Rescaling Educational Governance in Latin America. Recentralization and the rise of the meso level

• In Event: Latin America’s education policy from the mid 2010s to today: A fourth wave of educational reforms?

Proposal

After decades of decentralization, several recent education reforms in Latin America such as in Chile and Colombia have emphasized recentralization at the meso level. This presentation examines the political logics, institutional dynamics, and educational outcomes of this “rescaling” of governance, situating it within a comparative framework of systemic improvement across the region. Drawing on country-level policy analyses and comparative case studies, the paper argues that strengthening intermediate levels of governance is central to building state capacity, improving accountability, and ultimately refocusing systems on learning.
One rationale for decentralization reforms of the 1980s and 1990s was to democratize education and bring decision-making closer to schools and communities. Yet evidence from Chile and Colombia demonstrate persistent challenges: weak local capacities and unequal outcomes limited the effectiveness of local governance structures (Belei and Muñoz, 2021; Baxter & León Cadavid, 2020). In response, national governments have increasingly invested authority and resources in meso-level structures (departments, secretarías, servicios locales) as strategic nodes for reform.
During the Bachelet period Chile embarked on an ambitious reform called the New Public Education to create Local Educational Services (SLEP) as a corrective to increasing inequality caused by an underfunded public school system, school-level atomization and municipal fragmentation. As Bellei and Muñoz (2021) argue, this reform represented a deliberate recentralization to the middle, consolidating authority, professional capacity, and pedagogical support in regional agencies. Yet they also warn that, without strong professional cultures and mechanisms for participation, the reform risks reproducing bureaucratic centralism, creating new administrative layers without necessarily deepening democratic engagement or teacher empowerment. This tension illustrates the dual face of rescaling: it can enable system coherence, but also generate new bottlenecks if not accompanied by cultural and institutional change.

Comparative research shows that the middle tier is the connective tissue of education systems, linking central ministries with schools. UNESCO’s report Leading Teaching and Learning Together (2022) identifies this “missing middle” as the key site for instructional leadership, accountability, and professional support, stressing that reforms succeed when middle-tier actors are empowered to lead teaching and learning together. Similar research on governance from the OECD also highlights that middle-tier leadership enhances state capacity by bridging macro policy and classroom practice (2016; 2019)
A recent regional comparative eduation research project The Keys to Education (Rivas et al., 2021) ;reinforces this argument. Cases from subnational levels including Colombia, Chile, and Brazil show that improvements are the product of robust meso-level governance, combining technical capacity with pedagogical support and accountability (Rivas et al., 2021). By rebuilding state capacity at the meso level, governments are attempting to reconcile the equity goals of decentralization with the efficiency and coherence demanded by quality reforms. Yet as the Chilean and Colombian cases show, rescaling is not a technocratic fix but a political project: its success depends on whether meso-level institutions cultivate professional cultures, teacher agency, and participatory governance, rather than simply reproducing bureaucratic hierarchies.

Authors

• Gloria Maria Naranjo Quintero, Universidad de Los Andes

• Jorge G Baxter, Universidad de Los Andes