Neoliberal transformations of the State, new philanthropy and policy mobilities in federal education systems—the cases of Argentina and Brazil

• In Event: Highlighted Session: The State and education in Latin America: Foundations, fault-lines, and alternatives (Panel 2)

Proposal

During recent decades, South America has been heavily influenced by the creation of new forms of privatization in education. Rather than following structural State reforms, except for Chile, these trends have followed different paths: scaling-up (Brazil and Colombia), ‘default’ (Peru), historical public-private partnerships (Argentina) and latent (Uruguay) (Verger et al., 2017). This is part of a broader neoliberal transformation of the State producing significant changes in government and power relations, extensively referred as the governance turn (Jessop, 1998).

These transformations have enabled new formal and non‐formal spaces for networking and ‘partnerships’ between State and non‐state actors in reshaping education governance nationally and globally. In this context, new philanthropy has emerged as the direct connection between ‘giving’ and ‘outcomes’ (Ball, 2012). Instead of following traditional forms of funding transfers from the private to the public sector or as a charitable practice, new philanthropy introduces policy ‘problem-solving’ through the influx of private actors’ money and enterprise models, as an alternative to the ‘failing’ state (Ball & Olmedo, 2011). However, there is still little examination of the implications of State bureaucracies, ‘modernization’ transformations and privatization paths on philanthropic organizations’ forms of engagement in education policy.

Argentina has shown signs of new philanthropy emergence, particularly during the last decade. Philanthropy has also rapidly expanded in Brazil since the 1990s through network mobilisation and programme implementation (Shiroma, 2014). While research has been mainly focused on particular philanthropic organizations (Avelar & Ball, 2019; Friedrich, 2014; Matovich & Cardini, 2019), further comparative analysis is required to understand how new philanthropy’s forms of engagement are enacted across diverse forms of State configurations. Therefore, this work examines the specific implications of decentralized education systems for new philanthropy development in Argentina and Brazil by: analyzing how actors and policy solutions ‘travel’ across governance levels; examining how actors’ strategies are influenced by State bureaucracies; and identifying key implications of national-subnational tensions.

This study maps the main philanthropic organizations in Argentina and Brazil operating in education policy at different state government levels through diverse logics of intervention (Srivastava & Baur, 2016). Second, it proposes two in-depth case studies of the Varkey Foundation and Lemann Foundation, as these represent the most relevant organizations operating in these countries due to their scope and the reach of their operations. Data will be first collected by cyber ethnography to construct primary datasets of nodal actors, connectivities, partnerships, activities, institutional documents, social media publications and virtual conferences. This will be followed by in-depth interviews with organization members, partners and government education officers (Ball et al., 2017).

Results analyze the particular implications of diverse forms of decentralized education systems in Argentina and Brazil to new philanthropy forms of engagement. In particular, it maps the main philanthropic organizations operating in these contexts; it describes their forms of engagement while paying specific attention to the implications of these States’ bureaucracies and their ‘privatization paths’ to philanthropic governance.

Authors

• Ivan Matovich, Monash University

• Tomas Esper, Columbia University Teachers College