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The state, markets and higher education reform in Botswana
Abstract
Market forces are being introduced in public spheres such as higher education and public health, which hitherto were closed to such forces. Ironically, it is the state that is responsible for this process of marketisation. Some see this state action as leading to a growing influence of the state in public policy while others see an attenuation of its role. Critiquing this market–state incompatibility thesis from a geo-spatial perspective on globalisation, this paper calls for an articulation of state–market relations that emphasises their interpenetration. Using Botswana as a case study, the paper argues that although on-going tertiary education reforms in the country are characterised by the state's promotion of market forces this does not mean that the state is retreating, leaving the sub-sector to the vagaries of the market. Contrarily, the state is employing marketisation to reform the sub-sector so that it is responsive to labour and skills demands of an economy aspiring to be knowledge-based.
... While it is the case that this literature has impressively mapped the conceptual contours of the phenomenon, at the level of practice however, inter-disciplinarity often is presented as a technocratic exercise that involves simply repackaging existing knowledge to achieve the twin ends of relevance and responsiveness. This 'technicist' view of interdisciplinarity abounds in policy documents on higher education (Millar, 2016;Tabulawa, Polelo & Silas, 2013). Less emphasised is interdisciplinarity's ideological dimension i.e. how it impacts university culture and reshapes academics' professional identities. ...
... It is more potent when introduced together with an array of other reforms, such as semesterisation/modularisation, student-centredness and cost recover/sharing mechanisms, geared towards construction of a customer mentality among students and parents. Collectively, these reforms change the identities of students, parents, academics and institutions; education institutions/academics become 'providers' and students 'clients/customers' ready to demand an education that positions them favourably in the labour market (Tabulawa, Polelo & Silas, 2013). Academics are then transformed from in-ward to outward looking professionals. ...
... Here we see an attempt to redefine the state-marketsociety relationship; the state was to be 'rolled back' by elevating the market: "As the private sector matures, it can be given greater responsibilities for promoting national development, relieving the Government of some of the tasks it necessarily assumed when the private sector was nascent" (Republic of Botswana, 1991, p. 78). This was a major rethink of the Botswana developmental state, in which the state was the prime mover in development, but did so without seeking to supplant the market (Tabulawa et al., 2013). Withdrawal of the state was expected to lead to a scaling down of the welfare state. ...
This paper explicates the growing interest in interdisciplinarity as a form of knowledge organisation at the University of Botswana (UB). It accomplishes this by locating this development in a global context of a growing instrumentalisation of knowledge, partially occasioned by the advent of the knowledge society. Generally, the paper argues that interdisciplinarity is not some neutral, apolitical technical re-arrangement of knowledge, as often presented. Rather, it is a political technology implicated in attempts to break academics' monopoly on the processes and products of higher education (HE). It attributes interdisciplinarity's rise to the emergence in the 1970s of neoliberalism as a social settlement that privileges market rationality. There is, therefore, affinity between interdisciplinarity and neoliberalism, and it is a relationship in which the former is being deployed by the latter in HE to produce 'neoliberal academic subjects'. The case of UB is presented as a specific case of the general argument that interdisciplinarity is designed to effect new forms of academic subjectivities attuned to market rationality.
... In short, we may agree with Polelo that higher education was killed on the altar of efficiency and equity. The period of focus on primary education was also one of a decline of higher education in Africa and worldwide [37]. ...
This paper examines the illusion of relying on development aid by least developed countries in their
development agenda. The paper makes a theoretical analysis of aid by utilising a fusion of Dependency Theories and the Chinese dirge “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”. Using the historical, political, economic and capacity building contexts in Malawi as a proxy, the paper contends that development aid is not doing aid enough to development but
that it could be perceived just as another masked trap to neo-colonialism. The paper hence recommends that developing countries together with partners of good will should help break this chain of neo
-colonialism so that the end of the tunnel, meaningful development possible.
... Interaction between research and community engagement can also lead to positive synergies. The movement of research out of universities towards specialised (often private) units has been argued for on the basis of greater efficiency and attunement to industrial needs, but it has deeper implications in terms of the shift from basic towards applied research, with a movement from mode 1 knowledge towards mode 2 knowledge (as discussed in relation to Botswana in Tabulawa et al. 2013): this shift has apparent short-term benefits, but the longer-term ramifications are a source of concern. Furthermore, unbundling also prevents cross-subsidisation, through which institutions can use more lucrative activities to support those pursuits with less potential for profit generation but with other forms of value. ...
Higher education is increasingly acknowledged by national governments and international agencies as a key driver of development, and systems are expanding rapidly in response to rising demand. Moreover, universities have been attributed a central role in the post-2015 development agenda and the achievement of the sustainable development goals. Yet questions of institutional models and their differential impact on society have not received sufficient attention. This paper presents an analysis of the ‘anatomy’ of the university in order to identify the salient changes in the institution across time and location in relation to knowledge and relationships with society. A framework is proposed structured around three key dimensions: first, ‘value’—the extent to which knowledge is treated as intrinsically or instrumentally worthwhile; second, ‘function’—the role of the university in terms of storage, transmission, production or application of knowledge; third, ‘interaction’—the flow of ideas and actors between the university and society. This analytical framework is then utilised to assess two dominant tendencies in global higher education: commodification and unbundling. Finally, implications are drawn out for universities’ potential impact on development in low- and middle-income countries in the context of these contemporary trends.
... However, this is not to say that African countries are uniformly "basket cases." Some Africa nations have changed their formal institutions in recent decades through economic reforms, such as Botswana (Tabulawa, Polelo, & Silas, 2013) and Mauritius (Meyer & Venter, 2013). Both these nations now have less corruption and less business regulations than their typical Sub-Saharan Africa peers (Miller, Kim, & Holmes, 2014). ...
This paper uses hierarchical cluster analysis to group 35 countries listed as advanced economies by the International Monetary Fund, based upon their scores on the Index of Economic Freedom. Cluster analysis is a technique that groups together observations (cases) based on how similar they are to each other with regards to certain variables. In this paper, countries are grouped together based upon their scores on the ten components from the Index of Economic Freedom (IEF) published by the Heritage foundation. The ten component scores from the IEF that are used to cluster (or group) these nations measure the following: (1) business freedom, (2) trade freedom, (3) fiscal freedom, (4) government size, (5) monetary freedom, (6) investment freedom, (7) financial freedom, (8) property rights, (9) freedom from corruption, and (10) labor freedom. Clustering these nations by the ten components of economic freedom from the IEF should lead to nations with similar institutions and policies grouping together in the same cluster, while those with different institutions and policies should group in differing clusters. A taxonomy based upon six clusters (groups) is developed based upon the results of the cluster analysis. Some of the groupings are consistent with the historical linkages between countries as well as some of the common typologies found in the literature. The former British colonies of the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia tend to cluster together, indicating that these nations that share a common history with one another also share similar institutions with regards to economic freedom. Western European nations tend to cluster together as well, due to the fact that they often exhibit a combination of low corruption, strong property rights, but large governments, high taxation and fairly regulated labor markets. The Asian Tiger nations display some similarities to one another with regards to economic freedom, with Hong Kong and Singapore clustering together, as does South Korea and Taiwan. The economic freedom of countries has been used to predict a number of outcomes, including economic growth, happiness, self-employment and new firm founding rates. Using cluster membership variables to predict these outcome variables is an alternative way of examining these relationships. This can be done by simply constructing a series of dummy variables representing which cluster each country belongs to and using these dummy variables in a traditional regression analysis. This method may be particularly useful given the multicollinearity that exist between different components of economic freedom, and the complex interactions that are likely to exist among these variables.
The purpose of this paper is to criticize the New Public Management (NPM) in the higher education of Iran with a moral lens. Qualitative content analysis was used for this purpose and the fourth to sixth National Development Plans as well as the Comprehensive Scientific Map of Iran were investigated. The model of NPM that is promoted in the Iranian higher education mostly emphasizes corporatization and the diversification of financial resources, while less attention has been paid to the other dimensions, such as customer-orientation and accountability. The findings revealed that the NPM in Iranian higher education (a kind of pseudo-neoliberalism) is not only incompatible with the Islamic moral goals, but there are also significant contradictions. NPM is based on the commodification of knowledge and the homo economicus, while in Islam, emphasis is on the value of knowledge too, and the truth-seeking is the important mission of knowledge.
The ability of universities to fulfil the developmental role is not only dependent on their internal workings, but also on the external policy environment. This chapter addresses three major global trends affecting higher education: status competition, manifesting itself principally through international university rankings; commodification, appearing through the expansion of the private sector but also marketisation within public sectors; and unbundling, the disaggregation of the various functions of the university and constituent parts of the teaching and learning process. While these three are complex and sometimes contradictory processes, they all have a potential negative impact on the ability of universities to promote the SDGs, through reducing the resources available for contribution to the public good, and encouraging exclusivity rather than inclusivity.
The University of Botswana (UB) was established by government in 1982 as a national university. Its historically dominant role within the country’s tertiary education sector and its significance in national life make it Botswana’s flaship university. While its historical evolution is fairly well documented, the same cannot be said about its contribution to the nation’s well-being. This chapter addresses this concern by examining UB’s contributions to research, capacity building, and policy development and by exploring how it has influenced the development of the higher education sector in Botswana. The study’s methodology was primarily a desk review of policy documents, historical records and annual reports produced abundantly by the government and the university itself.
Higher education has special stakes for ruling ideologies and strategies. Universities represent the needs of the state and capital as the needs of society, while adapting the skills of professional workers to labour markets. Despite this role, often spaces are created for alternative pedagogies and critical citizenship.
As part of that long-standing conflict, marketization tendencies have a long history. Student numbers have increased, while teaching has been under-resourced and so appears as an ‘inefficiency’ problems, to be solved by standardizing curricula. Knowledge has been packaged in textbook-type formats, so that students become customers for products. As a US critic once remarked, ‘the various universities are competitors for the traffic in merchantable instruction’ (Veblen 1918: 65).
Neoliberalism--the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action--has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. Through critical engagement with this history, he constructs a framework, not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.
Adopting new and much more comprehensive concepts of both power and politics, the author develops a theoretical framework to show who really governs the world economy. He goes on to explore some of the non-state authorities, from mafias to the 'Big Six' accounting firms and international bureaucrats, whose power over who gets what in the world encroaches on that of national governments. The book is a signpost, pointing to some promising new directions for the future development of research and teaching in international political economy.
