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For international organisations in the global education policy field, legitimacy is based in large part on the supposed techno-rational basis of these organisations and their ability to credibly produce knowledge and policy expertise. However, as the present article demonstrates, there are clearly a range of macro–micro organisational dynamics driving the production of knowledge and the policy ideas that are advanced. By revealing the way that a particular policy emerged and was promoted within the World Bank, this article seeks to expose the way that policy innovation is produced by the iterative interplay of agentic activity and particular organisational circumstances – and how this process is used to maintain and extend the influence of international organisations and the individuals who represent them. By drawing on Stewart Clegg's 'circuits of power' approach, we seek to theorise the internal dynamics of international organisations, and, in so doing, to move beyond the dominant coercive and normative perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Argues for thinking about community-based management in terms of community organizing, building, and empowerment. • New and critical insights are shared on the well-known Education with Community Participation program from El Salvador. • The concept of social capital is highlighted as one aspect of the shift away from technical approaches to community-based management. • Underscore the many issues that confound the operation of community-based management as envisioned by development professionals. Abstract The present paper is both a critical analysis of an example of community-based management of education (CBM) and a call for a shift in perspective related to how we think about CBM, particularly in marginalized and low-income contexts. The example of focus that serves as the basis for critical analysis is the "Education with Community Participation" (EDUCO) program in El Salvador, which achieved fame in the late 1990s and 2000s because it formally transferred, among other things, the ability to hire and fire teachers to a committee of parents at the community level. Given its fame and the fact of its imitation elsewhere, it is important to have an in-depth understanding of how this program operated at the local level, with what limitations, and with what implications for CBM programs more generally. For the second purpose—related to shifting perspectives on CBM—this paper draws on concepts related to systems theory, social capital, and community empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between the emergence of global education policies and conflict-affected contexts by analysing the trajectory of community-level education decentralization within and beyond El Salvador from the 1980s, during the country's civil war, to the 2000s, by which point this approach to education governance was being widely promoted and adapted around the world. The findings – based on two years of data collection – demonstrate not only the way these contexts can be particularly susceptible to intervention by foreign governments and international organizations but also how, in certain historical-structural moments, those contexts can be transformed and leveraged to experiment with and to entrench certain policies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]