Exposing the dangers of a “single story”: Nuancing the discussion of overseas development assistance in the higher education sector

• In Event: Roundtable Session 6
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Policies and practices: constructing institutional and professional capacities

Proposal

As global governance has diversified in the contemporary global context, so too have the modalities, rationales, and directions of international support for higher education systems in low- and middle-income contexts. The shifts in overseas development assistance (ODA) flows to higher education are complex, given the simultaneous (and often competing) pressures on funders – both from funder and recipient national governments and from global policy norms relating to “aid” flows (e.g. the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness) and the role of higher education in development (e.g. as specified in the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs). This is further complicated by the emergence of newer actors in this space (e.g. private sector foundations and bilateral agencies with little prior history of support for higher education outside their borders). In the backdrop to this picture is, on one hand, the increasing importance of higher education in delivering on global development goals through training and research on interdisciplinary development challenges (Author 3, 2019), and, on the other, the geopolitics of higher education as vital nodes for knowledge diplomacy (Knight, 2016) and influence on global development agendas.

Scholarship on the relationship between international actors, development and higher education has not kept pace with these higher education dynamics, and key works at this interface (Bassett and Maldonado-Maldonado, 2009; King and McGrath, 2004) pre-date the formalization of the role of higher education in the 2015 SDGs. At the same time, the relatively limited recent literature on ODA support for higher education (notably UNESCO, 2022) tends not to acknowledge these broader complexities, thereby limiting our collective ability to understand how and why funders choose to support higher education in less-resourced parts of the world.

This presentation aims to introduce some of this nuance to the current narrative and update this limited body of scholarship by presenting the findings of a qualitative study, focused on the top funders of higher education in low- and middle-income countries. Each were identified via the OECD Creditor Reporting System on the basis of their net contributions to domestic higher education systems in partner countries (i.e. excluding funding for international scholarships and imputed student costs) between 2015 and 2019. Reflecting four key actor types, these include a traditional bilateral donor (USA), an emerging bilateral actor (Turkey), a multilateral organization (The World Bank), and a private organization (Mastercard Foundation). Through granting or lending, each represent the largest singular sources of higher education financing, variously realized through contrastive purposes and delivery modalities (e.g. loans and budget support for systemic reform, underwriting the development of research hubs, directly supplying vital university infrastructure, etc.).

The study, comprising both document review and key informant interviews with organizational representatives, explores the ways in which ODA is understood by the key actors involved in supporting higher education, the rationales that drive the different types of actors, and the manner in which ideological positions, roles, and rationales of key actors affect the modalities of support to higher education. In tackling the complexity of the contemporary ODA landscape, it draws connections between the types and volumes of support documented in recent reports on ODA to higher education and actors’ underlying institutional and geopolitical framings of support to higher education. The analytical approach first examined publicly accessible documents by each actor to trace how rationales are articulated for ODA generally and higher education support specifically. Interviews with representatives in each organization subsequently consolidated and further nuanced the findings of the documentary analysis; these combined analyses were then compared across actors to draw out some of their key differences in how and why they provide concentrated support to higher education.

The findings illuminate the dangers of presenting a monolithic narrative regarding overseas support for higher education, as each organization involved in the study was found to fund higher education overseas for different reasons and via different modalities – and to be affected by different forces when opting to make changes to their higher education funding strategies. Crucially, the findings also expose some critical limitations in recent analyses of international aid flows (e.g. UNESCO, 2022). Specially, this study’s qualitative analysis of the modalities used by funders exposes how highly dissimilar projects – with different rationales, implications and outcomes – can be classified as similar at the macro-level (e.g. the concept of “scholarships”), thereby leading to potentially misleading analysis of what modalities of funding do and do not make a positive impact. The findings also expose the crucial impact of both domestic politics and global events (e.g. changes in leadership, Coronavirus pandemic, etc.) on ODA budgets, cautioning against the use of any macro-level study relying on reported ODA volumes for any single year.

Authors

• Rebecca Schendel, Boston College

• Lee Rensimer, IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society

• Tristan Mccowan, University College London