2 - The Political Economy of Education and Development in Central America and the Latin Caribbean: Regional Dynamics and a Framework for Analysis

Summary

Introduction

This chapter concerns itself with three tasks: first, to depict some key historical and regional dynamics in Central America from a political economy perspective; second, to contextualize education reform in relation to international political-economic forces affecting the region; and, third, to outline the framework that informs the analysis and commentary presented in subsequent chapters. In attending to these tasks, the purpose is not only to provide essential background context relevant to all the chapters in this volume, but also to make explicit the dimensions and tensions to which the chapters in this volume speak.

The outline sketched here of historical and regional dynamics grew out of a multiyear collaboration with a network of colleagues from Central America. Teams of scholars from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua carried out case studies of education policy making in these countries, with a focus on the 1990s and 2000s. At the invitation of this network of scholars, my contribution to this collaboration was, first, to situate the aforementioned case studies in a long-term perspective. I did so by engaging literature from the fields of international development studies, international relations, sociology, history, and political economy. Second, my contribution was to engage in a cross-case analysis of those case studies in order to examine commonalities and differences in terms of the factors that influence education policy making, as well as how education serves to resolve the political and economic tensions that characterize the region. Both the individual case studies and my contributions are contained in a book published by the Central American University, entitled Quality of Education in Central America: Dynamics and Tensions between the ∼Model of Education and the Model of Development (Cruz, 2022). However, to date, the results of this multicountry and multiyear research collaboration are only available in Spanish.

Chapters 2 and 3 of the present volume thus seek to share the fruits of the aforementioned collaboration with a wider audience by making them available in English. This chapter does this by presenting the historical and regional panorama, while Chapter 3 then presents the insights generated through comparative analysis of the individual case studies.