Accountability and Global Education Policy Networks in the Indo-Pacific

Concern about education outcomes and the desire to improve literacy and numeracy outcomes has become a key part of social and economic policy agendas in high-income and middle- and low-income nations alike. What is also common to these concerns is an ever-increasing focus on measuring, monitoring and accountability as a key strategy for improving outcomes and equity.

Current practices in many countries are compliance-oriented, and they include devolution of responsibility and steering at a distance; the setting of KPIs and targets; and requirements to present data of particular types in particular formats, often on public sites (‘intimate accounting’).  But such compliance-oriented practices have not proven to be successful in improving student outcomes in many advanced economies, and have had several detrimental outcomes.

This project aims to explore the lived, day-to-day enactments of accountability in a number of entangled sites by examining approaches to, understandings of, and practices of accountability promoted by key international governmental organisations (IGOs), international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) and think tanks that are seeking to advance accountability and reforms in the Global South, as well as practices of accountability in two national sites – Cambodia and India.

Based on these empirical explorations, the aim is to develop principles for sustainable, deliberative and participatory accountability practices. The project also aims to contribute to accountability theory, and to theories of globalisation, contextualisation, infrastructures and 'scaling' in development work.