Private interests and public policies: a systematization of non-state actors’ strategies in the promotion of educational reform
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5944/reec.42.2023.35942Keywords:
Private sector, philanthropic foundations, educational policy, policy formation, public policy, privatizationAbstract
This paper aims at identifying the different influence strategies mobilized by the private sector to influence in the area of educational policy. While a growing body of scholarship has documented the deepening embeddedness of the corporate sector within policy-making processes, empirical research on such questions remains unsystematised and fragmentary. Furthermore, the bulk of existing evidence on corporate policy-influence strategies focuses on a limited group of Anglo-American countries and, consequently, is ill suited to capturing emerging policy dynamics globally. This article explores and systematizes a series of policy influence strategies mobilized by the private sector in the field of education, drawing on a literature review focused on pro-market educational reforms. Building on the results of this literature, this paper categorises four emerging strategies articulated by the corporate sector: knowledge mobilization, networking, engaging with grassroots, and leading by example. Each strategy is illustrated with examples from a selection of country case studies.
The study finds that the private sector plays an increasingly heterogeneous range of roles in education policy, and that private organizations are diversifying the resources and forms of capital they mobilize. Thus, when it comes to influencing public policy, the private sector does not rely solely on its economic power and the more obvious forms of political capital, but increasingly relies on relatively informal connections with different actors (such as the third sector, or economic and civil society elites), and their recognition as experts and as knowledge producers, acquired through the mobilization of evidence. Finally, our results suggest that the private sector is increasingly operating as a major political actor, organically integrated into policy-making processes and spaces
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