Sustainable Development Goals: Unleashing Unsustainable Accountability Regimes in Low-Income Nations?

• In Event: 25.036 - Undertheorized and Understudied: New Directions in the Research of Educational Inequality

Abstract

A renewed effort to reduce education inequality globally under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has mobilized a massive exercise in developing indicators and instruments to measure the quality of schooling, bringing new regimes of assessment and accountability to a large number of low-income nations, coordinated by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). This paper explores the theories of accountability that underpin this global movement by examining significant policy documents and websites, supported by interviews with key actors. The paper concludes that the assessments and accountability practices envisioned in these new regimes appear to mimic regimes that have already proven ineffective, if not harmful, in high- and middle-income nations. The paper proposes some speculative principles for developing sustainable accountability practices.

Author

• Radhika Gorur, Deakin University