Stephen Carney

Negotiating Policy in an Age of Globalization: Exploring Educational “Policyscapes” in Denmark, Nepal, and China

This article aims to explore processes of policy implementation with respect to an ongoing empirical study in three very different sites: Denmark, Nepal, and China. Rather than treat these investigations in the traditional manner of separate and contained national case studies, I attempt to create a “policyscape” around processes of what Roger Dale (2000) has called hyperliberalism in education, and I do so by working across different levels of the education systems within these three countries. My argument is that nationstate and system studies of education must be informed by understandings of the nature of globalization and especially the new imaginative regimes that it makes possible. Educational phenomena in one country case must thus be understood in ongoing relation to other such cases. In this sense, I am attempting to operationalize as a research program a new approach to comparison, one that has been alluded to in the literature but only conceptually (e.g., Cowen 2000; Marginson and Mollis 2001; Welch 2001). This new approach has its own problems, however. If we accept that educational phenomena are increasingly interconnected to the extent that they can be conceptualized as part of some meaningful single site, how then do we understand the role of states in reform? More broadly, how are we to work with locality and the situated history, politics, and culture of distinct places while acknowledging the ways in which these phenomena are themselves products of international dynamics? Further, and perhaps of greatest interest, if such policyscapes exist, how then are acts of negotiation, resistance, and opposition interconnected in the ways that theorists such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) have hypothesized? Perhaps their notion of an interconnected multitude overestimates the capacity of global reform to bring coherence of any type (Balakrishnan 2003), but what, then, are the connected possibilities for action in contemporary educational reforms, and how can these opportunities be understood?

Between Faith and Science:World Culture Theory and Comparative Education

World culture theory seeks to explain an apparent convergence of education through a neoinstitutionalist lens, seeing global rationalization in education as driven by the logic of science and the myth of progress. While critics have challenged these assumptions by focusing on local manifestations of world-level tendencies, such critique is comfortably accommodated within world culture theory. We approach the debate from a fresh perspective by examining its ideological foundations. We also highlight its shift from notions of myth and enactment toward advocacy for particular models, and we show that world culture theory can become normative, while obscuring our view of policy convergence. Finally, we critique the methods and evidence in world culture research. We argue that such research, while failing to support its own claims, actually produces world culture, as its assumptions and parameters create the very image of consensus and homogeneity that world culture theorists expect scholars to accept—in faith—as empirically grounded.

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

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-

Learner‐centred pedagogy in Tibet: International education reform in a local context

The paper explores the introduction in Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) of the new Chinese curriculum for basic education. In contrast to many previous initiatives since 1949 the present reform attempts to change not only what is taught, and by whom, but fundamental notions of how learning is best facilitated. The paper considers the connections between the reform and current directions in international education policy, and seeks to explore the ways in which the values inherent within this approach to teaching and learning relate to the practices that characterise Chinese/Tibetan classrooms. It is suggested that the meaning attributed to education at the local level shapes profoundly the types of cultural production that can emerge from it. International and national reform efforts must be and are always mediated through such understandings. In the case of Tibet, where often incompatible interests are at play, the impact of national level reform is unpredictable and uneven.

Empowering the 'local' through education?: exploring community managed schooling in Nepal

This article attempts to unpack the policy vision and discourse driving community management of schooling in Nepal and to consider the ways in which these policies are being experienced by bureaucrats, teachers, parents and children. The focus is on the World Bank funded Community School Support Project (CSSP) launched by the Government of Nepal in June 2003 and currently being used as a basis for extending community management to all of the country’s 26,000 public schools. The article illustrates how national level policy prescriptions lead to a range of outcomes, many of which are unintended. Community‐based schooling in Nepal is intended to shift the role of the State from manager to facilitator of schooling. However, the article suggests that reforms carried out in the name of greater efficiency, accountability and empowerment are driven primarily by a desire to limit the role of the State in the provision, but not necessarily control, of public education. The consequences of this include the on‐going marginalisation of many of the country’s poor and disadvantaged groups, a de‐motivated and further politicised teaching force and continued chronic under‐funding of public education.

University Governance in Denmark: From Democracy to Accountability?.

This article reports the findings of a Danish research council-funded project aimed at exploring a comprehensive package of management reforms in higher education instituted in Denmark since 2003. The reforms attempt to change not only the way institutions are governed but the very notion of democracy and engagement in higher education. In short, a long-established tradition for university governance based on the internal election of staff and students has been replaced by the formation of university boards comprising a majority of members external to the university. In most cases the leadership of these boards has fallen to senior executives from the commercial sector with a mandate to reform decision-making processes, to encourage the reorientation of educational programmes to the labour market, and to make research more accessible to industry and commerce. Whilst boards are responsible for the universitys development agenda (and formal development contract with the government), university rectors (vice-chancellors) and their senior management teams are given greatly increased powers to ‘run’ ‘their’ institutions. Whilst Danish universities have maintained some degree of continuity with earlier democratic/administrative forms of governance based on internal elected representation, these non-executive bodies are in the process of being marginalised by new hierarchical models of ‘executive’ governance. In the process, ‘democracy’, understood by internal stakeholders as a parliamentary political discourse based upon proportional representation, becomes an attachment to rather than a defining element of the university, posing fundamental questions about the role of such institutions in late modern society, and the place of academic staff within them.

Education in an age of radical uncertainty: youth and schooling in urban Nepal

This paper challenges us to consider the meaning of schooling for youth in the global south. We explore the ways in which young people living and learning on the outskirts of Kathmandu balance the visions and passions of modern schooling with social realities that are often quite incompatible. We depart from conventional analyses of modernity, evoking instead Baudrillards concepts of hyper-reality, seduction and unintelligibility. In the process we move beyond the dichotomy of ‘local–global’ in order to understand something of how globalisation is practised. Here, we see young people grabbling with what appear to be ambiguous identity projects where instability and uncertainty become basic conditions for life in societies characterised by connectivity and exclusion.

Education reform in Nepal: from modernity to conflict

In Nepal, the sudden arrival of ‘modernity’ through ‘development’ can be traced to a very specific historical moment. Free of the traumas, prejudices and preferences of colonialism, the Country opened its borders, at first tentatively, to a small band of international ‘experts’ who offered in an instant the fruits of a century of technical progress. What was delivered with optimism and determination was received with wonder and bewilderment. Consider the differences, for example, in the following two excerpts recalling events in Nepal in the 1950s bridged by a reference to air travel, an advance that allowed ‘development’ of all sorts to be extended for the first time to areas beyond Kathmandu. The first is from Hugh Wood of the University of Oregon and USAID who became Special Education Advisor to His Majesty’s Government, Nepal from 1953 to 1959; in effect the primary architect of Nepal’s ‘modern’ education system. Here, he recalls halcyon days introducing Mobile Normal Schools (MNS) to the Country:

Reform of Higher Education and the Return of ‘Heroic’ Leadership: The Case of Denmark

Denmark is experiencing a comprehensive package of educational reform aimed at enabling that country to recalibrate itself to the demands of the so-called ‘global knowledge economy’. In relation to the higher education sector, a new system of university governance is being implemented where boards are appointed (ultimately) by the State and comprised of a majority of members external to the institution. To further shape (if not direct) the work of universities, the new University Law requires that institutions prepare a ‘development contract’ with the Ministry, and that this is used as a framework within which universities direct their activities. To facilitate this process a new conception of leadership is invoked. Whilst university leaders (‘rektors’ in the Danish context) were previously elected by the academic staff of the institution, the new arrangements require that they be appointed by the board which looks to the rector to ‘run’ the institution and fulfil the demands of the development contract on their behalf. The study reported here utilises ethnographic method to explore such issues at a time of unprecedented change in Denmark. Notions of the leader as ‘hero’ – common in contemporary universities despite the general shift in the business world to notions of transformational and distributed leadership - appear not only difficult to eradicate but positively emboldened by the current reform movement. The paper explores different understandings of leadership, both in the literature and ‘in action’ via the perspectives of university leaders and decision-makers in the Danish case, before considering whether the current reforms make necessary such models of control and if the scope of action of such leaders is seriously curtailed by contemporary education policy.

Proteus: Comparative education and/ in the spirit of Andreas Kazamias

Can one person have so many layers? Can one person so embody the “protean episteme” (Kazamias, 2001) of comparative education? Important scholars are never one thing, changing through time and context as their thought evolves. As such, there are many iterations of Andreas Kazamias. He becomes who we need him to be. Our Proteus. There is (and remains) the young radical who, having made his home in the United States, challenged the giants of the time who were busy developing a “positive and predictive social science” of comparative education (Kazamias, 2009a, p. 145), erasing the unspoken and unspeakable dimensions of what it means to be human. There is Kazamias the giant himself, who, later in his career and in collaboration with Robert Cowen, delivered the monumental International Handbook of Comparative Education (2009), a work of such breadth of vision and reach that future generations will probably speak of it as our high water mark. And there is Kazamias the sage, teller of futures. The conscience of the moderns. Comparativists have come to know and appreciate Kazamias’s passionate calls for another education. At its most base, the message is that education has lost its “soul” as invasive governance, testing regimes, and a new language of “value” and “relevance” reduce the intergenerational transmission of culture to the interests of passionless, promiscuous global capitalism. Like all good tales, there is a grain of truth here. There seems no doubt that educators across an enormous range of contexts are being forced to rewrite curricula and rethink their classroom practices in order to satisfy an emerging consensus among policymakers in particular that education must be “useful.” Loose signifiers such as “quality,” “excellence,” and even “learning” are now used to displace ancient notions of what it means to be an educated person. In the process, we are seeing a renaming of education itself. What Kazamias calls our current “knowledge cosmopolis” reads like a very cold place indeed. Citing Readings (1996), Kazamias (2017, p. 22) suggests that the university is now part of the problem: a “ruined institution” unable to meet the needs of the “citizen subject.” This is a narrative not only about the state and fate of education, but the future of humanity. While he would probably shudder at the association, this Kazamias reminds us of Nietzsche’s famous madman: