Contents lists available at ScienceDirect International Journal of Educational Development journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijedudev Policy promise and the reality of community involvement in school-based management in Zambia: Can the rural poor hold schools and teachers to account? Taeko Okitsu a, ⁎ , D. Brent Edwards Jr. b a Department of Communication and Culture, The Faculty of Language and Literature, Otsuma Women’s University, 12, Samban-cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan b College of Education, Department of Educational Foundations, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, 1776, University Ave., Honolulu, HI, United States ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Community participation School-based management Accountability Rural poor Teachers Zambia ABSTRACT Community participation in school management—and in hiring and firing of teachers in particular—has been actively advocated as an effective reform to improve school and teacher accountability in the Global South. This paper examines whether such reform functions in practice as suggested in theory, drawing on the findings of a case study of community schools in rural Zambia. Using the concept of the ‘context of practice’,efforts have been made to understand the local meanings of community participation in school management rather than that of the central government or development partners. Such analysis illuminates the important roles that local economic and cultural capital, complex cultural norms and unexpected micro politics play in shaping the way parents and communities are actually willing and able to participate in school management, and how these issues influence school and teacher accountability. The findings also underscore the difficulty that teachers face when attempting to respond to the local demands, especially in the context of grossly inadequate resources being allocated to them by the state. The paper concludes by arguing, first, that community management of schools in Zambia was an unfunded and unclear policy that shifted financial responsibility to already marginalized rural communities and, second, that direct hiring relationships between parents and teachers will dilute the importance of the political accountability of the state to ensure quality education for all. 1. Introduction Decentralising major decision-making authority to the school level while allowing community and parental participation in key decision- making areas has been a mantra in international education develop- ment discourse and practices for some time. Such reform is often de- scribed as school-based management (SBM). Among other outcomes, it is generally expected that, when the voices of parents and local com- munity members are included in school management, the schools’ re- sponsiveness to the local priorities will improve, in addition to strengthening the accountability of the teacher, which in turn will lead to better student learning (Ranson and Martin et al., 1999; Gershberg and Winkler, 2004; World Bank, 2003; Barrera-Osorio et al., 2009; Bruns et al., 2011). A growing number of experimental studies have been conducted to analyse the causal relationship between such reform and student out- comes, or other intermediate effects such as teacher and pupil atten- dance (e.g., Jimenez and Sawada 1998; Kremer et al., 2003; Khan, 2003; King and Özler 2005; Di Gropello and Marshall, 2005; Parker 2005; Duflo et al., 2011; Di Gropello and Marshall, 2011). The high expectation for participatory school management notwithstanding, the results so far have been mixed (Carr-Hill et al., 2015). Thus, there is limited evidence from low income countries of this general relationship. Absence of strong evidence aside, decentralisation and community participation in education continue to attract national and international policy-makers’ attention. Several World Bank publications have suggested that the reason why some SBM practices do not produce expected results is because they tended to devolve insufficient power to the parents over teachers (Patrinos and Kagia, 2007; Bruns et al., 2011; Barrera-Osorio et al., 2009). They contend that giving parents the power to directly hire teachers, monitor their work and attendance, implement payment by results, and discipline or dismiss them if their morale and teaching are unsatisfactory, will incentivise teachers to make a greater effort than their government counterparts (ibid.). However, other systemic reviews of SBM in developing countries indicate that even where the power to hire and fire teachers is transferred to school committees, the results are still mixed across different contexts (Carr-Hill et al., 2015; Westhorp http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2017.07.001 Received 16 August 2016; Received in revised form 11 May 2017; Accepted 10 July 2017 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: t.okitsu@otsuma.ac.jp (T. Okitsu), brent.edwards@hawaii.edu (D.B. Edwards). International Journal of Educational Development 56 (2017) 28–41 0738-0593/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. MARK