Actors, bricolage, and translation in education policy: a case study from Ghana

Abstract

Due to the centrality of education to economic growth and social development, successful governments in post-colonial Ghana have implemented policies to improve the quality of education in the country. In line with this, Ghana embarked on its first major education reform under the Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) government. While several studies have been conducted to explain this, reform, these studies have largely been descriptive and theoretically have over relied on the conditionality thesis. Our study draws on ideational literature and research interviews to offer an alternative explanation of the reform. Drawing extensively on the ideational concepts of bricolage and translation, focusing on the actors using these two mechanisms, the study argues that, while exogenous forces did impact the reform, but they were mainly driven by endogenous factors featuring both path-dependent and departure-dependent changes.