Zone-Based Educational Governance in the New Public Governance Era: A Systematic Case Review

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Re-Scaling School Governance: New Spatial Perspectives on Autonomy, Assessment, and Accountability in Post-neoliberal Education

Proposal

After a long New Public Management era, public policy and public administration are increasingly turning toward New Public Governance (NPG): a mode of governing that understands public problems as distributed, relational and resistant to single-actor fixes (Osborne, 2010; Torfing & Triantafillou, 2013). Rather than relying on managerial autonomy or market mechanisms alone, NPG emphasises deliberate network institutional arrangements. This orientation is especially suited for addressing wicked problems - complex, shifting and value-laden challenges that demand cross-sectoral coordination and locally attuned, adaptive responses (Doberstein, 2015).
The education sector is no exception. Persistent attainment gaps, rising concerns on student wellbeing, teacher shortages or sociospatial segregation are increasingly present as wicked problems that a single school or one-off reform cannot resolve. Although many systems expanded school autonomy and accountability to spur responsiveness and innovation, these policies have not systematically overcome such issues, as they often meet uneven capacity, resource asymmetries and fragmented incentives that inhibit collective action (Torres, 2021; Jerrim & Sims, 2022).
In response, governments worldwide are piloting and enacting zone-based governance arrangements (e.g., Servicios Locales de Educación Pública in Chile or Territórios de Intervenção Prioritária in Portugal). These policies tend to create intermediate, place-based administrative nodes that sit between central authorities and schools to convene stakeholders, co-design supports and steer improvement collaboratively. Read through the NPG lens, these models instantiate metagovernance, co-production and shared accountability. In order to advance comparative knowledge, a review of existing experiences is needed to map enabling conditions, tensions and likely impacts of different zone-based approaches within the NPG turn in educational policy.
Our study undertakes a systematic review of ten zone-based education policies across diverse contexts. Drawing on peer-reviewed articles, grey literature, and policy documents, we focus on key dimensions such as governance structures, stakeholder involvement, intervention design and resources, accountability and monitoring mechanisms, equity considerations, and reported outcomes.

We find considerable variation in existing designs. In some cases, the governance body of a zone is a newly created entity specifically established to assume the coordination role. In others, leadership is assigned to a member of the school network (e.g., an experienced school principal) who takes on a new position as coordinator. Another important dimension concerns the degree of political and financial autonomy granted to each governance zone, including the capacity to hire or reallocate personnel. Furthermore, school networks themselves display diverse configurations, ranging from voluntary, self-managed collaborations to mandatory arrangements coordinated—or directly steered—by a higher authority.
Beyond design differences, another initial finding is that collaboration is frequently invoked as a mechanism for improving educational opportunities and outcomes. However, collaborative practices take very different forms and do not always translate into genuine or sustained cooperation among actors. Schools, in particular, often report difficulties in moving away from individualistic work logics and in opening themselves up to partnerships with other institutions. By contrast, notions of co-responsibility and shared accountability tend to remain implicit within these governance arrangements, rarely being made explicit or problematized in policy discourse or implementation frameworks.

Authors

• Delfina Campetella, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• Edgar Quilabert, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, VAT ESQ0818002H

• Antoni Verger, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• Mauro C Moschetti, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• Marcel Pagès