Sovereign Preferences? External Ideas and Policy Outcomes in African Education.

Many states in Africa have recently increased their use of African languages as media of instruction in their education systems. Contrary to rationalist expectations, this similarity is not the result of domestic pressures brought on government by language groups. Nor is it the straightforward result of international human rights advocacy networks. Instead, the policy outcome sits at the intersection of ideational pressures that have changed policy-maker preferences at several levels. First, at the international level, a group of strategic academics worked to alter the preferences of French ministers charged with foreign policy in Africa. These ministers communicated new policy preferences to African governments regarding language use in education. Simultaneously, as international language NGOs collaborated with local linguists to transcribe African languages, these actors worked diligently to transform the opinion of African parents, politicians and bureaucrats regarding the use of local languages in education. All of these pressures converged in the early 1990s to propel a pattern of changed policy in Francophone African states. This paper focuses on the first step in the causal chain: the changed preferences among government actors in France who are charged with policy formulation in aid to African education. These findings reveal the continued ideational links between France and its former colonies and contrast them with a lack of such connections in Anglophone Africa. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]