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Development studies and comparative

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a
Christopher Colclough
a
Centre for Education and International Development , University
of Cambridge , Cambridge, UK
Published online: 19 Nov 2010.

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 Compare
Vol. 40, No. 6, December 2010, 821–826

REFLECTIVE PIECES
Development studies and comparative education: where do they
find common cause?
Christopher Colclough*

Centre for Education and International Development, University of Cambridge,

Cambridge, UK
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10.1080/03057925.2010.523256
CCOM_A_523256.sgm
0305-7925
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Taylor
602010
40
cc413@cam.ac.uk
ChristopherColclough
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Francis
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(online)Education

Development studies and comparative education have unusually wide terrains.

Content analysis of selected journals reveals much that separates them, but areas
of overlap are increasing. Unlike development studies, comparative education
research remains mainly qualitative and is not mainly focussed upon low income
countries. However, inter-disciplinary and the use of mixed methods approaches
have become more common in both fields over the past two decades. Policy
concerns which extend beyond the purely educational domain are increasingly
prominent in the comparative literature – bringing closer engagement with issues
more commonly debated under the rubric of development studies.
Keywords: comparative methodology; comparative education; development
studies; research methods and approaches

Introduction
An important characteristic shared by scholarship in development studies and in
comparative education is that both are ‘fields of study’. Neither of them have an inte-
gral cognate discipline which defines the extent and borders of their subjects.
Although each field has important bodies of theory which aspire to hegemony
(economics in the case of development studies; sociology/psychology in the case of
education) there has been no resolution of these contests, nor is such an outcome either
likely or desirable. Partly because of this, the range of valid questions which can be
addressed within both of these fields is very broad, and what counts as valid answers,
for a majority of specialists within each of them, has changed significantly over the
past half century, and continues to do so. The task, therefore, of attempting to identify
trends, differences and commonalities in and between these fields of study is complex.
This essay takes the view that a significant difference between the orientation of
scholars in comparative education and in development studies is that the former are
primarily interested in examining and explaining the characteristics and effects of
education systems, policies and practices in different national, historical and cultural
contexts,1 whereas the latter are mainly interested in understanding economic, social
and political change in lower income countries and the changing relationships of these
countries with the rest of the world.2 At first sight these agenda seem very different.
As will be argued later, underlying the latter is a concern to eradicate poverty, whereas
the former – in explaining, and in some sense celebrating, difference – implies no notion

*Email: cc413@cam.ac.uk

ISSN 0305-7925 print/ISSN 1469-3623 online

© 2010 British Association for International and Comparative Education
DOI: 10.1080/03057925.2010.523256
http://www.informaworld.com
 822 C. Colclough

of an evolution to a ‘more developed’ state, characterised perhaps by higher incomes,

industrialisation, human development or agency. What then are their areas of common-
ality? Is there an intellectual project which, in an important sense, they share?

The changing content of comparative education

An interest in education from the perspective of development studies would seem to
be conditioned by the ways in which the state of education is, or can be, a cause or
consequence of economic, social and political change. This implies that for studies of
education to be included within the category of development studies they should, in
some important sense, be concerned to elucidate the linkages and interactions between
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education and society. On this interpretation, research focusing upon systems, content,
pedagogy, curriculum, efficiency and resourcing, or upon other important matters
which are internal to education systems themselves, would not be of particular interest
to scholars in development studies unless a significant part of their analysis focused
upon such wider interactions. Thus, the study of education in developing countries is
not, by itself, sufficient to deliver research which would fall under that rubric. There
remains, however, an important question about the extent to which articles in compar-
ative education journals do, in fact, analyse issues of education in low income states.
The evidence indicates that, within important subsections of the published litera-
ture, studies of developing country conditions are in the minority and that there has
been no significant change in this emphasis in recent years. For example, Rust et al.
(1999: 103) found that some 28% of articles in Comparative Education (CE),
Comparative Education Review (CER) and International Journal of Educational
Development (IJED) focused upon high-human-development countries (as defined by
the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)) over the period 1985–1995.
We find that proportion to have remained precisely unchanged for papers published in
those journals between 2004 and 2006.3 For the remainder, the number of papers
focusing upon medium-human-development countries has increased substantially (by
some 50%) whilst the low-human-development country group was much reduced.4
On this evidence, there has been no relative shift in the comparative education litera-
ture towards analysing low-income-country education conditions over that period.
In that context, it is worth noting that an earlier study of articles published in
Comparative Education revealed that whilst some 62% of articles published between
1977 and 1998 referred to one or more developing countries in their titles (using
UNESCO definitions), some 85% of the authors of these papers were themselves
located in developed countries (Little 2000). More generally, the published results of
social science research on low income countries remain mostly authored by research-
ers who are not themselves resident in those countries (UNESCO and International
Social Science Council 2010). This signals the profound inequalities in the disposition
of research resources, as between countries in the North and the South, which
continue to limit progress in our understanding of the constraints faced by the poorest
people and societies.
The dominant methodology used by authors of papers in the above three journals,
during the years 1985–2006, was qualitative. Mixed-methods approaches have
become only slightly more frequent: we find that those using a mix of quantitative and
qualitative methods increased from 11% to 16% of the papers published, as between
1985 to 1995 and 2004 to 2006. More surprising is that the number of single-country
studies published during 2004–2006 by the above journals was three times the number
 Compare 823

of multiple-country studies. This was heavily influenced by IJED where the single/
multiple ratio was 97/12, compared with 28/21 for CE and 36/15 for CER. Rust et al.
(1999) reported a 2/1 statistic across the three journals during the period 1985–1995.
Overall, then – and resting somewhat at odds with the notion of a ‘comparative’ meth-
odology – the proportion of single-country studies published in these comparative
education journals has increased significantly over the last quarter of a century.
On the other hand, there is a substantial, and increasing, body of research
published by some comparative education journals which takes on the broader canvas
of education/society interactions. Although categorisation is not straightforward, we
find (on the basis of reviewing titles and abstracts) the proportion of articles concerned
with the ways in which education relates to external variables in society to have
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increased from 37% to 49% in CE, 32% to 58% in CER and 39% to 44% in IJED
between, in each case, 1990 to 1993 and 2003 to 2006. Early 1990s articles related
more to matters of education policy and reform, literacy, public financing, teaching
practice, effectiveness and roles. The more recent group was more concerned with
international comparisons, globalisation and its effects, decentralisation policies and
outcomes, cultural diversification, gender/society and other issues. It might be argued
that these recent trends are consistent with the ambitions expressed by some of the
earlier contributions in the ‘deductive’ tradition. For example, Lauwerys (1973, xiii)
had argued that the hope, for comparative education, was that ‘it may become possible
to provide a body of general principles which would help to guide policy makers and
reformers by predicting, with some assurance, possible outcomes of the measures they
propose’. Whether such ambitions were realistic or not, an increased interest in policy,
and in policy reform which extends beyond education, characterises some of the more
influential contributions to the post-1990 debates. This then, begins to suggest a
greater overlap between the interests of specialists in comparative education and those
in development studies, in writings published over the last two decades.

Development studies and development policy

Questions of education/society linkages represent core interests for many of those social
scientists who publish mainly in the pages of the development journals. Dominant ques-
tions concern whether and, if so, how education causes growth, improves health and
fertility control, engages civic sensibilities, promotes democracy, and so on. Often their
methods are quantitative, in contrast to most writers in the comparative education
tradition. They often utilise multi-country datasets, and presuppose that country context
– save that which can be proxied by national-level variables – is unimportant.
However, an important motivator for many people involved in development stud-
ies research is the goal of enhancing knowledge about how to combat poverty, and it
is not coincidental that the definition of development studies suggested earlier
includes specific reference to development policy.
This has always been an important intellectual corollary for specialists in central
parts of the field. It is true that Marxist analysts of development were inclined to
dismiss as ‘developmentalist’ those whose work seemed to presuppose that the present
disposition of class interests and power could ever be consistent with the introduction
of policies more favourable to the lives and livelihoods of the poor. Nevertheless,
development economists and a good many political scientists and sociologists of
development have conducted research which points to the ways in which some such
amelioration could best be achieved.
 824 C. Colclough

Their work has played a central role in informing the dominant paradigms which
have influenced development policies over the past half a century, even though the
interaction between ideological and intellectual battles about policy has been
profound. This was perhaps most obviously seen in the shift away from the structur-
alist orthodoxy of the 1970s – which had emphasised (because of the particular struc-
tural characteristics of developing economies) the need to control markets, protect
infant industries, support public investment in utilities and infrastructure, and pursue
a range of other dirigiste approaches. However, research results which demonstrated
the inefficiencies of important kinds of state action (Krueger 1974; Balassa 1982; Lal
1983) became the ally of political changes within G8 countries and internationally
which shifted development policies away from social-democratic towards neo-liberal,
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market-oriented solutions (Colclough and Manor 1991).

The subsequent growth in influence of a ‘Washington Consensus’, which
purported to summarise the ways in which development policy should shift if the
benefits of market-led growth were to be captured, arose directly from this research
agenda, and became deeply powerful in informing the loan conditionalities imposed
upon developing countries by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) throughout the following two decades. The resulting debate amongst advocates
and critics has been enduring, and has represented one of the more productive themes
within development studies over those years (Williamson 1990; Wade 1992; Stiglitz
2002; Rodrick 2006; Serra and Stiglitz 2008).
There has, then, always been a profound interest, amongst researchers in develop-
ment studies, in using their results to address major policy issues of the day. These link-
ages have been strengthened in recent years, because the funding of development studies
research has become highly dependent upon the patronage of aid agencies. For example,
over the period 2000–2007, more than half of UK research income for development
studies is estimated to have come directly from the UK Department for International
Development (DFID) (RAE 2009), rising to more than three-quarters, if funding from
the European Union (EU), the World Bank and other official aid agencies is included.
The increased importance of such support, together with the quest for knowledge-
based policy making, have sharpened the instrumentality with which the research prior-
ities of aid agencies are defined, and by which funded-research outputs are subsequently
assessed. This has strengthened a research emphasis in development studies upon
policy-relevant questions, the relative importance of which has tended to be determined
by the particular anti-poverty agenda set out by the Millennium Development Goals.
So it is that a large amount of published output in development studies is concerned
with the broad agenda raised by the challenge of understanding and combating
poverty. Maturing and emerging themes include the environment, climate change,
conflict, migration, the role of the Asian fast developers, biotechnology and in infor-
mation and communications technology (ICT), livelihoods and many others.
However, the key topics of inequality, human development, social provision and
governance are, and are likely to remain, centrally placed on the development studies
agenda. As we have documented, a similar set of topics has gained increased promi-
nence in the comparative education literature in recent years.
As to methods, it is widely accepted in the literature on development that
questions posed from a monodisciplinary perspective can be too narrow, and that
interdisciplinarity is desirable yet demanding.5 One challenge is that such approaches
often require the use of mixed research methods, if sound answers to some central
questions are to be found. Practice, however often lags behind accepted principle:
 Compare 825

notwithstanding its averred importance, the number of genuinely interdisciplinary

contributions to development studies remain in a minority and, as with the compara-
tive education literature, mixed-methods contributions continue to represent an
uncomfortably minor part of the whole.

Conclusion
Both development studies and comparative education are ‘fields of study’ in which the
absence of a defining cognate discipline, together with – not unrelatedly – the rele-
vance of many disciplines to the questions they typically address, have meant that
their respective terrains are unusually wide. Whilst much may seem to separate their
core concerns, their trajectories over the last quarter of a century have nevertheless
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brought important areas of overlap.

Our assessment of the content of a subgroup of comparative and international
education journals revealed that only a minority of papers have focused upon the prob-
lems of low income countries (a major concern of the literature in development stud-
ies) and that most contributions employ qualitative methods and approaches (rather
than quantitative methods, which have been more dominant in development studies).
However, this paper has shown that there is substantial interest in interdisciplinary
and mixed methods and approaches in both development studies and comparative
education. Also, publications in comparative education have been engaging with the
broader effects of national and international policies towards education and human
development, thereby embracing issues which strongly reflect the traditional concerns
of development studies.
Our sampling of recent literature indicates that these issues are of growing signif-
icance for scholars in the two fields of study, and that they represent the area of great-
est overlap between them. It is not coincidental that – as regards both topics and
methods – they embrace questions and approaches which pose some of the greatest
challenges faced by researchers on education and on development.

Acknowledgement
The author is grateful to Andrew Webb for research assistance.

Notes
1. Any proffered definition is, of course, contentious. There have been great differences,
historically, between those who have wished to confine the comparative education canvas
mainly to description (Stenhouse 1979, 5; Heyman 1979) and those who have sought
general principles which would allow prediction and generalisation (Lauwerys 1973) with
differences between those who have advocated deductive (Holmes 1977) as opposed to
inductive approaches (Noah and Eckstein 1969).
2. A somewhat longer definition, used in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE)
exercise, conveys a similar meaning: ‘development studies is issue-driven research
concerning the analysis of global and local processes of cultural, demographic, economic,
environmental, political, technological and social change in low and middle income parts
of the world’. It went on to stress ‘structures and institutions; the changing relationships
between developed and developing countries; and the critical interrogation of theories of
these processes and relationships, and of development policy’ (RAE 2006, 61).
3. The present paper uses data drawn from the same three journals as Rust et al. (1999), in
order to document trends over the intervening years. The journal Compare is not included
for that reason alone, and there is no prima facie reason to suppose that our conclusions
would be changed by its addition to the list.
 826 C. Colclough

4. The country groupings used here for the three human development classifications are those
presented in the Human Development Report 2006 (UNDP 2006).
5. Hulme and Toye (2006) review the arguments underpinning the case for cross-disciplinary
research on poverty, and Kanbur (2002) provides useful conceptual clarification of the
ways in which the tools of different disciplines can be mixed.

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