Disjunctured reciprocity: paradoxes of community-school relationship in Nepal

Community-based school governance has been promoted as a popular policy for decentralization of education around the world. Within this policy, schools are expected to create institutional spaces such as School Management Committees with an assumption of reciprocal relation between school and commun...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Pradhan, U, Shrestha, S, Valentin, K
Format: Journal article
Language:English
Published: Routledge 2019
Description
Summary:Community-based school governance has been promoted as a popular policy for decentralization of education around the world. Within this policy, schools are expected to create institutional spaces such as School Management Committees with an assumption of reciprocal relation between school and community. This article questions the simplistic assumption through an ethnographic study of community-school relationship in Nepal. While these relationships may conflict with the kind of reciprocity assumed in school governance policies, we argue that this disjunctured reciprocity, firstly, reflects the gap between policy blueprints and action, and, secondly, reveals the competing logics of community-school relations which remain unacknowledged.