The international political economy of educational policy development in Nepal: 1950-2020

ABSTRACT

The modern history of Nepal started after the Kingdom of Nepal was formed during the 1760s through a series of military battles, which is now known as a national unification campaign, led by Prithvi Narayan Shah. The history of mass education, however, started during the 1950s when a political uprising overthrew autocratic Rana regime that had ruled the country for more than a century. This paper aims to explore Nepal’s educational history by analysing key educational policy documents produced by the Government of Nepal as well as its major donor the World Bank from 1950 to 2020. The paper uses international political economy as a theoretical framework and critical policy sociology as a methodological approach. The key argument of the paper is that, since some of the problematic assumptions of modernism, nationalism, and globalism have guided Nepal’s policy agendas, its education system has not addressed multifarious challenges faced by its citizens. The theoretical and methodological approaches taken for exploring the interconnections between education, economy, and politics will be helpful for future researchers to understand the significance of education not only for economic development but also for the institutionalization of democracy in both developed and developing countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Modernization
• nationalism
• educational globalization
• political economy
• Nepal

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. TU was established in 1959. It is the first and largest university in Nepal.

2. The NESP report downloaded from the Ministry of Education website (https://www.moe.gov.np/assets/uploads/files/2028_English.pdf) does not have page numbers. I have used subtitles/sections, for example Preface, rather than page numbers for citing direct quotes.

3. In the past the CPN broke out in several divisions and sometimes some factions got united. These factions have aligned sometimes towards centre-right (for example, under the leadership of late Madan Bhandari) and sometimes far-left which took the form of violent Maoist insurgency from 1996 to 2006.

4. Every year the political parties in the government rely on financial aid for having a bigger annual budget than the one announced in the previous years. Since the corruption control mechanism is not effective a huge amount of money remains unspent or completely misused.

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Kapil Dev Regmi

Dr. Kapil Dev Regmi is a senior lecturer in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, the University of Melbourne. Dr. Regmi’s research findings are published in prestigious international journals including Compare; Adult Education Quarterly; Higher Education Policy; International Journal of Sustainable Development & World Ecology; International Journal of Lifelong Education; International Review of Education; Globalization, Societies and Education; and International Journal of Research & Method in Education. His current research interests include international and comparative education, the prospects of lifelong learning for marginalized countries and communities, social foundations of learning, education policy analysis, and the role of education for sustainable development.