In the name of globalisation ?: southern and northern paradigms of educational development

Globalisation has altered educational agendas worldwide.
While some similarities in the global agenda can be identified, it is also the case that the ways in which those agendas are produced, distributed and carried out at different scales of decision-making may explain different implementation processes as well as different impacts on educational development and inequalities.

This paper explores how southern and northern paradigms of educational development have shifted for the last decades by identifying the explanatory and normative frameworks of different political agendas. By doing this we show that globalisation is used with different meanings and has different implications in shaping southern and northern education policy agendas.

The analysis takes a general form for the "southern case" while it focuses in the European education policy as a specific case of a "northern" paradigm of education and development.

Finally, we conclude by pointing out how different power relations impinge on the different mechanisms that set southern and northern agendas.