Walking the Washington talk? An analysis of the World Bank’s discourse-practice disjuncture in teachers' policy

• In Event: Discourses of International Organizations in Education – What Do They Promote, When and How

Proposal

The World Bank has a reputation as an advocate of pro-market policy solutions in multiple economic and social sectors. In the education sector, many scholars see the World Bank as a promoter of educational reforms that are inspired by (post)Washington Consensus' tenets such as deregulation, privatization and market competition. However, analyzing the World Bank mainly from the perspective of broader policy paradigms is problematic in that it neglects the diverging ideas and interests that are likely to exist within IOs, and does not pay sufficient attention to possible disjunctures between official discourses and real practices.
The aim of the paper is to explore whether and to what extent there is a tension between the World Bank discourse and practice (as manifested in its research and knowledge products and in its lending operations, respectively), as well as to suggest possible drivers explaining such disjunction. We address these questions by focusing on one of the central components of the World Bank’s education agenda, namely, teacher development and management. Methodologically, this research relies on a content analysis of a large corpus of World Bank-produced documents including knowledge products such as policy briefs and research papers (n=32); and project appraisal documents for a variety of lending operations (n=133).
Our results suggest that the World Bank’s portrait as an advocate of managerial and market-oriented reforms in education is accurate mainly at the discursive level. The knowledge products of the World Bank on teachers-related topics predominantly recommend the flexibilization of teachers' labor conditions and the introduction of both market mechanisms and accountability pressures in education systems. However, this policy agenda does not consistently translate into according practices at the country level. In fact, the World Bank's lending operations tend to focus on teacher training as one of the most consistently promoted policy measures, while, in most world regions, pro-market policy solutions score rather low in this IO's lending portfolio.
This misalignment between knowledge products and lending activity within the World Bank might be explained by the existence of contradictory preferences and incentives operating at different levels of the IO. At the political level, the policy-practice disjuncture could be explained by the World Bank’s loss of autonomy to impose an ideologically-driven agenda over their clients and the rise of a more client-driven approach. At the internal level of the IO bureaucracy, tensions between Washington DC-based staff and regional staff in charge of lending operations might also explain the discourse-practice disjuncture. This is in turn the result of different degrees of attention to and familiarity with contextual specificities, material incentives or pressure to lend among operational staff, the co-existence of different epistemic communities and dominance of the economic discipline within research staff.

Authors

• Clara Fontdevila, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• Antoni Verger, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona