Understanding the rationales of making of concepts and policies in the arena of Girls’ Education

• In Event: Evidence-based decision making in education
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Local and global manifestations of girls' education

Proposal

In the past few decades, the girls’ education has emerged as one of most significant policy objectives for governments and for development agencies. This paper highlights how international organizations committed to the girls’ education gain legitimacy and authority by constructing new global scripts (Pizmony-Levy, 2011) and what are the rationales behind these efforts. Global scripts are the ideas, models, or the policy guidelines, that are created at the global level by key policy actors, including the World Bank, and the UN (e.g., UNICEF, UNESCO & UNGEI) on girls’ education. The study helps our understanding of global scripts that have changed over time and in policymaking identifying those rationales that could result in ceremonial compliance of the other actors (countries’ domestic ministries etc.). This will help improve policy design and implementation.
Although the rationales for education focused on economic growth and human development in the decades following World War II, today, the policy rationales for educating girls are based on notions of human rights as defined in the United Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). These key policy actors set the norms for girls’ education, such as gender equality or gender parity in enrolments. However, Mundy (2010), describing these actors as “global governors”, argues that the commitment to EFA was a commitment to equity, economic redistribution, and human rights and these actors - with competing technical repertoires, different bureaucratic interests, and different sources of authority - committed to EFA to enhance their legitimacy and authority (p.333). Similar arguments can be made for the key policy actors in the girls’ education and their commitments, since the global policy for development on girl’s education draws on arguments about empowerment, human rights, and utility (Manion, 2012; Monkman & Hoffman, 2013). Hence, despite differing in their bureaucratic interests and technical repertories, these “global governors” set global scripts using the notions of equity and human rights.
To understand the rationales for the making of these global scripts and the role of these actors, I refer to the World Society Theory which examines the institutionalized culture of modern society (Schofer et al., 2012). By complementing a moral component, the cultural rules/ideologies, that regulate the social activities in a society, are institutionalized (Meyer et al.,1987). I examine how the global policy actors gain institutional legitimacy by approving the global scripts that have universal cultural perspective. Using content analysis (conceptual and relational analyses) as my method, I am examining the international declarations/conventions, including the key policy guidelines that were proposed for girls’ education by the UN and the World Bank in the past twenty years (from year 2000 onwards).
The preliminary results suggest that research, technical knowledge, and evidence on scientific criteria are the key measures for gaining legitimacy which brings status and authority to these policy actors. Moreover, if their research findings are embedded in the moral grounds and ‘infused with value’, such as human rights, the global scripts suggested by these organizations become institutionalized and the organizations gain socio-political acceptability and respect for working toward justice and progress.

Author

• Norin Taj, University of Toronto