Microsoft Word - 42abdeneur.doc © 2002 Current Issues in Comparative Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Current Issues in Comparative Education, Vol. 4(2) 57 Tilting the North-South Axis: The legitimization of Southern Development Knowledge and its Implications for Comparative Education Research Adriana Abdenur Princeton University Introduction A large noticeboard hangs in a hallway of the Ministry of Education in the Mozambican capital of Maputo; pinned to it are meeting schedules for teacher trainers from nearby Botswana who have come to exchange ideas on AIDS education with their Mozambican counterparts. At the University of El Salvador, Brazilian scholars help local administrators to implement the country's first graduate program in international relations, drawing on their experiences creating a similar program at the University of Brasília. In New York, staffers at the United Nations Development Programme regularly update the Web of Information for Development, a massive online database launched in January of 2000 that allows developing countries to share detailed information on their development projects and local experts. How does the current scholarship in comparative education, and in particular the work done so far on the transfer of education models, allow us to understand these cooperation efforts? In analyzing educational models in the developing world, scholars of comparative education have typically contrasted them to templates taken from developed countries, or else pitted "Southern" models against one another to determine which one best approximates a "Northern" counterpart. The literature on education transfer illustrates this narrow adherence to a North-South axis: scholars working in this subfield have formulated theories to explain the dynamics of education transfer that dichotomize the world into Northern lenders and Southern borrowers. This binary approach to development ultimately hides more than it reveals; it obscures not only the wide gamut of development levels among countries but also the complex network of cooperation ties across and within those levels of development. As a result, studies adhering uncritically to this dichotomy tend to disregard complex gradients of power associated with cooperation ties. Technical assistance does not flow narrowly from a core set of industrialized countries to developing countries; even a cursory examination of technical cooperation ties among developing countries reveals, for example, a circularity of resources and expertise which traditional frameworks have failed to consider: these developing countries do not only borrow development knowledge--they also lend it. Despite a wide variety of works in development and politics that problematize the North/South dichotomy and propose either more nuanced systems of classification or the discarding of such systems altogether, the continuing adherence of comparative education scholarship to a largely fictional North-South axis has resulted in large-scale neglect of patterns of international exchange that are not readily explained by the North- South model. This approach leaves little room for analyses of cooperation ties involving lender countries that have traditionally been peripheral to the development discourse. Adriana Abdenur 58 May 14, 2002 Perhaps even more interestingly, the simultaneous lending and borrowing of education models among developing countries prompts several questions for which comparative education so far offers very few clues. How do the politics of cooperation among developing countries differ from those originating in industrialized countries? Are these South-South lending activities merely symbolic attempts to project an image of progress? How do governments that must deal with severe development problems at home justify offering resources to other developing countries? Just as importantly, how do governments justify borrowing from a fellow developing country? These questions are relevant to many areas of technical cooperation, but they are particularly pertinent to the field of education transfer because the adoption of education models constitutes one of the core areas of cooperation among developing countries. This focus is not only a product of financial constraints that limit materials- based assistance by developing countries; it is also a reflection of a fundamental epistemological phenomenon that has transformed both development theory and development practices. More specifically, this focus reflects a crucial crossroads in the way that governments view and value development knowledge--the technical and cultural expertise required to carry out development projects. Over the past century or so, growing disparities in development have yielded a variety of perspectives on how development can best be achieved. Each perspective, in turn, ascribes legitimacy to different sources of development knowledge. I argue that new sources of legitimacy, based more on developmental affinity than on economic and political authority, have generated a rich network of South-South cooperation that remains for the most part terra incognita to scholars of education transfer. In sum, the main contribution of this article is not a reworking of the North-South dichotomy--which has been tackled many times before--but rather the distinction between two sources of criteria for development: affinity and authority. A few caveats are in order here. First, authority and affinity are analytical tools rather than concrete descriptive terms. Although they do not correspond precisely to de facto development ties--in fact they more often than not overlap and interact--analytically separating the two sources of legitimacy allows for greater clarity in academic scholarship of development relations. Likewise, I use "South" and "North" as ideal types rather than poles in a binary framework. Finally, even though the focus of this article is on the state as an actor of development, the argument is largely applicable to other agents in development, including NGOs. This article is thus anchored in those facets of development that are particularly relevant to the state as a unit of analysis. The argument is laid out in three parts. The first part of the article explores the scholarly neglect of education cooperation among developing countries by reviewing the relevant literature in comparative education and identifying the approaches taken so far to South-South education transfer. The second part provides an outline of the main currents of thinking about development, focusing on education and knowledge. After delineating the gaps that have resulted from the neglect of South-South ties, the last part of the article sketches out an agenda for further cumulative research on education transfer. Tilting the North-South Axis: The legitimization of Southern Development Knowledge and its Implications for Comparative Education Research Current Issues in Comparative Education, Vol. 4(2) 59 Literature Review In the postwar period, the modernist paradigm of development held that countries go through a unidirectional process of transition from traditional to modern society; it prescribed emulation of the industrial North as the sole remedy for the backwardness of the South. This paradigm lost favor in the post-colonial period as scholars and development experts began to question the narrow interpretation of development and proposed instead that there are several paths to this end. The backlash against modernism was strengthened by the burgeoning field of colonial studies, whose key figures challenged Northern domination often vociferously (Fanon, 1961; Memmi, 1957/1992; Said, 1978) and helped debunk the once-hegemonic modernist paradigm. Despite the success of colonial studies in rejecting the reductionist worldview proposed by modernization theorists like Rostow (1960), scholars of colonial and post-colonial education (some of whose work is described below) have failed to recognize that the criteria for legitimacy in transfers of development expertise have changed substantially during the past few decades. This excessively narrow focus has often led these scholars to overlook dimensions of international cooperation--most notably ties among developing countries--that have contributed significantly to the generation and legitimization of local knowledge. Development knowledge has figured prominently in a number of the field's seminal articles, but its geopolitical dimensions have seldom been analyzed in depth. Altbach (1984) broke new ground by describing how the unbalanced production and flow of academic literature worldwide has deprived the Third World of information that is crucial to social and scientific development. The corollary to his argument is that this deprivation is essentially systemic--a form of intellectual domination established during the colonial period and perpetuated thereafter through subtler, though no less insidious, political mechanisms. While Altbach's argument that Third World countries have continued to enjoy very limited access to this type of information is persuasive, he dismisses cooperation among developing countries by saying that Third World countries have not engaged in significant collaboration for the production and sharing of knowledge. Although publishing and other information-related forms of collaboration among Third World countries has indeed been limited, this vast over-generalization seems indicative of the readiness with which scholars are willing to dismiss the agency of developing countries. While some academics have recognized the role of South-South intellectual transfer (Arnove, 1980; King & Buchert, 1999), few have set out to explain its scope and politics. Despite this significant gap in the literature, strong criticism leveled by writers such as Albert Memmi (1957/1992) at colonial patterns of dominance has generated perspectives that problematize the North-South axis. Andrea Smith (1994), analyzing colonial education, has pointed out that even in North-South transfers knowledge does not flow in one direction; she notes that, far from being a monolithic instigator of change in the colony, the metropolis itself is also transformed by the colonial process. By debunking the myth of a single-vector transfer of knowledge, Smith convincingly portrays colonial relationships as textured and flowing both ways. Other scholars have complicated the simplistic view of metropolis/periphery by noting that "internal colonialism" also engenders centers and peripheries within a given country (Epstein, 1971). These dynamics are often mirrored in the post-colonial period, as noted by scholars of Adriana Abdenur 60 May 14, 2002 neocolonialism (Altbach, 1971; Elsemon 1981). Yet, although such studies problematize North-South relations, they do not depart from that axis; instead, they show that the relationship is bi-directional rather than uni-directional. They do not, in other words, explore the more horizontal links that emerged during and after the colonial era. Recent studies that touch on South-South education ties are few and far between. In a notable exception, Sandra Gillespie (2001) has investigated the transfer of knowledge between China and Africa. Her study contextualizes South-South transfer within the World Systems framework proposed by Immanuel Wallerstein, but it does not deal in great depth with the complex issues surrounding the legitimacy of this particular transfer. Rather, Gillespie's main contribution is a detailed examination of education transfer within the larger arena of foreign policy, which helps to ground the field in a broad international political context--a bird's eye view of the global arena that is essential in establishing a solid theoretical framework encompassing exchanges along several axes. Whereas the contribution of comparative education to the study of South-South cooperation has been remarkably thin, there is substantial literature on the subject by scholars of international relations and development experts. The vast body of work descending from studies of regionalism and globalization offer new frameworks for analyzing the multiplicity of cooperation ties at the turn of the millennium (Nye, 1968; Huntington, 1996). Especially since the emergence of dependency theory in the 1960s and 1970s, there has been a noticeable increase in the literature covering both bilateral and multilateral relations among developing countries. This is no doubt partly a result of an increase in actual transfer activities during the second half of the twentieth century; but it is also a reflection of a new worldview informed by structuralist perspectives such as Wallerstein's World Systems theory, which categorized countries according to four levels of involvement with the world economy--center, semi- periphery, periphery, and external (Wallerstein, 1974). Unfortunately, a large portion of the South-South literature that arose out of this worldview is prescriptive and technical rather than descriptive and analytical. Publications such as the Cooperation South journal, which the United Nations Development Programme has published biannually since 1995, provide a plethora of studies pertaining to cooperation among developing countries, but they seldom include attempts to theorize the specific nature of such ties and even more rarely question the dichotomous view of the world on which they are premised. Comparative education scholars have also drawn on the critical school of international relations, particularly on the work of Robert Cox (1996). Yet Cox's description of a New International Economic Order, despite its astute observation that the international arena is characterized not only by state actors but also by complex international networks, largely ignores more horizontal power structures. Although Cox purports to formulate a framework that will encompass all international relations rather than the oversimplified power structures delineated by the realist balance-of-power model, he conceptualizes the New International Economic Order as a negotiation between the North and the South (Cox, 1996). Tilting the North-South Axis: The legitimization of Southern Development Knowledge and its Implications for Comparative Education Research Current Issues in Comparative Education, Vol. 4(2) 61 As a result of this narrowly vertical definition, comparative education scholarship incorporating the work of Cox and other critical theorists of international relations has consistently reflected the restricted perspective of the North-South axis. Karen Mundy (1998) has applied critical theory to education multilateralism to describe the emergence of a new political sphere in education assistance and development. Like Cox, she concentrates on North-dominated organizations at the expense of Southern partnerships, which despite their relatively limited reach complicate overarching explanations of world politics--traditional and critical alike--through their sheer presence on the global scene. In sum, the dearth of scholarship on South-South education transfer follows a broader trend in the field of comparative education of concentrating far too narrowly on the North-South dimension of international development. The next section explores in greater depth the emergence of South-South cooperation networks and outlines the intellectual debates that accompanied and propelled the formation of those networks. The Quest for a Greater Symmetry In the backlash against modernist theory, colonial and neo-colonial patterns of domination remained the object of sharp criticism by scholars and writers through the 1960s and 1970s. As these attacks gained momentum, they were no longer restricted to academic forums; soon they began to permeate the discourse--and shape the practices-- of national governments and international organizations. This movement found a particularly eloquent expression in the call for empowering the South through knowledge of development. For instance, as the political legitimacy of colonialism crumbled, explicit calls for greater symmetry emerged in the literature concerning the transfer of knowledge (Noah & Eckstein, 1988). In 1972, UNESCO convened a group of experts to draft recommendations on how to engage in the transfer of development knowledge without exacerbating the dominance of traditional assistance programs. The scholars rejected the term "transfer of knowledge", which assumes a rigid pole of knowledge accumulation and a passive recipient, in favor of the "exchange of knowledge", which prescribes a bi- (or multi-) directional sharing rather than single-vector assistance (Ribes, 1981). A number of case studies highlighted what the writers perceived to be a critical need for local participation and outsiders' greater familiarization with local culture and society prior to project design and implementation. The authors concluded their report with a vague call for "self-training", asserting that the "original adaptation of imported elements" would allow recipient countries to help themselves. Despite its generous consideration of local needs and the necessity for selective adoption of policies and policies rather than wholesale models, this analysis nevertheless adheres to the traditional North-South perspective. While acknowledging the one-sided dominance that has been built into traditional technical assistance, it aims only at increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of development projects, rather than at creating truly indigenous sources of knowledge or subverting Northern dominance. In sum, the UNESCO experts were calling for further consideration of context and circumstance rather than human capital capacity. Their analysis stops short of an explicit attempt at redefining--and thus, empowering-- knowledge "recipients" as alternative sources of knowledge. Adriana Abdenur 62 May 14, 2002 What, then, generated knowledge transfers in which the North was no longer automatically regarded as the ultimate authority? Beginning in the 1970s, there was a substantial increase, both quantitative and qualitative, in cooperation activities between developing countries. This increase was triggered by the end of colonialism, a system whose narrowly vertical power structure largely crystallized trade within territories colonized by a single European country. As colonial yokes were severed, territorial restraints on trade and cooperation imposed by the colonizing countries also broke down (Johns, 1988). The Cold War intensified the establishment of cooperation ties among post-colonial and other developing countries as the United States and the Soviet Union fought to expand their respective spheres of influence. Ideology came to play a significant role in determining whether a particular link was acceptable; the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union prevented satellite countries from shifting sides by supporting regimes that shared their causes or interests, and they lured developing countries into their camps through financial assistance and transfer of knowledge. Although in many cases the economic help proved a more appealing bait than ideology for its own sake, a number of regimes established or strengthened ties with one particular superpower out of ideological affinity. Gillespie (2001) has described how academic exchanges between China and African countries (mostly flowing from the former to the latter) were fuelled by China's concerted effort to secure and retain the loyalty of African regimes with a leftist bent. Ideology has since given way to more pragmatic considerations since the end of the Cold War, but it still plays a part in development ties: for instance, China has continued exchange programs with several poor nations whose loyalty to the mainland might otherwise waver in face of the generous economic assistance offered by rival Taiwan. Partly as a result of the blocs formed by opposing ideological camps, Third World countries began to perceive the potential of cooperation among themselves. In 1972, the establishment of the loosely organized Third World Forum was a sign that a Third World perspective (the tiers-mondiste paradigm) was beginning to crystallize not only in the academy but also in policy-making. Mahbub ul Huq, a World Bank senior official from Pakistan, characterized the ultimate purpose of this grouping as the "intellectual self-reliance, both at the national and at the international level, which could give some form and substance to our aimless search for appropriate development strategies at home and to our disorganized efforts to coordinate out negotiating positions abroad" (cited in Cox, 1996, p.381). This attempt by developing countries to increase political leverage by banding together was reinforced by the oil crisis of 1973, when developed countries rather abruptly sidelined development issues in order to focus on their own imperiled economies. Ul Huq was not a solitary critic. He was part of an international network of intellectuals, many from the Third World, who around this time began to formulate solid critiques of traditional approaches to development and assistance1. Samir Amin, an Egyptian intellectual and former officer of the United Nations Development Programme, believed that self-reliance was not only an intellectual goal but also an economic one. Amin (1977) proposed that, in order to redress the dramatic inequalities between North and South, Third World countries should collectively limit the export of raw materials to the First World. Tilting the North-South Axis: The legitimization of Southern Development Knowledge and its Implications for Comparative Education Research Current Issues in Comparative Education, Vol. 4(2) 63 These ideas are variants of a uniquely Third World paradigm that was emerging in the late 1960s and 1970s. An intense questioning of traditional forms of dominance, strongly influenced by the historical structuralism of Marxist thought, began to take shape in Third World academic circles. Scholars such as Raúl Prebisch (1970) drew up a new worldview based on the concepts of metropolis and periphery. Although a number of variations emerged around this theme, these theories--known collectively as dependency theory--had as a least common denominator the notion that developing countries were kept subjugated to industrialized countries through forms of dominance inherited from the colonial period (Cardoso & Faletto, 1979; Frank, 1988). Dependence theorists suggested that industrialized countries maintained this exploitative dynamic by appropriating the surplus of developing countries, coopting their elites, and fostering the illusion in the periphery that its inhabitants were indeed free. The implication of this perspective, especially as refined by Wallerstein, was that the potential for transforming the world system lay in the Third World itself--a corollary that no doubt strengthened the drive of the tier-mondistes. The dependency theory school had a significant impact on international relations and on development policy, both directly and indirectly. It strengthened, for instance, the conviction of Third World development experts that industrialized countries eschewed local expertise in their development assistance programs, favoring forms of knowledge that were not always applicable to the local context. In general, this period brought about a deep suspicion regarding the motives of industrialized countries even in their aid activities. Crucial decisions regarding the global economy were now being made by international organizations (IMF, OECD) that excluded Third World countries (Mundy, 1998). More specifically, this period gave rise to a marked increase in regionalism and block formation in the South. In the late 1970s, South-South cooperation gained impetus with the signing of what is perhaps the most ambitious cooperation agreement among developing countries so far--the Buenos Aires Plan of Action (BAPA), which called for the expansion of trade and other networks within the Third World. The Plan, signed by 138 countries, marked the systematic approach of the United Nations Development Program to what it called Technical Cooperation Among Developing Countries (TCDC)- -a separate division within the organization (UNDP, 1978). The BAPA was a highly optimistic and ambitious document, and it had a deep impact on the formation of official ties among developing countries. In Latin America, for example, it expedited the creation of a solid network of technical cooperation agreements. In the mid-eighties, the Organization of American States established a Horizontal Cooperation program for multilateral and bilateral cooperation agreements between developing countries. The program encompasses the technical cooperation agencies of Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, and supports a number of other bilateral and multilateral cooperation venues between Latin American countries (CIDI, 2002). The program's launch coincided with other initiatives, taken both individually and jointly by developing countries. In Brazil, the establishment of a government Cooperation Agency (ABC) reflects this trend in its organizational structure: it is split into two separate divisions, one that coordinates assistance received from developed countries and multilateral organizations, and one that coordinates cooperation with other developing Adriana Abdenur 64 May 14, 2002 countries. The latter is largely concerned with providing other lusophone countries such as Angola, Mozambique, and East Timor with assistance in areas in which Brazil has accumulated a solid record. For example, the ABC has been actively involved in the training of Portuguese-language teachers in East Timor, drawing on its long tradition of popular education programs to help consolidate the education system of that newly independent country. The trend is not restricted to the Latin American context; nor is it peculiar to government agencies. Recent issues of Cooperation South, which tracks cooperation among developing countries, include an essay on India's Technical Cooperation Programme, which provides scholarships for academic exchanges with other developing countries and has sent around 500 Indian experts to assist in development projects elsewhere (Parthasarathi, 2000); a report on the Africa-Asia Business Forum, a coalition of 350 African and Asian business executives who meet regularly to promote trade, share ideas, and carry out collaborations in the form of joint ventures and technology transfers ("Windows on the South," 1999); and a description of a free-email project begun by Costa Rica and currently being expanded throughout Central America and the Dominican Republic ("Windows on the South," 2000). The transfer of education and training models has played a key role in South-South cooperation activities. This focus reflects the centrality of education and training in dependency theory, which posits that the control of knowledge enables the metropolis to inculcate in the periphery the illusion of freedom. To dependence theorists, this control allows the North to promote and validate those types of knowledge which are most convenient to Northern interests, often in spite of--and to the detriment of--local and traditional forms of knowledge. By undermining local knowledge in the South, the North was seen as undermining the South's sources of power. This perspective gained strength in the 1970s when Northern countries pushed for a "basic needs" approach to development assistance, sidelining education (whose impact on a society would take decades to determine) in favor of more visible, immediate-impact efforts in health and nutrition (Mundy, 1998). Scholars of education soon seized upon this concept to critique the structure of knowledge as one of the most fundamental tools in perpetuating Northern dominance, and they began to call for vigorous efforts to indigenize the production of knowledge without striving for complete isolation (Mazrui, 1975). Authority and Affinity This vibrant call for the development of localized knowledge, combined with the increasing attention paid to cooperation among developing countries, signals a fundamental shift in the source of legitimacy for development. This legitimacy was once predicated on political and economic authority, which largely corresponded to the developed world and was greatly reinforced by the colonial pattern of domination and its legacy. The colonial power structure ascribed dominance to the colonizer and relegated the colonized to a position of subservience. The mixture of terror and paternalism that characterized colonial relationships ensured not only that the colonized remained dominated, but also that he aspired to the "civilized"--hence, "knowledgeable"- -status of the colonizer. The colonizer, in other words, had ownership and control of knowledge that produced power, and this knowledge was meted out strategically to specific sectors of the population, notably instance the elite, whose complicity was Tilting the North-South Axis: The legitimization of Southern Development Knowledge and its Implications for Comparative Education Research Current Issues in Comparative Education, Vol. 4(2) 65 instrumental in safeguarding the colonizer's stronghold on the territory. The colonizer could thus define the knowledge-power relationship under a semblance of generosity (i.e., for permitting that some colonized persons enter their sphere of civilization)2. In the post-colonial period, outright coercion was replaced by the modernist prescription for emulation of the industrialized countries as the only path to development. In the 1960s, as dependency theory and its equally rebellious theoretical cousins took hold and governments began to question the wisdom of this worldview, there began to emerge new sources of legitimacy for the transfer of development knowledge. Development scholars like ul Huq and Mazrui began to place greater value on familiarity with the local context ("indigenous knowledge") and political affinity (kinship with the former colonized as opposed to the former colonizer). As developing countries incorporated this new perspective into their international cooperation activities, they began to actively construct an alternative political space where affinity supplemented authority as a source of legitimacy for development knowledge. The intellectual discourse around issues of development reflects changing views of the role of developing countries. Particularly notable is the concern with dampening the hierarchical connotations of development-related expressions. In the 1970s, some scholars appropriated the Maoist term collective self-reliance to describe their attempt to break the pattern of dependency, and then shifted to "softer" terms such as cooperation, assistance, and horizontal cooperation, and--most recently--South-South cooperation. Behind this shifting discourse was a strong emphasis (sometimes bordering on zealous insistence) that developing countries were capable of both producing and sharing development knowledge independently of the industrialized world. Despite the sometimes radical overtones of this discourse, it was far more than hot air; indeed, this discourse accompanied concrete changes in the cooperation practices--most notably the establishment of government agencies in developing countries geared specifically at fomenting collaboration with other developing countries--that in turn signaled new sources of legitimacy for development knowledge. This is not to say that cooperation achieved symmetry. Despite the effort to erase connotations of hierarchy from the language on cooperation between developing countries, these collaborative ties also imply complex political processes. The concepts of affinity and authority are useful insofar as they allow us to tease out the different sources of legitimacy for development knowledge and identify the dominant criteria for adoption of development projects in a given context. However, these are Weberian ideal types--analytical tools for comparative analysis. In reality authority and affinity are seldom mutually exclusive; they overlap and interact. Moreover, what to one actor seems like affinity might look like authority to another; this mismatch of interpretation itself yields complex power plays. Regional leaders such as Brazil, South Africa, and India may use their lending capacities to reassert their positions within their respective geopolitical arenas. Borrowing from such countries entails not only affinity but also authority, although of a different sort than that represented by industrialized nations. Even cooperation among countries at similar development levels involves complex political negotiation; for instance, lenders must justify using what are already scarce resources to assist others, and borrowers must justify the importation of models and knowledge that originate in other contexts of underdevelopment. Adriana Abdenur 66 May 14, 2002 Power persists in these ties partly because of the centrality of knowledge in this shift in legitimacy. The role of information and education in cooperation among developing countries cannot be understated. It is no coincidence that a substantial potion of South- South cooperation takes the form of technical assistance and education projects. This focus in part reflects the widespread belief that human capital formation is a key ingredient of national development. In addition, borrowing education and training from another developing country might be sometimes politically far less problematic than borrowing, say, economic models, which would make policymakers accountable according to a multitude of readily quantifiable variables. Finally, borrowing in these areas is a relatively cost-effective way to trigger and sustain socioeconomic change. Even exchanges that should be strictly classified as technical assistance rather than transfers of education impact the education system by altering the very sources that provide content (and sometimes, form) for education programs. Enhanced knowledge of AIDS prevention techniques, for instance, can trickle down as far as primary school as experts adapt school curricula to include that enhanced knowledge. These cooperation programs thus target specific individuals whose expanded human capital has a "multiplier effect". By focusing strategically on people who have a real impact on policy, borrowers can assure that whatever assistance they do receive has maximal effect. At the same time, lenders can optimize the impact of their own scarce assistance resources, which helps to justify lending activities at the level of internal politics. The centrality of education in South-South cooperation is thus closely tied to the role of knowledge as a fundamental tool of development. The primacy accorded to education in this arena in turn opens up exciting new possibilities for empirical research in comparative education. Conclusion and New Directions for Research This article has outlined the development of a new source of legitimacy for development knowledge that privileges social, political, and economic affinity between cooperation partners over the ascribed authority of an industrialized lender. The new focus on affinity, while not eclipsing the preeminence of authority, has yielded rich networks of collaboration in the South. Expanding the theoretical framework used by scholars of comparative education to include these networks allows us to redirect empirical research to unexplored areas of education transfer. Despite the political focus of this theoretical exploration, unearthing the complexity of South-South ties in the field of education yields several possibilities both for empirical research and for theoretical refinement of analytical frameworks. Here below I describe two particularly promising lines of work for further research on this topic. First, case studies that trace the circuitry of assistance within education development ties would shed light on the circularity of resources that becomes evident when we consider developing countries as lenders as well as borrowers. One area that is especially in need of further work is the topic of regional leadership, which might yield interesting data on relationships of authority among developing countries. As mentioned above, regional leaders such as Brazil, South Africa, and India have specific programs for "horizontal" cooperation that focus on education and training activities. Exploring the reasons why these countries lend assistance while receiving themselves substantial aid from the Tilting the North-South Axis: The legitimization of Southern Development Knowledge and its Implications for Comparative Education Research Current Issues in Comparative Education, Vol. 4(2) 67 North would greatly enhance our understanding of the politics of education at the international level. A complementary line of work would involve more explicitly comparative studies contrasting the politics of borrowing among countries at different levels of development. These comparative studies would be particularly fruitful in regards to the specific politics of borrowing and lending within these configurations. Areas of interest would include means of justification for engaging in such activities, the discourses that arise out of those means of justification, and the political resistance encountered by constituencies and political entities accustomed to authority as the primary source of legitimacy in development. Finally, empirical research need not be geared strictly towards refining the theoretical framework. Much of the scholarship in comparative education is carried out with the explicit purpose of assisting policymakers and development specialists to effectively adapt borrowed models of education. Greater attention to the flow of models between developing countries would no doubt generate important practical information on local context and capacity for adaptation. Notes 1. It must be noted, however, that many of these Third World intellectuals were educated in developed countries. Ul Huq himself was a Yale graduate, and Amin received his training in Paris. 2. 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