Power, Politics, and Higher Education in Southern Africa: Interna ...

The WTO classifies itself as a member-based organization that is founded on consensual decisions to support favorable members or punish a member who violates an agreement; it vehemently differentiates itself from the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) by emphasizing its practice of multilateral decision making involving 150 countries, as opposed to a bureaucratic intraorganizational decision making such as that entrusted to a board of directors. One important feature of the organizational structure of the WTO is the existence of internal groups that represent the common interests of their regions. These groups are praised by the WTO as auxiliaries for smaller countries to increase their bargaining power in negotiations with more powerful partners. Among these groups, the best structured is the European Union and among the least influential is the African group, a fact that calls into question the issue of equitable representation of less powerful nations.

In an attempt to unveil the complexities of power dynamics in the interactions between international regimes and Local Governments, I analyze the power dynamics between global international regimes and regional international regimes, and the implications of such power dynamics on the educational autonomy of local governments in Southern Africa. In the analysis I employ international regimes theory, filter effect theory, African renaissance, classical liberalism, globalization theories (e.g., world culture, world polity, and world system), and systems transfer.³