Domestic coalitions in the variation of education privatization: an analysis of Chile,Argentina, and Colombia

Abstract

Education privatization is a global trend that has nonetheless followed multiple trajectories. This article addresses the question of what explains this variation by demonstrating the role that political coalitions play in the re-interpretation of global privatization ideas. A political-coalitional approach helps us analyze from a long-term perspective, the interplay between ideational, political, and economic processes that occurred at the global and domestic levels. Both accumulated benefits and negative consequences of previous reforms realign domestic coalitions that then facilitate or constrain the selection of global ideas and shape the way in which they are implemented at the country level. Based on a comparative historical analysis of three countries, Chile, Argentina, and Colombia, the article identifies three privatization trajectories: marketization, erosion of public education, and dualization of education provision. The long-term analysis of these trajectories also shows that privatization is not a linear process but a complex dynamic with consequences that may trigger unintended changes in the future.     

Producing global citizens for the future: space,discourse and curricular reform

This article inquires into discourses of globalisation as they are put to use to accelerate higher education’s seemingly ready acquiescence to the demands of the market. We maintain that globalisation operates as a way to reason about space that produces images and narratives of universities, knowledge and students. We focus our analysis on curriculum reform as a way universities materialise the seemingly abstract economic logic of the so-called ‘knowledge society’ at the level of student-citizens, who are to be educated to become economic globalisation’s next agents. In order to locate curriculum’s productive role within university respatialisation, we offer a discourse analysis of the circulation of ideas about globalisation and higher education through intergovernmental and national documents, which take material form in a US state university system’s attempted curricular reform of its general education core. We inquire into the ways space, as a rationality, acts to create systems of reasoning about institutions, knowledges and subjects that furthers the production of a neoliberal global imaginary.     

The politics of research and innovation: Understanding instrument choices in complex governance environments – the case of France and Italy

What governments desire to achieve, and how they want to accomplish their goals, represent the core of any policy design process. However, it is still unclear how partisan politics, in its combined effect with path-dependency forces, influence policy makers’ choices over alternative instrument mixes. Through a comparative analysis of Research and Innovation (R&I) instrument choices in countries characterized by different paradigmatic models of policy (Italy and France), the paper investigates how the politics of different cabinets influence the formulation of national R&I strategies and the extent to which these decisions are constrained by the legacy of previous choices. By capitalizing on a new proposed treatment of policy instruments, the paper contributes to the definition of the types of tools found in policy mixes, investigating how national R&I instrument mix variations develop. The results of the analysis indicate how the selection of R&I policy instruments does not closely follow traditional left versus right-wing political cleavages, and their evolution is generally influenced by a combination of different context-dependent dynamics. However, when partisan acceptance of consolidated R&I instrument mixes across cabinets is present, this triggers a consolidating effect on path-dependency forces.