Since it entered the comparative education research agenda decades ago, the privatisation of education provision has become a more complex phenomenon (Bellei & Orellana, 2014). Policies that fall under the umbrella Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) are increasingly diverse and adopted with different objectives and through various instruments. In addition, such arrangements are found in an increasingly heterogeneous number of countries. For instance, public subsidies for private schools, frequently associated with countries of the Global North, are increasingly being considered in different countries of the Global South. However, as a consequence of the extensive evidence demonstrating the negative impact of education PPPs on equity, a debate has emerged in the past few years regarding the need of public regulation to counterbalance the educational inequalities associated with privatisation policies (Boeskens, 2016). Based on a systematic literature review, this paper aims to identify the different regulatory configurations of education PPPs and make sense of their recent evolution. The findings show how the policy objectives pursued with the adoption of education PPPs, as well as institutional factors and related path-dependencies, are crucial to comprehending the evolving configuration of regulatory frameworks. The research also identifies a cross-cutting trend to recalibrate existing regulatory frameworks in response to problematisation processes that brought to the fore the impact of private education on school segregation and social stratification between schools. In most cases, equity-oriented reforms are moving towards a command and control governance approach to the detriment of a market governance approach. New regulations tend to increase the role of the State in terms of educational planning, establishing norms and monitoring schools’ behaviour. The paper also reflects on three main challenges experienced during the research process, feeding into the current debate in comparative education policy studies. First, despite the global nature of education policies, such as privatisation and PPPs, cross-country comparability remains challenging due to the specific forms these policies take at the local level. Second, the increasing need for an interdisciplinary theoretical and analytical approach to capture the complexity of education policies poses a challenge to integrate these different perspectives consistently. In the case of privatisation, integration efforts are further complicated by ideological divides that continue to permeate the debate. Finally, while there is growing recognition of the multi-scalar nature of the privatisation phenomena, emerging regulatory trends point towards the need for a more systematic effort towards the categorisation and operationalisation of domestic drivers mediating in recontextualisation processes.

Bellei, C., & Orellana, V. (2014). What Does “Education Privatisation” Mean? Conceptual Discussion and Empirical Review of Latin American Cases. (ESP Working Paper Series, No. 62.) The Privatisation in Education Research Initiative (PERI). Boeskens, L. (2016). Regulating publicly funded private schools: A literature review on equity and effectiveness (OECD Education Working Papers, No. 147). Paris, France: OECD Publishing.