The Romanian education reform of 1995: ideological drifts and governance in the wake of the World Bank restructuring

Abstract

After the fall of the communist regime, Romania launched the first multi-systemic reform in the education sector in 1995. The reform was largely financed through a World Bank loan and closely followed the neo-liberal ideology promoted by Bank officials. It aimed to privatize and to implement private sector management principles in the public education sector. This paper argues that in order to introduce neo-liberal policy models, the Bank first created a structure of knowledge around the Romanian system of education, which diagnosed it as inefficient and underperforming. Specific representations of domestic institutions, bureaucratic processes, and actors were used to legitimate the forms of intervention proposed and the role of the Bank in internal governance. I argue further that the main stake of the project was reforming governance in education as new mechanisms for power distribution and money allocation were set in place. By manufacturing their role as impartial, apolitical “experts,” and by ignoring the political nature of government, they created a niche in governance and imposed neo-liberal understandings in education.

Keywords:

• World Bank
• neo-liberalism
• governance
• Central and Eastern Europe
• Romania

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dana Solonean

Dana Solonean is a PhD student at the Babeș-Bolyai University, Department of Sociology. She received a bachelor’s degree in territorial planning and a master’s degree in sociological research from Babeș-Bolyai University. She worked as a cabinet assistant in the Ministry of Education Romania and as an educational coordinator in the NGO sector in Poland. She is interested in education, state and governance.