Skills for development and vocational education and training: Current and emergent trends

In 2012, IJED published a special issue on vocational education and training and development that reflected the sense of being at a potential turning point for policy, practice and research in this area as UNESCO convened the Third International Conference on Technical and Vocational Education and Training. A decade on, we reflect on the way that the research literature has evolved in this period, suggesting a five-fold typology of literature that seeks to explore the VET-development relationship. First, we note that the vast majority of research published on VET in developing countries is practice-focused, concerned with improving classrooms, curricula and colleges, largely in the public sector. Whilst it considers VET in development contexts, it is typically not concerned with questions about the relationship between VET and development. Second, there is a well-established literature that provides an economic analysis of skills development in the Global South. As, we explain in the paper, this has two main strands: one from the supply and the other from the demand side. The former focuses on the cost-efficiency of the VET system, while the latter pays attention to the labour market demands for skills and education. Third, there is a constructivist tradition in which researchers emphasise empirically observing ways skills are demanded and used in the lives of people who embody them, instead of taking the models and logic of the public VET structure and educational programmes as paramount. Fourth, the political economy of skills tradition is concerned with the rules of how skills development operates, with a strong historical and comparative sensibility. Fifth, we identify a “post-political economy of skills”, which seeks to build from the political economy tradition through drawing on diverse theoretical influences, such as critical realism, political ecology and the capabilities approach. We argue that this pluralism is to be welcomed but, nonetheless, advocate for better dialogue across these traditions.