ABSTRACT
Borrowing from Elsewhere
: From Cross-national Attraction to Internalization of the
BTEP(Botswana Technical Education Program) in Botswana
Byoung-gyu GonG
Global Education Cooperation Program
The Graduate School Seoul National University

As its social, political, and economic situation changed, the educational policy focus of Botswana has shifted from general education to Technical Vocational Education and Training(TVET). The government of Botswana put a great deal of effort into promoting its TVET system during the 1990s by suggesting basic educational policy direction and relevant strategies. This endeavor came to fruition with the Botswana Technical Education Program(BTEP) introduced into technical colleges in Botswana in the early 2000s. The BTEP was the institution-based TVET program transferred from the Scottish Qualification Authority(SQA) based on a bilateral contract.
The BTEP case is notable in terms of studies on educational policy borrowing
within the field of comparative education. In comparative education, there has been a growing demand to explore various policy borrowing cases, as the complexity of the phenomenon has increased with globalization. The BTEP, as a borrowed program from the SQA, is expected to facilitate understanding of the micro-mechanism and process of cross-national education policy borrowing. Also, it provides more insight into the motivation to borrow a foreign education system in the face of a transitional moment, because it is a representative case of transitional policy measure organized by the Botswana government. This research investigates the process of the BTEP introduction from the SQA into Botswana with the conceptual and analytical framework of studies on educational policy borrowing. The four-stages of policy borrowing suggested by Phillips and Ochs(2004) is adopted as a main analytical tool. According to the framework, the BTEP case is described as a policy borrowing process that includes 1) cross-national attraction, 2) decision-making, 3) implementation, and 4) internalization. By identifying the actors and motivations in each of the stages, this study gets close to the full circle of the policy borrowing process of the BTEP.
The findings of the analysis offer an insight into the future direction of the TVET
policy in Botswana. The policy borrowing process of the BTEP proves that the
Botswana government was heavily dependent on foreign experiences in reforming its TVET system. This is in part because it did not have the capacity to produce and manage the required knowledge. This weakness triggered a more or less inattentive policy borrowing practice that did not heed the contextual and practical issues. Hence, the Botswana government needs to raise knowledge management capacity for its independent policy development. In addition, this research provides implications for the revision of the conceptual and analytical frameworks of educational policy borrowing studies. The findings indicate that recent policy borrowing practice is getting more complicated than before. Primarily, it is due to a growing ambiguity between borrowers and lenders as borrowers also have their own strategy to lend policies to others. Also, the concept of borrowing and lending is transformed into the market concept of buying and selling. That means that policy-makers recognize internationally renowned systems
as marketable goods.
keywords: educational policy borrowing, policy borrowing and lending in
education, policy transfer, cross-national attraction, Botswana Technical Education
Program, Botswana