NN43, February 2010
A World of Reports? A Critical Review of Global Development Reports with an Angle on Education and Training
NN43 - Preface
By Kenneth King, NORRAG, Edinburgh University
NORRAG NEWS has always been interested in the critical analysis of major world conferences, global summits, and international policy papers. Some NORRAG members have been present at many of these major events, such as the World Conference on Education for All at Jomtien in 1990; indeed, several of those present in Jomtien or at the World Forum on Education at Dakar in 2000 are actually contributing to this present special issue! NORRAG dedicated the whole of NN7 to the analysis of how the Jomtien Declaration and Plan of Action were actually created, and what was the role of regional meetings in the lead up to Jomtien. Equally, NN8 was entirely preoccupied with the critical analysis of What happened in Jomtien? Six years later there was a special issue which looked very critically at UNESCO’s handling of the mid-term review of Education for All in Amman (NN19). Then for the Dakar World Forum there was an entire special issue (NN26) given over to the Forum. What was unusual about these special issues was that they were not written months after the event; the special issues were actually available as hard copies in Jomtien, Amman and Dakar.
The same was true of our treatment of the World Conference on Adult Education (NN21), or when the World Bank brought out its first Higher Education Policy paper. We organised comments from around the world on the Bank’s higher education paper (NN16), and even organised a review meeting and later an entire book on the topic. Again, as with Jomtien, some of those who were involved in that review in 1994 have also contributed to this present special issue.
When the Bank’s Skills development in Sub-Saharan Africa came out, we organised a review meeting of scholars and policy makers in Nairobi (NN32);[1] and a year later in Bamako we reviewed the EFA Global Monitoring Report on gender (NN35). On both these occasions, NORRAG’s purpose was to encourage the critical reading of these major reports within Africa itself, and to get one or two of those responsible for the reports to be present. Similarly, 2005 was the year of the report of the Millennium Project, the publication of the Commission for Africa, and the G8 in Scotland; so a whole issue (NN36) was dedicated to this ‘Development Year’. Now, five years later, in 2010, and with only five years to go to the MDG Target Year of 2015, it is an appropriate year to look critically at the world of global reports, global targets, and global summits.
What does NORRAG NEWS do with all these global reports and global summits? Ideally we try and communicate a diverse set of views about them. We don't do scholarly reviews. Rather, we give a whole series of short, sharp angles or perspectives. Here is a perfect example of a NORRAG NEWS article, just eight lines long, from NN18 in 1995, by Claudio de Moura Castro. He was commenting on the then latest World Bank Education Sector policy paper:
The latest World Bank paper says that vocational and technical education is best imparted in the work place (World Bank, 1995). This may be true but the paper should have mentioned that no industrialised countries - without a single exception - actually follow this World Bank prescription. All industrialised countries offer massive quantities of training away from the work place. This includes US, Germany and Japan. It is distinctly misleading for the Bank to tell developing countries to do something that no developed country has ever done.
In this present issue, we point to the mass of global material that gets generated by the international development constituency, and we wonder how that vast amount of data and analysis actually gets filtered into national ministries, national policy, and national universities. We suspect that the translation from global to local is very weak. This is partly because the global reports themselves don't and can’t represent the situation at the local level in any detailed way; so national policy makers need to deduce from global reports what are the implications for themselves. This may not be easy since the global reports may not focus on the whole sector, but rather on the dimensions of basic education, or of the MDGs, but not on education or development as a whole. The debate about whether the global gets lost in translation when transferred to the local will continue. We encourage NORRAG readers to contribute to this debate.
[1] See also paper 7 of the Working Group for International Cooperation on Skills Development which reviewed an early draft in Edinburgh of the Bank’s Skills Development in Sub-Saharan Africa (www.norrag/wg)