neoliberal thought in the 1980s and 1990s, Hall identified the change in economic policy under British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as a third-order change, because the Keynesian mode of policy making was completely revamped, and replaced with a new monetarist approach.

In another early piece on policy learning and change, Colin J. Bennett and Michael Howlett (1992: 275) distinguished between actors, content, and effects of policy learning, and turned their attention to ‘who learns, what they learn, and the effects of learning on subsequent policies’. Unsurprisingly, incremental policy learning, considered the standard mode of policy change, does not attract great professional interest or academic scrutiny. On the contrary, most studies on the policy process focus on second-and third-order social learning.

In the same vein, research on policy borrowing and lending focuses on second-order and third-order policy change. More recent literature on policy studies, comparative education, and political science, features the terms ‘transfer’, or ‘policy borrowing and lending’, to neutralise the positive connotations associated with ‘policy learning’. This work also constitutes an attempt to examine the transsectoral or transnational dimensions involved in transfer processes. As with diffusion studies, research on policy borrowing and lending investigates how policies from one domain or one sub-system (education sector, health sector, economic sector, etc.) are transferred to another, or how they are transplanted from one system or country to another.

This particular area of policy research gained prominence in the context of globalisation studies, and studies on the international convergence of national education systems. Many important research questions arise when a policy borrowing and lending lens is utilised. Such questions include: why is a policy borrowed from another policy domain or system, when a similar reform has already been tested? Why is policy borrowing more likely to occur after political changes, or after changes in administration? Which educational systems tend to be objects of emulation, i.e. serve as reference systems or ‘reference societies’? Why are policies transferred that failed in the initial context? Why do emulation and lesson-drawing have a salutary effect on protracted policy conflict? As mentioned previously, the emphasis in this interpretive framework is on local policy context. This framework has also been applied to investigations of the economic reasons politicians and policy makers in developing countries are led to import reforms from the global North or the global West.

Obviously, there is no single term that could adequately contain all of the nuances embedded in a set of concepts as diverse as policy learning, policy change, policy transfer, or policy borrowin...