Bridging divides between critical researchers and development practitioners: a learning–unlearning journey of decolonising educational development

As the 2030 deadline for Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) approaches, the international development community has intensified efforts to address the so-called “learning crisis”. Framing the situation as urgent, this agenda tends to prioritise identifying “gaps” and prescribing universal “best practices” to meet globally determined targets.

A growing body of critical scholars is challenging this universalising and Enlightenment logic. Reflecting the recent “decolonial turn”, scholars interrogate the Western/modern onto-epistemic foundations underpinning global education policy (e.g. Edwards, 2025; Rappleye, Silova, Komatsu, & Takayama, 2023; Silova, Komatsu, & Rappleye, 2025; Takayama, Sriprakash, & Connell, 2017; Tikly, 2023). They argue that universalist policy discourses often reproduce the coloniality of knowledge production by positioning the West as civilised and the non-West as backward. Scholars emphasise how “elites” in Northern aid organisations frequently impose idealised education models grounded in Western onto-epistemologies, while marginalising the agency and diverse onto-epistemologies of the South. Such dynamics are often described as “uncritical education transfer” (Crossley, 2019) and characterised as the imposition of decontexualised “best practices” designed to raise student achievement in line with “global” standards (Silova et al., 2025).

Viewing such framing as a form of epistemic violence (Sriprakash, Tikly, & Walker, 2020; Tikly, 2023), decolonial scholars advocate what Mignolo (2007) terms “epistemic delinking” from the West and a shift towards the “pluriverse”, where many worlds coexist (Escobar, 2020; Mignolo, 2007, 2011). Central to this decolonial project is the unlearning of Eurocentric assumptions embedded in dominant frameworks, including human exceptionalism, (neo)liberal individualism and linear development models (Silova et al., 2025). The “decolonial turn” foregrounds horizontal approaches resisting the othering of the South, while foregrounding multiple onto-epistemologies marginalised by global education governance.

While being deeply sympathetic to these decolonial perspectives, we argue that cognate scholarship faces important methodological and conceptual limitations. First, as Takayama and Okitsu (2025) point out, much critical scholarship has adopted a form of distanced critique, interrogating the discursive power of development agencies primarily through analyses of policy documents and official reports (e.g. Hughson, 2024; Rappleye & Komatsu, 2018; Sriprakash et al., 2020). While these studies have generated important insights into the reproduction of dominant development discourses, they often evaluate the development agencies through normative frameworks developed by researchers themselves, with limited engagement with practitioners' own perspectives and experiences (Takayama & Okitsu, 2025). Consequently, the complex lived experiences, dilemmas and “hesitations” of aid practitioners often remain underexplored (Hashimoto, 2019; Takayama & Okitsu, 2025). As such, development practitioners are often represented primarily as complicit in reproducing colonial structures, rather than as potential co-agents of transformation. Such tendencies constrain opportunities for self-reflexivity and unlearning while also reinforcing long-standing divides between critical researchers, policy-oriented researchers and development practitioners in comparative and international education (Mundy, 2023; Takayama & Okitsu, 2025; Zembylas, 2025). Second, practitioners are frequently portrayed monolithically as “Northern elites”, with insufficient attention paid to their historical and contextual specificities (Takayama & Okitsu, 2025). Third, coloniality is sometimes discussed in ways that implicitly reduce it to “the West”, paying insufficient attention to its multiplicity, relationality and historical complexity. Such tendencies risk overlooking the complexity of how actors outside the West may simultaneously resist, internalise and reproduce colonial and developmentalist logics in historically specific ways.

These limitations become particularly important in the case of Japan. As a non-Western donor that transitioned from an aid recipient to a donor in the postwar period, Japan occupies a historically complex and ambivalent position within global development. Existing studies suggest that Japanese education aid has historically been characterised by relative caution toward universalist prescriptions and the transfer of Japanese models, alongside an emphasis on context sensitivity and recipient ownership. This orientation has been attributed, in part, to Japan’s own historical experience of education borrowing from the West and to the origins of its postwar aid programmes, which were initially framed through war reparations to neighbouring Asian countries (King, 2016; Saito, 2019; Sawamura, 2002; Takayama & Okitsu, 2025). Nevertheless, such historically specific and potentially alternative ways of engaging in educational development have received limited attention within international decolonial scholarship, despite its explicit commitment to cultural and historical plurality. Building on earlier efforts to move beyond distanced critique and to attend closely to the historical traditions embedded within Japanese educational aid (Takayama & Okitsu, 2024, 2025), this study explores what becomes possible when researchers closely engage with practitioners' perspectives and experiences.

In particular, this study moves beyond conventional distanced critiques of aid practitioners by adopting a dialogic and relational approach. Methodologically, the study builds on the work of Takayama and Okitsu (2025), which examined Japan’s education export policy through what the authors describe as a “middle way” approach. This approach sought to excavate the “good sense” embedded within the narratives of policy actors while simultaneously critically interrogating their ethical and political implications. Building on this approach, the present study shifts attention from the analysis of policy actors’ narratives to a more dialogic process through which researchers and practitioners engage in mutual learning, unlearning and self-reflexivity. Specifically, this paper presents the learning and unlearning experiences of four critically oriented researchers from Japanese universities and seven practitioners from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), who collaboratively reflected and rethought educational development through a decolonial lens. In doing so, we aspired to think with, rather than only about, practitioners.

Through dialogic interviews with practitioners, we sought to surface the colonial complicities embedded within educational development while also attending to the decolonial potentialities already present in practitioners’ experiences and practices, as suggested by Takayama and Okitsu (2025). Simultaneously, the study explores the complexities, dilemmas and tensions inherent in efforts to enact decoloniality within the prevailing aid architecture of the SDG4 era.

We adopted social constructionism as our methodological foundation, which views research as a relational and dialogical process through interaction (Gergen, 2009; McNamee, 2010, 2014). This approach positioned research interactions as spaces of mutual learning and unlearning, enabling practitioners and researchers to reflect critically on their own practices and assumptions.

Throughout this study, we use the concept of decolonisation cautiously in order to avoid reducing coloniality solely to “the West”, a tendency that has been noted by several scholars (e.g. Vickers, 2020). Following scholarship on modernity/coloniality (e.g. Escobar, 2020; Mignolo, 2007, 2011), we understand coloniality as historically produced structures of power, hierarchy and knowledge that circulate globally and become embedded within diverse institutions and actors. Japan itself occupies a complex and ambivalent position within these dynamics. As Iwabuchi (2002, p. 199) argues, Japan has historically positioned itself as both “in but above” or “similar but superior” to Asia – simultaneously aspiring toward Western modernity while reproducing its own regional hierarchies. Recognising this complexity allows us to move beyond simplistic binaries between a colonial “West” and a decolonial “non-West”, to examine how colonial and developmentalist logics may be both challenged and reproduced within historically specific forms of educational cooperation. It also enables us to explore the alternative possibilities, tensions and contradictions embedded within Japan's educational development practices without either romanticising or dismissing them.

The next section elaborates on JICA and the methodological foundations of the study. We then outline the research context and trace the beginning of our interactions. This is followed by an examination of reflections from JICA practitioners drawn from dialogic interviews alongside researchers' own reflexive accounts. Finally, we conclude by considering the possibilities and challenges of relational research approaches for decolonising international educational development.

JICA is the primary agency for implementing Japan’s official development assistance (ODA). Japan’s aid began as war reparations for Asian countries it had colonised during the Second World War and was guided by the principle of yōsei-shugi (request-based cooperation), whereby aid is provided only upon official request from recipient governments.

Unlike many Western donors that have prioritised the promotion of “universal” norms such as democracy, human rights and market reforms, Japan has typically framed its aid as support for recipients’ own needs and efforts (Shimomura, 2020). Takayama and Okitsu (2025) suggest that Japan’s preference for the term “cooperation” (kyōryoku) over “aid” (enjo) reflects a relatively cautious and horizontal engagement derived partly from reflections on Japan’s war-time imperialism and the desire to avoid imposition of education and language on other countries. This orientation is also reflected in Japan’s relatively restrained approach to educational cooperation. Until the 1990s, Japan largely refrained from engaging in the basic education subsector – due to sensitivities surrounding its imperial past and the imposition of education in occupied territories (Saito, 2019).

Critical scholars, however, caution against romanticising these horizontal narratives. Kitano (2017), for example, argues that Japanese aid has generally remained uncritical about broader developmentalist assumptions tied to modernisation and economic growth. He argues that the discourse of “cooperation”, while suggestive of horizontality, is conceptually vague, potentially obscuring asymmetries of power and knowledge between the donors and the recipient countries (Kitano, 2017).

In recent years, these tensions have become more pronounced. Scholars have pointed to mounting shifts towards “offer-based cooperation”, the rise of public–private partnerships and the strategic promotion and export of Japanese education overseas (King, 2016; Kuroda, 2023; Takayama & Okitsu, 2025). Some scholars have raised concerns that these developments reflect the growing entanglement of education cooperation with nationalist, neoliberal and soft-power agendas amid Japan's relative economic decline and intensifying geopolitical competition in Asia and beyond (Hashimoto, 2019; Oyama, 2021; Takayama & Okitsu, 2025). It was against this evolving backdrop that our interactions with JICA practitioners began.

This study is grounded in social constructionism, which understands knowledge as constructed through social interaction, rather than an objective truth “out there” to be discovered (Kvale, 1996; Takayama, 2024). Unlike positivist paradigms that privilege distance, neutrality, rationality and objectivity, social constructionism foregrounds interaction, meaning-making and reflexivity within research encounters (Gergen, 2009; McNamee, 2010; Takayama, 2024).

This study draws particularly on the relational orientations articulated by Gergen (1999, 2009) and McNamee (2010, 2014). From this perspective, research is fundamentally a relational process where meaning emerges through active engagement between the researchers and the researched, rejecting the notion of a self-contained individual. This constructionist stance challenges the Western notion of an autonomous self, particularly as conceptualised within the Platonic–Aristotelian tradition that emphasises subjectivism (McNamee, 2010). Knowledge is not objective but co-constructed through interaction, with meaning continuously shaped by dynamic relational processes – an orientation contrasting the Cartesian assumption that true knowledge arises only from an isolated, rational subject (McNamee, 2010). Following relational constructionist perspectives, the focus of inquiry shifts from understanding individuals as self-contained entities to exploring the relational processes through which meanings and possibilities for mutual transformation are collaboratively generated (Gergen, 2009; McNamee, 2010, 2014). Accordingly, practitioners are viewed not merely as sources of data but as interlocutors whose engagement contributes to the co-construction of understanding throughout the research process. We thus conceptualise research as an inherently relational and dialogical practice (Gergen, 2009; Kezar, 2003; McNamee, 2010, 2014; Takayama, 2024; Takayama & Okitsu, 2025; Way, Zwier, & Tracy, 2015) ^[1], which informs the following three interrelated methodological strategies.

First, inspired by Takayama and Okitsu (2025) that sought to excavate “good sense” in international educational development, we prioritise empathetic listening (Bloom, 1998) to practitioners’ lived experiences. According to Bloom (1998), empathetic listening involves placing oneself, as far as possible, in the interviewee’s position. This approach attends to the tensions, challenges and struggles practitioners encounter in attempting to enact decolonial principles in their professional contexts, while also allowing the decolonial possibilities embedded in their practices to emerge (Takayama & Okitsu, 2025). Thus, the analysis seeks to avoid framing practitioners solely through deficit-oriented or problem-focused narratives.

Second, while engaging closely with practitioners’ accounts, we do not abandon our critical orientation that explicitly explores entrenched power relations and societal structures that perpetuate coloniality and injustice (Takayama, 2024; Takayama & Okitsu, 2025). The researcher’s role is to cultivate a dialogic space that invites practitioners to engage in self-reflexivity and rethink their work, while remaining sufficiently critical and situating their experiences within broader socio-political contexts (Duff, Rory, & Duncan, 2015; McNamee, 2010; Takayama, 2024; Takayama & Okitsu, 2025; Way et al., 2015).

Third, we believe that conducting research within a relational framework requires researchers to critically reflect on their prior assumptions, framing research as a space for mutual learning and unlearning. Central to this orientation is an embracing of scholarly uncertainty, which challenges Western rationalist assumptions that position researchers as detached “experts” capable of diagnosing problems from a distance and prescribing solutions (McNamee, 2014). Here, we draw on Takayama’s (2025) notion of an interdependent mode of research. Building on Biesta's (2013) concept of “being taught by”, Takayama (2025) argues that meaningful learning emerges not through learner-centred control but through encounters with radical otherness that interrupt the self. While Takayama (2025) primarily theorises such interruption in relation to critical engagement among researchers – particularly through being challenged by other scholars – we extend this insight to encounters between researchers and research participants, suggesting that researchers can likewise be “taught by” participants in a relational inquiry mode, as mutual engagements can potentially unsettle researchers' own assumptions.

Accordingly, this strategy frames research as a pedagogical encounter in which both researchers and practitioners participate in processes of co-learning and co-unlearning through interaction, guided by principles of respect, trust, openness, curiosity, relationality and a willingness to disrupt the self by engaging seriously with the perspectives of “others”.

These strategies guided the formation of rapport with JICA practitioners and informed the interview approach, as well as the analysis and discussion in the following sections.

The four authors of this article are Japanese scholars with backgrounds in comparative and international education and philosophy of education, occupying fluid positionalities between research and practice. Authors 1 and 4 have worked as consultants for JICA, while Author 2 has engaged with JICA’s projects through her institution. Author 3 brings a philosophical perspective drawing on postcolonial theory. All four hold full-time faculty positions at universities in Japan, which affords certain privileges, including the ability to critically reflect on educational aid from a position of relative security.

In 2022, JICA invited Authors 1 and 4 to help regenerate a long-standing study group encompassing JICA practitioners and researchers. Originally established in the early 2000s, the group aimed to exchange ideas on improving Japan's educational cooperation. In 2023, Authors 1 and 4 sought to reinvigorate the study group by forming a new, smaller-scale one, inviting scholars, including Authors 2 and 3, alongside a younger generation of JICA practitioners.

The group began meeting online. To foster horizontal dialogue, we deliberately dropped honorific academic titles and adopted the neutral suffix “-san”, seeking to counteract hierarchical dynamics often embedded in researcher–practitioner interactions in Japan. We do not claim, however, that such linguistic adjustments automatically dismantled deeper power asymmetries. As Kvale (1996) cautions, atmosphere of equality aimed at in qualitative research may themselves obscure power differences and thus raise ethical questions. Nor did we regard this practice simply as the adoption of Western egalitarian norms at the expense of Japanese cultural traditions. Rather, it represented an imperfect and contextually situated effort to cultivate more dialogic and reflexive relationships, while remaining attentive to the persistence of age-based, institutional and epistemic hierarchies.

Online exchanges soon evolved into in-person gatherings, with some even involving their children, which helped create a convivial and inclusive atmosphere. We gradually cultivated friendships, trust and a sense of reciprocity, with one practitioner reflecting that, unlike previous encounters with researchers, this space enabled open, safe and respectful dialogue.

Researchers and practitioners co-organised a public seminar in September 2023 to further explore issues that had emerged within our study group. A central concern was the recent uncritical uptake of terms such as the decontextualised notions of “quality education” and “learning crisis”, alongside the growing tendency to frame Japan as a “solution provider”. For researchers, these trends seemed at odds with Japan's relatively “cautious” approach to educational aid, which rejects the transfer of a universal model.

Author 1 proposed using the seminar as a space to rethink educational development through a decolonial lens, which other researchers and practitioners broadly welcomed. In her keynote, she challenged the “learning crisis” narrative in SDG4 and global learning metrics, arguing that they risk reinforcing the Eurocentric view of educational quality and colonial logic of knowledge production. Drawing on Mignolo (2011), Sriprakash et al. (2020) and Rappleye and Komatsu (2018), she highlighted how universalising discourses and standardised frameworks position Western onto-epistemologies as universal, while marginalising diverse knowledge systems.

From the practitioners’ side, a mid-career JICA practitioner presented the agency’s Global Agenda, outlining how clusters of priority projects are organised around “development scenarios”, which combine causal diagrams with quantitative and qualitative “evidence” to deliver tangible, measurable, short-term student outcomes, in pursuit of the SDG4 goal of “quality education for all”.

His presentation appeared to have largely reflected a modernist, linear view of development oriented towards a universal goal and grounded in scientific objectivism. At the same time, he expressed unease about the adequacy and ethical implications of this approach. In particular, he raised fundamental questions about who defines “quality education” and how it should be achieved beyond standardised indicators. He then asked how aid agencies might navigate mounting global pressures to standardise education practices under the imperative of “leav[ing] no one behind”, while remaining attentive to diverse worldviews and local contexts.

As researchers, we initially viewed this approach shared by the mid-career JICA practitioner, as reproducing colonial Enlightenment logics that privilege universality, linear causality and standardised metrics. Yet we also came to see this practitioner’s reflexive self-questioning as an important opening: a moment where tensions within dominant development frameworks were made visible.

The seminar thus created a space to remain in uncertainty and collectively grapple with unresolved tensions. In the next section, we trace how these tensions continued to unfold in our post-seminar interviews with JICA practitioners.

Building on the seminar discussions and reflections, the researchers (Authors 1, 2, 3 and 4) conducted post-seminar interviews with JICA practitioners to explore how they reflected – if indeed they did – on their professional practices through a decolonial lens. The semi-structured interviews were guided by core questions but conducted flexibly, allowing emerging concerns and reflections to shape the flow of the conversation.

The interview focused on two guiding questions:

1. What forms of reflection, dilemmas and discomforts do practitioners encounter when relating decolonial theory to their everyday work?

2. What factors facilitate or constrain their efforts to envision and enact decolonial practices?

Participants were selected through purposive sampling, based on their relevance to the research purpose and potential to generate rich insights (Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2000, p. 103). The sample included four early-career practitioners who had participated in the study group since its early stages, one mid-career practitioner who spoke at the decolonial seminar and two senior practitioners who attended the seminar online. The senior practitioners were chosen for their long-term engagement with JICA and established relationships with the researchers, which enabled more reflective dialogue. Seven interviews were conducted – two in hybrid settings and five online (Table 1).

Guided by a relationally oriented social constructionist framework that views reality as a communicative construction (Gergen, 2009; McNamee, 2014), we approached these interviews, where possible, as interactive, dialogical and pedagogical engagements, rather than one-sided data collection. We encouraged them to critically reflect on their practices while attending to their struggles and exploring the ethical potentialities that were already present (Takayama, 2024; Takayama & Okitsu, 2025). This approach involved listening empathetically to the constraints they face and allowing more ethical and contextually grounded approaches to educational development. As Way et al. (2015) posit, we regard interviewees as human and research collaborators, rather than “objects” from whom to squeeze knowledge (p. 721). This approach required attention both to the content of our questions and to how we listened to them and probed them during the interaction (Takayama, 2024; Takayama & Okitsu, 2025; Way et al., 2015).

All interviews were transcribed and analysed collaboratively by the research team through an iterative and reflexive thematic analysis process (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The coding process drew on patterns and themes emerging from repeated readings of the interview transcripts and analysis of reflexive notes, as well as concepts embedded in the literature on decoloniality, educational development and Japan's aid approaches to educational aid.

The researchers first independently identified recurring patterns and preliminary codes within the interview data and subsequently engaged in repeated discussions to refine, merge and collectively interpret emerging themes. Examples of initial codes included “questioning universality”, “tensions with accountability”, “solution provider”, “sensitivity to contexts”, “equal relationships”, “co-construction of knowledge”, “ownership”, “reverse learning from recipient countries”, and “constraints of relational aid”. These were later grouped into broader thematic categories and refined into the following five analytical themes:

1. Unlearning coloniality, universality and replicability;

2. Tensions between decoloniality, SDG4 and upward accountability;

3. Grappling with the notion of “delinking” and the rejection of a strong version of relativism;

4. Relearning from JICA’s traditions of relational cooperation;

5. Challenges in enacting JICA’s tradition of relational cooperation.

Reflexive notes were taken after each interview, and the research team met repeatedly to document moments of dissonance and discomfort, which were understood as potential sites of learning and unlearning.

This section presents reflections from practitioners drawn from post-seminar interviews along with our own reflexive insights, organised around the five themes identified above.

The post-seminar interviews enabled practitioners and researchers to engage in an often-unsettling process of unlearning (Andreotti, 2010; Silova et al., 2025). We made it clear that our aim was not to judge practitioners’ work through a decolonial lens but to use the interviews as a shared space for mutual reflection.

This process prompted critical reflection on their own work, including the realisation that practices long understood as unquestionably “ethical” – particularly the moral obligation to help others – may unintentionally reproduce epistemic violence.

One practitioner described this moment of profound rethinking:

Another practitioner noted that until the seminar, he had not seriously questioned the risk of educational cooperation becoming neo-colonial, commenting that professional practice had gradually narrowed his focus toward achieving predetermined, test-oriented goals, leaving little space to interrogate the broader ethical implications of such work (P3).

As the interviews progressed, practitioners began to question the dominant and increasingly singular notion of “quality education” – one that has become central to SDG4 and is monitored through global standardised benchmarks such as PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) (Gorur & Wijetunga, 2025). They reflected on how these benchmarks not only measure educational outcomes but also actively shape what counts as “good” or “ideal” education across diverse contexts. While some noted that Japan’s high PISA performance lends credibility to its educational cooperation, others questioned whether global benchmarks themselves should dictate what is worth teaching and learning. This self-questioning was articulated clearly by one mid-career practitioner:

These reflections resonate with critiques of “data colonialism”, which highlight how global regimes of data extraction, comparison and ranking privilege certain epistemologies while marginalising others, thereby perpetuating epistemic violence (Gorur & Wijetunga, 2025).

Practitioners also began to question the assumption that practices shown to “work” in one context through impact evaluation can – or should – be replicated elsewhere as pre-packaged solutions, an approach recently gaining traction within JICA. Such self-questioning aligns with critical scholarship on policy transfer, which cautions that “best practices” often rest on abstracted indicators claiming universal validity (Crossley, 2019). Grounded in decontextualised views of knowledge that privilege theory over context (Gong, Jiang, & Silova, 2023; Rappleye & Un, 2018), these logics frame educational transfer as a value-neutral selection of “proven” practices, reproducing asymmetrical power relations and marginalising relational ways of knowing. At its core, this reflects a modern colonial logic that foregrounds a singular “truth” while rejecting the relational nature of knowledge.

Overall, our dialogue appeared to open space for practitioners to critically reflect on the dominant logics of universality, comparability and replicability that have become increasingly naturalised in their work.

While many practitioners critically reflected on universalising logics, many also spoke – often hesitantly – about the limits of fully embracing decolonial perspectives in their everyday work. One early-career practitioner noted that “the logic of decolonial theory and development practice are completely different” (P2).

Several practitioners explained that they are expected to demonstrate Japan’s contribution to educational improvement in partner countries in ways that are intelligible and accountable to stakeholders, including Japanese taxpayers. In this context, global indicators were described as a widely recognisable benchmarks for communicating outcomes. If results are not sufficiently demonstrated, it may become difficult to convey the significance of aid to stakeholders, including the Japanese public, which may in turn affect continued support for aid. Although practitioners acknowledged the need to question the uncritical pursuit of standardised numerical outcomes, they nonetheless emphasised that accountability to taxpayers cannot be easily set aside.

Initially, these perspectives sat uneasily with our own normative assumptions, as framing Japan as a benevolent “saviour” of supposedly “deficient” education systems risks reproducing colonial binaries of “developed” and “underdeveloped” worlds. Such instrumentalisation of aid reinforces the stereotypical depictions of people in the Global South as lacking the capacity to generate their own solutions.

At the same time, the above-mentioned practitioner’s reflection revealed a persistent dilemma and tension between pressure to demonstrate Japan's contribution to other countries using universal yardstick and efforts to engage more contextually and relationally with partner countries. These candid reflections prompted us to move from an initial stance of mere critique towards more empathetic listening, foregrounding the institutional, political and discursive constraints within which practitioners operate.

As the interviews progressed in this relational mode, similar tensions surfaced. Practitioners highlighted growing pressures to demonstrate quantifiable student outcomes aligned with SDG4, intensified by shrinking aid budgets and the resulting need for expanded multi-donor collaboration. In such settings, globally standardised learning outcomes increasingly function as the only “universal language” enabling coordination across actors – an almost inevitable feature of today's aid architecture.

Practitioners further stressed that demands for quick, measurable results are not imposed solely by Global North donors. Political elites in the Global South often drive these pressures, seeking to demonstrate political legitimacy through improved test scores. Some practitioners noted that partner governments sometimes explicitly request the transfer of foreign education models associated with high PISA performance, such as the so-called “Finnish model”. In other cases, politicians of aid recipient countries have requested that textbooks be rewritten in English in the name of economic competitiveness, despite concerns over intra-society “linguistic imperialism” (Walker, Tikly, Strong, Wallace, & Soudien, 2023, p. 3). Operating within a request-based cooperation framework, JICA practitioners thus find themselves caught in the tensions between the demands of political elites in the Global South and the need to engage with diverse local cultures within the partner countries, and particularly marginalised communities therein.

These practitioners’ struggles became key unlearning moments for us as researchers, prompting us to question simplistic Global North–South or donor–recipient binaries. They revealed how elite actors in the Global South can reproduce dominant global discourses, foregrounding multiple modernities, power differentials and epistemic violence within societies (Gorur & Wijetunga, 2025). Such dilemmas complicate simple portrayals of Northern aid practitioners as omnipotent “elites” vis-à-vis powerless Global South actors, inviting a reconsideration of taken-for-granted categories and assumptions. They further remind us that discursive spaces are not unidirectional but are mutually constitutive, simultaneously shaped by and shaping, local agency, negotiation and contestation.

Building on these discussions about tensions, struggles and dilemmas in applying decolonial thinking to everyday practice, we invited practitioners to reflect more openly on moments of discomfort and unease they encountered when engaging with decolonial perspectives. Some practitioners grappled with a central ethical dilemma: can educational development ever be ethical, or must it be dismantled to respect pluriversality?

Several practitioners expressed uncertainty about engaging with diverse onto-epistemologies without slipping into an extreme form of cultural relativism. One mid-career practitioner, for instance, while demonstrating a deep awareness of the importance of attending to diverse conceptions of education quality, nonetheless questioned whether decolonial perspectives risk fostering an “anything goes” attitude or a wholesale rejection of knowledge associated with the West: “Is all Western knowledge inherently bad?” “Don’t we need to foster some kind of common understanding about what we would like our world to be?” (P5).

Listening to these expressions of uncertainty prompted us, as researchers, to revisit our own earlier interpretation of decolonial perspectives. We began to question whether an overemphasis on “delinking” from Western knowledge (Mignolo, 2007) might unintentionally reinforce essentialising binary between Western and non-Western knowledge systems. As scholars argue (e.g. Takayama, 2025; Vickers, 2020; Zembylas, 2025), such binaries risk obscuring the entangled, transnational histories through which knowledge has always been produced, circulated and transformed across societies. Relatedly, the “delinking” thesis may also risk fostering indifference toward the suffering of others, foreclosing possibilities for cross-cultural learning and dialogue (de Sousa Santos, 2014), while also romanticising notions of subaltern ethics (Spivak, 1985).

These epistemological tensions also surfaced in more immediate ethical dilemmas encountered in practitioners’ everyday work. One early-career practitioner reflected on the dilemma of balancing the desire to avoid epistemic imposition with the fear of becoming indifference toward the others' suffering:

From a decolonial standpoint, framing the absence of certain knowledge and skills as “deficiencies” according to externally imposed standards risks reinforcing the colonial mode of othering. At the same time, as Hashimoto (2019) argues, acknowledging asymmetries and the impossibility of fully knowing the needs of the other – the very hesitancy voiced by this practitioner – can also open space for ethical reflection. From this perspective, ethical engagement does not demand straightforward moral certainty; rather, it requires continuous reflexivity, humility and self-doubt regarding the very asymmetrical power relations in which we are embedded (Hashimoto, 2019; Takayama & Okitsu, 2025). Furthermore, the challenge may not lie in outright rejecting subjects such as mathematics as inherently “modern Western” since mathematical reasoning has long existed across many societies, embedded in diverse spiritual, social and cultural contexts (Bishop, 1990). Rather, what is required is a critical examination of whose epistemologies become universalised and what hierarchies are reproduced through educational practices and standards.

As our conversations deepened, the notion of tai tōsei (対等性, respectful and equitable relations) and respect for local agency repeatedly surfaced in interviews. Several practitioners gradually articulated a renewed understanding that ethical educational cooperation may still be possible, but only through genuinely equal relationships grounded in epistemic humility. Such cooperation does not seek to erase epistemic differences or replace one form of universalism with another; rather, it aims to foster equal dialogue in relational ways that value multiple ways of being and knowing. This practitioner-articulated understanding of decolonial practice resonates with de Sousa Santos's (2014) argument that decolonial efforts must reject the fiction of a single universal knowledge system while cultivating conditions for respectful engagement across diverse epistemic traditions. Critiquing false universalism, however, does not require isolation; horizontal, cross-cultural dialogue remains possible when cultural sensitivity is sustained (de Sousa Santos, 2014).

Reflecting on earlier interviews, we realised that many practitioners had frequently demonstrated a relatively cautious stance toward imposing universal models – or the Japanese education model in particular – on partner countries. Even amid the intensified universalising narratives surrounding SDG4, this sensitivity and self-restraint had not disappeared entirely, appearing instead to persist as an underlying value orientation shaping their engagement with educational cooperation ^[2].

Overall, these insights prompted us, as researchers, to reconsider whether ethical engagement necessarily requires dismantling aid altogether (Takayama & Okitsu, 2025). Instead, echoing Shah et al. (2025) and Takayama and Okitsu (2025), the ethical task may lie in radically reconfiguring existing models. A practical first step and following the suggestion of Takayama and Okitsu (2025), we came to see, lies in identifying and reclaiming ethical orientations already embedded – albeit unevenly and often implicitly – within JICA’s postwar practices.

To this end, we invited practitioners to reflect on what they value, or had valued, in their work, as discussed in the next section.

Conversations with practitioners revealed that many still supported the postwar philosophy – marked by a relatively cautious, relational and context-sensitive approach respecting the country’s ownership in decision-making – as the ideal orientation for educational cooperation.

This commitment was particularly emphasised by senior practitioners with extensive experience in JICA’s technical cooperation. For example, one senior practitioner highlighted the principles that JICA had long valued:

He further stressed attentiveness to context as a core value of Japan's aid practice. For him, it is crucial that those providing assistance first learn about the culture and contextual realities of their partner countries from the partner themselves. This requires engaging in sustained dialogue with the counterparts and, through that process, jointly considering what is possible and desirable within their specific cultural and institutional contexts (P7). The same practitioner also critically reflected on the growing tendency to position Japan as a “solution provider”, arguing that such a narrative risk undermining JICA’s long-held philosophy of respecting the autonomy and contexts of partner countries, while collaboratively developing solutions through processes of capacity development and knowledge co-creation (P7).

Other practitioners similarly emphasised the fact that JICA’s approach centres on local agency, co-learning, locally led problem-solving and context sensitivity — what Spratt (2020) calls the “principle of relational aid”. As we were struck by the consistency of these accounts, we asked practitioners what shapes Japanese relational knowledge-making in aid activities. Several practitioners suggested that this relational sensibility may be historically and culturally grounded.

For example, the senior practitioner cited above traced the roots of this orientation while cautioning against essentialising “Japanese aid” against the Western counterparts. In his view, Western aid is often associated with a charity-based logic – providing goods or assistance on the assumption that the donor possesses what the recipient lacks. By contrast, he described Japan’s approach as emphasising self-reliance, whereby external actors offer advice or support while respecting local self-determination (P7). Drawing on Japan's own experiences since the Meiji period – when it engaged foreign (largely Western) experts and sent students abroad – several practitioners noted that Japan rarely adopted foreign models wholesale, but adapted them to its own social, cultural and institutional contexts. These experiences underpin JICA’s philosophy that development works best when local people retain ownership and pursue context-specific solutions, with external actors stepping back to facilitate rather than direct.

This view resonates with Sawamura’s (2002) observation that, in the late 19th century, Japan selectively adopted Western technologies and institutions while maintaining a strong sense of cultural identity and value – a process known as wakon yosai (和魂洋才, Japanese spirit, Western techniques). This historical experience reinforces the belief that “no knowledge is completely free of the culture from which it came, and that seldom is knowledge globally applicable” (p. 343).

Another senior practitioner similarly contrasted JICA’s approach with that of Western donors and international organisations, particularly the World Bank. She observed that, whereas the Bank’s aid often starts with predefined ideal and seeks to align partner countries’ education policies with those norms, Japan’s approach is more pragmatic and field oriented. It emphasises developing contextually grounded responses through working with partners to localise initiatives. She further suggested that such relational and pragmatic approach may be rooted in Japan’s agrarian social traditions, where collective coordination and step-by-step adaptation on the ground was essential (P6.)

Collectively, these practitioners’ narratives appear to stand in contrast to development models grounded in Enlightenment traditions, historically entangled with Christianity, which assume the universal applicability of a single knowledge system and promote the uncritical transfer of decontextualised “best practices” (Crossley, 2019; Gong et al., 2023). Rather than viewing development as the transmission of an ideal model from those who “know” to those who “do not know”, the practitioners emphasised adaptation, contextualisation and collaboration in knowledge-making with local actors. In this sense, their narratives point toward alternative possibilities for educational cooperation in which development is understood as a relational process of jointly crafting contextually meaningful practices and knowledges, rather than transferring supposedly universal solutions. Such orientation resonates with decolonial calls to challenge universalist assumptions and attend more carefully to local histories, cultures, institutions and ways of knowing and being.

To be sure, from a decolonial perspective, the discourses of “relational aid” also require critical reflexivity; it risks depoliticising aid by obscuring how power operates through the framing of available policy options – namely, which models and practices are presented as selectable and legitimate within historically constituted hierarchies of knowledge. As one practitioner reflected, the very institutionalisation of request-based aid may itself function to depoliticise aid, insofar as the presence of a “request” is taken to preclude the possibility of neo-colonial relations (P3). Indeed, the formation of these “requests”, however, is itself often shaped by global discourses and entrenched epistemic hierarchies. Without reflexivity toward these conditions, relational approaches risk reproducing existing asymmetries.

Moreover, an implicit division of epistemic labour can persist in the discourse of relational aid: expertise regarding educational practices remains mainly located in Japan (or the Global North), while knowledge of local context and culture is attributed to partner countries. Although this certainly challenges decontextualised universalism, it nonetheless rarely extends to recognising partner countries as producers of knowledge about what is ideal education itself. As a result, the possibility of transforming educational development through engagement with alternative onto-epistemologies – and thereby fostering genuinely horizontal relationships – remains largely unarticulated.

Taken together, while relational aid offers an alternative to universalised “best practices”, its uncritical adoption risks reproducing the coloniality of knowledge. As Takayama, Yonehara, and Yu-Ching (2024) and Shah et al. (2025) note, local adaptation of external models does not automatically undo hierarchical relations if donor knowledge continues to be treated as implicitly superior. A genuinely decolonial approach would therefore require horizontal engagement with diverse onto-epistemologies, alongside processes of unlearning and the destabilisation of modernist assumptions (Stein et al., 2020; Edwards, 2024; Takayama & Okitsu, 2025).

Against this backdrop of unresolved tension, we invited practitioners to recall any moment when engagement with partner countries had ever prompted them to reconsider globally circulated best practices or Japan's own education practices. Several reflected on experiences of introducing Japanese-style holistic education (tokkatsu) in Egypt, where practices such as classroom cleaning, school lunch duties by student themselves and student meetings were adapted more flexibly in situ. Practitioners described how Egyptian classrooms often prioritised responsiveness, creativity, spontaneity and stronger form of self-expression, promoting critical reflection on taken-for-granted understandings of desirable education, social organisation and ways of being. These encounters suggest that educational cooperation can open spaces for reciprocal learning and other ways of being, rather than a one-way transfer of knowledge from the Global North (de Sousa Santos, 2014).

However, such reflections remain largely individual and are not systematically embedded within aid frameworks. As one practitioner noted:

Nevertheless, the dialogic processes through which these reflections emerged suggest that such relational encounters may themselves become important opening for alternative and genuinely reciprocal models of educational cooperation.

The dialogue with practitioners revealed growing concern that JICA’s long-standing model of relational cooperation is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.

Practitioners reflected on how shrinking aid budgets and the emphasis on results-based management have reshaped project management practices – notably through shorter project cycles and increased outsourcing to private consulting firms. In their accounts, these shifts pose significant challenges to sustaining key elements of Japan’s postwar aid approach, including respect for country ownership, sensitivity to local contexts and relational co-construction of knowledge.

Several practitioners noted that when projects are limited to three or four years, questions such as “What did you achieve?” and “How much did test scores improve?” tend to dominate discussions, leaving little space to cultivate the trust and mutual understanding required for meaningful dialogue with local counterparts. Others contrasted this with earlier periods, when long-term expert placements enabled deeper relationships and more sustained knowledge co-creation in the field. As one participant observed:

Practitioners also highlighted the growing reliance on for-profit consulting firms and rigid contractual frameworks; projects are often predesigned with fixed deliverables, leaving little room for local adaptation or iterative learning.

Practitioners highlighted how these arrangements make it increasingly difficult to experiment, fail and adjust the project implementation. Predesigned projects with fixed outputs tend to reduce opportunities for organic, context-sensitive co-construction of knowledge, replacing it with a more transactional, technocratic, results-driven model. Practitioners began to articulate how these institutional conditions constrain what they value most in international cooperation-nurturing long-term relationships with counterparts and understanding local needs and contexts.

Through our relational inquiry, practitioners critically reflected on their everyday practices through a decolonial lens. This often involved emotionally demanding processes of reflection and unlearning regarding increasingly homogenising discourses underpinning their work. At the same time, the dialogue highlighted JICA’s historically distinctive “relational” approaches to aid (Spratt, 2020), which eschew top-down impositions of universal models in favour of respecting recipients' ownership and priorities, while emphasising heightened contextual sensitivity and knowledge co-creation. Practitioners suggested that these orientations stem partly from Japan’s own modernisation experiences of adapting Western models to local cultural contexts, as well as relational onto-epistemologies embedded in Japanese agrarian traditions. Such relational and context-sensitive approaches may provide resources for rethinking development imaginaries rooted in Enlightenment universalism, which have often framed particular models as universally applicable and their diffusion as morally desirable (Gong et al., 2023; Takayama & Okitsu, 2025).

While practitioners’ reflections challenged decontextualised universalism, it remains unclear to what extent they extended to recognising aid-receiving countries as producers of otherwise educational imaginaries. These tensions may reflect the broader complexity of the ambivalence and contradictions embedded in the Japanese discursive positioning as a “non-Western yet advanced” nation that successfully domesticated the Western modernity (Iwabuchi, 2002; Oguma, 1998). Indeed, both practitioners and researchers reflected how we often unconsciously rely on deficit framing of the Global South while uncritically accepting Western conceptions of development prevalent in international development－not only in aid practices, but also in our teaching and research ^[3].

Nevertheless, several practitioners described moments in which engagement with aid-receiving communities unsettled their own assumptions about desirable education and ways of being. Encounters with alternative educational practices prompted critical reflection on norms of “development” they had previously taken for granted. These experiences suggest that educational cooperation can create openings for genuinely reciprocal learning and possibilities for imagining other ways of being and thinking (Silova et al., 2025; Takayama & Okitsu, 2025).

Yet, these relational orientations and possibilities face increasing pressures within contemporary aid environments. Bureaucratic demands for measurable outcomes, results-based management, the dominance of “what works” discourses have intensified expectations for standardisation. Practitioners therefore face significant dilemmas as they attempt to sustain traditions of contextual sensitivity, knowledge co-construction and mutual learning while operating within technocratic systems that privilege measurable impact and short project timeframes.

Our dialogue with practitioners also became an important process of unlearning for us as researchers. Engaging closely with practitioners' lived experiences, dilemmas and hesitations disrupted some of our own assumptions about what it means to decolonise educational development. In particular, we began to question whether an overemphasis on “delinking” (Mignolo, 2007) risks being interpreted as a call to reject Western knowledge altogether, thereby unintentionally reinforcing essentialised binaries between Western and non-Western knowledges (Takayama, 2025; Vickers, 2020; Zembylas, 2025). Practitioners’ complex and often contradictory experiences also made us more attentive to the multilayered nature of coloniality within educational aid, where elites in the Global South may themselves reproduce dominant “global” discourses while marginalising less powerful communities, thereby reproducing internal hierarchies within societies (Moosavi, 2020; Zembylas, 2025). Furthermore, strong interpretations of the “delinking” thesis may risk foreclosing possibilities for transcultural learning and dialogue (de Sousa Santos, 2014). As Jules and Salajan (2025, pp. 5–8) argue, coloniality is multifaceted, placing a “duty of care” on decolonial scholars to engage with such complexity, reflexively and responsibly.

Our relational approach, however, is not without its limitations. Emphasising relationality may risk underplaying structural critiques of the aid industry's embedded modernity and coloniality or hesitating to name power explicitly – whether to preserve trust or avoid institutional backlash (Menashy, 2025). We are also aware of the danger of romanticising or essentialising Japan's approach vis-à-vis Western counterparts, which may inadvertently reproduce coloniality rather than disrupting it.

Moreover, emphasising relationality may conceal inherent power asymmetries both between donor and aid recipient and between researchers and practitioners. By inviting practitioners into decolonial dialogue, we may have unintentionally instrumentalised their stories to serve our own academic purposes, potentially reproducing what Moosavi (2020) terms a “decolonial bandwagon”. As Zembylas (2015) cautions, “pedagogies of discomfort” can become ethically problematic when they isolate individuals from the structural conditions shaping their actions. Several researchers involved in the dialogue also questioned whether framing practitioners’ experiences through decolonial theory risked imposing yet another externally derived interpretive framework onto practitioners’ realities. These concerns prompted further reflection on our own positionalities within global academic structures that continue to privilege certain internationally circulating critical theories.

This paper explored a dialogic process of learning and unlearning between development practitioners and critical researchers, with the aim of rethinking educational development through a decolonial lens. Building on the “middle way” approach (Takayama & Okitsu, 2025) and grounded in social constructionism with a relational orientation (Gergen, 2009; McNamee, 2014), we sought to create a dialogic space in which both sides critically reflected on their assumptions, positionalities and complicities through encounters with “others” (Andreotti, 2010; Takayama, 2025).

The study contributes to decolonial scholarship in four main ways. First, it advances methodological discussions by foregrounding relational and dialogic inquiry as a site of collaborative learning and unlearning. Rather than adopting conventional critical research rooted in a modern, positivist orientation in which self-contained autonomous researchers discover objective truth from a distance, we positioned our research as pedagogical encounters through which both researchers and practitioners engage in co-learning and co-unlearning through interdependent relationships (Gergen, 2009; McNamee, 2014). In doing so, the study calls for a shift from more distanced forms of critique towards relational forms of engagement that create opportunities for dialogue, mutual learning and unlearning. Such an orientation invites researchers to remain open to uncertainty and to having their own assumptions challenged through encounters with others. In this way, the study contributes to ongoing efforts to decolonise research methodologies in Comparative and International Education (Takayama et al., 2017).

Second, the study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of decolonial scholarship. The dialogue with practitioners cautions against rigid interpretation of “delinking” that may unintentionally reinforce binaries between Western and non-Western knowledges, romanticise subaltern ethics and foreclose possibilities for transcultural learning and dialogue. Instead, the study underscores the importance of engaging reflexively with plurality and complexity, recognising that all knowledge is incomplete (Andreotti, 2010; de Sousa Santos, 2014).

Third, the study further develops recent calls to attend more carefully to the historical and contextual specificities of development actors (Takayama & Okitsu, 2025). By focusing on Japan, it complicates monolithic representations of “Northern” donor and demonstrates that educational cooperation is shaped by historically and culturally specific trajectories that cannot be reduced simply to a singular “Western” tradition of development aid. The study also highlights the multiplicity of coloniality operating within global educational development.

Fourth, the study offers implications for educational development practice. The findings point to the importance of creating more sustained relational spaces within educational aid. Such spaces enable not only contextual sensitivity and knowledge co-creation, but also opportunities for genuinely mutual learning through which alternative ways of being and knowing may be imagined.

Finally, we do not claim that relational inquiry is a panacea. And yet, we suggest that relational inquiry holds promise at a time of increasing polarisation between critical researchers and development practitioners in the field (Mundy, 2023; Takayama & Okitsu, 2025; Zembylas, 2025). As Liwanag and Rhule (2021) argue, decolonial thinking becomes transformative only when it is made personal and relatable to diverse stakeholders. Rather than deepening polarisation and antagonism, relational inquiry may offer possibilities for working together more ethically through reflexive dialogue, humility, trust and mutual vulnerability. In this spirit, we hope the paper offers an invitation to pursue critical educational research otherwise-together.

The authors express their sincere gratitude to the JICA practitioners who generously gave their time, shared their experiences and reflections with openness and engaged with us in a process of dialogue. Their willingness to critically reflect on their own assumptions and practices created invaluable opportunities for mutual learning and unlearning, without which this study would not have been possible. They also thank Keita Takayama for his valuable comments and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback, which helped strengthen the manuscript.