Transforming Education In Egypt: Western Influence and Domestic Policy Reform

By Fatma H. Sayed

Basic education-considered essential for building democratic societies and competitive economies-has headed the agendas of development agencies in recent years. During the same period, Egypt topped the lists of recipients of development assistance and proclaimed education to be its national project. In Transforming Education in Egypt, political scientist Fatma Sayed explains how Egyptian domestic political actors have interacted with and reacted to international development aid to Egypt's educational system, particularly when that aid is linked to sensitive issues of reform and cultural change. In recent years, international donors have called for changes that are inconsistent with the functions, structures and culture of Egyptian institutions, resulting in a climate of suspicion surrounding foreign aid to education.
In this penetrating analysis, Sayed looks at how problems are diagnosed and reforms implemented and resisted. As Sayed demonstrates, the low level of ownership and consensus among the various domestic actors and the failure to establish strategic coalitions to support the reforms result in poor implementation and incomplete internalization. Policy makers have to date not succeeded in achieving the minimum level of domestic consensus essential for embedding the values and culture that bring about true reform. From the debate over free education to conspiracy theories and the evolving definition of international norms, this book sheds new light on the conflict of ideas that surrounds donor-sponsored reforms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9781617975417

Book preview

Western Influence and

Domestic Policy Reform

Fatma H. Sayed

The American University in Cairo Press

Cairo New York

Copyright © 2006 by

The American University in Cairo Press

113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt

420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018

www.aucpress.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 977 416 016 9

Dar el Kutub No. 23753/05

Designed by Fatiha Bouzidi/AUC Press Design Center

Printed in Egypt

To my beloved daughter Sara Umiliani

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Why Study the Influence of International Organizations on the Transformation of Education in Egypt?

The Analytical Approach

Part 1: International Norms and Domestic Policy Development

Chapter 1: Development Assistance and the International Socialization of Basic Education Reforms in the 1990s

The International Community: What It Is and What It Wants

Prevailing Developmental Ideas in the ‘International Community’ and the Role of Education as an Agent and a Subject of International Socialization

How Does the ‘International Community’ Aim to Achieve its Development Philosophy and Vision of Globalization?

Defining State ‘Domestic Interests’ in the Light of International Norms: International Organizations as Policy Teachers

The ‘Master Plan’ for Education Policy Reforms in the Developing World

Domestic Technocrats as Actors of International Socialization

Chapter 2: External and Internal Security Pressures and their Implications for Decision-Making in Basic Education

The Historical Setting of Education Policies

Education, National Security and Political Stability

Conclusion

Part 2: Development Assistance Versus Domestic Opposition: The Conflict of Ideas

Chapter 3: The Philosophy of Development and Its Impact on Development Assistance Directed to Basic Education

Defining Development and Identifying the Role of Education

The Counterarguments to Education and Economic Transformation: The Case of Egypt

The Role of Education in Neo-liberal Thought

The Neo-conservative View of the Role of Education

Free Education: The Leading Subject in Egypt’s National Education Debate

Developmental Thought and Egyptian Education Reform in the 1990s: Achieving Domestic Consensus

Conclusion

Chapter 4: Conditionality, the Conspiracy Theory, and International Cooperation

Defining Conditionality and Its Rationale

Political Motives for Providing Development Assistance to Egypt

The Conspiracy Theory: Its Origins and Propagators

The Presumed Triangle of the Conspiracy in Education

The Impact of the Conspiracy Theory on Development Assistance and Education in Egypt

Is There any Genuine Evidence of Conspiracy in the Conditions of EU and USAID Projects?

Does the Basic Education Curriculum Confirm the Conspiracy Assumptions?

The Impact of the Conspiracy Theory on International Assistance to Basic Education

Conclusion

Chapter 5: Development Assistance and the Concept of Participation in Basic Education

Democratization, Decentralization, and Governance in Education

The Community Participation Model in the Provision of Basic Education

Girls’ Education, Development Assistance, and Community Participation

The State, Development Assistance Agencies, and Civil Society

The Institutional Framework of the Democratization of the Education System

Conclusion

Chapter 6: Conclusion

The Model of Analysis and the Main Argument of the Study

Communicating with Identities, Interests, and Preferences

The Conspiracy Theory and Identity Issues as Contextual Variables

Applying the International Socialization Model and Identifying the Level of Domestic Consensus in Basic Education

Participation and Domestic Reform Consensus

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

First of all I would like to thank my professor Martin Rhodes, who was the main source of inspiration for this study and whose guidance, unlimited support, encouragement, and endless patience helped me complete this research. I also am deeply grateful to Professor Yves Mény for his continuous academic support, enlightening observations, and advice. To professors Ilya Harik and Ghassan Salamé, I wish to express my sincere appreciation for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this work and invaluable encouragement.

This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Professor Hassan Sayed, whose personal integrity, dedication to academia, perfectionism, passion for art, and creativity steer my every step and stimulate my inquisitiveness and ambition. I would also like to thank my mother, Nabila Okashia, whose love, unconditional support, liberal and positive outlook, and deep spirituality gave me the strength to dare, grow, and realize my dreams. My mother meticulously monitored all the Egyptian daily newspapers and other mass media to collect, classify, and register dates and references of news articles, press releases, and editorials related to my research and mailed them to me on a regular basis. In addition, she worked very hard to collect all the school textbooks of the eight years of basic education level (since changed to nine) in Egypt to enable me to analyze the content of school curricula. To Azza Karam, my closest friend, I owe the courage to leave secure employment and a set way of life in order to pursue an academic career and build on my desire for personal and professional growth. Azza has been a major source of sustenance all through this work and a driving force behind my most significant undertakings.

My beloved husband and soul mate Simone Umiliani, my sweet nephews Adam and Maria Letizia, my brother and best friend Sherif, and my cherished friend and sister in-law Salma Taher have been the main source of unconditional love, constant reassurance, and most of all, of joy throughout the writing of this book. I am most blessed and grateful for having them all in my life. I am also grateful to the Umiliani family for their kindness, affection, and for being a valuable point of reference. Thanks are also due to my friend and former boss, Dr. Mohamed Feteha, who encouraged my career development and sustained me all the way through my trajectory.

I also wish to express my recognition of and sincerest appreciation for the valuable help of Dr. Nader Fergany (international expert and lead author of the UN Arab Human Development Report), Dr. Robert Springborg (former director of the American Research Center in Egypt and present Chair in Middle East Studies and Director of the London Middle East Institute at SOAS), professor Salwa Gomaa (professor of public policies and director of the Public Administration Research and Consultation Center at Cairo University), Nagwa Farag (senior expert at the Supreme Council for Motherhood and Childhood), Essam Assaad (community education advisor at CARE International), Magdy Mehanni (capacity building and community schools’ expert), Dr. Kamal Mogheeth (senior researcher at the National Education Research Center), and Dr. Mahmoud Mahfouz (former head of the Education Committee at the Shura Council). They contributed immensely to enriching my insight and were valuable sources of information and references for the fieldwork and in-depth interviews conducted for this study.

Last but not least, I wish to thank all my friends for their companionship and affection and for sustaining me through the years.

Abbreviations

Introduction

Why Study the Influence of International

Organizations on the Transformation of

Education in Egypt?

"E gypt is the black hole of development assistance." These were the words of an international development agency official, when I mentioned that I was conducting my study of the impact of development assistance on basic education policies in Egypt during the 1990s. Similar statements have been repeatedly disputed by the Egyptian state and by development agencies and analyzed by academics and developmentalists. The main question is: Why does development assistance work or fail? The failure or success of aid has engaged public discourse in Egypt for many years and the debate has often been oriented toward the conspiracy theory, claims of the government’s corruption and/or that of development agencies, or local cultural values that get in the way of reforms. Very few academic works include comprehensive research on the political and normative context within which policy reforms, supported by development assistance, are introduced.

Therefore, it is important to understand what happens in the black box of policymaking and how the domestic policy process interacts with and reacts to foreign development assistance. It is also essential to identify the contextual variables (politics, society, economic conditions, and normative order) that affect the domestic policy process and its interaction with foreign development assistance. This is particularly true of a sensitive policy issue such as basic education. This book explores these issues and examines how policy reforms (which entail cultural and institutional normative changes) are decided, and how issues of reform are specified and problems diagnosed. This analysis will also examine the relative weight and influence of the various actors (external and domestic) on basic education policy process in Egypt. But most important of all, the analysis looks at how policy reforms are communicated and socialized on the domestic level, taking into consideration communication style as a major element in the process of institutionalizing and internalizing policy reforms.

I examine the international socialization of basic education policy reforms in the process of which development assistance agencies have endorsed a set of values in order to embed and habitualize them within Egyptian educational institutions. For this analysis I adopt Finnemore and Sikkink’s definition of international socialization to be the process by which actors internalize norms and habitualize them in the daily institutional practices (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). These norms represent the collective understanding and expectations about appropriate behavior of actors that share a specific identity.

The critical decade of the 1990s witnessed the end of the Cold War and the reshuffling of the world economic and political order. This brought about political and economic changes that have increased the significance of development assistance as an important mechanism affecting international relations. Nevertheless such changes forced policy makers in donor countries to rethink the destination and agendas of assistance. The very concept of development was widened to give more weight to human development criteria, such as the eradication of poverty, socio-economic equity, the goal of universal basic education, and individual empowerment as being central to development. Hence it is important to take a careful and comprehensive look at the interaction of development assistance with national development policies during that decade. Holding human welfare to be the ultimate purpose of development implies that the formation of human beings makes up a large part of the development process. This highlights the importance of education and empowerment for individuals, both as a means and an objective of development. Basic education in particular headed the agendas of development agencies throughout the decade and is defined by the World Bank (the largest donor to education during the 1990s) to be a powerful instrument for reducing poverty and inequality, improving health and social well-being, and laying the basis for sustained economic growth . . . and essential for building democratic societies as well as competitive economies (World Bank 2002a).

Egypt is an ideal case study of development assistance since it has topped the lists of development assistance recipients for the two decades after it signed the Camp David Accords in 1978, and has been second only to Israel in receiving aid from USAID. It also topped the list of recipients of European Union (EU) development assistance at 5.5 percent in 1997–98 (Commission of the European Communities 2000). Development assistance to Egypt in 1991 amounted to US$ 4.6 billion, which represents around 10 percent of total world development assistance (DANIDA 1996).

Being among those countries that receive large amounts of development assistance, Egypt is also influenced by trends of development assistance in the rest of the world. Therefore, parallel to the economic reform programs indicated by international organizations (IOs) and supported by donors, more programs were planned to bring about more social welfare and sustainable development. Areas such as basic education (especially girls’ education), civil society, the preservation of the environment, and basic health services attracted the most attention from the donor community in Egypt. Large donors such as the United States, the World Bank, the African Development Fund, the European Union, Germany, France, Canada, and others allocated some of their assistance budgets to basic education and recognized it as a fundamental element of human capital formation. Numerous programs addressing educational reform in Egypt have been planned and implemented by various international assistance agencies, both bilaterally and multilaterally.

Nevertheless, human development in Egypt remains an important challenge given that its working population amounted to only 25 percent of a total 64 million inhabitants during the 1990s. More than 20.4 percent of Egyptians live below the absolute objective poverty line of US$ 190 per year and the per capita income has been well below that of neighboring countries, according to Sophie de Caen, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Deputy Resident Representative in Egypt (UNDP 2003). It is worth noting that Egypt ranked 112th out of 173 countries on the Human Development Index (life expectancy, nutrition, education and literacy, infant mortality rates, and others) in 1998 and 120th out of 175 countries in 2003 (UNDP and Institute of National Planning, Egypt 2003).

My choice of the 1990s as the time frame for this study is justified not only by the fact that it is the period during which Egypt received the most development assistance: the 1990s were also the decade in which basic education was launched as Egypt’s national project par excellence and became the focus of attention of international development organizations. Furthermore, during that period international organizations gained more say in the field of national development plans seeking to achieve universal basic education, eradicate absolute poverty, and create socio-economic equity.

The Analytical Approach

The analytical approach in this book employs a number of concepts from the constructivist and the rationalist arguments of international relations theories. I maintain that both can be used in this analysis and are not necessarily in contradiction with one another. The rationalist approach purports that domestic actors may adopt reforms that are sponsored by external agencies in order to achieve other political or economic benefits, and not because they genuinely believe in the validity of those reforms. The constructivist explanation does not exclude the rationalist interpretation but maintains that throughout the instrumental adoption of reforms the domestic normative order reacts to the externally sponsored reforms and espouses them in different degrees. The degree of internalization of reforms in the existent normative order, according to the constructivist approach, is linked to socialization mechanisms and the interaction between international development agencies and domestic elites.

The rationalist approach helps explain why and how domestic policy actors (decision-makers and state elites) resort to international organizations and external assistance for policy guidance and espouse specific reforms on domestic policy issues. The constructivist approach on the other hand provides sufficient tools for analyzing how domestic actors, institutions, and groups put into effect reforms in a way that could either lead to their internalization or carry out reforms only on the ceremonial and official level without internalizing them.

According to the constructivists, the successful implementation of reforms requires three sequential phases: ceremonial conformity; persuasion and moral consciousness; and internalization and sustainability (Risse and Sikkink 1999).

Throughout my analysis I examine the communication style adopted by state and development agencies to persuade and raise moral consciousness during the various stages of the policy cycle. Therefore, I also investigate the levels of engagement of domestic elites and development agencies in the institution-alization and persuasion processes, which are intended to generate sufficient consent among domestic actors and institutions for reforms and embed them in the existing normative order.

This book seeks to shed light on how domestic politics, institutions, and social and cultural factors interact with external assistance in the field of national development. It aims to explain how reforms are carried out in such a way as to modify the normative order of domestic political, administrative, and social institutions as well as their formal and informal cultures.

Part 1

International Norms and

Domestic Policy Development

Chapter 1

Development Assistance and

the International Socialization of Basic

Education Reforms in the 1990s

This chapter presents the theoretical framework of the analysis and examines the concept of ‘international community,’ its foundations and objectives. It also introduces the concepts of ‘international socialization’ and ‘domestic resonance.’ I look at the prevailing developmental ideology of the international community and the role of education as an agent and a subject of international socialization. I then investigate how the international community aims to achieve its philosophy of development and vision of globalization through international socialization; in other words, how socialization is used to spread the vision of development held by the international community. In this context, I look at the plan for education reform policies devised by international organizations and donor agencies for the developing world. I also investigate how the professional training and selection of key technocrats and decision-makers in the developing world is a major factor of international socialization.

The International Community: What It Is and What It Wants

Democracy, liberalism, the free movement of capital and labor, universal human rights, peace, and welfare: these and many other material goods and normative values were the promises of globalization in the early 1990s. The liberal, democratic, capitalist West had just won the Cold War and a new world order was to be established, meaning that ideological references had to be revised in line with the winning norms. Defined by Finnemore and Sikkink as the shared expectations about appropriate behavior held by a community of actors, we can assume that it has been necessary for the dominant world powers to create a new set of universal norms in order to establish a new political and economic world order (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998). A new order that seeks universal legitimacy needs to be built upon a set of shared convictions, given that such universal norms, common value systems, shared terms of discourse, and social structures have the best chance of making uniform behavioral claims upon dissimilar actors (Finnemore 1996). These universal norms and value orientations occupy the analytic dimension that lies between deep philosophical beliefs about human nature and more narrow beliefs about what set of policies will maximize short-term interests, and they therefore serve to guide state behavior and shape the agenda from which elites choose specific policies (Ikenberry and