Chairing and Presenting a Symposium on Re-Scaling School Governance at CIES 2026

At the 70th Annual Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), held in San Francisco from 28 March to 1 April 2026 under the theme Re-examining Education and Peace in a Divided World, the ACCOUNTED team organized the symposium “Re-Scaling School Governance: New Spatial Perspectives on Autonomy, Assessment, and Accountability in Post-Neoliberal Education.”

Chaired by Edgar Quilabert, the symposium brought together four empirical studies examining how governments are redefining school governance by shifting autonomy and accountability from individual schools to collaborative networks and territorial governance arrangements.

The symposium featured four presentations:

  • Gonzalo Muñoz presented The Potential Contribution of the Intermediate Level of Educational Systems to School Change: An Empirically Based Conceptual Framework, drawing on the experience of Chile’s Local Public Education Services (SLEPs).
  • Patricia Burch presented Community, Collaboration, and Accountability: Practitioner Strategies Amidst Hybrid Governance Reforms, exploring governance reforms through school experiences in California.
  • Melanie Ehren, Patrick Jenis, Cor van Montfort, and Linda Schoonmade presented Accountability of Interorganizational Networks in Education: A Scoping Review.
  • Delfina Campetella, Edgar Quilabert, Antoni Verger, Mauro C. Moschetti, and Marcel Pagès, members of the ACCOUNTED team, presented School Collaboration in the New Public Governance Era: A Systematic Case Review.
The ACCOUNTED contribution

The ACCOUNTED paper, School Collaboration in the New Public Governance Era: A Systematic Case Review, examined ten zone-based education policies from different education systems across the world to better understand how collaborative governance is structured across different contexts. Eight initiatives—including England’s Education Action Zones (EAZ), Portugal’s Priority Intervention Educational Territories (TEIP), and Quebec’s School Service Centres (SSCs)—were analysed using a framework that considers both the breadth of collaboration and the intensity of governance integration. The review identified substantial variation in how collaborative governance is organized, particularly regarding who leads territorial networks and the degree of autonomy those actors possess. At the same time, it highlighted a recurring challenge across contexts: while collaboration has become a central policy objective, governance arrangements often fail to create the institutional conditions needed for meaningful cooperation, leaving shared responsibility more aspirational than operational.

A shared pattern across diverse contexts

Although each presentation focused on a different education system and governance context, the symposium revealed a striking convergence of findings. Whether examining interorganizational accountability, Chile’s SLEP reform, hybrid governance in California, or international experiences with collaborative school networks, all four studies pointed to a common challenge: traditional hierarchical, school-centred, and market-oriented governance logics continue to constrain the development of genuine collaboration. This convergence across independent research projects reinforces an emerging body of evidence suggesting that creating effective collaborative governance requires more than new organizational structures. It demands governance arrangements that explicitly support shared responsibility, collective decision-making, and sustained cooperation between schools and other educational actors. These findings also resonate strongly with the evidence currently emerging from the ACCOUNTED team’s fieldwork in Zona Nord, providing further support for the project’s ongoing research on territorial approaches to school governance.

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