Governance: concepts and emergence in Brazilian education

Abstract

The text discusses the polysemy of the term governance in different fields of knowledge, with a particular emphasis on the field of Education. Then, it discusses the state-of-the-art of governance in the education area, from an analytical-descriptive literature review based on content analysis. This paper analyzes governance in specialized literature by conducting a survey of the papers found in the databases of the Scientific Electronic Library Online and the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations during the period 2004–2015. The results indicate that the term governance has been increasingly used in discussions about changes in the state’s role and the phases of educational public policies, by force of the public-private partnerships. However, there is also a need to broaden the debate on educational governance in Brazilian academic circles, in view of the limited number of studies identified.

Keywords

• Governance
• Educational governance
• Education research