Transnational Policy-Making on Social and Emotional Learning in Crisis-Affected Contexts: The Case in Lebanon
Open AccessThis study examined the complex processes and underlying mechanisms in the formation of Lebanon’s national social and emotional learning (SEL) policy since the Syrian refugee influx in 2011. SEL has been increasingly adopted as a policy solution to promote learning and well-being in contexts affected by crisis and fragility in the Global South, but SEL has been analyzed and evaluated mostly in terms of individual programs. Rarely have researchers examined how, why, and by whom SEL has become a traveling global education policy. A comparative case study methodology was used to follow SEL as a policy discourse and traveling idea across multiple scales. Analytical frameworks from cultural political economy and key theoretical concepts from critical policy studies undergird this study, in which both policy actor-oriented endogenous drivers and exogeneous cultural, political, and economic drivers are shown to enable national SEL policy-making in Lebanon.The primary findings of this research illuminate the heuristic, longitudinal, and complex processes of the SEL policy adoption and formulation in Lebanon, which have evolved through interactions across actors, events, and technological apparatuses on multiple scales, highlighting the unique nature of such processes in the context of a crisis-affected Global South. Although the national SEL policy-making process in Lebanon was perceived to epitomize collaboration by those involved, the roles undertaken by transnational‒national actors and national policy-makers in those processes reflected unequal power dynamics in global education aid architecture. A complex group of transnational‒national actors deterritorialized and promoted SEL as a global policy solution and then powerfully mobilized and brought SEL into Lebanon with financial resources. Only then, national policy-makers reactively recontextualized and strategically maneuvered internationally funded initiatives to align with the national priority. From the perspectives and experiences of national‒local actors, implementation at the school level would be problematic because of the endemic mistrust of the Lebanese government among the teachers. A comparison of the conceptualization of SEL across policy actors vertically and horizontally revealed a mismatch between the narrowed, technocratic understanding of SEL as a global solution and the diverse and locally specific educational problems it was intended to address.
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