Education International
Mapping privatisation in and of education in the Caribbean In this section, we explore some of the main implications of our data and relate them to insights from the literature. It is well established that privatisation requires public services to be underfunded in order to legitimate private involvement (Saltman, 2010, 2015; Verger et al., 2016); this may be discursively framed as shrinking the state to enable the private sector to enter and flourish (Croso & Magalhães, 2016). In our study, we received reports from across the Caribbean that this underfunding exists and is endemic. This considerably raises susceptibility to privatisation, particularly where supranational organisations such as the International Monetary Fund require neoliberal restructures in order for funds to be released. Barbados (see above) is the only one of the ten countries explored here still with an active IMF loan (International Monetary Fund, 2021), but see Appendix Two for an overview of recent IMF-mandated or advised structural reforms. The states that we explored are variously more or less committed to privatisation as a key mechanism to modernise education provision and improve outcomes. Policy texts are often framed in language that borrows from discourses of privatisation. We read what Ball (2009: 93) has called “a reiterative stream of ‘solutions’ and ‘best practice’ and ‘evidenced’ developments [which] are ‘offered’ through reports, ‘research’ and ‘evaluations’ which seem almost always to privilege further privatisations or ‘business-like’ methods”. This goes beyond exogenous or endogenous privatisation, and provides evidence of ‘the colonisation of the infrastructures of policy’ (Ball, 2009: 88). Ball is referring here to exogenous privatisation of policy infrastructure, and whilst this may be happening, we have no data to support it. Nonetheless, we have identified through policy analysis an endogenous colonisation, in which ministers, state officials and other policy makers internalise, normalise and enforce privatisation. This was particularly evident in the data from the Regional Body representative, who argued for ‘the need to reduce the bureaucracy of the public service and ensure that it has greater agility and responsiveness’, and noted further that ‘I don’t think anybody is going to push back against agility’. We conclude that as has been the case internationally (see e.g. Gunter, 2012), privatisation has become collocated with modernisation such that its features become normatively desirable and alternatives unthinkable; they would be perceived as an 48
