Escaping the Plantationocene: plotting the future of education

We are currently in the midst of a sixth mass extinction (Kolbert, 2014). The looming threat of global environmental crisis has prompted scholars to characterise our epoch as the Anthropocene, “the era of humans,” recognising the profound impact humanity has on the planet. Over the past half century, vertebrate wildlife populations have declined by nearly 70%, with 1.7% of all species facing imminent extinction (Ceballos, Ehrlich, & Raven, 2020). This is due in part to global deforestation resulting from intensive resource extraction and corporate monopolisation, with approximately 1% of farmers controlling 70% of global farmland (IPES-Food, 2024). Originally conceptualised by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000), the Anthropocene provides a “rhetorically compelling keyword” that highlights growing concerns about climate change, species extinction and global ecological crisis (Davis, Moulton, Van Sant, & Williams, 2019, p. 1). However, while the term has gained prominence in academia and environmental discourses, it has also faced criticism for implying that all of humanity bears collective responsibility for our current predicament, instead of the ruling class and the capitalist system that sustains it (Davis et al., 2019; Chao et al., 2024). These critiques have resulted in alternative conceptualisations such as the Chthulucene, Capitalocene and Plantationocene.

The Plantationocene has received particular interest for demonstrating how current ecological and social crises are rooted in plantation systems of environmental modernisation, homogenisation and control (Davis et al., 2019). The Plantationocene connects ecological and social crises to plantation systems embedded in contemporary social policy and governance. Indeed, the plantation, long conceived as archaic, has emerged as a critical site for contemporary debates concerning environmental destruction and racial violence (Wolford, 2021). Yet, while the plantation has gained analytical traction across multiple disciplines, it remains underexplored within educational contexts, particularly international educational development.

This article operationalises the plantation to understand contemporary international educational development and governance. Throughout, I argue that the logics, politics, economies and forms of resistance that characterise plantation systems continue to shape international educational spaces ^[1]. These racialised and corporatised systems produce education monocultures, undermining diversity, autonomy and local knowledge systems through standardisation, surveillance and extraction. Across four sections, I present four analytical dimensions of plantation systems as they relate to contemporary education: plantation logics, plantation politics, plantation economies and plantation futures. Each discussion of these four analytical dimensions of the Plantationocene is followed by a reflection on their implications for education. These reflections are grounded in research on the Liberian Education Advancement Program (LEAP), which outsourced public primary schools to several largely international for-profit providers following the Ebola crisis. This research draws on over 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Liberia conducted over five years, consisting of hundreds of hours of observations and over 100 interviews with a variety of educational stakeholders. I extend these insights from LEAP to global educational development more broadly. Ultimately, the article explores how the plantation framework illuminates colonial residues in contemporary educational policy and governance, while pointing to opportunities for repairing these historical and ongoing injustices.

Coined by anthropologists and ecologists in 2014 as a corrective to the Anthropocene, the Plantationocene argues that our current multiple socioecological crises emerge from landscape simplification, the global circulation of plants and people and long-distance capital investments that produce homogenisation and control (Davis et al., 2019). Initially criticised for its limited engagement with Black scholarship and emphasis on ecological over human concerns (Jegathesan, 2021), recent work has begun to address these issues by focusing on the plantation as a site of racialised violence and extraction (Davis et al., 2019). As such, the Plantationocene provides several useful insights into understanding our current moment: (1) it calls attention to relations forged across species, connecting the human and non-human; (2) it understands the environmental crisis as rooted in plantation systems still present today and (3) it highlights how life and death are racialised and differentially situated in contemporary capitalist society.

While the Plantationocene is a relatively new academic concept, the plantation possesses a long institutional history (Wolford, 2021). Conceptually, the plantation first gained prominence as an analytical framework in the mid-twentieth century with the New World Group, a collective of multidisciplinary scholars including George Beckford, Norman Girvan and Lloyd Best. These scholars drew upon the foundational work of C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du Bois and Eric Williams to critically examine the political and racial dimensions of capitalism and decolonisation, attempting to understand the “functional role of race and empire in capital accumulation” (Timcke, 2023, p. 161).

In their analysis, the plantation is characterised as a “total social and economic unit” employing “routine surveillance” (Timcke, 2023, p. 160) and “aggressively-extractive market relations” to support authoritarian governance and capitalist development (Beckford, 1999, p. 33). Grounding their critique in economic structures, the New World Group also saw plantation logics encompassing ideological, social and psychological dimensions (Timcke, 2023). More recent Black Geographies scholarship applies the plantation framework to the larger spatiotemporal formations of racial capitalism, anti-Blackness and violence that persist through contemporary institutions, including the city (McKittrick, 2011), the prison (Gilmore, 2007) and broader governance (Woods, 2017). This scholarship also points to the ways the plantation generates opportunities for resistance and the creation of “otherwise worlds,” or alternative modes of living and being (King, Navarro, & Smith, 2020).

Given these histories, Chao et al. (2024) identify five recurring plantation dynamics that together comprise the broader Plantationocene: scales of extraction and control; racial logics of production; power and pervasive inequality; degradation of human and ecological health; and resistance and reparation. This article reworks these into four analytical dimensions: plantation logics, plantation politics, plantation economies and plantation futures (see Table 1). Plantation logics are defined by racialisation and hierarchical ranking, whereby racialised people and spaces are labelled as “in crisis” and in need of incorporation into the processes of capital accumulation. Plantation politics involve the enclosure, dispossession and scientific management of people and spaces to produce “productive” landscapes. Plantation economies are characterised by racialised capital flows and labour regimes that operate through financialisation, surveillance and extraction, while simultaneously working to create life and death. Plantation futures recognise that while plantations are inherently violent institutions, they also give rise to forms of resistance that generate alternative futures and ways of being.

Although the plantation framework has rarely been utilised to describe international educational development, various scholars have employed the plantation to understand certain historical and contemporary aspects of education. For instance, Williams, Squire and Tuitt (2021) characterise universities as embodying “plantation politics” through ongoing colonial relations and anti-Blackness, while Bristol (2012) presents how a “plantation pedagogy” permeated post-colonial schooling in Trinidad and Tobago, arguing that education there perpetuates plantation logics by “assimilating white capitalist economic culture” within the “non-white classroom” (p. 72). Similarly, Marquez (2024) uses the plantation to describe industrial schooling's proliferation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with plantation pedagogy advancing two principles: civilisation is measured by proximity to whiteness and labour transforms people and land into productive assets.

Following this scholarship, I mobilise the plantation to explore the racialised and extractive violence of contemporary educational policies and practices, particularly within international educational development. This analysis understands the plantation as representing connections embedded in land, labour and ecosystems of relations (Glissant, 2024). Thus, while the plantation framework shares analytical similarities with coloniality (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2022), corporatisation (Moeller, 2020) and broader criticisms of privatisation, its utility lies in its foregrounding capitalism's violence as a systemic, institutionalised, and intentional method of control. More substantially, the plantation framework names a specific, historically traceable institution whose logics move from the colonial estate, to the corporate concession, to the contemporary school, emphasising two dimensions other frameworks often neglect: (1) the governing of life and death and (2) resistance. The plantation framework moves beyond extraction and enclosure, to illuminate the interconnectedness of planetary life, insisting that “the terraforming of the planet cannot be thought apart from the categories of race, class and gender” (Verne, Marquardt, & Ouma, 2025, p. 8). This framing is not merely diagnostic but grounds a politics of resistance and emancipation rooted in epistemic flourishing, reparations and the diversification of human and non-human life, pointing towards spaces that not only imagine but also actively plot an otherwise.

Plantation logics begin with the identification of “wilderness” (spaces and people) to be conquered and transformed into productive global resources. Invented to justify colonial era social relations, these logics established racialised hierarchies, characterising the European as the ideal “modern man” (white, educated, Christian and male) while rendering Black, Indigenous and vulnerable populations sub- or non-human (Wynter, 2003). This process imposed a coloniality of knowledge, power and being that dispossessed communities of land, promoted Eurocentric epistemologies (rooted in liberalism, positivism and Christianity) over Indigenous ones, and subjected people of colour to colonial rule and capitalist “development” (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2022). Under these logics, Blackness is “denied humanity and thus ineligible for full citizenship” (Lawrence Henry, 2021), leading to what Fanon (1952) described as “zones of being” and “nonbeing” (xii) wherein whiteness enables the extraction of value from supposedly “non-valuable bodies” (Lawrence Henry, 2021, p. 134).

McKittrick (2011) identifies the plantation as a “meaningful geographic locus through which race is made known (and bodies are therefore differently disciplined) across time and space” (p. 949). Through these encounters, specific geographies of the racialised Other are cast as “lands of no one” and “emptied out of life” (McKittrick, 2013, p. 7), opening them as frontiers for colonial exploitation. This labelling of spaces as existing at the “edge of space and time,” where resources lay dormant, justified capitalist extraction and enclosure (Tsing, 2003, p. 7), ultimately resulting in “racial regimes of ownership,” where all land was viewed as white property, leading to the dispossession, enslavement and extermination of Indigenous and Black people (Bhandar, 2018, p. 5).

Plantationocene scholarship demonstrates how plantation logics have infiltrated spaces beyond the historical plantation, producing recurring “violence, land degradation and species extinction” (Wu & Xu, 2024, p. 10). These logics hold that any land or space not privately owned and managed for productive purposes is available for appropriation, working to “enforce and encode race-ethnic-class-based hierarchies” across multiple scales (Chao et al., 2024, p. 552). Plantation logics thus rank and label specific bodies and spaces as “in crisis,” requiring scientific management and “good governance” to make them productive.

Once people and spaces are labelled as “in crisis,” outside interventions typically operate through a “double gesture” of organised abandonment (exclusion) and inclusion, with the plantation system justifying itself through claims of care and compassion while perpetuating colonial era paternalistic relationships and violence (Mitchell, 2017). Mitchell (2017) details how under colonialism “patriarchal administration and humanitarian management” by Europeans were seen as necessary for the racialised Other to become fully adult (or human) and productive (p. 351). According to Rusert's (2019) analysis of the plantation in the United States (US), plantation management operated through “coercive care,” with plantations acting as a “biopolitical institution of health management” where “subjects became objects of knowledge and at the same time objects of domination,” transformed “in the name of health and life” (p. 30). As such, plantation logics perpetuate the idea that the habits, behaviours and mindsets considered “healthy” were those of the white coloniser, with traditional Indigenous ways of life cast as unhealthy and uncivilised (p. 29). Plantation logics thus result in certain “productive” forms of life being cultivated, while simultaneously necessitating the death or extinction of others.

Plantation logics manifest in contemporary educational policy around a “problematisation” of Black and Indigenous people and spaces in need of scientific and external management (Sriprakash, Tikly, & Walker, 2020; Pierre, 2020). These logics play out in the Liberian Education Advancement Program (LEAP), which outsourced initially 93 and eventually over 500 public primary schools to largely international for-profit school providers following the Ebola crisis ^[2]. According to Liberia's then Minister of Education George Werner, the crisis provided a unique opportunity to reimagine education, writing that “now is the time to be bold, to pilot and experiment” (Werner, 2022, para.7). The LEAP experiment brought in “external expertise” not just in school management, but in the creation and operation of the policy itself, with key investors constructing an externally staffed and funded Education Delivery Unit within the Ministry of Education (MoE) to help manage the project. According to several insiders, the unit was created to “bypass troublesome ministry officials,” providing outside organisations with greater project control (Hook, 2023, p. 100). LEAP thus perpetuated the narrative that Liberian actors (teachers, administrators and politicians) were corrupt, while “external experts” were virtuous, rational and evidence driven.

The plantation logics at play in LEAP are found in other educational projects and policies, including in the US where in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries problematisation discourses addressed “the problem of incorporating Black Americans into a post-slavery Southern political economy while simultaneously guaranteeing their subordination within the new system” (Offutt-Chaney, 2022, p. 185). Here, Black farmers were characterised as “owning land but making poor use of it,” and thus needing education and scientific management to create productive land and people (Marquez, 2024, p. 176). More recently, problematisation discourses have been mobilised around notions of the “girl in crisis” and the “global learning crisis,” once again targeted at communities of colour (Kirchgasler, 2025; Kirchgasler & Desai, 2020; Sriprakash et al., 2020). Baldridge (2017) argues these educational interventions mobilised around crisis “rely on narratives of damage and struggle whereby Black youth in low-income settings are framed as ‘broken’ and in need of ‘fixing’” (p. 281). These narratives allow “white architects” to displace democratic governance and implement technocratic reforms (Watkins, 2001).

Today, this dynamic appears across multiple educational contexts, most notably the outsourcing of public schools in communities of colour to private actors. For example, Lawrence Henry (2021) and Offutt-Chaney (2022) detail how educational reforms following Hurricane Katrina outsourced public schools to privately managed charters, exacerbating inequalities and dispossessing Black working-class communities. Ewing (2018) makes similar observations regarding Chicago, where the city replaced “failing schools” with charters despite opposition from the surrounding predominantly Black community, who viewed it as another power grab by political and economic elites. Internationally, Herbert (2023) describes this process through collaboration schools in South Africa – privately managed schools that implement global “best practices” including “no excuse” policies and pedagogies imported from US charters.

These educational interventions continue to operate through a double gesture of abandonment and inclusion. In LEAP, outside experts decide what constitutes legitimate schooling and curriculum, consigning Indigenous and traditional forms of knowledge and learning to a kind of death. Locals frequently described LEAP schools as “European schools,” distinguishing them from public, community and traditional “Bush” schools. This distinction reflects both a desire to preserve local education practices and an acknowledgment of external influence in LEAP. What's more, LEAP reformers often treated local schools as impediments to the program's success, seen in efforts by the MoE and LEAP providers to close traditional schools that interfered with the academic calendar, resulting in protests by community members (Weedee-Conway, 2025).

Similar logics are found in seemingly neutral and progressive policies like Education for All and the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goal Four (“Quality Education,” SDG 4). These policies draw previously excluded people and spaces into the firm grasp of global developmentalism (Kirchgasler, 2025) where they are cast as problems necessitating outside intervention, a framing that denies alternative forms of schooling and erases history, cultural identity and autonomy. Here, the model favoured by global education experts privileges certain types of schooling and epistemologies over others, ignoring the deeper historical and structural relationships that created these injustices in the first place (Sriprakash et al., 2020). As Sriprakash, Rudolph, and Gerrard (2022) argue, the “global agendas for education under the UN SDGs prioritise the incorporation and assimilation of children into systems of mass formal schooling without addressing, much less altering, the relationship between education, racism, and the economy” (pp. 34–35).

Following this view, educational anthropologist Sojoyner (2017) argues that we should understand education as an act of “enclosure” reproducing various forms of violence through the kinds of knowledge that are privileged – what is taught and not taught, and how students are classified. For Sojoyner (2017), formal education in Black and Indigenous communities serves to “negate alternative social visions presented by Black radical forms of Indigenous knowledge” while incorporating “obedient and nonthreatening forms of difference to prevent the exposure of highly oppressive governance” (p. 521). Applied to international educational development, the ultimate result of plantation logics is the dispossession and enclosure of marginalised communities – local ways of knowing, living and being – in service of corporate profits, leading to a sort of social death (Mbembe, 2020). As African philosopher Ngugi wa Thiong'o explains, this “annihilate[s] a people's belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves…It makes them see their past as one wasteland of nonachievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland” (Wa Thiong'o, 1998, p. 3).

Beckford (1999) describes plantations as first and foremost an “instrument of colonisation” where colonisation means the “process of bringing territory and people under new and more stringent forms of control” (p. 30). Thus, while plantation logics identify populations and spaces as “lands of no one” to be occupied and put to “productive use,” plantation politics involve the seizure, enclosure and development of said populations and spaces through quantitative and scientific management. In this way, plantation politics represent the technologies of governance that produce the economic, governmental and social conditions necessary for full incorporation into the global marketplace.

Plantation politics (historically and in contemporary formations) makes use of quantitative and scientific management by subjecting both land and people to constant surveillance and experimentation, seen for instance in the testing of new treatments for endemic diseases (of plants and people), the testing of chemicals to revitalise the soil and improve plant health and the testing of management techniques to improve productivity (Mitman, 2021). Economic historian Rosenthal (2019) finds that complex accounting practices and quantitative management on the plantation predate those in industry, evidenced in the subjecting of enslaved populations to experimentation, strict management of labour and production, incentive strategies and complex financial mechanisms to control and exploit bodies and land for profit. Considering these dynamics, Wolford (2021) describes the plantation as a discursive ideal for “organised, rational and efficient production and governance” that attempts to manage and produce “productive landscapes” (p. 9).

Surveillance, experimentation and standardisation comprise three essential elements of quantitative and scientific management. Surveillance on the historical plantation often took the form of a labour “overseer,” ensuring that every moment of the labourer's day was controlled and standardised. Browne (2015) describes plantation surveillance as a “technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies and performance concern the production of norms about race and exercise power to define what is in or out of place” (p. 16). This “racialised surveillance” reifies boundaries and bodies along racial lines, sorting data to control, regulate and discipline while prescribing “measures for regulating plantation life and ‘social death’” (p. 42).

In hegemonic development discourses, these technologies of governance work to erase histories of injustice, depoliticising governance and rendering it technical and “post-racial,” as something to be solved through universal solutions created by international experts (Ferguson, 1994; Li, 2007; Pierre, 2020). As such, quantitative and scientific management, extended into contemporary forms such as data-driven governance and evidence-based policy, functions to discipline, standardise, rank and nudge targeted populations towards socially and economically “healthy” norms and behaviours (Berndt, 2015). On the historic plantation this played out through the endless experimentation on crops, land and people in hopes of creating a more efficient and profitable system. Today, similar efforts prevail in social and educational interventions that treat communities as laboratories for testing and developing more efficient forms of governance and schooling.

While technocrats present these experiments as attempts to create something new and better, the surveillance and standardisation they entail produce homogenised educational landscapes. Conversi and Posocco (2024) describe such homogenisation as a cultural expansion carrying out “biological and cultural annihilation” that contributes to “exploitative human relationships on a global planetary scale” (np). This elimination of epistemic diversity creates “monocultural minds” that make it difficult to even recognise the existence of such systems (Dutta, 2020 cited in Wu & Xu, 2024, p. 10).

A monoculture mindset, combined with the belief that organisational change is essential for development in the Global South, has resulted in what Evans (2004) and Mkandawire (2012) describe as a monoculture of institutions, where neoliberal “good governance” policies work to impose standardised governance based on idealised Anglo-American models (Evans, 2004). This “institutional monocropping” follows a “one-size-fits-all” approach that standardises tasks and restrains institutional roles while subjecting them (particularly in sub-Saharan Africa) to “endless experimentation” (Mkandawire, 2012, p. iii).

In education, particularly international educational development, plantation politics are seen in the utilisation of standardisation and surveillance to produce an education monoculture of atomised individuals trained for participation in the global economy. Though promoted under claims of care (see plantation logics), these policies and practices ultimately perform a violent erasure of other, Indigenous and community-based ways of knowing, or epistemicide (de Sousa Santos, 2015).

While education serves diverse purposes, educational development discourse primarily views it as a means to cultivate entrepreneurial subjects for economic development. Human capital theory views people as investments, with the goal of schooling aimed at cultivating the skillsets needed for individual and national economic productivity (Schultz, 1961). Though normalised today, human capital theory originally received criticism for treating humans as capital, a prime feature of plantation slavery. In education, human capital theory instrumentalises educational investment for value extraction, with “quality schooling” defined as whatever produces the desired economic returns.

In LEAP, plantation politics are evident in international for-profit school firms like Bridge International Academies (renamed Bridge Liberia under its parent company NewGlobe Schools), the largest LEAP provider, whose “schools in a box” standardise all operations across networks, including teacher training, school management, curriculum and monitoring (Rangan & Lee, 2010, p. 8). In an evaluation of NewGlobe's operations in Kenya, authors including Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Kremer declared that “attending schools delivering highly standardised education has the potential to produce dramatic learning gains at scale,” suggesting policymakers explore “incorporation of standardisation, including standardised lesson plans and teacher feedback and monitoring” (Gray-Lobe, Keats, Kremer, Mbiti, & Ozier, 2022, p. 61).

This standardisation is associated with broader surveillance efforts of the entire learning process. NewGlobe deploys surveillance (and data collection) through various avenues, including tablets designed to standardise learning, monitor teacher mobility via sign-in data, and pay teachers based on attendance and lesson completion, as well as through School Performance Managers who regularly visit and observe schools. NewGlobe claims on its website that these surveillance platforms provide “real-time digital insights on exactly what is happening in every school, including lesson delivery, attendance, and learning outcomes” (NewGlobe, 2026).

Standardisation and surveillance are also evident in the overall management of LEAP. LEAP was intended to scale based on evidence from a randomised control trial (RCT), rewarding investors and providers for results achieved. However, within the first few months of the pilot (and before the release of the RCT midline results) LEAP was expanded, with providers rewarded less for their demonstrated impact than for their ability to raise capital (MoE, 2017; Tofaris & Romero, 2020). In this way, the RCT functioned less as an evidence-based governance tool than as a legitimising cover for the growth of for-profit providers (Cameron, 2020). Furthermore, to help manage costs and more efficiently monitor schools, outsourcing was done in clusters. This resulted in individual providers monopolising the entire public schooling system in some regions (Hook, 2024), leaving many parents no choice but to send their children to a for-profit school.

Broadening the scope, plantation politics are apparent in the various forms of data-driven governance that dominate the current educational landscape, including evidence-based policymaking (such as the aforementioned RCT to guide policy), results-based financing and international assessments. Globally, international educational assessments are increasingly relied upon not just for measuring student performance, but gauging a nation's modernisation and future economic prosperity (Popkewitz, 2025). Global assessments such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) openly rank nations, focusing on literacy, numeracy and science as success indicators for technological and economic growth, effectively narrowing the curriculum and the very idea of what is considered a quality education (Spring, 2015). These assessments even prioritise cultural norms and personality traits like “grit,” the “growth mindset” and “adaptability,” thought to produce entrepreneurial subjects ready to contribute to the global economy (Kirchgasler, 2018).

Plantation economies organise the extraction, processing and consumption of value across a global commodity market, channelling surplus from periphery to core. Considered a “highly capitalist enterprise” (Beckford, 1999, p. 33), the plantation is therefore an essential institution in the construction of a capitalist world-system – one that concentrates wealth while fostering economic dependency and underdevelopment (Rodney, 2018; Beckford, 1999). Racialisation, surveillance and financialisation are essential characteristics of a plantation economy, enacting an extractive imperialism whose networks, capital flows and value-forms convert life, land and labour into measurable, extractable capital for circulation in a global market.

On the historic plantation, “slave-backed bonds” raised capital by “selling shares in the bodies of bondspeople and their labour” (Byrd, Goldstein, Melamed, & Reddy, 2018, p. 8), reducing people to fungible units (Hartman, 1997) stripped of kinship and social positioning, and rendered as “flesh” rather than full humans (Spillers, 1987; King, 2016; Winnubst, 2021). A defining aspect of the plantation economy is the labelling of specific populations as extractable capital, available for investment or abandonment according to their perceived return.

Contemporary financialisation reproduces this logic under the guise of “philanthrocapitalism” and “conscious capitalism,” – combining profit-making with “doing good” – where instruments like social impact bonds and results-based financing make poverty reduction profitable, transforming those once deemed “valueless” into new sites of capitalist extraction (Kish & Leroy, 2015, p. 630). As Mbembe (2022) observes, life itself becomes a commodity, worthy of investment only if it can produce a desired economic or social return.

Zuboff (2019) terms this process “surveillance capitalism,” wherein human behaviour is rendered as raw material for “behavioural futures markets” through processes of extraction, prediction and modification (p. 8). In a complementary but more severe diagnosis, Mbembe (2022) describes how modern capitalism is premised on the commodification of all living things towards their eventual destruction for the sake of profit. These understandings, while distinct in emphasis, converge on a crucial insight: contemporary capitalism treats human lives as extractable resources to be mined, sold, optimised and discarded according to market logics. The result is a systematic reduction of human life to economic instrumentality, leading to social and economic death.

Plantation economies are characterised by racial hierarchies of movement (Achtnich, 2023). While the Anthropocene assumes a humanity with increased mobility, the Plantationocene recognises that racialised bodies continue to be policed and surveilled by powerful state and private actors. Here the contrast is stark: as elites and corporations move freely across borders and evade accountability, migrants and the poor are criminalised, labelled as “illegal” and denied fundamental rights.

Under plantation economies, racialised, gendered and classed differences continue to serve as the basis for labour divisions (Gerrard, Sriprakash, & Rudolph, 2022) and economic mobility. A key feature here is the fostering of dependency through outright control (enslaved or indentured labour) or through precarity (low-paid and immigrant labour) (Woods, 2017). Plantation labour is tightly controlled and surveilled through regimented schedules, information technologies and strategic spatial elements. As Browne (2015) explains, plantation owners attempted to standardise and account for every second of the labourer's life through “rules, instructions, routines, inspection, hierarchical observation, the timetable, and the examination” (p. 51).

Just as the historical plantation concentrated money, resources and power among white elites, contemporary capitalism generates wealth concentration at unprecedented scales. Today, venture capital (VC) specifically has been characterised as a “white boys club,” with VC firms largely male (approximately 82%) and graduates from either Harvard or Stanford (40%) (Kerby 2018, cited in Moeller, Kanopka, French, Hook, & Sedighi, 2024). These “founders,” investors and CEOs are seeing record breaking wealth accumulation, with billionaire wealth increasing by 81% since 2020 (Maitland et al., 2026). Currently the 12 richest billionaires (predominantly white and male) “now have more wealth than the poorest half of humanity” (Maitland et al., 2026, p. 19). This amounts to a new racial regime of ownership, where data and the wealth it generates is captured by a minority of individuals and corporations.

Plantation economies are evident in educational development and policy in various ways, from the surveillance and racialisation of labour, to financialisation through results-based financing, to the rise of educational technologies generating profit from data extraction and the commodification of students and workers.

Contemporary education projects frequently deploy precarious and underpaid and unpaid labour. Under LEAP, Liberian teachers have been subjected to increased surveillance, standardisation and precarity. Bridge in particular “removed 74% of incumbent teachers from its schools” in Liberia (Romero, Sandefur, & Sandholtz, 2020, p. 367). To fill the gaps, Bridge hired younger and less experienced teachers. These new teachers are heavily surveilled through tablets that track every aspect of their workday and are required to meet targets in attendance and lesson completion to receive a stipend (approximately $25 per month). Failure here results in non-payment, with one supervisor admitting that it is “nearly impossible” for teachers to meet the requirements (Hook, 2023, p. 103). As a result, many LEAP teachers take on second jobs or resort to sleeping in their classrooms (Hook, 2023, 2024). Across several interviews and conversations, teachers, administrators and community members described these teachers as the “living dead,” hovering at the edge of existence, without food or a place to stay. One school administrator characterised teacher labour under LEAP as “modern day slavery.” Even as teachers are denied basic necessities, NewGlobe has expanded across Liberia, the continent and the global south, growing into a $250 million company (Pitchbook, 2026).

Indeed, despite deteriorating working conditions and growing dissatisfaction among educational labourers that has resulted in a global shortage of teachers (UNESCO, 2024), the global education industry continues to boom, its valuation nearly doubling over the last decade to an estimated $6 trillion and expected to reach $10 trillion by 2030 (HolonIQ, 2023). Edtech has been the fastest growing sector, with the digital education market projected to double from $404 billion in 2025 to $850 billion by 2030 (Nartey, 2025). This growth has attracted venture capital investment, reaching a peak of $20.8 billion in 2022. This has since stabilised to around $2–3 billion annually, with investment favouring artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled platforms (HolonIQ, 2025).

Regarding LEAP, the for-profit providers (Rising Academies and Bridge/NewGlobe) have rebranded themselves as larger “edtech” and “software companies,” reflecting the importance of data (often captured through tablets and phones) to both learning outcomes and profits ^[3]. Data is now key, as made clear in a NewGlobe's investor prospectus highlighting how its technology can capture market research on communities (including population density and payment history) that could be used to “create a credit scoring system” and enable the “creation and brokering of low cost health insurance” and “financial loans,” presenting a “multi-billion dollar opportunity” (Bridge, 2016, p. 10). NewGlobe boasts that its digital learning platform enables “short-cycle randomised control trials [that] enable teacher guides to be continually iterated upon, using one billion annual data points a year” (NewGlobe, 2026).

While edtech purports to use data to improve learning, it exploits this data to achieve scale, transforming students and teachers into commodities in the process. The emergence of AI, built from publicly available data often obtained without meaningful consent, accelerates the enclosure of public knowledge as private property repackaged for commercial use. Indeed, edtech and AI are increasingly dominating nearly every aspect of the educational process, from classroom and course management (Canvas and Google Classroom) to self-assessment tools (Quizlet), to supplemental tutoring (Khan Academy), to the production of student work itself (ChatGPT). While data extraction in the classroom is ostensibly limited and regulated, persistent surveillance continues unabated. One edtech executive revealed that their company stores 345 terabytes of information from its users, approximately “22 billion pages, spanning each of [a child's] life stages” (EdTech Law Center, 2024, p. 1). This unprecedented scale of data accumulation exemplifies a new extractive economy where “data is the new oil” (White, 2025, para.1), positioning an individual's data as raw material for commercial exploitation.

As AI expands and intensifies this extractive process, it simplifies knowledge landscapes, scraping datasets and generating answers through large-scale pattern learning and matching. Couldry and Mejias (2023) argue that this intrusion of digital technology into everyday life constitutes a “data colonialism” that shares the main goals of the previous colonial eras: extraction and dispossession. They liken current data grabs to the land grabs of years past, now operating through a digitised landscape. Here, data has become a new form of capital that can be mined to make “existing value representations more efficient” (Wu & Xu, 2024, p. 11). These digital plantations position individuals as both digital workers and commodities themselves, harvesting data to direct behaviour towards specific profitable objectives. The aggressive expansion of AI also leads to social and ecological crises, seen in the potential for massive job losses (Bhaimiya, 2026) and in the destruction of land and waterways/systems through the creation of data centres and hardware that require massive amounts of energy and resources, including rare earth materials that continue to be harvested in former colonies through heavily exploited and racialised labour (Ren & Wierman, 2024).

While the plantation framework has been deployed here to explore the inherent violence of contemporary international educational governance, it also provides a useful lens for understanding decolonial alternatives. Critical scholars present plantations not simply as spaces of violence, but also of resistance (McKittrick, 2013). Key to this view is the concept of marronage, “the practices of flight from enslavement and placemaking beyond slavery” which provided an avenue for Black people to assert their freedom and create communities removed from the dominant planter society (Winston, 2021, p. 2185). Marronage demonstrates plantation resistance as not just a fleeting instance of escape, but as producing place (Winston, 2021), where zones of liberation take shape.

Wynter (1971) and McKittrick (2011, 2013) articulate a similar dynamic through the plot-and-plantation framework. Wynter (1971) argues that plots, the land allocated to enslaved people to grow food, constitute “secretive histories” that challenge plantation narratives (p. 101). These plots represent community gardens that preserve traditional knowledge providing a degree of independence from the plantation's demands. McKittrick (2011) expands this through “plantation futures,” defined as “the insistence that spaces of encounter, rather than transparent and completed spaces of racism and racist violence, hold in them useful anticolonial practices and narratives” (p. 955). The plot constitutes a counter-geography wherein Black people cultivate self-reliance, care and freedom (Barra, 2023).

The plot-and-plantation framework highlights the racialised violence at the root of contemporary plantation systems while simultaneously presenting these as spaces of resistance, survival and life-making that demand ethical engagement. Against the plantation's imposed monocultures, the plot demonstrates the importance of Indigenous and diverse systems of knowledge construction while encouraging holistic approaches that consider broader ecosystems (Davis et al., 2019).

I utilise Wynter's and McKittrick's conceptualisation of the plot to highlight three interlocking forms of resistance in education: plot as verb (plotting), demonstrating how teachers and community members actively engage in resistance; plot as community garden, represented in spaces of nourishment (intellectual, emotional and physical); and plot as narrative, whose stories are centred and disseminated.

Plotting resistance constitutes what Wynter describes as “cultural guerrilla resistance to the plantation system” (1971, p.100). In LEAP, this kind of plotting is reflected in teachers' refusal to teach from prescribed tablets, “forgetting” to charge the tablets and not abiding by the scripted lessons, all of which can negatively impact teacher pay (Hook, 2024). These acts are reminiscent of what Givens (2021) calls a fugitive pedagogy – subversive practices by Black educators who, despite surveillance and control, create and disseminate liberatory knowledge. Historical examples of fugitive pedagogy include Black educators secretly teaching Black history and culture despite these being prohibited by white boards of education (Givens, 2021). More recently, fugitive pedagogy can be found in educators' refusal to abide by curriculum restrictions around race, LGBTQ and social and climate justice issues (see Zinn Education Project), and in the creation and promotion of alternative curricula (see Black Lives Matter at School and “On a Move” Curriculum project in Philadelphia).

The plot as community garden is demonstrated in LEAP through teachers and students escaping LEAP schools to create alternative community schools in direct opposition to LEAP's corporate monoculture. Here, the idea of plot as community garden becomes material reality. Wynter and McKittrick note how community gardens serve as material and political formations of “otherwise worlds” at the plantation's edges, preserving “traditional knowledge to grow, feed, and share food and cultural traditions that plantation owners attempted to take away” (Barra, 2023, p. 19). These alternative schools, which I call “schools of resistance,” take shape in private homes, businesses, churches and other spaces at the edges of LEAP's corporatised ecosystem. Often staffed by community teachers on shared lands, they cultivate alternative ways of living grounded in local customs and traditions.

In my observations of these schools, teachers created their own lessons, incorporating a variety of activities such as local songs, dance, theatre and debate, and were respected as experts and professionals by the community. Perhaps most significantly, these schools were built and managed by the community, with teachers and students fed by community members, and materials for cooking and school construction all sourced locally. Many of these schools operated gardens (often partially funded by local NGOs), growing Liberian staples for school meals. Before and after school, the grounds bustled with vendors, typically parents selling snacks. These activities demonstrate a collaborative, less coercive form of care than that seen in LEAP schools, which strictly limit student enrolment, and erect walls to prevent students from escaping and outsiders from entering. In contrast, the schools of resistance were often open to all, allowing community members to freely access and participate in the schooling process.

Extending beyond Liberia, garden plots are found in the rise of homeschooling by Black and other marginalised families during and after COVID-19 (Johnson, 2022), in certain alternative schools founded to promote Black history and culture, and in the creation of technologies like Hosted in Africa, which aims to be a non-extractive and community-driven webspace to communicate with others. These gardens cultivate a more holistic and less extractive style of schooling that expands the classroom to the broader community, and typically fosters connections to the local environment, combining physical nourishment, political activism and the arts (Voelcker, 2025).

Lastly, the plot as narrative concerns the stories we tell and the data we use. Wynter (1971) presents the plot-and-plantation in connection to history and narratives, explaining how the “myth of history was used by the plantation to keep its power secure” (p. 101). For Wynter, the history taught in most schools represents “the official history of the superstructure; the only history which is written” (p. 101). While plantation history centres the needs of capital accumulation, plot history centres the needs of local people and the broader community. Plantation narratives represent those who justify and defend the system, while the plot represents those who challenge it.

In LEAP, international experts and investors have largely controlled the narrative, framing any research not coming from a randomised control trial (RCT) as biased and unreliable (Romero, Sandefur, & Sandholtz, 2017). What's more, many of these same powerful actors have manipulated RCT data to suit their interests; when results were less than ideal, school providers and investors created their own reports (Gbilia et al., 2017), pushed incomplete narratives (#PSLWorks), and wrote opinion articles and blogs criticising evaluators (Starr, 2020). When community members reported on failures to pay teachers and other provider misdeeds (including serious sexual abuse allegations later proved to be true) (Young, 2018) they were ignored and dismissed, and when RCT evaluators attempted to expand their analysis to address such concerns, they faced attacks from investors (Hook, 2025).

But plantation narratives are not confined to LEAP. When it comes to international educational governance and the global education industry, the stories told are typically those that serve the plantation, touting the success of standardisation (Gray-Lobe et al., 2022) while asserting that injustice and inequality are the result of bad governance and “traditional” or “backward” thinking (Pierre, 2020; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2022). These narratives animate institutional practices where success is determined by economic value, and where investor returns are prioritised over teacher and student wellbeing. Most significantly, plantation narratives perpetuate the idea that failure and success derive from individual effort or the right mindset, ignoring histories of structural inequality and injustice.

Overall, the plot–plantation framework illuminates community-based alternatives to the prevailing international education monoculture. The plot broadens our conception of quality schooling by centring voices and knowledge traditions typically marginalised in policy discourse, and by foregrounding practices that support the holistic flourishing of communities and ecosystems.

Throughout history, plantations and their extractive monocultures have produced various ecological disasters. Today, as in the past, the dangers of these plantation monocultures extend beyond purely ecological concerns like soil depletion and species extinction, to people's lives and wellbeing. Thus, even for a system as resilient as capitalism, the plantation represents a contradiction that may threaten its very existence, as monocultures and monopolies reduce competition, stifling the ingenuity and resilience that spring from diversity, and leading towards a kind of neofeudalism where political and economic decisions are made undemocratically by a small handful of unaccountable elites (Varoufakis, 2024). As Evans (2004) asks in relation to institutional monocropping, “if biologically diverse ecologies are more robust in the face of environmental change and diversified investment portfolios are superior in the face of risk, shouldn't institutional diversity have adaptive value for the global political economy as a whole?” (p. 34). Similar questions arise regarding education. If ecological monocultures threaten the sustainability of life on earth, do not educational monocultures also threaten the sustainability of contemporary schooling? Is not the loss of educational and cultural diversity a threat to human ingenuity and prosperity? What's more, faced with multiple ecological and social crises, aren't we best served by cultivating a diversity of knowledge traditions that might increase the possibilities of formulating solutions? This means prioritising an ethic that, against the current extractivism, values epistemological pluralism and enables alternative ways of collective flourishing. This is the life-sustaining alternative to the deadly logic of the plantation.

Understanding contemporary forms of education as perpetuating plantation systems helps us move towards alternatives. Going forward we must seek reparations – material, epistemic and pedagogical (Sriprakash, 2023). Material reparations should assume central importance in international educational development. At minimum, these must include basic debt relief, the implementation of new taxation (while enforcing current tax laws) and ensuring that all labour associated with the educational sector receives fair compensation (ActionAid, 2025). Reparations must equally centre land rights, strict regulation and protections around data collection (particularly concerning children and schools) and the prioritisation of publicly owned and community-based platforms. As researchers, we must shine a light on deteriorating teaching conditions and address the fact that many of the policies and programs we participate in rely upon unpaid and underpaid labour. Epistemic reparations involve moving beyond universalised and standardised policy prescriptions, or “best practices” and the Western exceptionalism that gives rise to them. This means opening research and development spaces to new ideas and knowledge traditions. It also means recognising that the value of education lies in more than just economic returns. Finally, pedagogical reparations involve reworking and repairing our relationships with each other and the environment, moving from extraction and exploitation to cooperation and collaboration.

We currently find ourselves in a particularly tumultuous global predicament, both in terms of our natural environment and our human-made institutions. Yet, this moment also offers unique opportunities to fundamentally reconsider how we live, including how educational development and governance is conceived, funded and implemented, and what is valued. The time has come to re-write the plot.