Adult education in Hybrid political regimes – gaps between policy and practice

Abstract

During the last decade hybrid political regimes with democratic structures and authoritarian practices became realities in many countries, particularly in the post-communist world. Our hypothesis is that the tension between the geopolitical desire to demonstrate the existence of the democratic processes and exclusion of citizens from the decision-making process and the arbitrariness of the authorities leads also to the discrepancy between adult education policy and practice. The paper aims to explore and analyse the relationship between hybrid political regimes (Ekman, 2009) and their adult education policy. Serbia is an example of such regime. On one side the process of European integration (and cooperation with UNESCO and others) sets certain norms, on the other side there is accelerated neoliberalisation of the society and a strengthened authoritarian government. This odd situation creates the unbalanced adult education governance. We argue that adult education policy is created either as a direct imitation of an international policy (Jakobi, 2009) or only for ‘external use’ to demonstrate that Serbia is on the right path to the EU accession, and that this leaves adult education practice poorly financed and without dedicated implementation of the policy. The paper will employ the approach of hybrid regimes, defining them as diminished subtypes of either democracy or authoritarianism or as transitional “situations” that are expected to revert back to one of two types. Content and discourse analysis will sample documents to expose the gap between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ in two main lines: discourses and concepts of adult education (Derasimović & Maksimović, 2017), as well as data and statistics. The gap will be illustrated by examples from the national documents and reports, and education practices, indicating the discrepancy.