THE WORLD BANK AND THE IMPLEMENTATION OF EDUCATIONAL POLICIES: FORMS OF INFLUENCE AND OMISSIONS
Keywords:
World Bank, policy implementation, education policy, non-State actors, educationAbstract
The World Bank has been for decades one of the most influential non-state actors in education, both in terms of funding and of knowledge production in the field of global education policy. However, there is little information on the contributions of the agency regarding the implementation of educational policies. Based on a systematic literature review consisting of 43 studies, this article identifies the various ways of influence of the World Bank in the implementation of educational policies internationally and analyzes some of the factors that have emerged as facilitators as barriers to its implementation. The forms of influence identified cover the entire implementation process, from the design of policies and the establishment of conditionalities, to the provision of technical assistance to recipient countries and the evaluation of implementation. Finally, the results also show some of the unexpected results by the financial entity, linked to the Bank’s inability to fully control the implementers and its omission of countries’ contextual factors in the policies design.
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