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Indeed, the SAPs were notorious for their one-size-fits-all policies, but they were officially adopted through contractual procedures required for the loans. However, with WTO and GATS, new mechanisms to legitimize external control have been designed.Dr. Cossa rightly indicates, recalling a critique formulated by AAU against WTO and GATS “agreements,” that these organizations have designed new institutionalized “binding obligations” and grounds for coercion of African countries into the “liberalization” framework that aims at producing transformations in the decisional power and authority of African and external agents “strengthening the external at the expense of the internal.”
In this context, this book is timely and refreshing as it provides a critical perspective, through theoretical articulations framed in “international regimes theory, filter effect theory,African Renaissance, classical liberalism, and globalization theories…and systems transfer” and an empirical study, by analyzing “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.”
Dr. Cossa creatively combines historiography and a methodology for contemporary data collection and analysis with qualitative and quantitative dimensions that help address fieldwork challenges of the gap between scheduled and actual samples. In the end, he has produced a very original study.