Dynamics of Decentralization and Privatization: National-Subnational Tensions, Territorial Inequities, and Profit-Seeking in Colombian Education

• In Event: Who rules? Actors, movements, and struggles behind education governance in Latin America (Part 1)

Proposal

Two longstanding reform trends—decentralization and privatization—have been central to education governance debates yet rarely examined together. Since the 1950s, various forms and levels of decentralization have been promoted by international organizations and adapted worldwide. Separately, since the 1980s, educational privatization—exogenous, endogenous, and through policymaking—has advanced and shaped governance at multiple levels. While influential individually, their interaction, particularly in the past years of accelerated privatization, remains underexplored. Existing studies seldom capture their dialectical relationship, in which each can enable and constrain the other. Decentralization devolves decision-making, creating subnational markets that open entry points for private actors; uneven fiscal and technical capacities foster reliance on private companies to address quality concerns and service gaps, often exacerbated in crises; and the combined logics of efficiency and profit risk marginalizing costly-to-support schools and students.
This study examines the decentralization–privatization nexus in Colombia, a relevant case for four reasons. First, Colombia has been politically and fiscally decentralized since the 1980s, with subnational units responsible for social service provision. Second, it has experimented with diverse privatization mechanisms, including charter schools and vouchers. Third, its decentralized system operates amid stark disparities in subnational fiscal resources and capacity, raising questions about how responsibilities are met under pressures from a centralized Ministry of Education. Fourth, Colombia offers insights relevant to other countries, as global inequalities deepen and urban concentration of resources reshapes state capacity distribution. Linking these macro-level shifts to governance reforms is crucial for understanding how spatial inequality is reproduced or contested through policy.
Building on post-2000 theoretical advances, this study engages two strands of scholarship: (1) national–subnational dynamics vis-à-vis global education policy trends through policy mobilities and assemblage thinking (see Beech et al., 2023, among others), and (2) scalar approaches emphasizing how histories, politics, institutional design, and administrative traditions mediate decentralization’s implementation and effects, including strategic action across levels (see Edwards, 2023, among others). It extends this latter strand by integrating historical institutionalism, a power distributional perspective, and policy instruments literature. Historical institutionalism focuses on first-, second-, and third-order policy change and critical junctures that establish new path dependencies (Hall, 1993). The power distributional perspective highlights how subtle institutional variations shape governance outcomes through interactions between political context, change agents, and shifting institutional characteristics (Mahoney & Thelen, 2010). Policy analysis examines the tools through which actors govern systems—setting expectations, generating resource conflicts, and defining boundaries—to reveal which actors exert control (Capano & Howlett, 2020).
Empirically, the paper traces the evolution of Colombia’s political, fiscal, and administrative decentralization; analyzes its relationship to inter-jurisdictional inequities; and examines how these conditions foster various forms of privatization, including public funding of private schools to secure access and contracting private firms for supplementary services. The analysis draws on a scoping literature review, document analysis, and 53 interviews with national and subnational actors, i.e., four differently resourced Secretaries of Education. Findings focus on the period since 2015, when a decree authorized subnational units to contract private entities for education provision and management.

Authors

• D. Brent Edwards, University of Hawaii

• Tomas Esper, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• Mauro C Moschetti, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• Patricia Grillet, University of Hawaii / East-West Center

• Alejandro Caravaca, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• Edgar Quilabert, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, VAT ESQ0818002H