TVET reforms in the Arab region : the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ in policy development

Abstract

There is a growing concern about the autonomy of national policy making and implementation within the turbulent global context. Globalisation, it is argued, reinforces the tendency for national economies to be increasingly interconnected, and for national policies to be shaped not only by national actors but also by global dynamics. The effects of globalisation hold true not only for economic relations but also for contemporary educational systems (Schriewer & Martinez, 2004), and the dialectic of the global and the local in education has been the focus of much research and debate in recent years (Steiner-Khamsi, 2004; Zajda, 2005; Rust, 2000; Sahlberg, 2008). At the heart of this debate are the complex issues of policy borrowing and policy lending (Phillips, 2005), which are of particular relevance to the educational reform movements that we see taking place across the Arab region. Several authors have proposed different models to describe and analyse processes of educational policy borrowing, with the focus typically being on crossnational attraction in education, the distinctive stages of policy borrowing, and the spectrum of policies and practices that are subject to educational transfers (Ochs & Phillips, 2004; Steiner-Khamsi, 2004). These models help us understand why some countries are more likely than others to be ‘policy makers’ rather than ‘policy takers’, identify patterns in the international flows of educational policies and practices, and decode the motivations behind a country’s or a region’s ambition to export (or import) policies, as well as the mechanisms that are usually used in order to facilitate the circulation of ‘solutions’ to perceived educational challenges. In this chapter, we will draw on some of this extensive literature in order to offer some reflections about the way such global forces have an impact on educational policy making in a number of Arab states. Our purview will necessarily have to be limited, and we will adopt a case-study approach, focusing on one education sector – Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) – and on one dimension of that sector – National Qualifications Frameworks (NQFs) – in an effort to illustrate some of the dynamic interactions between the global and the local in educational policy development in the Arab region. The Arab region is in a state of flux: population growth, urbanisation, industrialisation, growing graduate unemployment, and inward and outward migration, are some of the more immediately visible trends that have a major impact on most if not all the social institutions, not least the education system. As the different Arab countries engage reforms, they have major options to consider and choices to make, in an effort to safeguard identity and culture within an ever more tightly interlinked world. While there seems to be well-nigh consensus about the need to build knowledge-based economies and societies, a key debate is the manner in which the local and the global are to interact. The authors of the Arab Human Development Report, for instance, emphasise that lasting reform “must come from within”, but also argue that the “Arab World must turn outwards and immerse itself in the global knowledge stream” and that “Arabs need to drive the process themselves: promoting local innovation as a necessary complement to harnessing knowledge and technology from abroad” (UNDP, 2004, pp. i–ii). Similar views have been expressed by other agencies (inter alia, ETF and World Bank, 2006; World Bank, 2008).