International Organizations and the Politics of Knowledge Production: The World Bank and the Mobilization of the Education Privatization Agenda

Education privatization generates one of the most polarized debates in education policy research internationally. A swath of highly contradictory empirical research surrounds the issue of private involvement in education provision on a variety of related-themes (voucher schemes, charter schools, freedom of school choice, school competition and so on). Yet, the fact that evidence on these themes is far from conclusive is used to legitimate a range of different policy preferences as well as the political agendas of several educational stakeholders, including key international organisations such as the World Bank. The World Bank is an international organisation with great capacity of influencing education policy decisions in low- and middle-income countries through lending and/or consultancy operations. In the last decades, the World Bank has shifted its organisational strategy as a way to raise its profile as a “knowledge bank” and, de facto, as a knowledge broker between the research community and policy-makers operating at a range of scales. Nonetheless, despite its aspiration of promoting evidence-based policy, in the educational sector, the World Bank is known for its inclination to disseminate global norms and beliefs promoting educational liberalisation. Based on the application of bibliometric analysis techniques, this paper examines the intersection of research production, research brokering, and knowledge mobilization in the context of international organisations. Specifically, the paper maps the epistemic configuration of the education privatization debate, and explores how the knowledge products of the World Bank fit within and engage with the identified epistemic communities generated around such debate. Among other things, our research shows that the World Bank publications on education privatization cite repeatedly a limited (and usually non peer-reviewed) number of like-minded studies as a way to create an illusion of a general consensus around the advantages of quasi-markets and free-choice policies in education.