Teacher Remuneration

We analyse the politics of the reform of teacher payment modalities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in light of the uneven territorial reach of the DRC state. The reform focused on ex-tending this reach by paying all teachers via a bank account, replacing long-standing shared govern-ance arrangements between state and faith-based organizations with a public-private partnership. By using qualitative and quantitative data, we map the political practices accompanying the implementa-tion of the reform. While the reform itself was officially deemed a success, its intended effects were almost completely offset in rural areas. Moreover, governance of teacher payments was not rational-ized but instead became even more complex and spatially differentiated. In sum, the reform has ren-dered governance processes more opaque and it deepened the existing unevenness in the geography of statehood.