Still searching for a theory: the interface between VET research and VET interventions by donors and governments in LMICs

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

The last decade has brought a renewed political interest in VET and skill development among global actors and agendas. In parallel, critical researchers from around the world have been contributing with innovative theoretical frameworks (Powell and McGrath 2019; Spours 2019; Brown, Lauder, and Cheung 2020) and new research evidence to academic debates about the role of VET policy in human and sustainable development. However, these two avenues of VET policy re-invigoration have not managed to productively interject and result in more progressive global policy solutions. Global and national policymakers have largely relied on the same economic ideas that dominated the sector for decades (i.e. human capital) and on the same global policy solutions (i.e. NQFs, Dual Apprenticeships).

This disjuncture between the creation and the utilisation of scientific knowledge is partially explained by the difficulties critical researchers encounter in mobilising their new research evidence, but it is also explained by the resistance from VET policy environments to questioning established beliefs and socioeconomic imaginaries. An emerging industry of international consultants and think tanks have managed to fill in this gap by offering policymakers the same old wine in new bottles. Under the pretension of rigour and scientificity, plug-and-play global policy models have been sold to governments as technical solutions to political problems without much attention to national specificities and their impact on social justice, and without understanding the ways in which economic and social contexts at the global to national level shape and constrain skills systems. The commercialization of knowledge dissemination in the development field is not exclusive to VET, but it is particularly prevalent in this policy area. In the highly privatized VET sector, always open for business and profitmaking, consultants and policy-driven researchers have continued offering piecemeal solutions to structural problems, which often revert to the mainstream market-driven solutions that only reinforce the institutional dependency of VET communities on private forces.

Traditional efforts to theorize the disconnection between academic research production and its political utilization have identified two main barriers for collaboration (Parkhurst 2016). On the one hand, you need a stable supply of quality evidence and academic researchers motivated and skilled in communicating their research findings in an accessible and actionable manner. On the other hand, you need policymakers that demand and can engage with scientific evidence and privilege this form of knowledge over their own interests and other forms of knowledge. The gap between research production and utilization is thus reduced to a problem of supply-demand imbalance. This very simplistic explanation of the disconnection between academic and policy communities has been the dominant one in the “evidence-based policy” rhetoric, mostly imported from the medical sciences and indebted to instrumental models of knowledge utilization and to a linear understanding of the policy process.

A more nuanced theoretical explanation has been offered by public policy studies and the “evidence-informed policy” tradition, suggesting that the complexity of real policy environments may be too complex for linear models, and that researchers should consider different policy theories when strategically engaging with policy stakeholders. It is argued that much is to be gained from theories that bring to the fore the messy nature of the policy process and the constrained environment in which policy-makers operate (Cairney and Oliver 2017). Probably the most salient contribution from this tradition is the identification of two main dilemmas that researchers face when trying to reach out to stakeholders. First, how far should scientists go to frame policy problems and solutions to persuade policymakers to act on their evidence? This question highlights the risk of resorting to manipulative emotional appeals that may have reputational costs for researchers in the long run, but also of circulating misleading ideas that leave fundamental policy problems unexamined. And second, how far should scientists go to defend a hierarchy of systematic evidence, and how this relates to alternative local and national research into policy solutions? This second question highlights the risk of policy reforms not incorporating local knowledges in the scaling up of policy solutions that should be relevant for these communities and service users, thus exacerbating inequalities among them. At the same time, many interventions or donor-driven evaluations ignore bodies of academic knowledge and consider only isolated knowledge generated in the field. The challenge is finding ways for the two to speak to each other.

The panel focuses on the difficulties of critical VET research to engage with global and local stakeholders, and the obstacles for translating this influence into progressive educational change, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). It situates its debates within the “evidence-informed policy” approach but, given its interest on the global development angle of these debates, it does so in a necessary dialogue with current appeals for the decolonization of education and development research (Sriprakash and Mukhopadhyay 2015), the political economy critique of new forms of imperialism through world order rules and international actors (Novelli et al. 2014), and claims for the transformation of the current ecology of knowledge between Western and non-Western cosmovision (de Sousa Santos 2009). Papers in this panel explore processes of knowledge (co-)production and mobilisation in the VET and international development field. They draw on the experience of researchers, policymakers and practitioners participating in international VET research projects in different world locations (i.e. Africa and Latin America). We focus on looking critically at the field of Comparative and International Education, and how it has engaged with vocational education and skill formation, and how it can better theorize social, political, economic, and cultural systems to contribute to solutions across contexts, systems, and communities around the world. Key to this is an analysis of how research in this field of comparative and international vocational education can challenge the dominance of northern actors and perspectives in global policy making, which continue to undermine the reality of both research and policy making in low- and middle-income countries, and can thereby contribute to more effective policy models for educational improvement and a more equitable world.

Sub Unit

• Globalization & Education SIG

Chair

• Stephanie Allais, University of the Witwatersrand

Individual Presentations

• What problem should skills solve? Interrogating theories of change underpinning strategies and interventions in vocational education and skills in LMICs - Stephanie Allais, University of the Witwatersrand

• Testing the assumptions of the UK Research Impact Agenda in the case of a VET research project in Mexico - Oscar Valiente, University of Glasgow; Clara Fontdevila, University of Glasgow; Ellen Vanderhoven, University of Glasgow

• VET research engagement with policymakers - Cristian Martín Lincovil Belmar, Ministry of Education, Chile

Discussant

• Carmel Marock, University of the Witwatersrand