Inventaire d'enquêtes Demostaf

This article documents the ways in which school norms are produced and spread in an international context. By using the concept of "epistemic communities", which is borrowed from internationalism in political science, the article aims to show the part played by some of the actors involved in the production of legitimate knowledge which underlies public education policies, at the scale of a country such as Senegal. Bringing to light the social and political conditions for the emergence of this group of people, by analyzing their professional trajectories and their movements, allows us to understand the logic behind public policy and its reconfiguration within the framework of international development aid programs. The creation process of an epistemic community sheds light on how a consensus on education can be reached, going beyond how heterogeneous the actors and the institutions may be, at the heart of the dynamic reforms launched in the 1990s. Achieving a consensus rooted in a knowledge which is considered legitimate is part of the process of depoliticization, which is inherent to international governance. Analyzing this process illuminates new ways in which norms are produced. Far from being a mere projection of exogenous methods and reference systems, this legitimate and consensual knowledge is co-produced and reinvested into public education policies by the local actors. They do so by mobilizing both local (militant and professional networks) and international (study abroad) resources, as well as the social and cognitive wealth which they have accumulated throughout their careers. Bringing to light these lasting dynamics allows qualifying the traditional divide between national and international loci of production and negotiation of education norms, by underlining the great changeability and the transnational character of the loci of normative production.