Educational exceptionalism in small (and micro) states: Cooperative educational transfer and TVET

Since 2002, the 15 member states of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) have shifted human resource development reforms from focusing on providing basic, mass primary and secondary education and limited tertiary education toward diverting resources to Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) to accommodate labor mobility. This shift fixated on facilitating the creation of the Caribbean Single Market (CSM) in 2006, which was premised upon the free movement of service, capital, goods, people, and the right to establishment (ability of any CARICOM national to establish a business). The motivation was to create an optimal frontier at the regional level to aid in the development of the ‘ideal Caribbean person.’ This article will examine how CARICOM members relied upon the non-economic policy process of functional cooperation and the policy tool of what I call ‘cooperative educational transfer’ at the regional level to move ideas and practices collaboratively to stimulate national education reform. A summative content analysis shows that the rise of cooperative educational transfer at the regional level was a direct consequence of dialectic, dynamic, and fragmentary effects of globalization, since emerging markets in the small (and micro) states of CARICOM cannot insulate themselves from global economic pressures individually. In an analysis of 13 national CARICOM educational policies, findings show that during the 2002–2010 policy period, decisionmaking was distrait, since national governments incorporated both national mandates and regional aspirations and commitments in their reform agendas.