Subvention and Governance Reforms in Secondary Education in Bangladesh: Actors, Acquiescence and Resistance in the Policy Processes

Abstract

The study examines the trajectory of policy processes related to secondary education governance reforms in Bangladesh covering a period from 1993 to 2012. It traces the gradual changes in the school—state relationship, the role of the multilateral institutions (the World Bank and Asia Development Bank), the complex interactions between various national policy actors and these multinational institutions in the process and the responses from various local actors to this change. The study focuses particularly on the shifting policy meaning of subvention. In Bangladesh, nongovernment secondary schools constitute about 98 percent of the secondary education system, and they receive significant subvention from the government in the form of salary support to the teachers. By situating the analysis of subvention in the shifting policy context over the last 20 years where the multinational institutions have come to play an increasingly powerful discursive role, the study illuminates how subvention has gradually become a key policy lever in the emerging mode of governance driven by new managerialism. Then, the study looks at how the managerial governance reform was mediated and negotiated by various national and local policy actors. <br/> Conceptually, this study selectively appropriates the perceptual and analytic tools drawn from critical theories and post structuralism. First, it approaches the analysis of national policy context and its interface with global policy environment enacted through the multinational agencies through the critical conceptualization of policy borrowing and lending from comparative education. Second, the study approaches the powerful discursive roles played by the multinational institutions in legitimizing their preferred policy solutions through the theories of discourse formation and their relations to ‘truth’ and knowledge. Third, it draws upon the Foucauldian notion of Governmentality, the architecture of self-governance, in understanding the changing school-state relationship and the new mode of governance manifested in the newly instituted practices. Fourth, it appropriates Thomas Pedroni’s post-structurally informed Gramscian discussion of re-articulation in order to assess the processes of mediation and negotiation that various local actors engage under the changed relationship. <br/> Data for this qualitative research came from four major sources: (i) review and interpretation of embedded discourses in various documents; (ii) interviews and focus group discussions with various actors both at the school and community level and at the policy making level; (iii) in-depth analysis of two school situations and (iv) observations from various meetings, training and workshops on secondary education. <br/> The findings of the study suggest that while administration of subvention had a number of real problems, the multilateral institutions (MLIs) constructed the problems in a preferred way to gradually advance a managerial self-governance model that would delink subvention from teachers’ salaries and move the system towards financing of the schools through grants conditional upon meeting a set of performance criteria. The legitimating narratives of the MLIs, buttressed with a plethora of discursive products, an overwhelming ‘referential web’ and resources for education development projects, redefined goals of education in terms of meeting market needs and gave new meanings to the categories like ‘nongovernment schools’ as ‘private schools.’ New identities and roles were assigned to the schools and school communities—all drawn from neoliberal market principles and practices in the private sector enterprises. The linkage between “subvention” and “provision of education” was now to be reconceptualised as a “transaction” under a form of contractualism leading to a significant change in the school-state relationship. <br/> The research found that implementation of this governance model had evoked a range of responses and strategies of resistance/subversion from various local actors. They included, among others, (i) ‘policy double-speak,’ procrastination and deferment of implementation from various parts of the government, (ii) counter-discursive strategies of teachers’ unions dragging the policy debates into the political terrain to deny the MLIs any space in the debate, (iii) non-acceptance of and resistance to the identities on offer from the schools and school communities, and (iv) disentangling the discursive constructs of the multilaterals, identifying the ruptures and weaknesses in them and creatively rearticulating the concerns of the school communities into a different set of political discourses. All these impacted the implementation of the governance model preferred by MLIs.