The 30th anniversary Human Development Report, entitled "The Next Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene," was released by the United Nations Development Programme in December 2020. It marks an important step forward as a high-profile publication trying to radically re-think the challenge of sustainable development and revisit…

The current decade has seen a significant return of interest in vocational education and training (VET) amongst the international policy community. This rise in policy and programmatic interest in VET's role in development, however, stands in contrast to the state of the academic debate. Whilst there have continued to be both policy and academic…

Vocational education and training (VET) has returned to the list of policy priorities for education in Africa after an absence of a quarter of a century, yet there has been no new research that overturns the existing orthodox position that such provision, whether during or after schooling, is inefficient and ineffective. This paper addresses this…

The current dominant account of aid to education focuses on schooling and official development assistance and talks in terms of policy work, donor harmonisation and, increasingly, budgetary support. However, this approach is limited in a number of ways. The return of international policy interest in vocational education provides an opportunity to…

Much of VET policy internationally draws on a toolkit that has been seriously questioned for its logic, international relevance and effectiveness by considerable amounts of academic research. Reflecting primarily on our experiences of leading a complex, multi-country policy study, we develop an account that seeks to explore ways in which the…