Hierarchies, networks and improvisation in education governance

Over the past three decades, major trends have transformed the context of educational governance and created new governance challenges. Partly in response to these trends new forms of governance have risen, relying less on strong centralised rational planning and more on decentralised actors and market forces. These new forms of governance have not always solved existing problems and sometimes created new problems. However, because of societal changes, returning to a strong central government with rational planning is no longer possible. This then raises the question what the next governance innovation should be, moving beyond the state and the market. While some propose governance networks as a promising avenue, the horizontal nature of networks creates tensions with the vertical, hierarchical organisation of ministries. This makes the position of civil servants working on the intersection of these vertical and horizontal logics of networks and hierarchies and their ability to cope with the tensions between them very important.