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Policy Instruments for Educational Governance: A Comparative Investigation of India and China

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International Handbook on Education Development in Asia-Pacific

Abstract

As the emphasis of education reforms around the world has increasingly shifted from expanding schooling access to improving student learning outcomes, the policy instruments used in educational governance has accordingly proliferated in order to fulfill this more complicated and challenging policy goal. Despite a growing body of knowledge on various specific instruments, there lacks a synthesized picture with which to inform a systematic understanding of the broad range of policy instruments being deployed, how they function, and with what impact. To fill the gap, this chapter applies Christopher Hood’s NATO framework to comparatively examine the informational, regulatory, fiscal, and organizational instruments used in India and China, countries with two of the largest basic education sectors in the world. The results show that while each of the four key resources (nodality, authority, treasure, and organization) have been actively mobilized, the configuration of individual instruments, and therefore the full policy portfolio, can be markedly different in the two systems. This digested knowledge provides a timely stock-taking of a scattered empirical literature, which also serves as a valuable starting point for future research to advance the understanding of instrument choice and policy effectiveness.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK

    Yifei Yan

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  1. Yifei Yan
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Correspondence to Yifei Yan .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Singapore Institute of Adult Learning, Singapore University of Social Sciences, Singapore, Singapore

    Wing On Lee

  2. School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Phillip Brown

  3. Thomas More Brennan Chair in Education, Lynch School of Education and Human Development, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA

    A. Lin Goodwin

  4. Institute of Education, University College London, London, UK

    Andy Green

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  1. Institute of Education, University College London, London, United Kingdom

    Andy Green

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Yan, Y. (2022). Policy Instruments for Educational Governance: A Comparative Investigation of India and China. In: Lee, W.O., Brown, P., Goodwin, A.L., Green, A. (eds) International Handbook on Education Development in Asia-Pacific. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2327-1_98-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2327-1_98-1

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