Politics and specialized knowledge
the educational reform in Uruguay (1995-1999)
Keywords:
Education, Educational Policy, Uruguay, Education ReformAbstract
Over the last two decades, especially since the foreign debt crisis, Latin America has undergone an intensive process of economic reform. In broad terms, both the process of economic adjustment and the reorientation of public policies have been aligned with the mainstream economic policy that has dominated since the 1980s: liberalism. The multilateral credit agencies (World Bank, IMF, IDB) have played a prominent role in
promoting this new model of market-oriented development. However, reform of the different sectoral policies has not always followed to the letter the models deriving from the Washington Consensus. The aim of this paper is to analyze the political factors that intervene in the dynamic of specialized knowledge in general, and more specifically in the process of the transfer of policies from international financial institutions. In order to explore this theoretical question, we look at the case of the Educational Reform Program in Uruguay (1995-1999), one of the most important structural transformations to be carried out in the country in the last fifteen years. The World Bank and IDB played a fundamental role in both funding and implementation of the reform. However, the orientation of the reform was not imported from these institutions. On the contrary, the new policy paradigm is the product of a long and complex process of endogenous accumulation of specialist knowledge in the area of education policy .
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