Subnational Variations in Education and Policy Innovation in Argentina

BEHREND, JACQUELINE

The Oxford Handbook of Education and Globalization

Oxford University Press

Lugar: Nueva York; Año: 2023; p. 908 - 934

In federal systems like Argentina, education is often shaped to a considerable extent by subnational politics. This provides a comparative basis for evaluation and learning within a nation state and not just between states. This chapter focuses on Argentina to show how public policies that are developed by national governments, but implemented at the subnational level, can lead to important variations within countries. This variation is increasingly relevant in Latin American nations, which are often unequal and have territorially uneven patterns of development. But, at the same time, highly decentralized countries offer the opportunity for subnational jurisdictions to innovate with public policies or build on national policies to improve the quality of services they offer their citizens. Territorial conflicts and uneven patterns of implementation of national policies evidence the ideological differences that exist between political elites at different levels of government (Eaton 2017).