Global best practices, national innovation systems, and tertiary education: a critique of the World Bank's Accelerating Catch-up (2009)

The World Bank's 2009 publication Accelerating Catch-up: Tertiary Education for Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa outlines tertiary education reforms designed to promote knowledge economies. In this document, the World Bank recognises that reforming the tertiary education sector in sub-Saharan Africa necessitates enhanced state functions in terms of governance, coordination and networking capacity, and seeks to reconcile this with its advocacy of neo-liberal global best practices for tertiary education through the national innovation systems (NIS) framework. In the NIS framework, competitive advantage is derived from national political economic distinctiveness. Yet, neo-liberal global best practices constitute a problematic one-size-fits-all development strategy that promotes institutional and organisational convergence in the tertiary sector. Accelerating Catch-up therefore provides a deeply contradictory model for tertiary sector reform.