Disconnect and capture of education decentralisation reforms in Nepal: implications for community involvement in schooling

Abstract

This article argues that processes of disconnect and capture have affected Nepal's efforts to decentralise its education system, leading to a failure to engage the very stakeholders – parents and communities – that the reforms sought to reach. Specifically, disconnect occurred in the development and implementation of the latest ‘decentralisation’ reforms because they were formulated via a highly centralised policy-making process and then implemented from the top down. As a result, they had little impact on community-level school leadership or ownership, and led to a continued exclusion of the very community-level stakeholders that the reforms sought to engage. Furthermore, the policy reforms have also led to an increased central legitimisation and empowerment of school management committees, which in turn has facilitated the capture and politicisation of these bodies by locally established leaders who are often not motivated to engage parents and community members in school reform. While these processes are not necessarily new phenomena to Nepal, they illustrate the extent to which globalised policy agendas have been ineffective in engaging community-level stakeholders.