SOFT POWER - The Intercultural Bilingual Education policy as a window onto larger processes of governance

This study looks into Intercultural Bilingual Education among the Indigenous Peoples of the Andes. Using the policy as a vantage point it shows the interconnectedness of the different parts of a larger network of processes influencing it. Spring boarding of Foucault's second notion of biopower, that which concerns the regulation of the population, and the governmentality concept, the study considers the global processes of power affecting a policy on a local scale and thus shaping the lives of communities. It explores the confining framework of a normative system attempting to incorporate diversity and shows how policies create as much as they reflect societies, meaning that education can as such function as a vehicle of change. Furthermore it acknowledges the agency of the governed in the process of both contestation and internalization. The goal of the study is to display the messiness of the policy process as it moves across time and space, from global to local levels, rarely managing to remain within one policy domain.