Comparative African Experiences in Implementing Educational Policies

摘要

The paper reviews the scholarly literature concerned, directly or indirectly, with the implementation of educational policies in Sub-Saharan Africa. The paper is in three parts. The first part considers the reasons both for the past neglect of implementation issues and for the current interest in the subject. The second part offers general observations concerning the literature on the implementation of educational policies in Africa, and characterizes the literature with respect to the policies considered, the countries studied, and other variables. The third part outlines the major conceptual frameworks that have been developed for the analysis of implementation issues. It then considers the matter of causation as this is addressed, explicitly or implicitly, in the literature on educational policy implementation in Africa. The paper concludes with some comments on the deficiencies of literature reviewed and with a call for research that is better informed by the often more sophisticated work of those who have studied implementation issues in other policy domains and in other parts of the world. The appendices list the journals surveyed and a bibliography.