Exploring the experiences of civil society participants in education policy dialogue mechanisms in complex and challenging contexts

• In Event: Roundtable Session 12
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Advocating for quality education for all in a digitalising world: Civil society’s engagement in education policymaking through Education Out Loud

Proposal

The NGOs and advocacy organisations funded by Education Out Loud have campaigned and lobbied on many policy issues relevant to our increasingly digitised world. These include the significance of digital divides and equity, the pedagogical implications of technology reliance, and digital tools and opportunities for citizen and learning engagement. Many do this in some of the most complex contexts for advocacy, where conflict and violence lead to displacement and impaired educational infrastructure, or authoritarian governance practices and closing civic space - often supported by digital surveillance and repression - mitigate against critique of government policy.

As our input to this roundtable we will share insights from new research on how these organisations navigate the affordances and limitations of formal policy dialogue mechanisms that should theoretically enable them to raise concerns and highlight opportunities of new technologies. Such mechanisms include national level Local Education Groups, or Education Sector Working Groups, as well as those created within the Humanitarian system, and for purposes of donor coordination. We argue that these policy dialogue mechanisms can be understood as ‘invited spaces’ where there is an opportunity to raise civil society voices, but largely on the terms of more powerful actors – in contrast to spaces that are ’claimed’ by civil society campaigns. Despite the power differentials, however, we look to unpick the ways in which organisations participating in these education policy dialogue mechanisms leverage that membership to create change or build the power of argument for reforms, and gain or use tangible and intangible resources that enable civil society organisations to play a full part in education policy.

Authors

• Colin Anderson, IDS

• Rosie McGee, Institute of Development Studies