Neo-Liberalism, Knowledge and Inclusiveness

Over the past decade, ‘knowledge’ has become a key policy buzzword. This is particularly evident in policy material on education, science and research, where references to the importance of building the ‘new’ knowledge society and economy abound. This article discusses two examples of these new knowledge discourses at work in the New Zealand context. The first is the Foresight Project, a futures-oriented policy initiative developed under a National Government in the late 1990s. The second is the Labour-led Tertiary Education Strategy, which sets out priorities for post-compulsory education and training from 2002 to 2007. The author argues that these initiatives blend narrative, techno-scientific and neo-liberal forms of knowledge, with the latter ultimately dominating the other two. He supports the attempt to take the future seriously in policy development but maintains that these initiatives foster an illusory notion of inclusiveness and consider only a narrow range of social and economic alternatives.