Curriculum is back on the educational agenda. The 4^th goal on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (UNDP 2015), with a strong focus on educational quality raises the need for curricular capacity strengthening. However, the necessity and importance of strengthening such capacities is often not aligned accordingly. Post-2015 discussions identified several gaps, such as a too narrow, one-size-fits-all approach to education; inadequate attention to human capital and resource constraints, including an inadequate focus on teachers as key agents for quality education (UNESCO & UNICEF, 2013). Many curriculum development interventions, where local partners in developing countries work together with international organisations lack sustainable outcomes, often due to strategies with a too narrow focus. Knowledge regarding systemic curriculum development is needed to achieve more sustainable educational and curricular outcomes. Such a comprehensive perspective on curriculum does not only require curriculum knowledge, but also knowledge regarding professional development of (future) teachers, education managers, the inspectorate, etc., and the indispensible inclusion of relevant stakeholders. This knowledge is often lacking or weak, and repeatedly leads to weak reforms and disappointing results. A more solid and systemic curricular capacity development knowledge base could help in shaping international initiatives supporting curriculum development. The Netherlands National Commission for UNESCO and The Netherlands Institute for Curriculum Development (SLO) initiated research into enhanced sustainable curriculum development, in order to propose approaches for more successful curriculum reform interventions. The research focuses on curriculum development in international development cooperation and aims to answer the question how curriculum development processes can be optimised in order to strengthen curricular capacity of stakeholders and to enhance the sustainability of curriculum reforms, and investigates which design principles should underlie such trajectories.

The research consists of three stages: 1: mapping and articulating the existing academic and professional knowledge base regarding curricular capacity development efforts in such contexts, 2: relating the knowledge base to curricular reforms and capacity development practice in selected countries and 3: identifying implications for international development cooperation and public policy. The first stage comprised a literature and context analysis, which focused on the identification of fundamental principles for increased sustainability in international development cooperation. It put the general developments and paradigms in this sector from World War II until now under scrutiny to learn more about underlying reasons for success and failure, and to draft potential design principles for enhanced sustainability of curriculum reforms. The subsequent context analysis shifted the focus towards the operational level by drawing a more specific picture of contemporary curriculum development and educational practice in the sector. The findings of the whole analysis are synthesised into a foundation for sustainable curricular capacity development (CCD), consisting of five pillars, including a number of corresponding recommendations. This foundation serves as a set of design principles (by analogy with the formula of Van den Akker, 2013) for CCD-processes, and is presented to a number of experts at several stages during its development, including at previous ECER conferences. This theory is now being validated in three case studies in Africa and the Caribbean. In those three contexts, different projects with different scope, duration, type of funding are run, ranging from interventions that are entirely marked by curriculum development, or that include at least a curriculum development component. This paper presents the outcomes of this case study research, including the design principles.  

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