Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

Shows how education transformation in the New South is reshaping global development as Southern actors claim agency, build coalitions, and lead reform while Northern dominance recedes. Insights from the Network for Education Systems Transformation highlight trust, context, and shared leadership.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines education system transformation as a critical arena in which the New South is reshaping global development. The contraction of Northern aid and the weakening of multilateral leadership have created conditions in which Southern actors assume greater responsibility while redefining the ethical and epistemological foundations of development practice. Education is a revealing lens, since it is both a site of redistribution of power and a site where ideas about knowledge, evidence, and progress are contested.

The paper draws on collaborative work in the Network for Education Systems Transformation, a partnership across ten countries. The analysis focuses on what has been learned from collaboration itself, including how partners negotiate unequal resources, asymmetries of voice, and the tension between local priorities and international expectations. Empirical reflections are drawn from shared learning activities and comparative case discussions across contexts.

The paper advances three contributions. First, it shows how forms of relational leadership grounded in care and reciprocity are emerging within South–South and South–North collaboration. Second, it argues that disagreement and discernment are not obstacles but productive conditions for ethical collaboration. Third, it demonstrates how epistemic trust in contextual knowledge reshapes what counts as valid evidence in education reform.

Overall, the paper contends that education system transformation work in the New South is not simply filling a vacuum left by Northern withdrawal. It is redefining what constitutes improvement, how collaborative decisions are made, and whose knowledge has authority in shaping collective futures.