Global education policies and taken-for-granted rationalities: Do the poor respond to policy incentives in the same way?

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. Investing in education opens up the possibility of breaking the intergenerational cycle of the reproduction of poverty and guarantees a long-term strategy to reduce poverty. Beyond the economic and political reasons for the globalization of demand-side interventions, the transnationalization of these policies also carries a process of globalization of the assumed responses of actors to policy incentives. In the policy domain, rationality debates are especially relevant because policies always convey an explicit or implicit understanding of human behavior. Instrumental rationality has been assumed as the only possible rationality of the poor, and their expected and predictable reactions to policy incentives are at the heart of the theory of change of demand-side education policies. Neoclassical economists have been able to adapt their understanding of the rationality of the poor to non-perfect situations.