The Politics of Public Private Partnerships in Education: An Analysis of Stakeholder Dynamics in Edo State, Nigeria

Like many places in Sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria's education system suffers from poor quality. Edo State, located in southern Nigeria, is an example of this. While most children in Edo State access primary schooling, they still demonstrate low levels of learning. To address the inadequate quality of education, in 2018, the Government of Edo State entered into a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) with a for-profit private actor NewGlobe (formerly, Bridge International Academies). The PPP was designed to deliver a series of reforms under the flagship Edo State Basic Education Sector Transformation (EDOBEST) programme. The government retained the ownership and management of all schools during the seven-year programme. NewGlobe were responsible for implementing key components of the reform, including data collection and management, the provision of scripted computer-based lessons, teacher training, and monitoring and evaluation. In 2021, the government, who had solely financed the first phase of the PPP (EDOBEST 1.0), received funding from the World Bank to launch EDOBEST 2.0. This funding supported the existing programme in primary schools and its expansion to junior secondary schools. The literature shows that PPPs are a politically contentious issue. These contentions revolve around the contested nature of the ‘intersectoral relationship’ between state and non-state actors. This has given rise to a series of tensions that threaten the political survival of PPPs in practice. Policymakers who have adopted PPPs must navigate these issues to ensure the continued operation of these arrangements. EDOBEST was implemented for seven years across the two-termed tenure of the incumbent Governor. The uninterrupted implementation of this PPP is therefore worth investigating. This thesis took aim at EDOBEST between the period of 2018 - 2023 to answer: How did political factors shape the uptake, design, and implementation of an education Public Private Partnership in Edo State, Nigeria? To do this, a single-embedded qualitative case study design was used to examine how stakeholder dynamics operating at the state, local, and school-levels shaped the government’s approach towards EDOBEST 1.0 and 2.0. The study comprised document reviews, and thirty-two semi-structured interviews with political elites, civil servants, private sector partners, international development partners, education secretaries, head teachers, teachers, and members of the community. Visual mapping exercises were conducted with fifteen of these participants to generate a thick, rich description of power dynamics during the design and implementation of the PPP. Thematic data analysis was conducted using NVivo 14. Conceptually, this study was rooted in the domains of power framework, pioneered by Sam Hickey and Naomi Hossain. This framework offers a meso-level analytical framework to study how interactions between a state’s political settlement and education policy domain shapes the process of education reform. In line with the critical realist philosophy, which holds that the unobservable layers of reality give rise to observable outcomes, the domains of power framework was paired with my ‘3-Ps Framework’ and stakeholder analysis, to present an extended version of the domains of power framework that introduces the “PPP domain” as an additional layer for political analysis. This approach enabled the extension of political settlements analysis beyond the ‘meso-level’ of the education policy domain, and into the PPP domain to analyse the distribution of power between state and non-state actors. Overall, this study found that the Government of Edo State introduced EDOBEST 1.0 and 2.0 as “Public-focused” PPPs. Namely, the contracted role of NewGlobe was to strengthen the government’s capacity to deliver quality education in Edo State. The uptake, design, and implementation of the “Public-focused” PPP was shaped by a series of underlying interactions between the dominant with rule-by-law characteristics political settlement, who negotiated the interests of the education policy domain, in consideration of the distribution of power within the PPP at each stage of the policy making process. First, the uptake of the “Public-focused” PPP model by policymakers in Edo State was a temporary measure. The terminal goal was to improve the capacity of the government to deliver the quality education reform on its own. The “Public-focused” PPP model aligned with the views held by almost all members of the education policy domain I interviewed, including civil servants, local government officials, and headteachers, concerning the role of the private sector within education PPPs. Second, the design of the PPP was shaped by the ruling coalition’s recognition of a strong teachers’ union who had been successful in halting previous quality-oriented reforms which threatened their interests. This study found that the decision to proceed with a “Public-focused” PPP model, marked by the government’s refusal to outsource the management of schools to NewGlobe, was directly informed by the ruling coalition’s desire to implement the “most palatable” PPP model within the education domain. Finally, the implementation of the Public-focused PPP was marked by contestations between the public and private actors over the full control of the education reform. All three areas of collaboration could be seen as ‘arenas of contestation’. There were tensions surrounding the transition of knowledge, resources, and responsibilities held by NewGlobe to the public sector officials. Civil servants reported a reluctance from their private partners to share data, and resources involved in the monitoring and delivery of the scripted lessons. Although most public officials welcomed the scripted lessons owned and delivered by the private partners, many teachers voiced their discontent at the limited power they had over its design and delivery. Therefore, whilst most participants believed that the government was the more powerful partner, in line with the “Public-focused” conceptualisations of the PPP model, in reality, the public sector’s reliance on the privately-owned scripted lessons which were withheld by NewGlobe, showed that the for-profit firm held a significant amount of power within the PPP. This thesis makes three contributions to the existing literature. Empirically, it contributes evidence from Edo, Nigeria, to show the ways in which political factors shape the uptake, design and implementation of PPPs in education. Methodologically, it contributes an understanding of how qualitative political economy frameworks can be adapted to unpack the PPP ‘black box’, by eliciting insights on the nature of power dynamics within an education PPP in Edo, Nigeria. Conceptually, this thesis draws on the application of the extended domains of power framework to show that the analysis of PPPs as a third ‘domain of power’, can contribute a better understanding of the underlying political factors that shaped the way state and non-state actors interacted during the implementation of the PPP in Edo, Nigeria. Based on these findings, this thesis proposes a policy diagnostic tool to inform the appraisal of PPPs in education.