Elites, Incrementalism and Educational Policy‐making in Post‐independence Zambia

Abstract

The growing gap between the rhetoric of educational reform and the propensity of educational institutions to stay the course or veer in some unexpected direction in many developing countries demands an understanding of some major factors influencing educational policymaking. Many evaluations of educational reforms and experiments in these countries have tended to focus on the technical side of the enterprise, namely on issues of design, resource and other environmental constraints on the implementation process, to the marginalisation of group influence and method of policy-making. There are other subtle but equally important concerns which are of interest to the student of comparative education, namely the questions of who makes or influences educational policy, and how such a policy is made have an equally important bearing on the fate of educational reforms. Studies alluding to these concerns have not been entirely lacking. O'Brien [1], for example, has examined the role played by el1ite groups in the recent Educational Reform debates in Zambia [2] but his approach is hyperfactual, with an over-concern for factual narrative without theoretical underpinning or significance. The inclusion in this discussion of 61ite and incremental models of policy-making is intended to address this deficiency. For the purpose of an orderly discussion, the paper is prefaced by a review of el1ite and incremental models of policy-making, and then proceeds to outline three major educational policy efforts in 1966, 1976-77 and 1979-82 aimed at reforming the national educational system, and examine realities of policy-making against the two models. The choice of Zambia is interesting in that it is one of the few ex-British colonies in Africa to make a serious attempt to break with several British educational conventions, but without much success. The 1976-77 Educational Reform proposals, for example, were the only occasion in Commonwealth Africa to attempt to enlist wide popular participation in educational policy-making in the postindependence era. The Reform proposals were so well advertised both in and outside the country that one author was enticed to compare them with those undertaken in the Netherlands [3], while others gave extensive comments in international journals [4,5], and at international conferences [6].