Education as Border Externalisation: Refugee Education Policy Enactment in Ethiopia

• In Event: Contesting borders and centering learners: Global migration across four continents

Proposal

Drawing on multiscalar research, this presentation focuses on the roles, rationales, and implications of policy actors operating within Ethiopia during a period of recent migration governance change, specifically the enactment of the global refugee education policy.

Since the signing of the Global Compact on Refugees in 2016, the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF) has increasingly become a central policy focus for international and national migration and development actors. Ethiopia, itself a conflict-affected context, hosts over 800,000 refugees and was the first nation to commit to enacting the CRRF. The CRRF forms part of a wider complex array of policies and actions by northern states to regularise and ultimately diminish migration from contexts such as Ethiopia.

Migration and education are central concerns for sovereign states. Existing literature on the role of refugee-hosting states often focuses on the governments' lack of capacity and critiques the involvement of neo-liberal and post-colonial actors. However, less attention has been given to the actions or inactions of authoritarian governmental actors and their willingness to implement agreed-upon policy agendas, especially in relation to migration (Norman, 2021). Such attention is important to understand the implications of policy enactment, both for building peaceful states and to conceptualise how socially just policy might best be enacted.

Adapting the Comparative Case Study approach (Bartlett and Vavrus, 2015), this research considered the global, national, and local dimensions of change in the period 2016-2021. Interviews were conducted with policy actors, education providers, teachers, and refugees and analysed using thematic analysis. Documents were selected based on their relevance to the CRRF and were reviewed through critical discourse analysis. Applying Jessop's (2015) Strategic Relational Approach to understand the roles of the range of actors operating in the Ethiopian context. Through the findings of this study, I develop the concept of the ‘permissive space’ (Cooper-Knock, 2017) to innovatively conceptualise how sovereign governments engage with global policy agendas and the array of actors within the ensemble who enact them.

I argue that Ethiopian government actors, distrustful or perceptive of potential disadvantages in proposed changes, consistently disengage from agreed migration focused policy priorities. It is in the resulting permissive space that powerful international, foreign government and non-governmental actors dominate policy enactment priorities, ultimately resulting in the reification of Northern discourses, ideas, and policy agendas. Within refugee education, and through the CRRF’s enactment, these ideas are increasingly characterised by market-orientated development approaches. These approaches underwrite policy and practice which are explicitly focused upon instrumentalising education for the purpose of immobility. Concurrently, state disengagement has the consequence that policy enactments are not consistent or comprehensive, but rather piecemeal and limited in nature.

Contradictions within the enactment process and between different actors’ priorities have real-world consequences for education practitioners and refugees alike. Education providers strategically interpret and adapt education policy to the cultural and structural contexts they operate in and are compelled to maintain and negotiate relationships with governmental and international partners and funders alike. Whilst examples of hopeful educational practice endure, the process can be to the detriment of refugees who are presented with structural, bureaucratic and temporal barriers in the pursuit of their aspirations. Consequently, opportunities do not always align with refugees imagined futures, who can find themselves in cycles of re-education, each as irrelevant as the last to either their envisioned aspirations or present opportunities. Despite these challenges, refugee learners are highly dynamic in attempting to realise their often strongly held educational, migratory, or wider life aspirations. In the complex malaise of enactment, I propose that education provision in such contexts, dominated by northern migration agendas, is being deployed as part of wider border externalisation processes.

Author

• Martin Preston, University of Bristol