When Global Ideas Meet Local Contexts: The Case of Girls' Education in Urban Pakistan

Abstract

Global commitments to achieve gender equality in education are promoting a convergence of educational aims, policies and practices across nation-states, including those in the developing world. This study attempts to understand ways that global-level concepts related to girls’ education are interpreted in local contexts. Its overarching question is: how are global policy scripts that promote girls’ education interpreted or “refracted” by a diverse group of urban actors and elites in a developing nation-state? Specifically, this dissertation examines how three global concepts related to girls’ education – “equality and inclusion”, “value and purpose” and “empowerment” are re-interpreted by local actors. Its conceptual framework has two components: one for understanding converging meanings, and one for diverging meanings. It draws on several theoretical frameworks: institutional pillars, institutional logics, World Society theory, concerted cultivation and Bourdieu’s concepts of field theory and habitus. Data were collected through participant observations and 26 semi-structured interviews with urban parents, non-governmental organizations and policy actors. Two Pakistani cities were chosen to conduct interviews because they are key sites for observing dialectical relations between urban families and institutions and global policy prescriptions.Findings suggest that the refraction of global policies for educating girls into local understandings are guided by the parameters set by institutions of family, religion and state, each of which has its own logic that, when combined, creates a contested terrain for attaining gender equality through education. Parents aspire to cultivate a set of legitimized schooling, professional, and behavioural goals in their daughters. Policy actors recognize that standard global prescriptions may not fit well in local contexts but collaborate with partner institutions to attain legitimacy. As a result, policy actors focus more on gender parity than girls’ actual educational experiences. The study advances understandings of the issues of ‘what works’ in comparative girls’ education without neglecting ‘how it works and for whom.’ It highlights the roles of cultural- cognitive institutions and overlapping institutional identities of actors when they enact global education policy at local levels. By focusing on gendered dimensions of class reproduction processes, it extends theories of cultural capital and concerted cultivation by applying them to non-western settings.