Policy instruments for educational governance: a comparative investigation of India and China

As the emphasis of education reforms around the world has increasingly shifted from expanding schooling access to improving student learning outcomes, the policy instruments used in educational governance has accordingly proliferated in order to fulfill this more complicated and challenging policy goal. Despite a growing body of knowledge on various specific instruments, there lacks a synthesized picture with which to inform a systematic understanding of the broad range of policy instruments being deployed, how they function, and with what impact. To fill the gap, this chapter applies Christopher Hood’s NATO framework to comparatively examine the informational, regulatory, fiscal, and organizational instruments used in India and China, countries with two of the largest basic education sectors in the world. The results show that while each of the four key resources (nodality, authority, treasure, and organization) have been actively mobilized, the configuration of individual instruments, and therefore the full policy portfolio, can be markedly different in the two systems. This digested knowledge provides a timely stock-taking of a scattered empirical literature, which also serves as a valuable starting point for future research to advance the understanding of instrument choice and policy effectiveness.