Evidence and Peer Learning in Transnational Education Policy: A Comparison between OECD and World Bank

• In Event: The Changing Dynamics of Global Education Reform: Globalization and Variation Mechanisms in a (Post-)Neoliberal Era

Proposal

We live in an era with a surplus of data, research, and good practices; freely accessible and actively promoted by global knowledge banks. Unsurprisingly, there has been a shift in the debate on global public goods from producing research to producing “evidence” by synthesizing, interpreting and translating research for policy usage. This shift is intended to improve knowledge-based regulation. Thus, there is an expectation that policy makers learn from experiences in other countries, selectively borrow “proven solutions” from elsewhere by engaging in peer exchange and policy learning.
This study examines the different approaches to policy learning, pursued by the two largest global knowledge banks in education: the World Bank and OECD. Consequently, it examines which educational systems these two organizations use as reference societies or examples of emulation, and which ones they leave out.
Methodologically, this study draws on different country reports, namely the World Bank’s Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) series and the OECD’s Education Policy Outlook (EPO), and Reviews of National Policies for Education (RNPE) to examine differences and commonalities in how the two organizations engage in comparative analysis for policy review and evaluation. Specifically, we compare (1) the country level references and (2) the country coverage in their review and evaluations.
Our preliminary findings show that the OECD promotes horizontal policy learning (learning from other countries) whereas the World Bank apparently seems to make a case for vertical policy learning (learning from their portfolio of best practices). Concretely, the OECD addresses more frequently country level experiences and cites specific policies in their policy evaluations as compared to the World Bank. This suggests that the World Bank’s lesson-drawing remains self-referential, using its own portfolio of best practices, while the OECD is particularly fostering peer learning, albeit with an idiosyncratic, OECD view of education.
A closer examination reveals that the two IOs also select different countries for their report series: while the OECD more frequently covers middle to high-income countries, the World Bank does have a stronger focus on developing countries. While some countries are covered by both IOs, others are left out of the reports completely. Thus, special attention needs to be given to “policy darlings”, those that receive a surplus of policy recommendations or evidence by the two knowledge banks, as opposed to the “policy orphans”, countries that are neither covered by the OECD or the World Bank. The questions then become: how do policy darlings cope with the potentially contradictory policy advice given by their international partners? Do policy orphans implement different kinds of school reforms given their location in an autonomous or non-aligned policy space?
Further analysis will focus on the expansion of the two IOs’ coverage over time, determining which countries are increasingly being included in the two organizations’ portfolios, and which remain perpetually excluded from these reports. This will indicate which countries are over-referenced and which are underrepresented in the machinery of evidence production for policymaking and peer learning.

Authors

• Helen Seitzer, University Bremen

• Chanwoong Baek, University of Oslo

• Gita Steiner-Khamsi, Columbia University Teachers College