Global Venture Philanthropy and Education Policy: Processes of Neoliberalization

• In Event: Elite Policy Networks and the Politics of Education Reform: Researching the Social Geography of Power

Abstract

The third presenter assumes a global perspective and reports on two ongoing studies—
one funded by the Leverhulme Foundation and the other by the British Academy—that explore the formation, activity, and effects of education policy networks, specifically those involving philanthropic actors in India and Sub-Saharan Africa. Using social network mapping techniques, web searches, and interviews, the studies indicate the increasing participation of US philanthropies both as direct agents of policy and in support of local philanthropic actors in global policy networks. These networks operate within and between nation-states, in new sites, using new methods. They reveal a high degree of social connectivity and provide means for the flow of resources and discourses on social disadvantage and development of global human capital. In effect, policy ideas, particularly that of charter school reform, are "exported" as solutions to developing countries. The presenter will address the structure, relationships, and growth of such policy networks through illustration as well as the processes of networking that animate them. The presenter argues that these networks constitute and contribute to processes of neoliberalisation. This research presents the increasingly complex and opaque crossings, blurrings, interweavings, and hybridities, that constitute the neoliberal landscape of policy. These are, to borrow from Ong (2006), "new spaces of entangled possibilities," that is, new spaces of neoliberalism and of the "economization of the social" (Shamir, 2008).

Author

• Stephen J. Ball, Institute of Education - London