This paper discusses the strange "non-death of neo-liberalism" (Crouch, 2011) in the Bank's education sector policy priorities. A key point of entry will be the two education sector strategy reports, Education Sector Strategy 1999 (World Bank, 1999) and the Education Strategy 2020 (World Bank, 2011), to guide the Bank's education operations. The article focuses particularly on the ways in which an expanded private sector, together with the International Finance Corporation (the Bank's private sector investment arm) are promoted as having the knowledge, and capacity, to play a more central role in education as "an emerging market".Thus, the paper criticizes public private partnerships (PPPs), reflecting on neo-liberalism as a political project, and on the apparent paradox that, for the moment at least, its manifest failures seem to animate further rounds of neoliberal ingenuity in the education sector.
neoliberalism; World Bank; education; PPP; privatization