The BELMAS editorial team are pleased to introduce Rayan Katerji’s blog, ‘Problematising Educational Policy within the Arab Context: Challenges and Implications’.
In this blog, the author invites us to reflect critically on how education policy is designed, communicated, and enacted across Arab education systems. Drawing on a comparative document analysis of policy texts from Lebanon, Jordan, and Kuwait, the blog explores how technocratic centralisation, fragmented procedural frameworks, limited research use, and global policy borrowing shape school leaders’ agency. It raises important questions about the marginalisation of principals’ voices and the implications for meaningful reform.
This is a timely and thought-provoking contribution to debates on policy enactment, leadership, and sustainable educational change. Readers are invited to reflect on parallel dynamics in their own contexts and continue the conversation on re-centring leadership and practice in policy processes.
If you have any comments or thoughts about this blog and the points it raises, then do share on social media using the hashtag #BELMASblog or contact the BELMAS Blog editorial team by emailing: blog@belmas.org.uk
Opening Policy Black Box
Across the Arab region, education policy often unfolds behind closed doors; its intentions declared, but its inner workings unseen. Centralised decision-making and distant bureaucracies leave educators with little room to understand and align with policies shaping their work. Yet, policy defines conditions under which leadership and innovation can thrive. School principals, positioned at intersection of policy and practice, are key to translating policy into action, but their voices are often absent from policy conversations. My research examines how school principals in Lebanon, Jordan, and Kuwait engage in policy enactment and advocacy. Using Bowen’s (2009) document analysis framework and typology of texts, I mapped macro-level policy landscape to explore contextual conditions shaping leaders’ agency in these countries. Analysis revealed recurring policy patterns that constrain leadership participation. Unpacking them invites leaders to better understand policy environments they navigate and reimagine themselves as informed and critical actors who can shape and influence policy.
Technocratic Centralisation and Leadership Marginalisation
Findings from this document analysis revealed that across three contexts, policy texts are authored by centralised authorities, reinforcing technocratic, top-down model of policymaking. Bureaucratic language, such as the prescriptive tone of Kuwaiti Ministerial Decision No. 286/2025, which mandates fixed procedures and assessment schedules that schools “must implement” without modification, emphasises compliance over innovation and empowerment, and perceives school leaders as implementers rather than professionals who can shape policy meaning. This dynamic reflects Ball’s (2012) critique of policy-as-text as mechanism of control and aligns with regional findings of persistent centralisation and practitioner marginalisation (Ghamrawi, 2025; Karami-Akkary and Rizk, 2014). Yet, recognising this pattern can also open an analytical space to consider how principals might claim greater voice and what spaces may exist for them to interpret, adapt, and influence policy within their schools.
Procedural Proliferation Over Coherent Transformative Vision
Across analysed documents, policies appear primarily as laws, circulars, frameworks, and memos, often scattered across multiple pages of ministry websites, creating fragmented, difficult-to-navigate policy environment. For example, on Lebanese Ministry of Education (MOE) website, policy texts are presented as long, unorganised lists of circulars and decisions, displayed as standalone procedural items with no thematic structure, target-group classification, or topical organisation (Lebanese MOE, n.d.). Abundance of siloed procedural texts results in what Charteris and Smardon (2018) describe as maze-like information dissemination, creating labyrinth of documents that school leaders must navigate with directives that accumulate but offer little clarity or meaningful guidance.
Deficient Research-Informed Policymaking
My analysis shows that policy texts are rarely grounded in systematic research, educational theory, or local evidence. Policy documents seldom link global knowledge to local realities. The Regional Center for Quality and Excellence in Education (2021) review similarly found weak research infrastructure in the Arab region, with centres underfunded, limited evaluation capacity, and evidence often used to legitimise decisions rather than inform them. Without research-based, iterative policy culture, reforms remain fragmented and technocratic, echoing concerns that evidence becomes political “ammunition” rather than developmental tool (Lingard, 2014). These patterns underscore the need for stronger institutionalisation of evidence use and mechanisms that capture leaders’ contextual expertise to guide policy learning.
Global Borrowing, Local Detachment
Finally, this document analysis revealed prevalence of donor-supported education policies, those shaped or financed by external agencies such as the World Bank and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). These policies often appear polished and aligned with international agendas such as digital learning and educational technology integration by the Jordanian MOE (Jordan MOE, n.d.). International agencies often shape reform agendas as policy elites (Cuban, 2013), promoting global metrics over local meaning and undermining local ownership and grounded reforms (Verger et al., 2018). Such reforms are also criticised in regional research for being driven by neoliberal agendas (Bahout et al., 2018) and parachuted onto schools with little alignment to local needs, resulting in fragile, unsustainable reforms (Ghamrawi, 2025; Morgan, 2017).
Re-centering Practice and Agency
This document analysis highlights the need to rethink how education policy is shaped and enacted in schools. The fragmented, opaque, and highly centralised nature of policy texts raises fundamental questions about who shapes policy, whose knowledge is valued, and what evidence counts. These texts do more than outline procedures; they determine what becomes visible, actionable, and thinkable for leaders. When policies lack clear rationales, coherent frameworks, or meaningful engagement with school realities, they complicate leaders’ efforts to interpret, enact, and translate them into practice. Recognising this interplay between policy design and enactment underscores the importance of positioning school leaders as active contributors to policy knowledge rather than passive implementers. The study suggests that ministries begin to address these gaps by involving leaders in policy design, evidence sharing, and evaluation, ensuring reforms reflect school realities. Likewise, leaders can cultivate critical reading, contextual interpretation, and relational networking to navigate and humanise policy. These steps can nurture reform culture grounded in trust, local knowledge, and the lived experiences of those who enact policy in practice.
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