Locating Public Finance Dynamics in Education in Nepal

project summary

The main objective of this project is to enhance understandings of the causes of corruption within the school education sector in Nepal by analyzing the manner in which differently located social actors interpret meanings and measure moral and legal claims, practices and behaviors tied to corruption in the context of local standards and practices. The education sector, which receives the largest government and donor budgetary allocations and has undergone significant decentralization reforms, serves as a useful window through which public fiscal governance and the framing and understandings of corruption in Nepal can be understood during a protracted socio-political transition.

The project proposes a historically situated, grounded, multi disciplinary study to understand how education institutions and their fiscal dimensions have been comprehended and appropriated in practice by differently situated social actors in a time of political transformation. It will generate robust ethnographic and historical data on fiscal behavior in the education sector that is expected to engage several theoretical views on corruption and enable better grounded understandings of the implications of policy-making and implementation in countries undergoing such transitions as Nepal. The project will be led by Martin Chautari, a nonstate research institution located in Nepal in collaboration with Kathmandu University, Nepal and Aarhus University, Denmark.