State-led or market-led?: regionalism and educational policies in South Americ

PERROTTA, DANIELA.

Ljubljana

Conferencia; ISA-CEEISA Joint Conference,; 2016

ISA-CEEISA

Almost every regional scheme has launched programs and policies to promote the coordination, cooperation and/or integration of education systems and institutions since mid-nineties, during a previous ?wave? of regionalism and have continued delivering initiatives up to the current ?wave?. Region-building processes that emerged in Latin America since the beginning of the 21st Century (UNASUR, ALBA-TCP and CELAC) are assessed in terms of post-liberal, post-trade regionalism, post-hegemonic or new strategic regionalism. Additionally, with the creation of the Pacific Alliance, a renewed discussion emerged related to open regionalism and asymmetrical bilateral trade agreements. Therefore, this paper aims to contribute to the conceptual discussions about regionalism, regional integration and region-building processes. This paper focuses in the South American region and develops a comparative analysis of educational policies, focusing on four cases: Mercosur, Alba-TCP, UNASUR and the Pacific Alliance. These projects are delivering policies of educational cooperation, coordination and/or integration. By unfolding regional policies from a comparative perspective, we expect to contribute to the theoretical analysis of regionalism (and the discussion about ?regionalism with adjectives?). We argue that the divide between these projects is ideological and refers to how developmental claims unfolds