Assessing the Globalization–Decentralization Nexus: Patterns of Education and Reform in Mexico, Chile, Argentina and Nicaragua

At first glance, a chapter dealing with educational policy may seem out-of-place in a series devoted to the study of global governance and converging markets. While the literature on this subject often gives extensive treatment to the demands and pressures placed upon national economies, the demands being made upon national social sectors have received fewer considerations. Where the literature does attend to this matter, it often assumes, rather than demonstrates that social policy is governed by global processes and economic patterns. In educational policy, for example, the vast number of countries to have enacted large-scale, decentralization is often taken as evidence for globalization’s effect on educational policy (Folwer, 1995; McGinn, 1997; Scribener and Layton 1995; Schugurensky, 1999). Here, converging trends in educational decentralization and economic restructuring appear as ‘twinned outcomes of the new globalization’ (Carnoy, 2002: xvi), policies which are seen as ‘increasingly governed by similar [external] pressures, procedures and organizational patterns’ (Schugurensky, 1999: 288). Viewed from this perspective, educational decentralization appears as a significant neo-liberal reform, an evaluation that appears quite problematic in light of new evidence.

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