Assembling Pacific Regional Education Development Policy

This thesis explores what is made possible by bringing Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory into conversation with policy mobilities and Pacific research for the study of education development policy. Empirically, the research focuses on a particular policy assemblage, referred to in the thesis as Pacific regional education development policy (PREDP). The research takes as an entry point the becomings of the Pacific Regional Education Framework 2018-2030 (PacREF), and explores the flows, forces and intensities that produce regional institutional and intergovernmental cooperation on education policy and service delivery across the so-called developing island nations of the Pacific Ocean. The research explores what different ways of thinking about and engaging with PREDP are possible if we ask not what PREDP is nor how effective is it, but instead why PREDP has become in the way that it has, how is it sustained through encounters with the potential to destabilise it, and what capacities does it make possible. The research data has been generated from conversations with 30 policy actors and the analysis of relevant policy documents. By attending to the mutual presupposition of molar and molecular tendencies generated through PREDP, and embracing the both/and thinking of Pacific research, the research demonstrates how PREDP functions to make competing desires consistent. The research argues that PREDP can be experienced as both regional and national, local and global, an artefact of donor imposition and of decolonial resistance. The research re-problematises what are arguably staid dialectics of power/resistance, global/local, dependence/independence and generality/context. It reconceptualises these in terms of becomings of responsibility, interdependence and responsiveness. In so doing, the research makes significant contributions to Comparative and International Education and Critical Policy Studies literature, offering different ways of thinking-doing education policy research that might open-up new lines of flight for educational futures.

This work © 2024, Rebecca Spratt.