Seeing like philanthropy: views of the State and education policy in Argentina and Brazil.

• In Event: Privatizing education policy: exploring the role, networks and strategies of philanthropic actors to advance educational reform glocally (Part 1)

Proposal

The international community has officially ‘welcomed’ philanthropists as legitimate educational policy actors in the Education 2030 Framework for Action for Sustainable Development Goal 4. However, philanthropy entails inherent tensions between its potential to leverage education and its origins from inequities, which grant them a privileged position to mobilise discourses into a value-driven and disputed field (Srivastava & Oh, 2010). Latin America remains among the most unequal regions in the world (Chancel et al., 2022). The COVID-19 crisis witnessed the rise of new billionaires, and philanthropic actors have increasingly increased their influence and legitimacy in education policy (Avelar, 2023). Yet, comprehensive intra-regional comparisons remain scarce.
This paper addresses philanthropic actors’ ways of seeing education policy in Argentina and Brazil. Drawing on Scott’s work on Seeing Like a State (Scott, 1998), I use the metaphor of ‘seeing like philanthropy’ to examine this sector’s attempts to make society, and education policy in particular, legible. I analyze how philanthropic actors simplify and abstract education policy to render it more legible and align it with their interests. Based on interviews with foundations’ executive directors and public sources, I compare how their ways of seeing shape the educational landscape, highlighting the power dynamics inherent in their interventions.
Findings show a common way of seeing in Argentina and Brazil’s philanthropic actors, which I synthesise as ‘seeing like a meritocrat’, a central element of philanthropic actors’ lenses. The analysis also delves into more specific views in Argentina and Brazil, which I describe as ‘seeing like an outsider’ and ‘seeing as a guardian of the nation’, respectively. Based on these differences, I explain how these two ways of seeing arrange philanthropic actors’ power within the education arena. I argue that such differences have diverse implications on how philanthropic actors view the state, education policy and themselves in regard to this policy space. These findings open new questions about the interplay between philanthropic actors’ meritocratic ethos, divergent historical state roles, and elites’ engagement education governance.

Author

• Ivan Matovich, Monash University