The introduction of per-capita education financing in former USSR countries

It has been well documented in comparative education research that former USSR countries have tailored educational reforms in the post-independence era after reforms that were tried elsewhere. In particular, several states of the Baltic, Caucasus, and Central Asian regions have implemented general education funding models based on per-capita calculations. Various local and global actors participated in the borrowing process. In this dissertation, I try to discern why the per-capita funding model of education resonated with these actors.;I address this research question through two approaches. First, the education funding policy reforms in Georgia and Latvia are analyzed comparatively through data that were generated by the study of the policy documents and media. The policy actors, including policy-makers, technical experts, school directors, members of the civil society, and international organizations, were also interviewed. Second, the factors that influenced the policy process in Georgia and Latvia were further investigated on a wider scale. Utilizing Qualitative Comparative Analysis, 15 former USSR countries were examined on variables of education efficiency, corruption, economic capacity, and orientation toward the market-driven policies.;Based on this analysis, I demonstrate in this dissertation that the policy borrowing in education is a process of complex interactions between various actors. The per-capita funding model resonated differently with diverse actors in Georgia and Latvia, which faced both shared and unique policy environments. At the time the new funding model was introduced, Georgia was plagued with corruption and relatively low capacity in their public governance. In Latvia, the policy was introduced during a major economic crisis. The process of borrowing was highly selective, and local actors in both countries actively transformed the funding model.;One common approach to establish legitimacy of the new policy was to reference the new model to the external societies, such as the West, or to ascribe the policy agenda to the pressures originating from the international donors. The Soviet Union was also constructed as a negative counter-reference society that was considered worth departing from. After the implementation of the funding models, special efforts were made to indigenize and de-territorialize the elements of the imported global reform package.