International organizations and domestic policy reform : the case of basic education in Egypt in the 1990s

Abstract

Described by the world bank to be essential for building democratic societies and competitive economies, basic education headed the agendas of development agencies in the 1990s. The 1990s is also the decade when Egypt topped the lists of recipients of development assistance and proclaimed education to be its national project. This Study seeks to explain how domestic policy making interacts with and reacts to international development assistance directed to reform issues that involve cultural and institutional normative change. Those reforms required institutional changes that were inconsistent with the functions, structures and culture of Egyptian educational institutions and have operated in a climate of suspicion surrounding foreign aid to education. The analysis looks at how issues of reform are specified, problems diagnosed, and then reforms are implemented and evaluated. I analyze the process of international socialization of reforms through which external actors endorsed a set of values in order to internalize and habitualize them within Egyptian educational institutions. Throughout the analysis I examine the communication style adopted by the state and development agencies to persuade and raise moral consciousness during the various stages of the policy cycle, so as to investigate the level of engagement of domestic elites and development agencies in the institutionalization and persuasion processes. In the course of the study I look at how the norms of the international community interact with domestic policy development and the conflict of ideas that surrounds donor-sponsored reforms. I explore the impact of development assistance on the domestic policy process (initiation, formulation, implementation and valuation) as well as the participation of civil society. The main argument is that the low level of ownership and consensus among the various domestic actors and the failure to establish domestic strategic coalitions in support of reforms result into poor implementation of these reforms and their incomplete internalization. Policy makers did not succeed to achieve the minimum level of 'domestic resonance' essential for embedding the values and administrative cultures advanced by reforms in institutions or publics. Therefore, domestic actors inside and outside the educational establishment resisted reforms at both the social and administrative levels.