International Organizations and the Politics of Knowledge Production: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Education Privatization Debate

• In Event: The International Politics of Knowledge Mobilization: The Intersection of Funding Agencies, International Organizations, Epistemic Communities, and Policy Entrepreneurs

Abstract

Education privatization generates one of the most passionate and polarized debates in education policy research. A swath of highly contradictory empirical research surrounds the issue of private involvement in education provision on a variety of related-themes such as the cost and benefits of voucher schemes, charter schools, freedom of school choice and/or school competition. Yet, the fact that evidence on these themes is far from conclusive is used to legitimate a range of different policy preferences as well as the political agendas of many educational stakeholders, including think tanks, private foundations and international aid agencies. In the US context, for instance, it has been documented that the publications of think tanks and other education privatization advocates tend to cite repeatedly a limited and usually low-quality (i.e. non peer-reviewed) number of like-minded studies as a way to create an illusion of a general consensus around the advantages of quasi-markets and free-choice policies in education. This is what Lubienski et al. (2009) qualify as an “echo chamber effect” in the use of research.

Based on the application of bibliometric analysis techniques, this paper maps the epistemic configuration of the education privatization debate and explores the role played by a group of international organizations in the politics of knowledge production that surround this debate. The specific objectives of the paper are: (a) to review the state of the art of research on quasi-markets/privatization in education in the last two decades, identifying the different epistemic communities that configure this research field; (b) to analyze the main factors that constitute the separation between the different epistemic communities identified (discipline, territorial scope, type of journal/source); and (c) to explore how the knowledge products on education privatization of key international players fit within and engage with the existing epistemic communities. In relation to the latter objective, we will focus on some of the most emblematic publications on private education produced by the World Bank and the Council for British Teachers (CfBT). These two international agencies have been selected due to their great capacity of influencing education policy decisions in low- and middle-income countries through lending and/or consultancy operations.

The main findings of our research are, first, that literature on education privatization is created and disseminated by distinct epistemic communities that operate in isolation of one another. Second, the roots of this divide are grounded in different disciplinary traditions and approaches to the education privatization debate. Third, this divide is made even more pronounced by the role played by international organizations that, when engaging in the education privatization debate, reproduce like-minded policy discourses and hardly incorporate academic knowledge from outside their policy circle. Among other strategies, the publications of the World Bank and the CfBT are biased in favor of those pieces of research that better fit within their policy preferences. Accordingly, these international organizations produce an echo-chamber effect around a small number of studies that is far from being representative of the broad and more complex private education debate.

Authors

• Antoni Verger, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• Ruarri Rogan, University of Amsterdam

• Thomas Gurney, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam