Conference Agenda

This article aims to contribute to the debates on the explanatory role that a political economy approach can have in the field of youth policies in Mexico and Latin America, specifically by explaining the recent adoption of an unprecedented workplace-based social policy for young people in Mexico. Several Latin American countries share similarities that go back to their similar industrialisation trajectories between the post-war period and the 1970s and the subsequent privatisation of strategic development sectors during the neoliberal period beginning in the 1980s. A political economy approach offers an account of the various institutional arrangements and educational, labour and youth policies in the region. The article draws on various existing approaches that together can constitute a proposal to bolster the study of these policies.

'Youth policy' is a developing and multidisciplinary theme of study whose central academic debates revolve around a diversity of scholarly work, ranging from the analysis of the political determinants of active labour market policies (ALMPs) in Europe (Bonoli, 2010) to the divergent configuration of national education and skills training systems (Busemeyer and Trampusch, 2012), to the recent emergence of a myriad of 'policy devices' or 'policy innovations' focused on supporting young people amidst increasingly uncertain social and economic prospects worldwide (Jacinto, 2010).

Compared to studies focused on European countries and the global north, the Latin America region is still understudied, and its local institutional, political, and economic arrangements are still enveloped with homogenising and generalising conceptions, such as the notion of the ‘hierarchical market economy’ proposed by Schneider and Soskice (2009). At the same time, there is a recent resurgence of political economy approaches in the region that aims at inquiring into intraregional differences (Hernández López, 2017; Madariaga, 2019). In this sense, this article also seeks to contribute to this debate.

In December 2018, a newly elected left-wing government in Mexico announced the launch of a massive national workplace-based social policy for 2.3 million people between 18 and 29: 'Youth Building the Future' (JCF). In addition to paid work-based learning in all types of participating companies for up to 12 months, the policy grants beneficiaries social security. The main research question of this article is: What were the main material and ideational factors that led the Mexican government to adopt the JCF policy? To answer the question, the article draws on first-hand empirical evidence consisting of interviews with numerous policy stakeholders and an analysis of policy documents.

Theoretically, this article is informed by several currents of political economy studies, particularly the analytical framework of 'Cultural Political Economy (CPE), as developed by Jessop (2010). CPE continues in the critical tradition of social analysis that, since Marx, has understood social reality as 'conceptually mediated' (Fairclough, 2013). Its main claim is that policy adoption processes are explained by 'material' (economic, institutional, and political) and 'ideatic' or 'semiotic' (discourses and ideas) factors.

Jessop (2010) operationalised this analytical framework through the three ‘evolutionary mechanisms’ of variation, selection, and retention, where variation refers to the initial moment in which a subject area or domain is problematized in such a way that policy change is instigated; selection refers to the interpretative struggles, both of the causes and of the possible solutions that should be adopted to solve the problematized situation, and finally, retention refers to the moment of formal and legal institutionalization of a specific political solution. Not much research has applied CPE to the field of education and training, so it is still a budding field to which this article seeks to contribute.

The role of vocational education and training (VET) has been shifting in recent decades with the influence of globalisation and social-economic events such as the downturn in the economy and financial crises. In this regard, the role of international organisations like UNESCO, the European Union (EU), the World Bank, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in shaping VET policies in developing countries have been debated in the scholarship. On the one hand, neo-institutionalist scholars who endorse the World Culture Theory argue that politicians at the national level are subjected to and subsequently borrow or transfer policies backed by international players such as the World Bank or the EU in order to be perceived as legitimate (Ramirez, Meyer, and Lerch 2016). For these scholars, multinational organisations articulate universal norms, values and virtues and these common values influence the education policy decisions and preferences of decision-makers operating in different countries which leads to convergence. However, the opposite string of scholars, without ignoring the influence of globalisation on the national police arena, indicate that convergence cannot be reduced to the formal adoption of specific policies and policy instruments (Verger and Fontdevila 2022). Thus, there are factors of a different nature (global, local, material and ideational) that drive national policymakers towards borrowing these policies but similarly, these factors influence the recontextualization of the borrowed mechanism.

In the case of EU members, various directives featuring mechanisms (like metrics and indicators) were adopted at the macro-institutional level, and states were expected to enact policies that would meet certain models and standards in national VET strategies (Lawn and Lingard 2002; Witt 2018). However, the situation differs in the case of non-member European neighbourhood nations, particularly when countries that do not aspire to EU membership follow policies and processes devised and endorsed by the European Union. The research looks at the experience of Azerbaijan, an EU neighbour country that reformed its VET system based on EU-encouraged policy models and procedures.

The study's purpose is to identify the primary factors and elements influencing the Azerbaijani government's decisions to accept EU-supported VET mechanisms within the reform initiative. It also seeks to clarify the mechanisms by which European policy models appear on Azerbaijan's national policy agenda, as well as the contextual (political, economic, and cultural) factors that influence national policymakers in their adoption or rejection of those ideas. The main purpose is to better understand the EU-Azerbaijan policy borrowing and try to identify elements that impact decisions on policy borrowing that go beyond past studies on international political and economic aspects (Langbein and Börzel 2013). Nonetheless, to uncover these factors, the study employs the Cultural Political Economy (CPE) concept developed by Jessop (2010) and further enhanced by Verger et al. (2016), which would help to understand reasons and methods of policy dissemination, adoption, and change with the content and the ideological drivers in the national context.

The study concentrates on change agencies, i.e. stakeholders, the institutions and policymakers that decide on policy adoption, by examining their motivations as well as the environment surrounding them during the decision-making process. For this purpose, the research primarily seeks and answers the following question: To what extent has the EU influenced the reform of the VET system in Azerbaijan? The study also aims to answer the following supportive questions: which VET policy concepts are appealing to Azerbaijani policymakers, and why? Why did certain EU-encouraged VET mechanisms make it to the policy agenda and be adopted as a policy while others did not? what are the primary elements (motivations/incentives) that influence Azerbaijan's policymakers' decision to embrace EU-encouraged VET policy models in the VET system reform?

The French system relies on a state-regulated model of vocational training regimes (Greinert, 2005). It thus distinguishes itself from the dual corporatist model or the liberal market economy model that can be found in the german and anglo-saxon worlds respectively.

The French education system is based on a strong academic convention (Verdier, 2018) embodied by a specific grammar of schooling, a "school form" (Robert, 2013). The vocational training system has a strong tradition of schooling (Brucy, Troger, 2000). Although the vocational baccalaureate is presented as a baccalaureate "like any other", the vocational route suffers from a hierarchy of disciplines imposed by academic convention (David, 2021). In fact, the vocational baccalaureate is therefore a baccalaureate somewhat apart (Maillard, Moreau, 2019), whose identity and comparative advantages are regularly questioned. The problems of the vocational track are now attributed by the political and economic world to the academic convention.

Since 2007, the French vocational track has undergone two important reforms: the renovation of its flagship diploma and the inclusion of apprenticeship in vocational high schools (until then, apprenticeship was reserved to the training centers of apprentices). A third reform is in preparation. This multiplicity of reforms raises questions about the real effects of these political decisions on the education system.

At the end of the Second World War, France gradually set up vocational high schools. Created in 1985, the lycée professionnel (LP - vocational high schools) actually welcomes more than two-thirds of the young people in the vocational track for upper secondary education (RERS, 2021), with the remaining third turning to apprenticeship in apprenticeship centers. The LP was instituted at the same time as a new vocational diploma: the vocational baccalaureate, which was prepared in four years (compared to three years for the general and technological baccalaureates).

The creation of this diploma competes with the CAP diploma (created in 1919) in order to respond both to a political will (to revalorize the vocational pathway, to reduce the number of graduates without diplomas, to improve the link between training and employment) and to a demand from the metallurgy sector. This sector, represented by the employers' federation (very powerful in France) asked for the creation of an intermediary diploma between the CAP diploma and the technician's diploma (for higher education). This diploma was to prepare young people capable of mastering numerically controlled machines and looking for a quick integration (Bernard, Troger, 2012). The LP has helped to absorb the massification of access to education. The growth of students has been accompanied by the abolition of entrance tests (Pelpel, Troger, 1993): these two elements have contributed to the downgrading of the vocational track's image.

The last reforms of the vocational path are presented by politicians as a desire to revalorize the vocational pathway in terms of the vocational convention by attenuating the school-based form that links it to the academic convention.

Based on the sociology of conventions (Boltyanski, Thevenot, 2006), this paper proposes to reflect on the evolution of the French vocational training system. To what extent does the implementation of these reforms, and the necessary translations by the actors in the field that they imply, allow for this renovation of the vocational track ?