Complicated Crises: How the World Bank’s Approach to the Education Sector is Changing

• In Event: Highlighted Session: International Organizations and Education Policy: Crisis, Collaboration, and Coloniality

Proposal

The World Bank’s putative role is to support the long-term development of educational systems and to end world poverty (Mundy and Verger 2016). It is the largest international organizational financer of education and is also among the most influential knowledge brokers in the global education policy space. (Klees et. al, 2012; Fontdevila and Verger 2020).
In recent years, that Bank has been faced with the challenge of responding to at least four global crises: the climate crisis; COVID19; migration and refugee crises; and more broadly the erosion of a stable world order characterized by the war in the Ukraine and the dissolution of free trade arrangements (Kentikelenis 2020; Khan et. al 2020; Duggan et. al; Clemens & Kremer 2016; UNICEF 2021). On top of this, the Bank also faces widespread economic instability in its partner countries, including rising debt crisis (Kopiński, & Wróblewski, 2021). In this paper, we ask how these crises may have changed the Bank’s education sector portfolio, look specifically at its approach to education system reform.
To do so, we compare the Bank’s financing portfolio in education during the last 5 years; with its portfolio during the era of structural adjustment, when many of the Bank’s most critiqued approaches to educational reform became institutionalized. We ask how the Bank’s projects/operations have changed across these two time periods, and how these changes embody new theories of change about how to improve education systems and state capacity.
We also explore how the Bank’s education sector portfolio has begun to take on new challenges of climate, Covid, refugees/migration and war. We argue that despite historical path dependencies, today’s education Bank is quite different from the historical Bank of the 1990s. We interrogate these changes and re-evaluate the Bank as an educational development actor, focusing specifically on its evolving approach to building state capacity.

Author

• Karen Mundy, University of Toronto