Global Governance of Education : The Historical and Contemporary Entanglements of UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank [24, 1 ed.] 9783031404108, 9783031404115

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
About the Authors
Abbreviations
Chapter 1: Global Governance of Education: An Introduction
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Global Governance of Education: Theoretical Perspectives
1.2.1 Constructivist-Ideational Theories of Global Governance
1.2.2 Materialist Theories of Global Governance
1.3 Situating This Book in the Literature on International Organizations and the Global Governance of Education
1.4 Methodology and Structure of the Book
References
Chapter 2: UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank: A Global Governance Perspective
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Key Ideational Building Blocks of the Interwar World Order
2.3 Organizational Steppingstones of the Interwar World Order
2.4 UNESCO: The Idealist
2.5 The OECD: The Master of Persuasion
2.6 The World Bank: The ``Master of Coercion´´
2.7 UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank: A Global Governance Perspective
References
Chapter 3: In the Shadow of the Cold War: Educational Planning and the Rise of Global Governance of Education
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Turf Struggles Between UNESCO and the OECD
3.3 The 1961 Washington Conference and the Mediterranean Regional Project
3.4 The Expansion of the Mediterranean Regional Project to Latin America
3.5 The Creation of the International Institute of Educational Planning (IIEP)
3.6 The Role of Output-Oriented Governance of Education
3.7 Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: The Struggle Between UNESCO and the World Bank Over Education for Development
4.1 Introduction
4.2 The UNESCO-World Bank Co-operative Program, 1964-1989
4.2.1 The Establishment of the Co-operative Program: Rationale and Challenges
4.2.2 Shifting Dynamics in the 1970s
4.2.3 The Expansion of Education in the World Bank
4.2.4 An ``Alien Body´´
4.3 Education for All
4.3.1 From the International Working Group on Education (IWGE) to Dakar
4.3.2 The 2000 World Education Forum in Dakar and Its Follow-Up
4.3.3 The Top-Down and Parallel Global Governance Structures of EFA
4.4 Conclusion
References
Chapter 5: The Turbulence of Statistics in Education
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Understanding the Role of Data, Indicators and Statistics in the Architecture of IOs
5.3 The Struggle for Accurate Education Statistics in the Context of Changing Geopolitics, 1945-1960s
5.3.1 Geopolitics, the Sputnik Shock and Education Statistics
5.3.2 Statistics and Indicators in Education Planning and Systems Analysis
5.4 Reorganizing Alignments and Breakthroughs in Education Statistics and Indicators in the 1970s
5.5 The Resurgence of Geopolitics in the Shaping of Education Statistics and Indicators in the 1980s
5.6 Reshuffling Positions in the IO Arena in the 1990s
5.6.1 The Scramble for Developing International Comparative Statistics and Indicators
5.7 Aligning IO Efforts in Education Statistics and Indicators in the 2000s
5.7.1 Intra- and Interorganizational Struggles
5.8 Concluding Discussion
References
Chapter 6: From Lifelong Learning to the Measurement of Skills
6.1 Introduction
6.2 The Establishment of CERI
6.3 Éducation Permanente and Recurrent Education
6.4 The Shift Towards Education Indicators
6.5 The Resistance to Lifelong Learning and Its Revival in a Neoliberal Guise
6.6 Concluding Discussion
References
Chapter 7: Knowledge Brokers and Actor Entanglements in the OECD, UNESCO, and World Bank Triangle
7.1 Introduction
7.2 The Actor Perspective in International Organizations
7.2.1 Methodology and the Construction of a Spatial Venn Diagram
7.2.2 Some General Analytical Observations
7.2.3 Case Arena 1 - The Creation of the International Institute of Educational Planning (IIEP)
7.2.4 Case Arena 2 - Mats Hultin´s Travels and Correspondence in the Late 1960s/Early 1970s
7.2.5 Case Arena 3: Andreas Schleicher in the Formation of the INES/PISA Complex
7.3 Concluding Discussion
References
Chapter 8: Contemporary Agendas and Shifts in the Global Governance of Education
8.1 Introduction
8.2 Relating Some Key Findings of the Book to Contemporary Developments
8.2.1 UNESCO Lost Out Against the OECD and the World Bank
8.2.2 Interactions Between IOs and Powerful States
8.2.3 The Role of Global Agendas
8.2.4 Boundaries
8.2.5 Homogenizing Effects and Isomorphic Tendencies
8.3 Recent Shifts in the Global Governance of Education
8.4 Connections to Theoretical Perspectives
8.5 Conclusion
References
Index of Names
Subject Index

Citation preview

Educational Governance Research 24

Maren Elfert Christian Ydesen

Global Governance of Education The Historical and Contemporary Entanglements of UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank

Educational Governance Research Volume 24

Series Editors Lejf Moos , Aarhus University, Copenhagen, NV, Denmark Stephen Carney , Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark John B. Krejsler , Danish School of Education (DPU), Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark Editorial Board Members Stephen J. Ball, Institute of Education, University of London, London, UK Lucas Cone, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark Neil Dempster, Institute for Educational Research, Griffith University, Mt Gravatt, QLD, Australia Maren Elfert , King’s College London, School of Education, London, UK Olof Johansson, Centre for Principal Development, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden Klaus Kasper Kofod, Department of Education, Aarhus University, Copenhagen NV, Denmark Cathryn Magno, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland Romuald Normand, Research Unit CNRS SAGE, University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France Marcelo Parreira do Amaral, Institute of Education, Universität Münster, Münster, Germany Jan Merok Paulsen, Teacher Education, Oslo Metropolitan University, Oslo, Norway Nelli Piattoeva, Faculty of Education & Culture, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland Barbara Schulte, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria James P. Spillane, School of Education & Social Policy, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA Gita Steiner-Khamsi, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA Daniel Tröhler, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria Michael Uljens , Faculty of Education, Åbo Akademi University, Vaasa, Finland Antoni Verger, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain Florian Waldow, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

This series presents recent insights in educational governance gained from research that focuses on the interplay between educational institutions and societies and markets. Education is not an isolated sector. Educational institutions at all levels are embedded in and connected to international, national and local societies and markets. One needs to understand governance relations and the changes that occur if one is to understand the frameworks, expectations, practice, room for manoeuvre, and the relations between professionals, public, policy makers and market place actors. The aim of this series is to address issues related to structures and discourses by which authority is exercised in an accessible manner. It will present findings on a variety of types of educational governance: public, political and administrative, as well as private, market place and self-governance. International and multidisciplinary in scope, the series will cover the subject area from both a worldwide and local perspective and will describe educational governance as it is practised in all parts of the world and in all sectors: state, market, and NGOs. The series: – – – –

Covers a broad range of topics and power domains Positions itself in a field between politics and management / leadership Provides a platform for the vivid field of educational governance research Looks into ways in which authority is transformed within chains of educational governance – Uncovers relations between state, private sector and market place influences on education, professionals and students. Indexing: This series is indexed in Scopus.

*** Please contact Astrid Noordermeer at [email protected] if you wish to discuss a book proposal.

Maren Elfert • Christian Ydesen

Global Governance of Education The Historical and Contemporary Entanglements of UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank

Maren Elfert School of Education, Communication & Society King’s College London London, UK

Christian Ydesen Department of Culture and Learning Aalborg University Aalborg, Denmark

ISSN 2365-9548 ISSN 2365-9556 (electronic) Educational Governance Research ISBN 978-3-031-40410-8 ISBN 978-3-031-40411-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40411-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 Chapter “UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank: A Global Governance Perspective” is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see license information in the chapter. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgments

We have been acquainted with each other’s work since at least 2016, when Professor Poul Duedahl connected us with each other due to our common research interests. The first time we discussed the possibility of writing a book together was at a lunch after the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) in Hamburg in early September 2019, and in 2020 our book started taking form. Two research projects essentially form the backbone of the data collected for this book, Christian’s research project on “The Global History of the OECD in Education,” funded by the Rector’s Research Talent Development Programme, which ran from 2017 to 2020, and Maren’s project on the history of educational planning, funded from 2019 to 2021 by a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation postdoctoral fellowship. The book would not have been possible without the funding and research opportunities provided by these grants. Several people have contributed to the completion of the book in numerous ways. We owe a special thanks to Xiaomin Li who proved invaluable in helping to organize and combine our datasets and providing critical and constructive comments on early chapter drafts. We are also grateful to Camilla Addey for sharing some of her raw interview data with us, which has been very helpful in terms of gaining deeper insights into the mindset of OECD staff. Many thanks also to Simon Holleufer who helped prepare the social network analysis and the creation of the Venn diagram in Chap. 7. We also owe gratitude to Paul Morris, Kjell Rubenson, and Yvon Laberge for reading and commenting on chapter drafts. Finally, we would like to thank all the archivists who have helped us collect archival resources, and most of all our interviewees who took time from their busy schedules to speak with us and/or share information in writing: Dimitri Argyropoulos, Klaus Bahr, Guy Benveniste, Michel Bourgeois, Mark Bray, Gabriel Carceles Breis, Nicholas Burnett, Françoise Caillods, Sir John Daniel, Alexandra Draxler, Mats Ekholm, Louis Emmerij, Birger Fredriksen, Ron Gass, Suzanne Grant Lewis, Anton de Grauwe, César Guadalupe, Jacques Hallak, Ward Heneveld, Stephen Heyneman, Klaus Hüfner, Lucila Jallade, Stan Jones, Josef Konvitz, Francis Lethem, Marlaine Lockheed, Steve Packer, Ulrika Peppler Barry, Francisco Ramirez, Richard Sack, v

vi

Acknowledgments

Antoine Schwartz, Jørn Skovsgaard, William Thorn, Albert Tuijnman, Hans Vejleskov, Raymond Wanner, Alex ter Weele, Hans Weiler, and Peter Williams. We have only listed here the names of those informants who are cited in this book. Over the years, we have conducted more interviews with key individuals involved in international organizations that have informed this book, even if we have not made direct references to those interviews. A special thanks to our families without whose undying support the work on this book would have been difficult to complete.

London, Aalborg June 2023

Maren Elfert Christian Ydesen

Contents

1

2

3

Global Governance of Education: An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Global Governance of Education: Theoretical Perspectives . . . . . . 1.2.1 Constructivist-Ideational Theories of Global Governance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2.2 Materialist Theories of Global Governance . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Situating This Book in the Literature on International Organizations and the Global Governance of Education . . . . . . . . 1.4 Methodology and Structure of the Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank: A Global Governance Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Key Ideational Building Blocks of the Interwar World Order . . . . . 2.3 Organizational Steppingstones of the Interwar World Order . . . . . . 2.4 UNESCO: The Idealist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 The OECD: The Master of Persuasion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6 The World Bank: The “Master of Coercion” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.7 UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank: A Global Governance Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In the Shadow of the Cold War: Educational Planning and the Rise of Global Governance of Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Turf Struggles Between UNESCO and the OECD . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 The 1961 Washington Conference and the Mediterranean Regional Project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 The Expansion of the Mediterranean Regional Project to Latin America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 1 4 8 10 12 14 16 23 23 25 27 29 33 38 41 45 51 51 53 57 60 vii

viii

Contents

3.5

The Creation of the International Institute of Educational Planning (IIEP) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6 The Role of Output-Oriented Governance of Education . . . . . . . . . 3.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

64 65 69 71

4

The Struggle Between UNESCO and the World Bank Over Education for Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 4.2 The UNESCO-World Bank Co-operative Program, 1964–1989 . . . 78 4.2.1 The Establishment of the Co-operative Program: Rationale and Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 4.2.2 Shifting Dynamics in the 1970s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 4.2.3 The Expansion of Education in the World Bank . . . . . . . . . 84 4.2.4 An “Alien Body” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 4.3 Education for All . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 4.3.1 From the International Working Group on Education (IWGE) to Dakar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 4.3.2 The 2000 World Education Forum in Dakar and Its Follow-Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 4.3.3 The Top-Down and Parallel Global Governance Structures of EFA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 4.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

5

The Turbulence of Statistics in Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Understanding the Role of Data, Indicators and Statistics in the Architecture of IOs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 The Struggle for Accurate Education Statistics in the Context of Changing Geopolitics, 1945–1960s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.1 Geopolitics, the Sputnik Shock and Education Statistics . . . 5.3.2 Statistics and Indicators in Education Planning and Systems Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Reorganizing Alignments and Breakthroughs in Education Statistics and Indicators in the 1970s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5 The Resurgence of Geopolitics in the Shaping of Education Statistics and Indicators in the 1980s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.6 Reshuffling Positions in the IO Arena in the 1990s . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.6.1 The Scramble for Developing International Comparative Statistics and Indicators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.7 Aligning IO Efforts in Education Statistics and Indicators in the 2000s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.7.1 Intra- and Interorganizational Struggles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.8 Concluding Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

109 109 110 113 114 116 118 120 122 126 130 131 134 135

Contents

6

7

8

From Lifelong Learning to the Measurement of Skills . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 The Establishment of CERI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Éducation Permanente and Recurrent Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4 The Shift Towards Education Indicators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5 The Resistance to Lifelong Learning and Its Revival in a Neoliberal Guise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.6 Concluding Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Knowledge Brokers and Actor Entanglements in the OECD, UNESCO, and World Bank Triangle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2 The Actor Perspective in International Organizations . . . . . . . . . . 7.2.1 Methodology and the Construction of a Spatial Venn Diagram . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2.2 Some General Analytical Observations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2.3 Case Arena 1 – The Creation of the International Institute of Educational Planning (IIEP) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2.4 Case Arena 2 – Mats Hultin’s Travels and Correspondence in the Late 1960s/Early 1970s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2.5 Case Arena 3: Andreas Schleicher in the Formation of the INES/PISA Complex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 Concluding Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contemporary Agendas and Shifts in the Global Governance of Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 Relating Some Key Findings of the Book to Contemporary Developments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2.1 UNESCO Lost Out Against the OECD and the World Bank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2.2 Interactions Between IOs and Powerful States . . . . . . . . . . 8.2.3 The Role of Global Agendas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2.4 Boundaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2.5 Homogenizing Effects and Isomorphic Tendencies . . . . . . . 8.3 Recent Shifts in the Global Governance of Education . . . . . . . . . . 8.4 Connections to Theoretical Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

ix

143 143 145 149 152 158 161 164 169 169 170 172 173 179 181 184 188 189 193 193 197 197 198 200 203 204 207 211 213 215

Index of Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225

About the Authors

Maren Elfert is Senior Lecturer of International Education in the School of Education, Communication and Society at King’s College London. She holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia. She is author of the book UNESCO’s Utopia of Lifelong Learning: An Intellectual History, and she has published on the history of international organizations in relation to education for development, literacy, and adult education and lifelong learning policy. She is submissions editor of the International Review of Education and member of the editorial board of Comparative Education. Christian Ydesen is Professor at Aalborg University, Denmark, and an Honorary Research Fellow at Oxford University, UK. He has recently completed the research projects “The Global History of the OECD in Education” funded by the Aalborg University talent program and “Education Access under the Reign of Testing and Inclusion” funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Edinburgh, UK (2008–2009, 2016), the University of Birmingham, UK (2013), the University of Oxford, UK (2019), and the University of Milan, Italy (2021). He has published several articles on topics such as educational testing, international organizations, accountability, educational psychology, and diversity in education from historical and international perspectives.

xi

Abbreviations

ADG ALL BICSE CAME CEPAL CERI CICI CP CSTP DAC DFID DG EAG EBPR EC ECLA ECOSOC EFA EFD EIP EPA ERT ETS EU EWLP FAO FTI GAML

Assistant Director-General Adult Literacy and Lifeskills Survey Board on International Comparative Studies in Education Conference of Allied Ministers of Education United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean Centre for Educational Research and Innovation International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation The UNESCO-World Bank Co-operative Program Committee for Scientific and Technical Personnel The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee Department for International Development (United Kingdom) Director-General Education at a Glance Evidence-Based Policy Research European Commission UN Economic Commission for Latin America Economic and Social Council (of the United Nations) Education for All Education Financing Division Programme on Educational Investment and Planning in Relation to Economic Growth European Productivity Agency European Roundtable of Industrialists Educational Testing Service (United States) European Union Experimental World Literacy Programme Food and Agriculture Organization Fast-Track-Initiative (World Bank) Global Alliance to Monitor Learning xiii

xiv

GCM GPE IALS IBE IBRD IDA IEA IEI IIEP IICI ILO ILSA IMF INES IO IR ISCED IWGE LN MDG MRP NCES NGO NIEO OAS OECD OEEC PIAAC PIRLS PISA PPBS PRSP PSA RCT SABER SDG SOEC TALIS TCG TIMSS TNC UIE UIL

Abbreviations

Global Education Cooperation Mechanism Global Partnership for Education International Adult Literacy Survey International Bureau of Education International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) International Development Association (World Bank) International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement International Examinations Inquiry International Institute for Educational Planning International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation International Labour Organization International large-scale assessment International Monetary Fund International Indicators of Education Systems International organization International relations International Standard Classification of Education International Working Group on Education League of Nations Millennium Development Goal Mediterranean Regional Project American National Center for Educational Statistics Non-governmental organization New International Economic Order Organization of American States Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Organization for European Economic Development Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies Progress in International Reading Literacy Study Programme for International Student Assessment Planning Programming Budgeting System Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper Division for Policy and Sector Analysis (UNESCO) Randomized Control Trials Systems Approach for Better Educational Results Sustainable Development Goal Statistical Office of the European Communities Teaching and Learning International Survey Technical Cooperation Group Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study Transnational corporation UNESCO Institute for Education UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning

Abbreviations

UIS UK UN UNESCO UNICEF UNDP US USAID WCEFA WHO

xv

UNESCO Institute for Statistics United Kingdom United Nations United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization United Nations Children’s Fund United Nations Development Programme United States of America US Agency for International Development World Conference on Education for All World Health Organization

Chapter 1

Global Governance of Education: An Introduction

1.1

Introduction

This book examines the role of three international organizations (IOs),1 created after World War II as part of a new multilateral world order, in promoting and shaping education as a fundamental feature of the modernization of society and contributing to the globalization of educational norms, policies and technologies: the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), created in 1945 as the specialized agency of the United Nations for international intellectual cooperation; the World Bank, created in 1944 at the Bretton Woods conference as part of the post-World War II financial system; and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which emerged from the Organisation for European Economic Development (OEEC), established in 1948 with the mandate of administering the European Recovery Plan (the Marshall Plan). This book will make a contribution to the vast body of literature on the role of IOs on national and transnational educational policymaking (e.g. Jones, 1988, 1992; Jones & Coleman, 2005; Henry et al., 2001; Klees et al., 2012; Ydesen, 2019) by providing two novel perspectives: first, it will pay close attention to the historical trajectories of educational ideas, tools and policies up to the present time; and second, rather than treating UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank separately, it will examine the historical entanglements, relations and struggles between them with regard to their roles in the global governance of education. For this latter contribution, the book picks up the baton from Phillip Jones (2007), who argued that IOs should be considered as part of the global architecture of education [as] seen as a complex web of ideas, networks of influence, policy frameworks and practices, financial arrangements and organizational

We will use the term “international organizations” (IOs) throughout this book. However, it is important to note that the OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank are intergovernmental organizations, composed of member states, which distinguishes them from the wide range of organizations with an international scope that could be grouped under that term.

1

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structures–a system of global power relations that exerts a heavy, even determining, influence on how education is constructed around the world. (p. 325)

These perspectives will shed light on the historical development and shifts in the “global architecture of education” (Jones, 2007; see also Burnett, 2019) from the time these organizations were created to the present day – a system that has changed considerably in the past 70 years. Understanding the global architecture of education is important as it (1) contributes to framing and shaping perceptions of education and policy directions in education, (2) affects education access and provision for different groups of people, and (3) impacts the very conditions under which education may be realized in different contexts. While in the first two decades after World War II, global education was the domain of UNESCO, which was created with this mandate, since the 1970s the World Bank has progressively gained influence over education policies and programmes in developing countries. The OECD, which had played a role as policy advisor in education since the 1960s, has emerged as a powerful influence in much of the industrialised world since the launch of the first Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study in 2000, and is currently extending its reach to low-income countries (Auld et al., 2019; Li, 2021). We will therefore treat these three organizations as a nexus and examine how they have contributed to, and in some cases, competed and/or collaborated in global norm-setting and policy-making in education. While IOs often seem to be partnering and collaborating on certain strategic agendas in global education, they are in fact often struggling over mandates, constituencies, partners, funds, authority and the very right to define programmes, instruments and priorities (Grek, 2020a; Robertson, 2021; Ydesen, 2021). The roots of this competition between IOs stem from overlapping and/or different membership and staff bases, purposes, priorities, approaches, goals and underlying power structures (Elfert, 2021). Kranke (2022) uses the term “‘boundary work’ for an analysis of institutionalised interactions between IOs, which encompass both inclusionary practices of cooperation and exclusionary practices of demarcation” (p. 454). IOs seek to preserve or preferably expand their significance, position and role in the shaping of global developments (Rutkowski, 2008; Steiner-Khamsi, 2015). As observed in a recent chapter about the OECD, the organization needs to “act strategically and secure its organizational survival by providing member-states, partners, and decision-makers with sought-after solutions to various sociocultural issues” (Ydesen & Grek, 2019, p. 3). This “strive for uniqueness within spheres of overlapping authority. . . makes ‘the view that IOs can be studied in isolation’ untenable” (Kranke, 2022, p. 456). Education emerged as a key force of social, political and economic development since the post-World War II period. It was considered instrumental for achieving a range of societal goals, and it came to be strongly implicated in geopolitical priorities, often via the arenas provided by IOs for the export and diffusion of national agendas. In that respect, education became a major ideological battleground of the Cold War. In the late 1950s, the promotion of education was given a major impetus when it was deemed the “third factor” of economic growth, alongside

1.1

Introduction

3

capital and labour. In the eight decades since the end of the Second World War, education has become a major societal force all around the world. Schooling has seen tremendous expansion, and more recently, the enrolment of students in higher education has grown massively; not least accentuated by the emergence of what from the late 1990s was broadly termed the “knowledge society” (Darcovich et al., 1997). It is fair to say that education has become a fundamental feature of the modernization of society, a phenomenon that has been described as educationalization (Depaepe, 1998; Depaepe & Smeyers, 2008; Tröhler, 2017). UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank have played a major role in “educationalizing” the world. These organizations have been instrumental in educational promise-making and the “politics of convergence” (Cammack, 2022), spanning from the shaping of modernist social engineering strategies and tools in developing countries during the heydays of educational planning in the 1960s to the contemporary agenda of benchmarking, of which the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the most recent example. They have built their legitimacy on promising the achievement of a range of aspirational goals, such as economic growth and productivity, the reduction of poverty and inequality, “education for all” and “21st century skills”, to name just a few. However, it is hard to argue that these promises have become reality. The social and economic outcomes of the “educationalization” of the world are disappointing. The grandiose promises of greater equality and reduction of poverty have remained largely unfulfilled. Education expansion and social mobility have slowed in many countries and inequality gaps have widened dramatically. The dropout rate of children from primary schools in sub-Saharan Africa remains largely unchanged since the 1970s (Fredriksen, 2022), and the number of out of school children in the region is growing (UNESCO, 2020). Also in rich countries, inequality in children’s education is alarming (UNICEF Office of Research, 2018). Higher education is characterized by “large disparities in access and completion” (UNESCO, 2017, p. 1), and participation in adult learning is highest among the most educated and privileged (Elfert, 2019; UIL, 2019). Even the IOs themselves highlight the ongoing problems, illustrated by the World Bank’s 2018 World Development Report, Learning to Realize Education’s Promise, which paints the picture of a “learning crisis”, without acknowledging the role that the World Bank itself might have played in making promises that remained unrealized (World Bank, 2018). The history of global governance of education is full of visions of the future that remained unfulfilled. Since their inception, UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank have been at the service of modernist “transforming visions” (Scott, 1998, p. 86) that have not come to pass. Currently, the SDGs, in particular SDG 4 devoted to education, represent the dominant promise-making vision for the future that constitutes a source of power and legitimacy for the IOs discussed in this book. Another important contemporary discourse employed by IOs that has seen a revival in the context of the Covid crisis, is the technology-enhanced society. As shown by Shultz and Viczko (2021), all three IOs discussed in this book – the OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank – have responded to the Covid emergency by proposing remote learning, centring “privatised, corporate edu-business and edu-tech aimed at online education

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delivery. . . bringing significant risks for the erasure of local knowledges” (p. 219). Andreas Schleicher (2018), director of the OECD’s PISA study, touts digitalization as “a democratising force” (p. 226), despite compelling evidence that remote education has sharply exacerbated existing inequalities (Black et al., 2020; Bonal & Gonzáles, 2020). Digital-solutionism (Morozov, 2013) is only the latest example of universal “transforming visions” put forward at the global level, to the detriment of local perspectives (Milan, 2020; Shultz & Viczko, 2021). These “transforming visions” represent an instance of “cruel optimism”, a notion used by Lauren Berlant (2011) to denote visions of the future that hold promises for upward mobility, job security and equality that our liberal-capitalist societies can no longer keep. As argued by Black (2021) in relation to South Africa, “techno-solutionism sustains investment in educational improvement, but only for the hegemonic minority wedded to the fantasy of middle-class education for all without radical shifts in politicaleconomic arrangements at the macro level” (p. 675). Some of these “transforming visions”, rather than improving the lives of people, serve as self-sustaining agendas from which IOs (and other actors, such as governments, corporations, and philanthropic foundations) draw their legitimacy, but have little meaning and potentially harmful effects for the majority of the population. As shown by Regmi’s (2017a, b) in-depth analysis of the World Bank’s promotion of SDG 4 in Nepal, even low-income countries, for whom the limited neoliberal concept of lifelong learning makes little sense, feel coerced by IOs to adopt the prevailing discourse. In a similar vein, Auld et al. (2019) show how Cambodia was pressured by the OECD to participate in PISA for Development (PISA-D), despite the reluctance of government officials who would have much rather invested in their own national survey. These examples illustrate that the “politics of convergence” pursued by the global governance policy triangle that we will examine in this book has profound implications for a wide range of people around the world, but do not necessarily change their lives for the better. Despite their failure to deliver on these visions, these IOs have been successful in normalizing certain educational discourses and policy agendas and generating “a global frame of action” (Caruso, 2008, p. 837). This book is driven by our interest in understanding how this happened. We believe that our historical analysis of the intersections between these organizations, but also the boundaries between them and the different epistemic and intellectual traditions that they represent, will further our understanding of the historical contingencies and power dynamics that have shaped the possibilities within which our thinking of education is set.

1.2

Global Governance of Education: Theoretical Perspectives

We will be employing the concept of “global governance” as an analytical perspective that takes into account the heterogeneity and interrelations of the actors that shape and finance education globally (Dingwerth & Pattberg, 2006; Rosenau, 1999).

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Global Governance of Education: Theoretical Perspectives

5

The “global governance” lens is useful to examining how these three IOs – UNESCO, OECD, and the World Bank – have built “spheres of authority” in global educational policy-making that go beyond the traditional perception of the nationstate as the primary unit of analysis in theories of policy-making. This section will be devoted to a further definition of the concept of “global governance” and its theoretical underpinnings. In the scholarly literature, both “global governance” and “transnational governance” are commonly used to signify governance processes that cannot adequately be explained at the level of nation-states. In our understanding, “transnational governance” emphasizes movement and interactions across and between national borders, thus creating transnational spaces. “Global governance” on the other hand entails an assumption that the global constitutes a sphere of its own and that it is the legitimate starting point for analysis. In that respect our approach shows affinities with World Culture Theory (Meyer & Ramirez, 2000), which emphasizes the convergence and homogenization of norms and practices through processes of globalization. The term “global governance”, first coined by the phrase “governance without government” (Rosenau & Czempiel, 1992), reflects the transformations of the dynamics of government and power in the international system from the governments of nation-states, regulated by democratic principles or some kind of authorized legitimacy, towards an increasingly complex and opaque network of governance, including a range of non-state actors (Avant et al., 2010). Global governance captures the complexity of today’s globalized system, in which nationstates, national governments and national interests must be considered as entwined with globalized processes of governing. The perspective of “global governance” emerged as a reaction to the limitations of the realist school of international relations with its focus on the centrality of national interests as the main driver of world order. Since the 1990s, realist theories seemed increasingly inadequate to explain the rising influence of non-state actors, technology and the dynamics of globalization (Weiss, 2000). It remains to be seen whether the latest geopolitical shifts – visible in the war in Ukraine and the expansion of the group of BRICS countries – will lead to a resurgence of realist theories. A global governance perspective does not per se emphasize a hierarchical perspective between actors. A national government could potentially be an equally relevant actor of the world order as an IO. Rather, the global governance perspective is more interested in examining different layers – local, national, regional and global – of power and policy influence (Dingwerth & Pattberg, 2006). Despite the non-hierarchical perspective of “global governance”, “there are . . . actors of different sizes” (Srnicek, 2013, p. 20). The size is not meant in physical terms, but in terms of the effects and influences an actor can bring about globally. Arguably, the OECD is a rather small organization with about 2500 staff members located in Paris, but the effects its activities have, in particular its global PISA survey and its subprogrammes, make it a truly global actor that reaches into schools, directly influencing local educational practices and impacting a range of actors at different levels, from policy makers to teachers and families (Lewis & Lingard, 2023). The same is

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true for UNESCO, an organization that has exerted global influence on norm-setting and human rights frameworks in education, and the World Bank, whose structural adjustment programmes have affected the lives of millions of people (Babb, 2013). As argued by Srnicek (2013), “Some actors, simply put, are capable of exerting force on a wider range than others and are therefore larger than others” (p. 20). It is an empirical task to analyse these power dynamics that we will tackle in this book. Global actors are characterized by their involvement and reach in global networks of relations between institutions, people, and technologies, sometimes referred to as “assemblages”2 (Gorur, 2011; Salajan & Jules, 2023; Thompson et al., 2022). According to Srnicek (2013), a minimal condition for being global is the capacity to affect large numbers of actors that are widely dispersed throughout a series of assemblages. Whether an actor is global or not is determined as much by the range of effects it can carry out, as it is by the conduit of networks it can ally itself to. (p. 22)

As Zapp and Dahmen (2017, drawing heavily on Chabbott, 2003) have shown in their research on how the concept of lifelong learning has travelled between IOs, there is a “core-periphery pattern” (p. 510) of influence, with “a small set of core organizations” (p. 510) conducting most of the theoretical work on educational policy ideas, which are then taken up by smaller and newer IOs. These findings are in line with other studies that have examined the influence of IOs from the perspective of world culture theory, which is concerned with the increasing homogenization of education systems around the world (Chabbott, 2003; Meyer & Ramirez, 2000; Resnik, 2006). It is fair to say that UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank are core actors of global governance of education, but as the global architecture of education and dynamics of power are constantly shifting, new organizations and actors emerge, such as philanthropic foundations, edu-businesses and multi-stakeholder groups who commonly operate through these IOs to gain legitimacy. One such example is the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), a multi-stakeholder international organization that derives from the Education for AllFast Track Initiative, established in 2002 (Menashy, 2016). These actors will also play a role in this book, in particular in terms of their relationships and connections with UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank, forming groups of stakeholder alliances with converging interests that exert influence on how education is conceived, practised and organised around the world. It is important to point out that the influence of IOs and their “politics of convergence” (Cammack, 2022) varies between regions and countries and is always mediated by local, national and regional contexts as well as the material resources and cultural and intellectual traditions. IOs’ influence can be significant on a particular sector, but negligeable on another, and is contingent upon the existing policy landscape (Grek, 2009). Given its origins in and entanglements with Western

2

A term derived from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s work (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) that is frequently used by globalisation scholars to capture the complexity and fluidity of international governance networks.

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Global Governance of Education: Theoretical Perspectives

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liberal policy ideas, the influence of OECD policy agendas has arguably been stronger in liberal Western countries than in other parts of the world, but to varying degrees. Australia and the Scandinavian countries, for example, have taken up OECD agendas to a higher degree than Britain and the United States. Given its funding power, the World Bank has been more influential in low-income countries, and UNESCO’s sway over developing countries builds on its traditional role as norm-setter, coordinator of development agendas and capacity-building agency. Even countries traditionally less susceptible to global discourses such as China engage in “policy borrowing” (Minina et al., 2018) and take up policy ideas promoted by IOs.3 Although a global governance perspective goes beyond the nation-state and considers the state as one important actor among many, this book will acknowledge the powerful role states have played in the system of global governance (Tröhler et al., 2021). As our historical analysis will show, in particular the United States of America, the state that emerged as the dominant power after the Second World War, played an influential role in creating and shaping the organizations we will discuss in this book as vehicles to mold the world in its image (Ydesen, 2021). In particular the World Bank and the OECD served to a large extent American interests, while the relationship between the US government and UNESCO was much more contentious and difficult (Elfert & Ydesen, 2020; Elfert, 2021). The influence of US institutions on global education will be an important theme throughout the book, but we will also refer to the influence of other countries, such as the role of the Scandinavian countries in the OECD (Eide, 1990; Ydesen, 2021). However, when considering the role of states in the global governance of education, it is important to keep in mind that they are not monolithic but are comprised of many different actors and factions who do not always act in conformity with each other, especially in decentralized states such as the United States. We will consider these three intergovernmental organizations – UNESCO, the World Bank, and the OECD – as key agents of a system of “global governance”. They are truly global organizations insofar as they have the capacity to shape discourses, policies, and practices of a myriad of actors, namely governments and a range of education institutions, as well as influence the experiences of a large number of students, teachers and parents in countries all over the world. Each organization “governs” by shaping and normalizing educational discourses and building consensus around policy ideas, but in different ways: UNESCO is mainly a norm-setting organization that adopts human rights frameworks, declarations and recommendations, coordinates global development agendas, and it also has a history as a capacity-building agency. The OECD derives its authority from the generation of expert knowledge and research, and exerts “soft power” through the use of

3

See, for example, Yang’s (2010) study on the impact of the World Bank on higher education in China, Han’s (2019) study on UNESCO’s Education for Sustainable Development agenda in China, and Zou’s (2019) study on the relations between the OECD and China in terms of education policy.

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Global Governance of Education: An Introduction

indicators, benchmarks and comparative rankings that build up peer pressure. The World Bank’s policy influence is financially-driven; the Bank’s funding contracts with loan-receiving countries are tied to conditions that have a considerable impact on education policies in low-income countries. The infamous Structural Adjustments Programmes of the neoliberal policy era of the 1980s and 1990s are the most prominent example of this form of governance (Mundy & Verger, 2015; Seitzer et al., 2023; Samoff, 1994).

1.2.1

Constructivist-Ideational Theories of Global Governance

As a consequence of the counter-reaction to the realist school referred to above, since the 1990s, constructivist scholars of international relations who take a sociological approach to IOs, commonly referred to as “new institutionalism”, have been very influential. These scholars have turned away from realist and liberal theories of international relations which saw material causes as drivers behind IOs and treated them as the long arm of states (Keohane, 1988). Rather, they consider them as autonomous actors who generate social and symbolic meanings. Barnett (2002), for example, sees in IOs “the new missionaries in world politics” (p. 114) – they shape and diffuse ideas, values and norms and define new categories with the help of their authority, which derives from their specialized knowledge (Barnett & Finnemore, 1999, 2004). This perspective has yielded an emphasis on actors, “knowledge brokers” (Weber & Yanovitzky, 2021) and social networks in the study of global governance, IOs and educational policy-making (Ball et al., 2017), which has been referred to as a “spatial turn” because of its attention to the flows of ideas and individuals across spaces and organizations (Warf & Arias, 2009). In Chap. 7, we have applied an actor/social network perspective as a way of unpacking the interorganizational workings and demonstrating how “epistemic communities” operated across the three IOs we are discussing in this book (Haas, 1992). Finnemore (1993, p. 565) has emphasized the role of IOs as “teachers of norms” that shape collective identities, meanings, interests, practices, as well as visions of the future. An important observation that supports the view of IOs as autonomous actors is that new IOs are usually founded by other IOs (Grek, 2020a, p. 323, referring to Shanks et al., 1996) – an example is the International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP), created as a UNESCO institute in 1963, with the support of other actors, including the World Bank.4 Bøås and McNeill (2003), focussing on “power and ideas”, have discussed the role of IOs in terms of “framing” policy issues, “which serves to limit the power of potentially radical ideas to achieve change” (p. 1). Through “framing”, a particular way of thinking about certain issues becomes

4

The IIEP will be discussed in more detail in particular in Chaps. 3 and 7.

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Global Governance of Education: Theoretical Perspectives

9

common sense, while other views are marginalized. Leimgruber and Schmelzer (2017) make a similar point in relation to the OECD: One of OECD’s key contributions to global governance was the repeated provision of a generally acceptable framing of issues and cause-and-effect relationships, the creation of convincing narratives, and the production of powerful models and metaphors, all of which enabled Western civil servants to perceive social facts and political problems in a convergent way. (p. 45)

Convergence occurs through isomorphic processes, the tendency of organizations to adopt certain bureaucratic and administrative practices for reasons of legitimacy, because they are considered “state of the art” in their environment. As DiMaggio and Powell (1983) have shown, the “iron cage” of rigid bureaucratic procedures and management approaches can lead to excessive routinization and conformity. These studies, while outside of the field of education, have greatly influenced the work of scholars interested in the role of IOs in education policy and global governance, such as our own work, and have been applied to educational phenomena such as PISA, which has shaped dominant conceptions of “good education”, or lifelong learning, which shifted from a radical idea to a mainstream policy concept deprived of its capacity to effect social change (Elfert, 2018), and Education for All, which has contributed to the diffusion of universal schooling as a “world culture” (Chabbott, 1998, 2003). The constructivist and institutionalist lens is therefore well suited to understand the self-identity and workings of IOs. For example, UNESCO has adopted management tools used by the World Bank in an attempt to enhance its professionalism and administrative efficiency, although these rationalized procedures conflicted with the organization’s mandate and philosophy (Elfert, 2021). An important argument for the understanding of global governance of education pertaining to the constructivist-ideational school is that modern education policy formation is driven by “promissory legitimacy” (Beckert, 2020) or “anticipatory governance”, defined “as a diverse set of transnational practices of producing, contesting and implementing global present futures” (Berten & Kranke, 2019, p. 3). In this view, “the uncertain future becomes a source of power as contemporary global policy actors define policy problems and devise solutions” (p. 2). As argued in relation to the “educationalization” of education, IOs construct education as a steppingstone and catapult for better, more effective, more competitive, richer, and/or more sustainable societies (Robertson, 2021). Beckert (2020) proposed the notion of “promise-oriented” or “promissory” legitimacy in the context of a discussion about “input” and “output”-oriented legitimacy of political authority. Relating to the unfulfilled promises of neoliberalism, Beckert referred to the “promises with regard to future outcomes that political (or economic) leaders make when justifying decisions” (p. 318). This perspective is very useful to understanding the legitimacy of IOs, which builds on the promises of their visions for the future. Significantly, René Maheu, a former Director-General of UNESCO, said in 1962, “I believe that it is in this task of planning the future – perhaps more than in operational activities, however necessary they may be – that lies the principal and immediate vocation of (international) organizations and, certainly, of Unesco” (cited in Diez-Hochleitner,

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1963). The OECD and the World Bank have built their legitimacy on human capital theory, promising greater productivity, poverty reduction and rising equality as a result of increased investments in education. As discussed above, also universal agendas and goals such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the SDGs that heavily frame the work of IOs, make promises about the development of societies for the better (Fontdevila, 2021; Hulme, 2010).

1.2.2

Materialist Theories of Global Governance

We will also draw on materialist perspectives on global governance. It could be argued that the OECD and the World Bank have achieved hegemonic influence over education because they were more successful in constructing somewhat material – in the sense of measurable – realities through “representational technologies”, which are utilized “in order to augment limited individual and institutional means for cognition” (Srnicek, 2013, p. 10). This concept could be applied to tools that IOs use to measure education, such as indicators, statistics and surveys, and accountability mechanisms such as poverty reduction plans and logic models. Drawing on Latour’s Actor-network-theory, Srnicek argues that the size of actors and the power they exert in the global system does not simply rely on social relations, but on the incorporation of more durable materials of which “representational technologies” are a part: By associating materials of different durability a set of practices is placed in a hierarchy in such a way that some become stable and need no longer be considered. Only thus can one ‘grow’. In order to build the Leviathan it is necessary to enrol a little more than relationships, alliances and friendships. An actor grows with the number of relations he or she can put, as we say, in black boxes. A black box contains that which no longer needs to be reconsidered, those things whose contents have become a matter of indifference. (Callon & Latour, 1981, cited in Srnicek, 2013, p. 21)

Also employing the metaphor of the “black box”, Resnik (2006) makes a similar argument. She argues that IOs such as the OECD have built their authority on “the education–economic growth black box”, the unquestioned assumption that investment in education is instrumental to economic growth. This can explain how a relatively small organization such as the OECD can achieve such a wide impact. Staying with the OECD and PISA, it could be argued that PISA, which represents a “representational technology”, is a “black box” as it has become common sense, a global educational institution that remains largely unquestioned by policy-makers (Hopmann et al., 2007). A related concept for Srnicek is “cognitive assemblages”, which are key to understanding global governance, defined as “hybrid systems comprised of individuals, institutions, norms and representational technologies which have as a primary goal the production of linguistic, numeric, and/or visual representations about some phenomenon in the world” (2013, p. 14). In that regard, scholars understand PISA “as part of the move to new global forms of networked governance”, where “infrastructures of ‘datafication’ function as a form of global

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panopticism” (Lingard et al., 2013, p. 552). As argued by Gorur (2016), we learn to see and read education like PISA. “Representational technologies” have always been instrumental in making nature and society legible, which is “a central problem in statecraft” (Scott, 1998, p. 2). IOs have contributed to making society legible and mappable in order to engineer modernizing visions. With its claim of measuring 15year-olds’ reading, mathematics and science skills to meet real-life challenges and make these data comparable across countries globally, PISA could be interpreted as an offspring of one of “the great utopian social engineering schemes of the twentieth century” (Scott, 1998, p. 4). Our perspective on global governance of education is also inspired by the school of international political economy, of which Susan Strange (1985) and Robert Cox (2002) were major proponents. Although the school of international political economy shares similarities with the constructivist school of international relations in that both analyse power also in cultural, social and symbolic terms, the former places greater emphasis on structural power, defined by Strange (1988/2015) as “the power to shape and determine the structures of the global political economy, within which . . . states, . . . political institutions, . . . economic enterprises and . . . scientists and professional people have to operate . . .” (p. 27). Along with ideas and institutions, material resources are a key component of structural power (Sinclair, 1996). Scholars in this tradition are concerned with the tensions between political and economic-capitalist structures.5 For example, Cammack (2022), from a neo-Marxist perspective that focuses on the “governance of global capitalism” (p. 15), argues for a “new materialist understanding” of the influence of IOs. Examining the “politics of convergence” pursued by the OECD, he argues that the organization aims “at the creation of a competitive capitalist economy of global scale” (p. 4). We share with the international political economists the interest in the shifts in the multiple expressions and transnational dimensions of power (which sets the school of international political economy apart from the realist school of international relations that focused on political-military inter-state power) and the economic foundations of power. Most importantly, we share with them the interest in “history as a mode of understanding” (Cox, 1996, p. 28), which draws on historical materialism and a historicist interpretation of organizations and ideas (Cox, 1987, 1996, 2002), and the concern for the role of global governance in contributing to inequality. Most scholarship is situated in between the materialist and constructivist-ideational lens as both of these dimensions have to be brought together to understand the workings of IOs and the global governance of education. An example is the “practice turn” in international relations theory (Adler & Pouliot, 2011), which focuses on the micro-processes in terms of “the practices, routines and worldviews exhibited by international organizations” (Fontdevila, 2023, p. 4).

5 The more recent school of cultural political economy adds the cultural dimension (Edwards & Moschetti, 2022).

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1.3

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Global Governance of Education: An Introduction

Situating This Book in the Literature on International Organizations and the Global Governance of Education

A vast amount of scholarship exists on a wide range of aspects covering the influence of the OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank on education (e.g. Mundy, 1999; Mundy & Verger, 2015; Seitzer et al., 2023; Sellar & Lingard, 2014; Sorensen et al., 2021), and on various aspects of global governance of education, such as policy networks and technologies and public-private partnerships (Junemann et al., 2016; Robertson et al., 2012). Much of this literature could be situated in the field of policy studies, another strand of scholarship has a strong historical orientation (Bürgi, 2017a, b; Tröhler, 2013). Driven by the belief that historical perspectives advance the understanding of contemporary phenomena, we understand our work to “bridge the research fields of policy studies and the history of education” (Ydesen, 2019, p. 5). However, there is little literature that discusses the triangular entanglements between UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank from a global governance perspective. Given that studies on IOs “overwhelmingly miss the relational dimension” (Kranke, 2022, p. 456), we believe it is important to put these three key organizations of education governance into one analytical lens. We would like to address what we consider the three most important limitations of this book. First, shining the spotlight on the OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank neglects the role of other IOs that have exerted considerable transnational influence on education, including other United Nations organizations, such as the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF)6 (Chabbott, 2004), supra-national organizations at the regional level such as the European Union (Brøgger, 2019; Lawn & Grek, 2012), and many more transnational organizations active in the field of education such as the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) (Pizmony-Levy, 2013), regional development banks (Martens & Niemann, 2021), or the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) (Menashy, 2016). We will, however, refer to such organizations to the extent that they are relevant to our analysis of the UNESCO, OECD, and World Bank triangle. Second, given that the history of these three IOs is very much entwined with the age of the US American Empire, this book certainly emphasizes the role of American power. The United States played a key role in the creation of the post-World War II multilateral system, of which UNESCO, the World Bank and the OECD constitute key pillars. Much of the story told in this book was situated during the period of the Cold War, in which the world was divided in two ideological camps, the USdominated capitalist bloc and the Soviet-dominated communist model. UNESCO certainly had much stronger relations with countries across the East-West divide than the other two IOs, which – as we argue in this book – represented to a great extent instruments of American hegemonic aspirations. Some countries associated 6

There are many collaborations between in particular UNESCO, the World Bank and UNICEF, and UNICEF has taken over responsibilities and activities from what used to be the domain of UNESCO.

1.3

Situating This Book in the Literature on International Organizations. . .

13

with the Soviet bloc such as Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia had joined UNESCO from the beginning, and the Soviet Union became a member of UNESCO in 1954, while it was not a member of the other two organizations. As we discuss briefly in Chap. 2, UNESCO served as a space of diplomacy between the East and the West, and there is still much to uncover in the history of the relationship between UNESCO and the Soviet Union (see Ignatovich & Walker, 2022; Kulnazarova, 2016). We certainly do not pay enough attention to the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) and the architecture of governance and international cooperation beyond the iron curtain (Steiner-Khamsi & Stolpe, 2006). Third, given the focus of this book, we will pay more attention to the homogenizing effects of global governance than to the micro-politics of resistance against these effects and how local actors have manoeuvred and negotiated these global discourses on the ground.7 There is a very important body of literature (although more research on that area is needed) that addresses these struggles at the local and national levels as well as the lack of resistance against the influences of global governance (e.g. Ferguson, 1990; Li, 2007; Auld et al., 2019; Carney, 2008; Regmi, 2017a, b). The negligence of this perspective is due to the theme of this book that focuses on the interactions between the UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank in the struggle over authority in the global governance space. We would argue that it is impossible to study global governance without the three organizations addressed in this book. By tracing the evolution and interaction of what are arguably three major actors in global education governance with other actors of world politics, such as governments and non-state actors, we wish to advance the understanding of how these IOs built their influence on education policy discourses. This, we hope, will contribute to the analysis of contemporary shifts in the dynamics of the global governance of education, and global governance more broadly. However, it is by no means our aim to overstate the influence of these three IOs, and we would like to acknowledge that a study of global governance of education could be tackled in different ways and from different perspectives. In situating this book in the literature on the influence of IOs on global governance of education, we would like to highlight in particular the late Phillip Jones, whose research has greatly inspired our own scholarship (e.g. Jones, 1988, 1992). In his book with Coleman (Jones & Coleman, 2005), Jones examined the role of United Nations organizations in the global expansion of education, with a focus on UNESCO, UNICEF, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Bank. While the book is organised in chapters covering the respective organizations individually, it addresses the complementarity between IOs, but also the uncoordinated and at times competitive nature of their activities. Chabbott’s (1998, 2003) research on consensus-making in the field of educational development, illustrated by the case of the Education for All (EFA) initiative, also made a seminal

As stated by Jonathan Friedman (1994), “Ethnic and cultural fragmentation and modernist homogenization are not two arguments, two opposing views of what is happening in the world today, but two constitutive trends of global reality” (p. 102).

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contribution to our understanding of how IOs generate consensus through isomorphic processes, and has informed others’ contributions, such as Resnik’s (2006) analysis of IOs as agents of the diffusion of a world education culture, which includes the OECD. A wide range of scholarly literature has critically discussed the role of IOs from a global governance of education perspective through the lens of “governing by numbers” (Grek, 2009; Borer & Lawn, 2013) and “representational technologies”, such as management tools, statistics, surveys, indicators, global benchmarks and data (Grek et al., 2022; King, 2017; Unterhalter, 2019). The SDGs constitute the prime contemporary example of global benchmarking, “now firmly established as a distinct mode of transnational governance” (Broome & Quirke, 2015, p. 813). Recent literature has shed light on the interrelations between IOs in constructing the global metrological field of numbers and data and the role of SDG 4, the SDG related to education, in legitimizing IOs to produce learning metrics as a global governance tool (Grek, 2020a, 2020b; Fontdevila, 2021). Many of these studies refer to interdependencies between IOs, but a systematic historical review focusing on the interplay, overlaps and interrelationships between UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank is still lacking. We therefore believe the orientation taken in this book will make a valuable contribution to the literature on global governance of education.

1.4

Methodology and Structure of the Book

This book draws on a comprehensive dataset compiled in the context of two different research projects while some have been purposefully collected for the writing of this book. The data consist of interviews and a wide range of primary source materials harvested from the United States National Archives, the Danish National Archives, the Rockefeller Archive Center, the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, and the UNESCO, OECD and World Bank archives. In addition, we have retrieved official documents, such as reports and oral history interviews, from the digital online libraries of UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank. The first research project is “The Global History of the OECD in Education”, coordinated by Christian Ydesen. In this project more than 2000 documents were harvested from the OECD archive and selected national archives between 2017 and 2019. These documents consist of programme descriptions, reports, records, discussion papers, education committee minutes, and country reports produced between 1961 and 2018. In addition, some 1000 documents were collected from the US National Archives and Danish National Archives containing in- and outgoing correspondence with the OECD. These documents were run through OCR recognition and uploaded to a searchable online database using the Mayan software. The other project is Maren Elfert’s National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation postdoctoral fellowship on the history of educational planning. Under the auspices of this project documents were collected in the archives of UNESCO and the World Bank, the Rockefeller Archive Center and a German National

1.4

Methodology and Structure of the Book

15

Archive, the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, which holds the Hellmut Becker papers. Some documents relating to Philip Coombs were also received remotely from the Hoover Institution in Stanford. The collection contains some 400 documents consisting of correspondence, letters, memos, and minutes. In order to cultivate the datasets in alignment with the purpose of writing this book the archival sources were organised anew and reread in accordance with the themes and topics of this book. In this process we found that combining archives across contexts allows for a deeper inquiry, because the archives hold different resources, but also because the combination of archives enables the tracking of movements across organizations and allows for a glimpse into the negotiations, boundary work, and the reception history of ideas, instruments, and agendas. Our dataset also contains some 40 interviews conducted with educational professionals who were associated with the OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank (in some cases, with two or even three of these organizations) and involved in the developments discussed in the book. About half of these interviews were conducted in person, the other half online. The interviews were between one hour and two and a half hours in length. Some of the interviews were conducted in connection with previous projects, such as Maren Elfert’s doctoral dissertation. This is why some interviews go back to the year 2014 and others have been conducted only recently. For all interviews ethical approval had been sought and the interviewees had approved the use of the interviews. In some cases, where it seemed appropriate, the interviewees have been made aware of the use of their quotes under a new analytical endeavour and approved their use. Wherever possible, we have verified biographical information with our informants, for example in the case of the short biographies contained in Chap. 7. All interviewees have been offered anonymity but all of them agreed to be named. The book includes eight chapters. The next chapter, Chap. 2, will provide an introduction into the epistemic and ontological underpinnings of UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank and give an overview of the educational work of these three organizations from a global governance perspective. Chapter 3 will delve deep into the 1960s, the early years of educational planning in developing countries and the rise of global governance of education in the context of the Cold War. The chapter will pay special attention to the connections and turf struggles between UNESCO and the OECD, which both claimed a dominant role in educational planning, and to the emergence of the international expert in the production and legitimation of knowledge that underpins the global governance of education. Chapter 4 focuses on the relationship and shifting dynamics between UNESCO and the World Bank in the expanding field of education for development, spanning from the creation of the Co-operative Program between the two organizations in the 1960s to the Education for All initiative in the 1990s. Chapter 5 will shed light on the collaboration and competition between UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank with regard to educational statistics, which became a key tool of global governance of education. Chapter 6 provides a critical analysis of UNESCO’s and the OECD’s engagement with lifelong learning policies. The fate of lifelong learning as a policy agenda holds some lessons about the wider policy circles that influenced the

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educational work of UNESCO and the OECD, and also about the institutional boundaries within and between IOs. In Chap. 7 we conduct an analysis of the role of actors appearing in cross-organisational arenas in the UNESCO, OECD, and World Bank triangle. Drawing on the notion of knowledge brokers – understood as key intermediaries who facilitate the exchange of knowledge between individuals or organizations (Weber & Yanovitzky, 2021) – we will trace the appearances and influence of some key actors working in or being affiliated with these organizations in key positions. This will allow us to shed light on at least some of the ‘revolving doors’, coordination efforts, power positions, and the boundary work that goes on between IOs. The concluding Chap. 8 reiterates the main findings of the book and discusses current agendas and changes in the system of global governance of education, in particular the shift from multilateralism to multistakeholderism. We will reflect on the extent to which the OECD, the World Bank and UNESCO were successful in “embody[ing] the rules which facilitate the expansion of the hegemonic world order [and] ideologically legitimate the norms of the world order” (Cox, 1983, p. 172) and will situate the declining influence of UNESCO in the context of the demise of the United Nations system and its co-optation by the corporate sector (Gleckman, 2018). Finally, we will offer some reflections on the dangers inherent in the future of global governance and what we can learn from our historical analysis about what values and agendas count in education, and more broadly.

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Yang, R. (2010). International organizations, changing governance and China’s policy making in higher education: An analysis of the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 30(4), 419–431. Ydesen, C. (2019). The OECD’s historical rise in education: The formation of a global governing complex. Palgrave Macmillan. Ydesen, C. (2021). Extrapolated imperial nationalisms in global education policy formation: An historical inquiry into American and Scandinavian agendas in OECD policy. In D. Tröhler, N. Piattoeva, & W. F. Pinar (Eds.), World yearbook of education 2022: Education, schooling and the global universalization of nationalism. Routledge. Ydesen, C., & Grek, S. (2019). Securing organisational survival: A historical inquiry into the OECD’s work in education during the 1960s. Paedagogica Historica, 56(3), 412–427. Zapp, M., & Dahmen, C. (2017). The diffusion of educational ideas among international organizations: An event history analysis of lifelong learning, 1990–2013. Comparative Education Review, 61(3), 492–518. Zou, Y. (2019). OECD and educational policy in China. In C. Ydesen (Ed.), The OECD’s historical rise in education (pp. 155–173). Springer.

Chapter 2

UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank: A Global Governance Perspective

2.1

Introduction

This chapter will provide a foundation for the following chapters by introducing the epistemic and ontological underpinnings of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank and giving an overview of the educational approach and activities of these three international organizations (IOs) from a global governance perspective. While all three IOs represent pillars of the post-World War II global education governance architecture, their ideological orientations and modes of operation are very different yet intrinsically connected with key developments and trajectories formed in the interwar period. As we have already pointed out in Chap. 1, our focus on UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank as key actors of the global governance structure is certainly limiting. It is not our intention to give the impression that the global governance structure of education is composed only of these three IOs. There are many other influential stakeholders that require attention, such as other IOs, supranational and regional organizations, as well as non-state actors. However, the approach taken in this book is based on the assumption that these three IOs have played instrumental roles in the building of a global education governance structure, and bringing them into one analytical lens will enhance the understanding of power dynamics in global education more broadly. It is the overall argument of this chapter, and to some extent also of the entire book, that, although UNESCO was created as the international agency in charge of education after World War II, the OECD and the World Bank challenged UNESCO’s authority as the United Nations’ designated agency for education since the early 1960s (Ydesen & Grek, 2020). Both the World Bank and the OECD – initially its precursor, the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) – got involved in education in the late 1950s when education The open access publication of this chapter was supported by King’s College London. © The Author(s) 2023 M. Elfert, C. Ydesen, Global Governance of Education, Educational Governance Research 24, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40411-5_2

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was increasingly tied to the economy and became a pillar of American foreign policy. The rise of the OECD and the World Bank to hegemonic policy shapers in education is related to the role of the United States in strengthening the power of these organizations, while withdrawing support from UNESCO (Elfert, 2020, 2021; Elfert & Ydesen, 2020). The United States withdrew from UNESCO in 1984, and after returning in 2002 suspended the payment of membership dues again since 2011, and is currently not a member of UNESCO.1 This has added to budgetary pressure and has forced the organization to seek partnerships with the private sector and accept “tied money” that significantly restricts its room for manoeuvre. Another factor that enabled the OECD and the World Bank to challenge UNESCO’s educational mandate is its complex governance structure. With almost universal membership, it is much more difficult to find common ground among its diverse members than in the case of the OECD that has a much smaller and more homogenous membership and represents a “Club of the Rich” (Schmelzer, 2014) of like-minded countries. At the same time, the intellectual, immaterial tradition of UNESCO stands in stark contrast to the OECD and the World Bank that have built, as we will argue, much of their power on instrumental rationality and “representational technologies”. While UNESCO’s ontology can be traced back to the pre-World War II internationalist movement, both the OECD’s and the World Bank’s ideology is rooted in free-market capitalism and derives from the intellectual and political climate of the Cold War. The OECD’s focus on classical economics, productivity and manpower politics reflects the logic of the Cold War rivalry between two economic and political systems, liberal capitalism in the West and communism in the East (Spring, 2015). The World Bank used its financial power to contain communist influence in “Third World” countries, and the Bank’s loans and grants “rewarded like-minded regimes for preserving their free market economies” (Steiner-Khamsi, 2006, p. 25), while UNESCO served to a much greater extent as platform for East-West diplomacy. It is further important to consider in what way the forms of governance employed by the OECD and the World Bank allowed them to expand their influence to the detriment of UNESCO. In relation to the OECD, authors such as Rubenson (2008) and Henry et al. (2001) have identified the organization’s “mechanisms of persuasion” (p. 2) in educational governance, a form of governance that has often been described as “soft governance” or “soft power” (Sellar & Lingard, 2013; Bieber & Martens, 2011). Among the soft governance mechanisms associated with the OECD are data gathering and idea production, instrument development, policy evaluation, enrolment and participation in OECD-led programmes, and the creation of a culture of multilateral surveillance among member and participating states (Martens & Jakobi, 2010). As argued by Elfert (2021), the World Bank’s epistemic power prevailed over UNESCO’s as it was more aligned with the dominant political economy. Scholars have pointed to the World Bank’s coercive mode of governance

1

At the time of submitting the book manuscript, the United States has just announced that it will rejoin UNESCO.

Key Ideational Building Blocks of the Interwar World Order

2.2

25

based on its funding power and its close ties to powerful fields such as business and finance that constitute the structural power of American hegemony (Elfert, 2021; Zapp, 2017). The World Bank shifted from a mere funder of education in the 1960s to an influential “architect of global education policy” (Klees, 2012, p. 62) and producer of knowledge (Jones, 2004; Zapp, 2017). By tying educational funding for developing countries to conditions and policy directions, most infamously with its structural adjustment programmes, the World Bank has become both “juge et partie” (judge and party) in education policy-making (Elfert, 2021, citing Sack, 1988). While the OECD and the World Bank functioned as agents of the “economics of education”, UNESCO never endorsed the economistic and instrumental approach to education and stayed quite consistent in its humanistic-idealistic worldview (Elfert, 2018; Jones & Coleman, 2005; Rubenson, 2006). Against this background, we will conceptualize UNESCO as the “idealist”, the OECD as the “master of persuasion”, and the World Bank as the “master of coercion”. In the opening sections of the chapter, we will tease out some key precursors and antecedents of the epistemic and ontological components that fed into the formation of UNESCO, the OECD, and the World Bank and which hold explanatory power in terms of understanding the nature of the educational work undertaken by the three organisations. We will then outline the background and historical context of each of these IOs’ creation and role in education and give a short overview of their main areas of activity and ideological orientation. In the last section of the chapter, we will critically reflect on the role these IOs have played in the global governance of education by discussing them in relation to each other.

2.2

Key Ideational Building Blocks of the Interwar World Order

On an overall level, the key interwar building blocks for constructing the post-WWII global governance architecture in education can be summarized as the establishment of an international and comparative outlook, the formation of international networks and organisations, and the development of and confidence in a scientific toolbox encompassing statistics, psychometrics and applied psychology (Porter, 1995; Ydesen & Andreasen, 2020). But perhaps more fundamentally the post-WWII global governance architecture can be argued to hinge on the rise of bureaucracies and a technocratic worldview which is intimately linked with the emergence of modern nation-states in the decennia after the Enlightenment. Tröhler and Maricic (2021) even argue that this development cannot be understood without considering religious ideas about “faith and ideas of salvation” (p. 150). Their argument finds resonance in Fuchs’s (2007) analysis of historical networks in education contending that, the transnational philanthropic and religious networks of the nineteenth century were replaced by professional actors and experts whose profession was education. The rather

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private transnational activities turned into formalized international relations that included governments and international agreements. (p. 208)

Part of this new orientation of mastering society included a will to comparison and inspiration from other nations. In this sense, we saw the birth of comparative education as a field (Bu, 1997; Schriewer, 2012). One of the earliest examples was Friedrich August Hecht’s 1795 book De Re Scholastica Anglia Cum Germanica Comparata. Reflecting on the history of comparative education in 1931 and epitomizing a shift towards a more quantitative and generalisable mode of comparability, Scottish educational psychologist, Robert R. Rusk (1879–1972), director of the Scottish Council for Research in Education, referring to standardized tests of the International Examination Inquiry (see below), noted, For some time past, there has been a discussion in America as to what was meant with comparative education. In the past it meant that a man went round among various countries and gave his opinion. Now that has been discredited so that our investigation and the adaptation of these tests might be made the beginning of a new comparative education on scientific lines. I should therefore merely like to intimate that we here might perhaps form the basis of a new science of comparative education. (cited in Lawn, 2008, p. 26)

The quote signals the transition of the comparative gaze of state-crafting into a belief and confidence that international comparative investigations could be developed into a scientific and objective approach that would allow education to be designed using appropriate datasets. This ambition to make education the object of scientific inquiry and as such improve its role in state-crafting processes was broader than merely comparative education. As argued by Tröhler and Maricic (2021), the social sciences as such should “discover psychological laws, identify the problems of the social world and contribute to ordered progress through an efficiently administered school that converted the pupil into a ‘learning child’ as an empowered future bearer of progress” (p. 139). To no small extent this idea involved the transformation of pedagogy into applied psychology, psychometrics and statistics (Danziger, 1998). As an international trend, concerns were growing about segments of the population that did not benefit from education and which did not contribute to society in ways that were deemed meaningful. Social engineering was the order of the day as for instance reflected in the British Fabian Society and the People Commissions in the Nordic countries in the interwar years which were deeply dedicated to the cultivation of the societal talent pool. These concerns were fuelled by the rise of eugenic ideas which permeated the leading scientific circles at the time, and which even reached into the founding of UNESCO with Julian Huxley (1887–1975) – a known eugenicist – as its first Director-General (Weindling, 2012). These were defining components that floated from the interwar to the postwar era. In many ways these ideational building blocks conflated into the notion of human capital, education as an economic production factor, as well as a belief in modernization and development that became so indicative of the post-war global educational architecture. Within the overall paradigm of modernization, there were notable differences between the IOs. A picture can be drawn of an idealist paradigm – represented by UNESCO’s rights-based approach and “scientific humanism” –

2.3

Organizational Steppingstones of the Interwar World Order

27

versus an economic development paradigm – represented by the OECD’s and the World Bank’s reliance on human capital theory. But both of these paradigms were characterized by a strong belief in education as a vehicle of progress. In the next section we will briefly outline some selected organisational steppingstones of the interwar years that epitomized some of these ideational building blocks and laid out important tracks for how the post-war global educational architecture came to operate.

2.3

Organizational Steppingstones of the Interwar World Order

A key organisation of the interwar period is the League of Nations (LN), founded in 1919, which came to serve as the center and main agent for the establishment of new educational networks in the interwar years. More specifically, the batons carried by the two LN bodies, the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (CICI) established in 1922, and the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation (IICI) created in 1926, were picked up in the early formations of UNESCO (Robertson, 2022). In the words of Julian Huxley, the first Director-General of UNESCO, at the General Conference of UNESCO in November 1946, “behind this decision [to establish UNESCO], there lay 15 years of activity of the International Institute of International Cooperation in Paris” (cited in Omolewa, 2007, p. 216). In relation to education, the New Education Fellowship was founded in 1921 by leading progressive educationalists with a cosmopolitan outlook. Changing its name to World Education Fellowship in 1966, it became a UNESCO-associated non-governmental organization. Similarly, the International Bureau of Education (IBE) – an offshoot of the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute – was created in 1925 to provide intellectual leadership and to promote international cooperation in education. The IBE was integrated into UNESCO in 1969. UNESCO’s philosophy and many of its educational programmes trace back to these inter-war internationalist movements that promoted international understanding through the cooperation of intellectuals (Krill de Capello, 1970; Renoliet, 1999). Another important development rooted in the interwar period is the emergence of the figure of the international civil servant. In their analysis of the League of Nations, Gram-Skjoldager and Ikonomou (2020) demonstrate how, the principles of independence from member states and international representation (i.e. a broad geographical dispersion in personnel) articulated in the Standards of Conduct were adopted and emulated by other post-war international and regional organizations such as the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC). . . . (p. 227)

While the establishment of an international bureaucracy was necessary for the credibility and authority commanded by IOs, it also meant a delicate balance for the international bureaucracy between being accepted as legitimate by member states and being autonomous from the same, i.e., a tension between whether international

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bureaucrats are expected to represent the interests of the nation-state from which they originate or whether they are supposed to serve the field and the cause for which they work; i.e. ideally be the embodiments of disinterested internationalism and pure scientific interest. This tension connects with the question of mandate – and mode of governance – of IOs which very much relies on their function vis-à-vis member states which often constitutes their very raison d’être. For instance, and as pointed out by the Welsh League of Nations Director, Gwylum Davies, in his account on “Intellectual Cooperation between the Two Wars”, prepared for the founding of UNESCO, “national education lies outside and will always lie outside the competence of any official committee of the League” (Davies, 1943, p. 12). Another layer of tension in the establishment and reproduction of an international bureaucracy is the question of who gets to take up which positions, which positions guarantee the most influence and which areas stand out as particularly important for various national interests. As it was already visible in the League of Nations, the human make-up of international organizations tends to reflect and reproduce power hierarchies (Gram-Skjoldager & Ikonomou, 2020). As argued above, the launch of scientific approaches as a means to the development of education became very pronounced in the post-WWII scenario. Networks of scientists and researchers in the interwar years constitute an important factor in this development. A key network in this respect was the International Examinations Inquiry (IEI) funded by the Carnegie Foundation and operational between 1931–1938. The IEI comprised USA, Scotland, England, France, Germany and Switzerland, and it later grew to include Norway, Sweden and Finland (Lawn, 2008). The aim of the IEI project was to determine the most effective way of examining students for entry into secondary education. It produced publications on examinations and intelligence and was dedicated to the development of international standards and statistical tools for testing and comparison. As argued by Lawn (2008), the IEI appears to model or at least foreshadow a spate of post Second World War international studies and the establishing of common epistemic communities, in which loosely integrated professional, academic and policy actors form a network, and it establishes a model of work recommended for the post-war United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). (p. 9)

The IEI constituted a motley crew of pioneering participants reflecting the different strands of education research at the time – the study of intelligence, comparative education, and child-centred pedagogy associated with the progressive education movement. One of the leading actors of the IEI was Isaac Kandel (1881–1965), Professor at Columbia University and a pioneer of comparative education, who became a major educational advisor to UNESCO in its early years (Kandel, 1955). Others included . . .the founders and popularisers of the study of intelligence (Spearman, Thomson, Drever, Thorndike, Nunn, Ballard), the first generation of comparativists in education (Monroe, Kandel, Sadler and Ulich), and key members of a world progressive education movement (Ziliacus, Bovet, McClelland and Boyd). (Lawn, 2008, p. 11)

2.4

UNESCO: The Idealist

29

But the IEI was also an arena for the development of key instruments and approaches enacted in the OECD and World Bank in the post-war global educational architecture. As argued by Lawn (2008), “through the alchemy of their procedures, with a language of reliability and an emerging discourse of objective and universal standards, they [i.e. the members of the IEI] are beginning to establish their authority over the older cultural connoisseurship and qualitative judgment of the earlier internationalists” (p. 15). But we also see the contours of the extrapolation of nationalisms in the IEI, that is the use of international networks and organisations to promote national agendas and/or national models of development. Lawn highlights how “within the internal correspondence between the key New York actors (Monroe, Keppel and Thorndike), there is a clear sense of mission to modernise examining practices in other countries (in the new American way) and to ‘offer’ a distinctive and valuable research practice which could be used by European countries” (Lawn, 2008, p. 20). In this sense, the IEI is an early example of an international forum where leading actors in the fields of comparative education and assessment formed an alliance promoting an approach to education where numbers and ideals about modernization, objectivity and generalization stand central. Simultaneously, this approach was strongly promoted by the American members of the IEI with a distinct cultural export agenda seeking to proliferate the American way to European counterparts. As we shall see, the course of these interwar dynamics would become even more pronounced in the post-war global educational architecture.

2.4

UNESCO: The Idealist

UNESCO was founded as a specialized agency of the United Nations in 1945. Tracing back to the League of Nations, UNESCO emerged from the conviction that cooperation limited to the political and economic realm was not sufficient to secure peace in the world, but that states and people around the globe needed to collaborate in the fields of education, science, culture and communication in order to achieve an “intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind”, as stated in UNESCO’s constitution. This represented a new approach and a new experiment of international cooperation, which prompted some of the earlier writers about UNESCO to define its function as “symbolic”: “The Organization has met the condition of being a symbol to the peoples of the world of ‘what is now desirable and what may become an actuality in the future’. As such it has a standing in its own right” (Sathyamurthy, 1964, p. 51/52). This view is consistent with that of constructivist scholars of international relations, who have defined UNESCO as an example of an organization that exists primarily “for reasons of legitimacy and normative fit rather than efficient output” (Barnett & Finnemore, 1999, p. 703). UNESCO, which is based in Paris, is predominantly an intellectual organization that generates normative documents and human rights frameworks for its member states, such as the Convention against Discrimination in Education, adopted in 1960. Its key mandate and raison d’être is international understanding, and

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UNESCO’s ontology is underpinned by an idealistic worldview, which contrasts with the focus of the OECD and World Bank on education as means to an end, namely productivity and economic growth. UNESCO’s ontology as the “conscience of humanity” (d’Orville, 2015, p. 100) derives from a cosmopolitan and universalist outlook, which emphasizes what unites people rather than what divides them, captured by Laves and Thomson (1957) as the principle of “unity in diversity”. Another pillar of UNESCO’s Weltanschauung is the unshakable belief in education for the purpose of developing every human being’s full potential and in the capacity of human beings to change their world for the better. Here, the pre-WWII ideals of progressive educationalists can be clearly traced. However, UNESCO’s history is characterized precisely by tensions deriving from its role as an organization with a strong normative mandate, which is often at odds with the dominant managerial principles of effectiveness and accountability. More than the OECD and the World Bank, which have somewhat greater autonomy because their constituents form a much more homogenous group (in the case of the OECD) or because the role of the organization is much more unambiguous (as in the case of the World Bank), UNESCO had to navigate several fields of tensions, starting even before UNESCO was founded, when two competing proposals regarding the role of the new organization had been put forth, one by the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education (CAME), based on a proposal by the American government, the other by the French government. While the CAME draft proposed an intergovernmental organization engaging in work of a technical and functional kind, the French proposal represented a vision for an organization based on the collaboration among intellectuals, following the model of the League of Nations’ IICI (Krill de Capello, 1970). This ambiguity between a broad intellectual and a limited technical mandate for the organization has never been resolved (Elfert, 2018; Jones, 1988). When in the context of decolonization development became an important domain for multilateral organizations, UNESCO had to demonstrate its functionality as an operational IO, in order to compete with the other agencies that gained influence in the multilateral arena. Consequently, many donors have treated UNESCO as a development agency, to be evaluated on the basis of measurable results, which is very problematic for a normative organization like UNESCO (Elfert, 2018). Another example of the tension between the technicalintellectual binary are the reforms “aimed at improving the efficiency of the work of the Executive Board” (UNESCO, 1992), the first in 1954 and the second in 1993. These changes entailed that the Executive Board was no longer composed of autonomous experts who were appointed by governments, with the result that technocrats instead of intellectuals assume the seats in the Executive Board and the committees, which has diluted the organization’s intellectual capacity (Hüfner, 2015; Elfert, 2018). Many hopes were pinned on the founding of UNESCO, but from the outset there were indications pointing to the gap between its potentialities and what the circumstances would actually allow the organization to become. This is what William Benton, vice-chairman of the American delegation to the founding conference, held in London in 1945, likely meant when he claimed that UNESCO was the

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UNESCO: The Idealist

31

“most underrated organization in history” (Preston et al., 1989, p. 33). The organization’s unifying ambitions were based on the hope that humanity would evolve toward a world community (Sluga, 2010) – UNESCO’s first Director-General Julian Huxley proposed “the advance of world civilization” (p. 412) as one of UNESCO’s central mandates.2 This unifying worldview has greatly influenced the organization to the present day, but has always been highly contested. Huxley’s cosmopolitanism was controversial as nationalism was still going strong, and the United Nations and UNESCO were by no means a project that would undermine nationalist aspirations (Mazower, 2008). An indication of the reluctance of the Great Powers to give up national sovereignty in favour of multilateral structures was the decision taken by the United States and several Western countries in 1944 to channel funds for post-war reconstruction bilaterally rather than through UNESCO, which meant that UNESCO’s budget would remain very limited, a factor that has impaired the organization even before it was established (Jones, 1988). Early on, UNESCO’s potentialities were also seriously hampered by competition with other emerging international agencies, initially the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), later the World Bank and the OECD. These IOs contributed to constructing UNESCO’s high-flown educational programs, from “fundamental education” (1946–1958) to the Experimental World Literacy Program (EWLP) (1965–1976), as failures as they were not successful in showing economic returns (Elfert, 2018). The EWLP was already “a kind of consolation measure” (Jones & Coleman, 2005, p. 203), which was adapted to the parameters of available UNDP funding, as by the mid-1960s it was clear that UNESCO had to give up its eternal dream of a global literacy campaign. While such a campaign found strong support among the newly independent countries that came out of colonial rule, the United States was critical of it and favoured a focus on the expansion of formal school education and technical education (Jones & Coleman, 2005; Dorn & Ghodsee, 2012). Both the “fundamental education” programme and the EWLP illustrate that UNESCO was continuously forced to downsize its ambitious educational visions. On the one hand the Cold War period was difficult for UNESCO as the organization was constantly under suspicion of falling under communist influence (Interview with Alexandra Draxler, 2019)3 and suffered from Cold War tensions between its member states, which resulted in what some have referred to as the politicization of UNESCO (Dorn & Ghodsee, 2012). In the United States especially, conservative hostility against the organization was high (Hart, 2016). On the other hand, the Cold War gave meaning to UNESCO, as it was one of the few diplomatic spaces where

2

In a similar vein, René Maheu, UNESCO’s Director-General from 1962 to 1974, promoted the idea of a “civilization of the universal” (“civilisation de l’universel”), in which he declared that “mankind is moving towards a planetary civilization” (Maheu, 1966). 3 Alexandra Draxler spent most of her career at UNESCO, in various capacities related to public policy in education and development. She held, among other roles, the position of Executive Secretary of UNESCO’s Delors Commission (1993–1996).

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the East and the West could meet. As Mark Bray4 put it, “That’s where UNESCO had the edge on the World Bank. The Soviet Union was not a World Bank member, and so UNESCO was a universal organisation and Russian was. . . one of the six. . . UN languages” (Interview, 2019). Of the three IOs discussed in this chapter, UNESCO played the most important role in keeping diplomatic relationships with institutions and personalities of the Soviet sphere of influence, although also “the OECD sought to be a place where Cold War tensions could be defused with EastWest cooperation on issues such as trade, tourism and technology” (Hynes & Trzeciak-Duval, 2015, p. 30).5 Several of UNESCO’s initiatives, such as its Associated Schools programme, spanned East-West boundaries. UNESCO’s intergovernmental conferences, such as MINEDEUROPE, the Conference of Ministers of Education of UNESCO’s European Member States, and the International Conferences on Adult Education (CONFINTEA), brought together countries from both sides of the Iron Curtain (Barrows, 2017; Elfert, 2013a). Another notable institution was UNESCO’s European Centre for Higher Education (CEPES), founded in Bucharest in 1972, which served as a space of dialogue for policy-makers and researchers from Eastern and Western European countries (Barrows, 2017). It could therefore be argued that the end of the Cold War diminished UNESCO’s authority as the global organization for education. While during the 1970s and 1980s, UNESCO’s educational activities to a large extent revolved around literacy and lifelong education, since 1990, UNESCO’s agenda has been dominated by the Education for All (EFA) initiative with its focus on universal primary education, against UNESCO’s comprehensive lifelong learning approach (Power, 2015). The shift in educational priorities that EFA entailed, constituted another concession that the organization made due to the pressure exerted in particular by the World Bank. Chabbott (1998) explained the dominance of the World Bank over the EFA process with the coercive effect of “the dependence of other donor agencies and the developing countries themselves on the financial and intellectual resources of the World Bank” (p. 212). Since 2011, UNESCO has been in a precarious situation due to the loss of the American membership dues. To compensate for this loss, UNESCO had to accept voluntary project-bound contributions, which jeopardized the autonomy of the organization as the donor countries determine its programme (Hüfner, 2015). The lack of funding pushes the organization into cooperation with the private sector, as illustrated by the Global Education Coalition launched by UNESCO as a response to the Covid crisis (Shultz & Viczko, 2021). The admission of corporations such as Microsoft into the group of UNESCO partners, putting them at the same level as NGOs, risks to put UNESCO in the position of a service provider (Seitz & Martens,

4

Mark Bray is an educational planner and academic. He was the director of the IIEP from 2006–2010. In the course of his career, he also worked as a Research Fellow for the World Bank. 5 The OECD had some contacts with the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), the multilateral economic and trading organization of the Eastern bloc, but collaboration was limited (Hynes & Trzeciak-Duval, 2015).

2.5

The OECD: The Master of Persuasion

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2017). Although UNESCO still has a coordinating role in the framing and implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4), the UNESCO-driven SDG-4-related 2030 Framework for Action (UNESCO et al., 2016) is being challenged by parallel agendas, such as the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and its expansion to developing countries and the World Bank’s “learning agenda” based on the measurement of learning outcomes. New global governance bodies are taking over the role that was traditionally assigned to UNESCO, not only the OECD and the World Bank, but also multistakeholder groups such as the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), the G7 and the G20 (Matovich & Srivastava, 2023; Wulff, 2019).

2.5

The OECD: The Master of Persuasion

The OECD was established in 1961 in Paris. It grew out of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), which was created in 1948 to channel American investments and know-how to European countries in the context of the Marshall Plan. Many scholars have pointed out that the OECD must be understood as an organization shaped by the bipolar world order of the Cold War, characterized by the rivalry between United States and the Soviet Union, representing two different political systems and ideologies (Leimgruber & Schmelzer, 2017; Bürgi, 2017a, b; Ydesen, 2020). The launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite, in 1957, which came as a shock to the United States, is often referred to as the moment after which “the Cold War became thoroughly educationalized” (Tröhler, 2014, p. 3) as the US government and scientific institutions started to invest in education, in particular science education, in order to secure scientific and technological superiority over the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, the OEEC and later the OECD served as platforms for the spread of the scientific and managerial turn of education and the pursuit of American economic policies for “productivity” and economic growth – a period characterized by a faith in social engineering and a trust in numbers (Porter, 1995). The organization furthered the rationalization and standardization of education with the help of “representational technologies” and planning tools, such as statistics (Tröhler, 2014). In 1958, the same year when the National Defense Education Act was launched in the United States as a reaction to Sputnik, the US government initiated the establishment of the Office for Scientific and Technical Personnel (OSTP) in the OEEC, with the aim of increasing the supply of a scientifically and technically trained labour force (King, 2006; Papadopoulos, 1994, p. 23). Planning was at the core of the mandate of the OSTP, which “has been advocating planned investment in human resources and contending that in no country should education be allowed to develop in a haphazard manner unrelated to its wider economic and social repercussions” (OECD, 1965a, p. 8). While the promise of technology and productivity was embraced in the United States, Europeans were much more apprehensive towards these ideas as they feared they would lead to unemployment and exploitation (Bürgi, 2020; Elfert, 2018). An

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example of how the OEEC served the spread of the American management culture to Europe was the European Productivity Agency (EPA), which represented one of the key operational bodies within the OEEC and accounted for 40% of its budget (Boel, 2003). The EPA, which promoted the spread of American business management schools and methods across Europe (Gemelli, 1996; King, 2006), has been considered an important precursor of the OECD in terms of its “enculturation” function (Bürgi, 2020). As stated by Boel (2003), “the politics of productivity thus also served the strategical purpose of fortifying a ‘free world’ united by common ideals— those embodied by the American way of life—and weakening its enemies” (p. 22). The OEEC/OECD was also instrumental in what scholars have called the “economization of education” (Spring, 2015). As formulated by the President of the OECD Development Centre, Robert Buron, in 1965, a key achievement of the OEEC/OECD was “the establishment of a sort of common economic language” (OECD, 1965b, p. 10) among its member states. A Study Group on the Economics of Education, set up in 1960, was greatly influenced by human capital theory and American rate of return studies (Schultz, 1963; Becker, 1964), which showed a strong relationship between investment in education and economic growth (Lyons, 1964/1965). Denison’s seminal OECD study (Denison, 1962; OECD, 1964) contended that, apart from factors such as capital and labour, there had to be a third factor instrumental for economic growth, a “residual factor”, which was attributed to investments in human beings, such as in education and health. The OECD Conference on “Economic Growth and Investment in Education”, held in Washington in 1961, building on a previous conference on “Economic Aspects of Educational Development in Europe”, held a year prior at the Rockefeller Foundation conference center in Bellagio, Italy, led to two major operational projects based on the theory of the relationship between education and the economy: the Mediterranean Regional Project (MRP), an educational planning project carried out by the OECD in its poorer European member states, and the Educational Investment and Planning Programme (EIP), which was concerned with educational planning and growth studies in economically more advanced OECD member countries (Bürgi, 2017a, b; Lyons, 1964/1965). The MRP, which ran from 1962–1965, represented an experiment in manpower planning, which was in line with the highly technocratic social engineering approach characteristic for the time. It entailed the calculation of a country’s “manpower” needs and the drawing up of plans for the allocation of resources to meet those needs, based on available statistics and economic and demographic data. The methodology employed by the MRP, which attracted the attention of economists of education, was later transferred to some Latin American countries, with financial support from the Ford Foundation. We will come back to the early years of educational planning in the next chapter. From a historical perspective, the MRP represented an important episode in the life of the OECD in so far as it reflected the scientific, social engineering mindset of the early Cold War era, which has persisted in the OECD to this day. When the EPA was dissolved, many of its programmes were transitioned into the OECD and taken up by various units such as the Committee for Scientific and Technical Personnel (CSTP), the Manpower and Social Affairs Committee, and the

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The OECD: The Master of Persuasion

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Development Assistance Committee (Bürgi, 2017a). In 1968, with funding from the Ford Foundation and Royal Dutch Shell, the OECD set up a Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), which grew out of the CSTP. In light of the student unrest and sense of crisis that prevailed in the late 1960s, CERI marked a shift in the work of the OECD towards innovation, taking a research and policy orientation and expanding the disciplinary basis of its activities from economists to sociologists (Bürgi, 2017b). In the 1970s, very much under the influence of Sweden’s progressive education policies during that period, CERI engaged with the concept of recurrent education, which represented the Centre’s interest in the role of education for social equality (Rubenson, 1994). However, the recurrent education experiment was short-lived as, in the context of neoliberal policies, the OECD became more focused on a results- and output-oriented approach (Eide, 1990, p. 34). The OECD’s 1989 report Education and the Economy in a Changing Society marked a renewed focus on the economy, in that “education was no longer promoted as a common good but as an instrument in global competition” (Rubenson, 2008, p. 253). Additionally, the OECD had to respond to member states’ concerns about growing youth unemployment, a defining feature of the economic situation during the 1980s (Eide, 1990; Papadopoulos, 1994; Li & Auld, 2020). The output orientation of the OECD became very apparent when the organization started its “Indicators of Education System” (INES) programme, which aimed at building a system for comparative education statistics within the OECD. The indicators were published every year in the Education at a Glance report, which was launched in 1992 (Lundgren, 2011). The United States was a driving force behind this initiative. Since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983 triggered anxiety among the American public about the shortcomings of the American school system, the United States became very interested in comparable education statistics in the context of the rising discourse of the “knowledge society” (Lundgren, 2011). Henry et al. (2001) reveal how President Reagan’s administration drove the OECD to launch a programme aimed at improving the international indicators of education to make transnational comparisons more reliable and valid. Based on the INES indicators, the OECD produced its “country reports”, reviews of member states’ school systems and education policies, which generally appeared to be infused by at least two principles, first, a shift from inputs and procedures to learning outcomes; and second, the need to instil an evaluation culture based on accountability, transparency and the appraisal of education stakeholders against well-defined performance and quality benchmarks (Verger et al., 2019). As Gorur (2015) has argued, the INES programme and Education at a Glance illustrate how the OECD has made “the world of education calculable and comparable” (p. 581). In the 1960s and part of the 1970s – and in keeping with the dominant economic Keynesian paradigm at the time – the frame of reference among OECD specialists was the state. Key questions they grappled with were related to how states could optimise “manpower” investments to improve economic growth and how mathematical models could be developed to forecast these needs (Lyons, 1964/1965). In the 1970s, the OECD began to reorient its centre of gravity from the state to the individual and took a more sociologically-oriented approach as exemplified in the

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recurrent education agenda (Rubenson, 2008). In line with the rise of new public management around 1980, Lundgren (2011) contends that, as a general characteristic of this decade, “education became the arena for consultants with ambitions to increase efficiency and restructure management” (p. 21). These changes indicate a shift towards a more market-oriented approach to education (Kallo, 2021), which went along with the shift from inputs, processes and contextual approaches to educational outputs and standards. In 1998, the OECD founded the Centre for Co-operation with Non-Members, which constituted the culmination of a new focus within the OECD on non-member states and “economies in transition”, that began after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the period which, according to Martens (2007), marked the emergence of a “comparative turn” in the OECD. Education was positioned as an economic production factor tasked with providing human capital to sustain national economic competitiveness in an emerging knowledge economy (Li & Auld, 2020). The OECD positioned itself as an organization with the right tools and solutions for ‘new economies’ to adopt the Western path of development and prosperity. Education constituted a central building block of that agenda, and participation in international large-scale assessment programmes (ILSAs) such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) was presented as the key tool of education quality assurance and a guarantee of being on the right track in the global competition race (Rasmussen & Ydesen, 2020). Throughout its history, the OECD had a strong policy orientation. In contrast to its main competitor in the domain of ILSAs, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), which has a much longer history than the OECD in administering ILSAs such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), the OECD does not limit itself to conducting the surveys and providing the data, but engages in policy recommendations and interpretations and policy-oriented “packaging” and marketing of the data. In particular PISA is accompanied by a range of products such as a video series that features “high performers in education”, media-friendly rankings and by-products such as “PISA 4U” and “PISA for Schools”, which, from a global governance perspective, “help further the ability of the OECD and partner organisations to speak directly to schools without the intervention of government” (Lewis, 2017, p. 531), supporting the finding that “the OECD is increasingly operating as a global education policy actor in its own right” (p. 532). The branding and marketing skills of the OECD are a big part of what many scholars consider its hegemonic influence on education policies. The organization demonstrates a strong perception of the dominant policy discourses and responsiveness to the issues that member states are preoccupied with. It is therefore fair to say that to some extent the OECD shifted from an organization that was pursuing data for the sake of policy to an organization that pursues data as a “self-serving instrument” (Li, 2021). The OECD Vision Statement released in 2011 on the organization’s 50th anniversary seems to indicate a new chapter in the expansion of the OECD’s ambitions in

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education. The Learning Framework 2030 aims to develop and improve the practical applicability of the OECD’s competence framework. As argued by Li and Auld (2020), the OECD has taken “a humanitarian turn”, which consists of a blend between economic competitiveness and social inclusion, “expanding the scope of PISA metrics to incorporate non-cognitive skills, such as social and emotional skills, creativity, and well-being” (Li, 2021, p. 53; see also Rappleye et al., 2020). The “social inclusion” turn is not new to the OECD, which, in particular in the 1970s after the creation of CERI, engaged with considerations of equality of opportunity with its concept of “recurrent education”. Even though the scope of the OECD’s policies in education undergoes shifts, the cultivation of talent and human capital as a vehicle for providing the appropriate competences and skills to the labour market remains a vital purpose of education in the OECD discourse. The OECD is an IO that has so far succeeded in constantly re-inventing itself and persuading others that its role is necessary and beneficial. This adaptive and persuasive part of its identity goes back to the times of the OEEC when the organization’s original mandate – the administration and coordination of the Marshall Plan in Europe – became obsolete, and in order to survive, the organization needed to find a new role for itself. Significantly, the name of the successor organization, OECD, does not include the word “European” anymore, as it expanded across the Atlantic to include the United States and Canada, and took on the word “development”, which is a significant marker of the OECD’s legitimacy, promising the right stage of development for its member states and non-member states if they follow its recommendations. In that respect the organization lives off its “promissory legitimacy” (Beckert, 2020, p. 318). The paradigms of productivity, human capital and economic growth that characterized the educational vision of the OECD were endowed with this “promissory legitimacy” that explains the OECD’s hegemonic role as shaper of education policy. In that respect, as formulated by Rubenson (2008), “the OECD has achieved hegemony over educational discourse through its capacity to manufacture the ‘common sense’ of society” (p. 242). Ron Gass (2013), a pioneer of the OECD, put it as follows: “Although the OECD has legally binding codes and conventions, it operates mostly according to the ‘soft power’ of peer pressure and persuasion” (para. 3). PISA is the prime contemporary example of how peer pressure and persuasion is achieved through OECD’s governance by “competitive comparison” and “vertical ordering of things and people according to their relative positions on ranking scales” (Sorenson & Robertson, 2020, p. 21). In this regard the OECD still permeates the logic of the Cold War. As one of our interviewees put it, “the OECD . . . has set itself up as the one organization that wants to show in the competition of systems that we are always the best” (Klaus Hüfner,6 cited in Elfert & Ydesen, 2020, p. 89). With its ability to perceive the dominant discourses and market the “common sense” of

6

Klaus Hüfner, Professor Emeritus, Freie Universität Berlin, is an expert on UNESCO, the United Nations system, and the economics of education. He worked at the OECD/CERI in the early 1970s. During his time at the Max-Planck Institute for Educational Research, he was instrumental in introducing research on human capital to Germany.

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society, while being at the same time an elite club of rich countries, its use of “soft power” on the basis of “representational technologies” (in particular the PISA study) and the spread of the gospel of innovation and social development, the OECD represents the global governance organization par excellence.

2.6

The World Bank: The “Master of Coercion”

The World Bank was created as the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) as part of the post-WWII financial order conceived at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 with the purpose of funding post-war reconstruction. When the reconstruction mandate lost pertinence, the Bank shifted its attention towards the financing of infrastructure development projects in developing countries. The late 1950s and 1960s were the high time of the decolonization movement and education became an urgent issue for newly independent African and Asian countries. In the context of the human capital and Cold War Sputnik era, the World Bank emerged as a “chosen instrument” (Oliver, 1989, p. 1) of the American foreign policy interests, which included education as a way of drawing countries into the American sphere of influence. The World Bank granted its first educational loan to Tunisia in 1962. In the early years, the Bank’s educational loans were strictly related to human capital and productivity considerations – similar to the case of the OECD, education had to be conducive to economic development. The Bank’s lending activities in the 1960s and 1970s thus focused on vocational, technical and secondary education, which was considered important for training workers and skilled personnel for the economy. An example of this approach was the Bank’s focus on “diversified” curricula between the 1960s and the 1980s, based on the Bank’s conviction that practical training such as woodshop for boys and cooking for girls, was more relevant for economic development than academic subjects (Heyneman, 2003). Infrastructure projects, such as school buildings, constituted another area of educational lending (Jones, 1992). As the World Bank had no expertise in education, it established, in 1964, a Co-operative Program with UNESCO, which lasted officially until 1989. A unit of professionals, the Education Financing Division (EFD), was formed, which was located in UNESCO Headquarters in Paris and staffed by UNESCO, in cooperation with the World Bank. The financing of the division, which carried out the technical preparations of the Bank’s educational loans, was divided between 75% by the World Bank and 25% by UNESCO. As will be discussed in detail in Chap. 4, the relationship between the Bank and UNESCO was an uneasy marriage. Although both organizations formally belong to the United Nations system, the World Bank joined the UN only reluctantly and was always concerned about its independence as a financial organization that relies on its close ties to Wall Street. As shown by Elfert (2021), in the 25 years of the existence of the Co-operative Program between UNESCO and the World Bank, the Bank built its own resources and expertise and overtook UNESCO as the main policy shaper for education in low-income countries.

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The World Bank: The “Master of Coercion”

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Under the presidency of Robert McNamara (1968–1981) the World Bank broadened its scope to a development agency that claimed an intellectual and policy authority in advising countries on their education systems. The Bank expanded educational lending with a focus on the poorest countries and also increased lending for basic and primary education (Kapur et al., 1997). The 1974 Education Sector Working Paper reflected this new self-identity of the World Bank and therefore caused considerable tension between the World Bank and UNESCO (Elfert, 2021). The 1980 Bell report, which was the outcome of a commissioned panel of experts chaired by the Executive Vice President of the Ford Foundation, David E. Bell, recommended a diversification of the Bank’s methodology, which so far had been too narrowly focused on manpower planning. The Bank’s subsequent shift to the rate of return approach allowed for an expansion of investment in primary education, secondary and general higher education, as well as education research. This development paved the way for a further extension of the Bank’s educational activities into the realm of UNESCO’s responsibilities (Elfert, 2021). Based on the rate of return approach, much of the Bank’s lending in the 1980s followed a “short policy menu” (Heyneman, 2003), prescribing investments in primary education, education sectors opening up towards privatization and placing increasing costs for education on students and parents at a time when countries were burdened by the debt crisis (Mundy & Verger, 2015). In this situation, in which countries were particularly vulnerable, the World Bank had expanded its role to that of both “juge et partie” (judge and party) (Elfert, 2021, drawing on Sack, 1988). The double role of the World Bank as funder and policy adviser was particularly problematic during the era of the structural adjustment programmes – the 1980s and 1990s –, when countries were forced to accept conditions (“conditionalities”) tied to loans, which imposed the reduction of public sector spending and marketoriented principles for education. These policy measures, which were promoted particularly in Africa and Latin America, had detrimental effects on education in low-income countries, where the improvement of education was particularly important for economic development. As argued by Carnoy (1995), structural adjustment policies “were associated with increased poverty, increased inequality of income and wealth and slow (or negative) economic growth” (p. 657). In the early 1980s, the educational investments of the World Bank, which had traditionally focused on technical and secondary education, moved towards primary education. In the aftermath of the Bell report and the epistemological shift towards the rate of return approach, the Bank, in 1981, hired the economist George Psacharopoulos as head of the Education Department’s Research Unit, whose research suggested that primary education yielded the highest rates of return compared to other levels of education (Jones, 1992; Psacharopoulos, 1981). The World Bank’s influential report Education Policies for Sub-Saharan Africa: Adjustment, Revitalization, and Expansion asserted that “renewal of progress toward universal primary education is the new investment that will bring the highest economic and social returns in many countries” (The World Bank, 1987, p. 132). This new priority was very consequential, as the focus on the expansion of primary education came to dominate the global Education for All (EFA) initiative, which was launched in

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1990 at the World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA) in Jomtien, Thailand. Initially spearheaded by UNICEF, all major international organizations, NGOs and aid agencies were involved in this global agenda, which was meant to expand basic education in developing countries. Although UNESCO, which coordinated EFA, favoured a broader approach to basic education, including adult literacy, the World Bank prevailed with its priority on the expansion of universal primary education (Power, 2015). In 2000, a follow-up conference was held to take stock of (lacking) progress of the EFA initiative, the World Education Forum in Dakar. While UNESCO continued to be in charge of the overall coordination of EFA, the World Bank took the leading role in the Fast-Track Initiative (FTI), a multilateral fund set up to finance universal primary education on the basis of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) that the countries needed to produce as a condition for funds. The PRSPs, as well as the national EFA strategies, which fell under the responsibility of UNESCO, brought about a much stronger emphasis on accountability than had been the case in the first decade of EFA. The PRSPs, which had to be “agreed” by donors and then implemented by national governments, consituted the vehicle by which countries were subjected to the logic of the market. As Paul Cammack (2006) put it, the PRSPs represented “a case, perhaps, of poor countries being clubbed into convergence” (p. 6; see also Cammack, 2002). From the FTI emerged the Global Partnership of Education (GPE), established around 2010 as a response to the growing criticism of the dominance of the World Bank and donor countries in the FTI. While the World Bank still hosts the GPE, it represents a “‘transnational public-private partnership’ . . . of donor and developing country governments, multilateral organizations, civil society, private companies and foundations” (Menashy, 2016, p. 98). Although the GPE investments still focus on schooling, Mundy and Verger (2015) have pointed out that since the financial crisis in 2008, Bank education lending has shifted from African countries towards large emerging economies, such as Brazil and India, who are more interested in secondary and tertiary levels of education than in basic education. In the past two decades, the World Bank has focused on the measurement of learning outcomes as a way to ensure the quality of education systems, reflected in the Bank’s Systems Approach for Better Educational Results (SABER), defined on the Bank’s website as an “initiative to produce comparative data and knowledge on education policies and institutions, with the aim of helping countries systematically strengthen their education systems and the ultimate goal of promoting Learning for All” (The World Bank, 2021a). Not only has the Bank funded the participation of countries in learning outcome surveys and International Large Scale Assessments (ILSAs), it has also signed a partnership agreement with the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) to strengthen capacities of low-income countries to measure learning outcomes (Fontdevila, 2021; The World Bank/UIS, 2019; Mundy, 2019). New indicators such as the Learning Poverty Target (The World Bank, 2019) and initiatives such as the Human Capital Project, “a global effort to accelerate more and better investments in people for greater equity and economic growth” (The World Bank, 2021b), serve the World Bank’s pursuit of “measuring the

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unmeasurable” (Unterhalter, 2017) and mastering the social world under a scientific guise, underpinned by its highly technocratic management approach and tools, which will be further discussed below. In light of its track record of policy measures based on scientific claims that have turned out to be controversial, such as the doxa of the “diversified curricula”, the structural adjustment programmes, the promotion of school fees and the narrow focus on primary education, the Bank’s policy prescriptions have to be taken with a grain of salt. Since it started granting educational loans in the 1960s, the World Bank has developed into the most influential policy shaper of education in low-income countries. Especially since the McNamara years, the Bank has sought to expand its role from a bank to a development agency. This development was enabled by the Bank’s role as “juge et partie” of education policies, as it tied educational loans to conditions, of which the structural adjustment programmes are the prime example, and which made it a coercive actor of global governance of education. With regard to the future of the World Bank’s influence on education, the Bank’s dominance might be weakened by geopolitical factors, such as the decline of the United States as the global hegemonic power, the changing dynamics among Bank members and “the questionable value” of “the rigidity and linearity of Bank prescriptions for educational systems. . . [for] the rapidly transforming emerging economies” (Mundy & Verger, 2015, p. 17).

2.7

UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank: A Global Governance Perspective

The three IOs discussed in this book represent the formation of somewhat contrasting agendas of the reconstruction of education after the Second World War. UNESCO represents the logic of internationalism in terms of the promotion of international understanding, global peace and universal values through the development of international structures. The idealist ontology of the organization is anchored in the iconic sentence of its constitution: “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.” UNESCO’s cosmopolitan view of international cooperation derives from inter-war movements of intellectual cooperation as embodied in the ICIC of the League of Nations; its ideology goes back to the Enlightenment tradition of idealism and belief in progress and modernity (Renoliet, 1999). The World Bank and the OECD, on the other hand, represent a line of thinking on international relations that relies on the logic of globalization in terms of the global marketplace and the free flow of capital, and the pursuit of competition as a driver of the world order.7 Both the OECD and the World Bank were to a large extent useful tools of the expansion of American

7

The distinction between the logic of internationalism and the logic of globalization is inspired by Jones (1998).

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hegemony – the OECD helped to expand American influence in Europe, and the World Bank was the “chosen instrument” of American free-market foreign policy in developing countries. UNESCO, on the other hand, turned out to be a difficult partner for the United States, although the country was instrumental in creating the organization. With the influx of newly independent “Third World” countries in the late 1950s and 1960s,8 UNESCO, which represents the most democratic among the three organizations, as it is “the UN organization institutionally most directly responsive to the majority of its members” (Samoff, 1996, p. 267), became unattractive for the United States as a foreign policy instrument. Ultimately the United States has greatly contributed to weakening UNESCO’s influence in the international realm (Elfert & Ydesen, 2020). While the idealistic-humanistic ideology dominated the thinking about education in the first decade after WWII, in the 1950s a counter-agenda emerged with “the marriage of two social sciences, economics and education” (UNESCO, 2003, p. 4), from which the concept of “human capital” derived, which is still the dominant paradigm underpinning education policies worldwide. This tension between the humanistic and economistic approach to education runs like a thread through the relationship of the three IOs and global governance of education to this day. The ontological difference between the World Bank and UNESCO can be illustrated by their approach to literacy. Universal literacy has always been a priority for UNESCO, and in the early 1960s UNESCO submitted a proposal for the realization of a universal literacy campaign to the UN General Assembly. However, the proposal lacked support, especially by the United States, forcing UNESCO to downscale its plans, which resulted in the Experimental World Literacy Programme (Elfert, 2021; Mundy, 1999). Also, the World Bank was strongly opposed to the idea of a universal literacy campaign – the difference in the approach to literacy between UNESCO and the World Bank is well formulated by Ricardo Diez Hochleitner, the first head of education at the World Bank, who was seconded in 1963 from UNESCO. He stated in an office memorandum to a superior at the World Bank that “literacy is not an end in itself [UNESCO’s position] but an instrument of adult education to fit adults to assume responsibilities and to play an active role in economic and social development [the Bank’s position]” (cited in Elfert, 2021, p. 7; square brackets added). While UNESCO promoted education as a right and public good with an intrinsic value, the Bank considered education primarily as a means to an end, namely as an investment in productivity and economic growth. The OECD’s position is similar to the Bank’s although there are periods in the OECD’s history when the OECD held a kind of middle ground between these two positions. The OECD’s engagement with recurrent education, which will be discussed in Chap. 6, is a case in point. Both the OECD and the World Bank pursue grand measurement projects, but we would argue that the OECD is more interested in measurement for the sake of

8

Between 1947 and 1967, 70 countries from Latin America, Asia and particularly Africa joined UNESCO (Morel, 2013).

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“competitive comparison”, while the World Bank is guided by the rationalistic logic of effectiveness. During the period of the Co-operative Programme between the Bank and UNESCO, even UNESCO staff acknowledged that UNESCO could learn from the World Bank in terms of its “structure” and effectiveness that is illustrated by the highly bureaucratized cycle of its educational loans (Elfert, 2021). Management tools such as the Planning-Programming-Budgeting System (PPBS), brought into the World Bank by Robert McNamara, allowed for professionalization and bureaucratization of the Bank’s operations. PPBS was a corporate management tool that had been developed by the RAND Corporation for military purposes, as an “efficient machinery with which to exercise management authority” (McNamara, 1968, p. 94), which “shifted the focus on decision-making from inputs to outputs” (Breul, 2010, cited by Natsios, 2010, p. 15). These representational technologies were used to “expand the dominance of rational organizations” (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, p. 150) over education for development and claim bureaucratic expertise. They represent the “coercive isomorphism” (p. 150) of the Bank, which is one of the features that allowed it to expand its role as a key actor of the global governance of education. The managerial approach to educational planning left its imprint on UNESCO during the period of the Co-operative Program between the Bank and UNESCO. Due to isomorphic processes, results-based management and technocratic management procedures have pervaded UNESCO, which are to some extent at odds with the organization’s humanistic ideology (Benavot, 2011; Elfert, 2018; Elfert, 2021) and may constitute a hindrance to the realization of “progressive educational transformations externally” (Benavot, 2011, p. 558). While all three organizations are guided by a scientific worldview, the World Bank and the OECD are much more than UNESCO characterized by a culture of social engineering, based on material technologies and a comparative outlook, represented by indicators, ILSAs, statistical tools, and the development of standards (Lawn, 2008; Ydesen & Andreasen, 2020). The strong increase in PISA participation would not have been possible without the World Bank’s grants and loans that provided strong incentives for countries, and in some cases, coerced them to participate in ILSAs. Although UNESCO also pursued these technologies as they were part of its mandate, UNESCO with its emphasis on normative instruments and universal values has a much more immaterial outlook, as stated in its constitution. UNESCO also lacked the resources and structural conditions to compete with the OECD and the World Bank over these technologies. As we will discuss in Chap. 5, UNESCO’s function as provider of education statistics was highly contested, among others by the OECD and the World Bank. Some of the representational technologies that dominate the education discourse today even started in UNESCO, but were then moved elsewhere, such as the ILSAs, which originated in the 1950s in the UNESCO Institute for Education (UIE) (De Landsheere, 1997; Elfert, 2013a). One of the key founders of the UIE, John Thompson, repeatedly wrote about “immaterialism”, which can best be interpreted as the “immeasurable” (Weindling, 2010, p. 192; Elfert, 2013b) that should, in his view, underpin the UIE’s work. The controversy between the material and the immaterial/spiritual were typical for the intellectual climate of the post-WWII years, but continued to preoccupy UNESCO also in later

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2 UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank: A Global Governance Perspective

years. For example, the Delors report, one of UNESCO’s education flagship reports, refers to “the tension between the spiritual and the material” (Delors et al., 1996, p. 18). In that spirit, UNESCO was always more interested in intellectual and humanistic values that are ultimately unquantifiable, in contrast to the OECD and the World Bank. In our analysis of these three IOs from a global governance perspective, it will be important not only to examine how these organizations have interacted with each other, but also how they have constructed their power and networks with other actors. As Samoff (1992) has argued, education is governed by a “financial-intellectual complex” that has significantly shaped the thinking about education and development. While this “financial-intellectual complex” is part and parcel of the World Bank’s power as a global governor of education, UNESCO has been weakened by the economic field that was brought into it by external pressures (Elfert, 2018, 2021). Two reforms of its Executive Board resulted in the replacement of individual autonomous experts by technocrats, which eroded UNESCO’s intellectual capacity. The lack of operational budget and the significant loss of funding after the United States withdrew from the organization, first in 1984, then again – after the United States rejoined the organization in 2002 – in 2011, after the General Conference adopted Palestine as a full member, forced UNESCO to accept “tied money” and seek partnerships with the private sector, which led to the weakening of the organization by heteronomous influences, defined by Bourdieu (1996) as “the loss of autonomy through subjection to external forces” (p. 57). The UNESCO-OECD-World Bank triangle represents a particular historical period, which has been referred to as “educational multilateralism” (Mundy, 1999). Given the increasing involvement of non-state actors, such as think tanks, philanthropic foundations and corporations, it could be argued that we are entering a new stage in the governance dynamic from multilateralism to multistakeholderism (Gleckman, 2018). These developments will likely impact the role of the OECD, the World Bank and UNESCO in the system of global governance of education. We will come back to this issue in the last chapter of the book – at this point it is fair to speculate that UNESCO, as is the case for the UN more broadly, will be further eroded by the growing influence of public-private partnerships and corporate actors. UNESCO’s role also continues to be challenged by other IOs, in particular UNICEF. The World Bank may lose ground as a consequence of geopolitical shifts, such as the rise of China and the BRICS countries, and economic and financial turmoil (Güven, 2017; Mundy & Verger, 2015). With regard to the OECD, there are indications that countries are getting tired of PISA and the high time of the PISA-era might be coming to an end, but the future of the OECD seems more uncertain, as the organization has a remarkable ability to re-invent itself. Its current emphasis on non-cognitive outcomes, such as global competences, soft skills and well-being, and education in the digital age, may indicate a shift towards finding a new role for itself in a post-human and post-work society.

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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Chapter 3

In the Shadow of the Cold War: Educational Planning and the Rise of Global Governance of Education

3.1

Introduction

The 1960s represented the heydays of a rationalistic social engineering approach to education. “That extraordinary decade of educational euphoria” (Coombs, 1992, p. 33) yielded a group of planners and economists who specialized in a new professional field: educational planning in the newly independent post-colonial countries. Their approach to planning largely originated in the military, where inputs and outputs were more easily quantified and measured. The new science of educational planning was strongly shaped by the international organizations (IOs) created after World War II, in particular the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the World Bank. It was also endorsed by the United States government, in particular the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations, the big American foundations, such as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and American universities. When the United States emerged from World War II as the new global power, the country sought to extend its influence to Europe and to the developing countries, which became a battleground of the Cold War (Berman, 1979). In the early 1960s, the Kennedy administration promoted international development as a foreign policy issue, and underpinned by human capital theory, educational planning rose to prominence as a key element of the country’s strategy to contain communism. According to Döring-Manteuffel (cited in Huber, 2017, p. 96), planning was an “icon of the twentieth century”. Planning the state economy had been widely accepted in war times, and it was also prevalent in the interwar period. For example, France’s World War II Plan de Modernisation et d’équipement made France “the first western country to commit itself wholeheartedly to economic growth and modernization as public policy” (Judt, 2005, p. 70). Planning was also carried out in the United States under President Franklin D. Roosevelt who established a National Planning Board (Engerman, 2015). After the Second World War, inspired © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Elfert, C. Ydesen, Global Governance of Education, Educational Governance Research 24, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40411-5_3

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by Keynesian economics, planning regained importance as a tool for achieving rapid economic growth. Although planning was suspicious to many as it was associated with communism, the idea of a predictable future had a strong appeal also in the West, and social engineering and planning promised to “transform the future into numbers, and suggest certainty and predictability” (Huber, 2017, p. 111). The launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 sharpened East-West confrontation and set off a veritable technological and educational catch-up race between the Soviet Union and the United States (Tröhler, 2010). The United States was fixated on economic growth during those years. This preoccupation can be explained by the country’s experience of a devastating economic crisis before World War II, and it also constituted a key factor in the ideological obsession with communism (Biddle & Holden, 2014). Moreover, the push for productivity in the United States has been interpreted as a way of finding consensus in a deeply divided society. High growth rates made it possible to “transform political issues into problems of output, to adjourn class conflict for a consensus on growth” (Maier, 1977, p. 608). Driven by the paradigm of economic growth, in the 1960s, the OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank started promoting educational planning in European low-income and developing countries. The United States was instrumental in defining the place of education in this development agenda pursued by capitalist and geopolitical interests. The Kennedy administration played an active role in conceptualizing the First United Nations Development Decade (1960–1970) and built education into its foreign assistance programmes, such as the “Alliance for Progress” initiative, a 10-year plan for economic and social development in Latin America. In late 1961, the US government created the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in the context of the Foreign Assistance Act. As will be discussed below, education was given an important role in the Alliance for Progress programme, which was meant to tie the Latin American region to the United States and make it more resistant to communist influence spreading from Cuba (Latham, 1998). The importance ascribed to education for this agenda can be further seen from the fact that the Kennedy administration was the first to appoint an Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs. It justified this move by pointing to “the great value of educational and cultural exchange to improving world understanding and to strengthening our own international position” (The White House, 1961). Kennedy felt that “this whole field is urgently in need of imaginative policy development, unification and vigorous direction” and therefore needs to be given “an appropriate place in the governmental structure” (The White House, 1961). The first to hold this position was Philip H. Coombs, an American economist with strong roots at the Ford Foundation, who was a central figure in educational planning in the 1960s. In 1963, he became the director of the International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP), a UNESCO institute, the creation of which involved all major international organizations working in educational planning at the time, and which is still in existence today. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations were interested in expanding what Coombs (1964) called “the fourth dimension of foreign policy,” denoting educational and cultural affairs, as distinct from political, economic, and military foreign

3.2

Turf Struggles Between UNESCO and the OECD

53

policy. In particular the economist Walter W. Heller played an instrumental role in arguing for federal attention and funding for education and persuading “politicians and policymakers to view education through the lens of human capital theory, in which education was a means to achieve national economic goals” (Holden, 2018, p. 28; see also Biddle & Holden, 2014). In 1966, a year after the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, President Johnson launched the less well-known International Education Act, which intended to add “a world dimension to our educational efforts” (Read, 1966, p. 406). Many US-spearheaded conferences on international education were held at the time in collaboration with multilateral partners, such as the 1961 OECD Policy Conference on Economic Growth and Investment in Education held in Washington D.C., the Bellagio meetings, and the International Conference on the World Crisis in Education at Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1967 (Champion Ward, 1974), which formed the breeding ground of the post-World War II global governance structure of education. The US government, the newly created IOs, and the big American philanthropic foundations and universities formed a network of global governance that promoted an economistic approach to education as a Cold War weapon of American dominance. Education was shaped by scientificmilitary methods and networks that dated back to the “martial maths” tools developed in the US War Department during World War II (Bürgi, 2017a), the 1957 Sputnik shock and the 1958 National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of the Eisenhower administration (Giovinazzi, 2022; Rudolph, 2002). In his opening remarks at the Williamsburg conference in 1967, President Johnson said: “You are dealing with the real dynamite of our times” (The White House, 1967). Education for development was booming. This chapter examines the early years of educational planning and the entanglements of IOs, the US government and American institutions from which a system of global governance of education emerged. Special attention will be paid to the interconnections between UNESCO and the OECD, which both claimed a dominant role in educational planning. The OECD’s Mediterranean Regional Project (MRP), which was expanded to Latin America, challenged UNESCO’s traditional role as the dominant IO in charge of the expansion of global education. The creation of the IIEP will serve as another illustration of the collaboration and competition between those two organizations. The chapter will also shed light on the rise of the international expert in the production and legitimation of scientific-managerial knowledge claims that came to underpin the global governance of education.

3.2

Turf Struggles Between UNESCO and the OECD

The precursor of the OECD was the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), established in 1948 in Paris, with the purpose of administering the European Recovery Program (the Marshall Plan) for the reconstruction of Europe. Within the OEEC, the European Productivity Agency (EPA) was set up as a semi-autonomous entity, “explicitly created with a view to transferring techniques,

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know-how, ideas from the United States to Western Europe” (Boel, 2003, p. 18; see also Bürgi, 2017a). The introduction of American business management systems in Europe, which was also greatly supported by the Ford Foundation, was “thought to be of crucial importance in reinforcing American political leadership of the West” (Gemelli, 1996, p. 40). As stated by Boel (2003), “until 1957, the European productivity program represented an investment of more than 300 million dollars, approximately two-thirds of which were directly or indirectly financed by the United States” (p. 115). Schmelzer (2014) has argued that “the European Recovery Program has become the master narrative for much of the thinking about the ‘development’ of the postcolonial world” (p. 173). Especially in its early years, the OEEC/OECD played a major role in promoting the belief that the “Western Europe miracle of economic growth” (p. 173) could be replicated in developing countries. The OECD’s MRP, which will be further discussed below, played a key role in the early 1960s in promoting the educational planning approach to poorer and developing countries. Equally located in Paris, UNESCO had been founded 3 years earlier, in 1945, as the specialized agency of the United Nations for educational, scientific and cultural affairs. Although UNESCO also embodied a belief in science and progress, the organization’s view of education was rooted in the humanistic tradition of the Enlightenment, which promoted education as an intrinsic value for the sake of individual fulfilment and dignity (Elfert, 2018). Although both organizations promoted a modernist ideal of progress, the notion of “economic growth [as the] sine qua non for human progress” (Mahon, 2015, p. 116) was less pronounced in UNESCO. On the OECD side, there was a conviction that “the fight for education is too important to be left solely to the educators” (OECD, 1961a, p. 35). The United States initially viewed UNESCO as a vehicle for exporting Western cultural values to the rest of the world. However, given the universal membership of the organization and shifting power dynamics when many newly independent Global South countries joined UNESCO in the 1950s and 1960s, UNESCO became an unreliable partner and the relationship between UNESCO and the United States became strained (Elfert, 2021; Elfert & Ydesen, 2020). UNESCO shifted its attention towards developing countries, while the OECD represented the “Club of the rich” (Schmelzer, 2014). Given that both organizations were located in Paris, UNESCO served as a reference point for the OECD, and the two organizations were potentially competing for personnel. In a memo about the preparation of a meeting between UNESCO officials and representatives of the newly created OECD in 1961, Herbert Moore Phillips, the director of the Economic Analysis Division of UNESCO’s Department of Social Sciences, cautioned that “this organization was not slow in utilizing our ideas and incorporating them in its own programme” (UNESCO, 1961, p. 2). In 1963, UNESCO and the OECD, aware of the risk of overlapping activities, signed a formal agreement, establishing relations between the two organizations (OECD, 1963). The letters exchanged between the OECD’s Secretary-General and UNESCO’s Director-General expressed interest in establishing a “. . .reciprocal basis, to an exchange of information and documentation on questions considered

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Turf Struggles Between UNESCO and the OECD

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by the two parties to be of common interest” (OECD, 1964, p. 367). However, a dispatch from the Danish delegation to the Danish Ministry of Education specifically stated that collaboration between the two organizations should be restricted to the secretariat level and would not include observer exchanges in committee meetings. In fact, according to the OECD Secretary-General, the OECD was to avoid any such expansion of the collaboration (Danish Ministry of Education, 1963). The Danish dispatch seems to indicate that all was not blissful between the two organizations and that their ability to maintain a critical distance was the order of the day. UNESCO staffers were very concerned about the direction taken by the OECD. In particular the OECD’s activities in relation to development and the Mediterranean Regional Project (MRP) were considered problematic as they fell under UNESCO’s mandate. In a confidential UNESCO memo, Alfonso de Silva, head of the division for relations with international organizations, to M. Paul Bertrand, director of the office for relations with international organizations and programmes, reporting on a meeting with Dr. Alexander King, Director General of Scientific Affairs at the OECD in 1964, complained about “the total lack of exchange of information, let alone coordination, with which the OECD organized this project [the MRP]” (UNESCO, 1964a; our translation from French).1 De Silva further reported that the OECD was emphasizing the economic aspects of development and that King had said that “the OECD is increasingly becoming a ‘rich man’s club’, which raises certain problems for the nature of its relations with other international organizations” (UNESCO, 1964a; our translation from French). In this context, it is worth noting that King was critical of the dominance of the focus on increasing quantitative economic growth and joined Thorkil Kristensen, Secretary-General of the OECD from 1960 to 1969, in calling for “qualitative growth” (Schmelzer, 2015, p. 5). King agreed that “formal working discussions” should be organized between UNESCO and the OECD in the areas of science, education, and the social sciences (UNESCO, 1964b). Ron Gass, Deputy Director of the Directorate for Scientific Affairs since 1962, occasionally invited UNESCO staff informally for exchanges on the OECD’s and UNESCO’s activities. He stated that “we had good relationships, but never really formalized” (Interview with Ron Gass, 2017).2 Despite these personal contacts, the relations between the two organizations remained distant. The OECD’s move into development was a further affront to UNESCO. As explained by the President of the OECD Development Centre, Robert Buron, in 1965, the replacement of the word “development” for “European” in its name when the organization transitioned from the OEEC to the OECD, denoted its selfunderstanding as “not only an instrument for co-operation between the industrialized countries, but a medium for the study of development problems” (OECD, 1965a,

1

In the context of this meeting, Dr. King also reported about overlap of OECD activities with the Council of Europe, which according to King, “has already seized, on several occasions, to make them their own, the ideas or projects of the OECD” (UNESCO, 1964a; our translation from French). 2 Ron Gass joined the OEEC in 1958 and worked for the OECD until his retirement in 1989. He was the first director of the OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI).

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p. 10). To this end, in 1960 the OECD established the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) and, in 1962, the Development Centre, “responsible for ensuring contact between the Organisation [the OECD] and the developing countries. . .to examine and consider development problems. . . [and to] transfer to developing countries the knowledge acquired by Member countries” (OECD, 1965b, p. 10). The OECD’s expansion towards development clearly challenged UNESCO’s traditional role as the designated UN agency for international education. In 1966, Mr. Krill de Capello, liaison officer in the Bureau for Relations with International Organizations and Programs at UNESCO, noted: Concerning OECD, it may be added that the Committee for Scientific and technical Personnel has, at its 10th session, established a ‘working party on Mediterranean Educational Development’. On the basis of the suggestions of this Working Party the OECD Secretariat has submitted to the committee a summary of the main policy conclusions, entitled ‘the Effective Use of School Building Resources in the M.R.P. Countries’. . . . Such procedure enables OECD to study simultaneously the problem of ‘educational development’ within industrialised and European non-industrialised countries and, through its Development Centre, to utilize the twofold experiences in Asia, Africa and Latin America, where Unesco’s activities are being touched. (Krill de Capello, 1966)

It was Krill de Capello’s impression that the OECD attempted “to become the intergovernmental organisation for the co-ordination of educational development in Western Europe”. He was so concerned about this ambition that he found it “necessary to draw the attention of the European member-states to the fact that the natural expansion of international organisations leads more and more to overlapping duplication of work and mutual concurrence in many fields” (Krill de Capello, 1966). The urgency of the situation is expressed later in the same document in the sentences: “OECD imitates systematically our work. The situation is very serious, [a] ‘life or death struggle’. Difficulty: OECD Member States are the financing States of UNESCO”. It is likely for the reason stated in the last sentence that de Capello’s superiors did not follow his advice to launch an examination of the competencies of different IOs, and to “use the next report to the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe for raising this problem” (Krill de Capello, 1966). UNESCO was generally concerned about alienating member states, and in this instance, the fear was also that the Western European member states would choose to align themselves with the OECD instead of UNESCO. Krill de Capello’s concern and irritation are, however, telling in terms of understanding the challenges encountered in the OECD– UNESCO relationship and the wider field of IOs claiming a role in education, such as the Council of Europe.3

The Council of Europe was also complaining about the OECD beginning “to intrude on a broad scale into the domain of education, which, until now, was rather exclusively reserved to the Council of Europe. . .” (Krill de Capello, 1966).

3

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3.3

The 1961 Washington Conference and the Mediterranean Regional Project

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The 1961 Washington Conference and the Mediterranean Regional Project

The OEEC started getting interested in education in the late 1950s. In the wake of the Sputnik shock, the “Conference on Techniques for Forecasting Future Requirements of Scientific and Technical Personnel”, held in The Hague in 1959, represented the first “forum [where] the view was expressed that a positive correlation exists between qualified manpower (read educational output) and economic growth” (OECD, 1979, p. 2). Building on that philosophy, at the beginning of the 1960s the OECD played an instrumental role in two activities that represent milestones in the history of educational planning: The 1961 Policy Conference on Economic Growth and Investment in Education held in Washington D.C., and the MRP, the multi-country manpower planning project carried out in the OECD’s poorer Southern European member states, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and Yugoslavia (Gass, 1967). The 1961 Washington conference, which “stands out as a landmark in the OECD educational story” (Papadopoulos, 1994, p. 39), created a favourable environment for educational spending and rapid growth of education systems in OECD countries that characterised the decade of the 1960s. It followed up on the recommendations of a previous conference on “Economic Aspects of Educational Development in Europe”, held in July 1960 at the Rockefeller Foundation conference center in Bellagio, Italy, which adopted the “Bellagio doctrine”, calling on governments “to adopt a human capital approach and expand their educational systems to boost growth” (Schmelzer, 2016, p. 205). The 1961 Washington conference was the first OECD conference to be held in the United States and represented a sort of endorsement of the OECD by the US government. It was chaired by Philip Coombs, at the time still Assistant Secretary for Educational and Cultural Affairs in the Kennedy administration. In his opening address, Dean Rusk, US Secretary of State, expressed “great expectations about the possibilities of OECD” and promised support for the organization (Schmelzer, 2016, pp. 39–40). According to OECD pioneer Ron Gass, “the Washington conference became a very visible event for all the OECD countries because Washington, the Kennedy Administration, the top American economists. . .and in the process, the education activities of the OECD. . .became sort of. . .legitimized by the powerful macroeconomists” (Interview with Ron Gass, 2017). The merging of education and economics launched at the Washington conference was then followed up by the OECD in the Study Group of Economics, which had already been set up in 1960, but was particularly active between 1962 and 1965 (Papadopoulos, 1994). This group, which was mainly composed of European economists, such as John Vaizey, who was at the forefront of the new field of the “economics of education” (Vaizey, 1962), played an important role in transferring the first studies on education as a human capital investment, carried out by economists such as Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker, from the United States to Europe and promoting education as an investment in productivity (Elfert, 2020). The conference discussed the major approaches to educational planning, in particular the so-called “social demand” approach (based on

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consumers’ demand) that was considered more suitable for “the developed industrialized OECD countries”, and the “manpower” approach, which was considered more useful for developing countries (Blaug, 1967).4 The prime example of the manpower approach was the MRP, an initiative that emanated from a country review of Portugal conducted by the OEEC and published in 1960, and the 1961 Washington conference (OECD, 1965b; Teodoro, 2020). Representing the “quintessence of educational planning in the 1960s” (Williams, 1987, p. 335), it constituted the testing ground for manpower planning, which came to represent the dominant approach to educational planning in developing countries until up to the 1980s. The approach involved the calculation of the future needs for enrolment and manpower requirements for certain qualifications in light of estimated population growth and projections of the gross national product (Lyons, 1964/65; Blaug, 1967). On the basis of these calculations and projections, planning frameworks for social and economic development were drawn up until the year 1975, giving an overview of numbers of students, graduates, teachers and investments in buildings and infrastructure. National teams were put in place, composed of “economists, statisticians and educational experts” (Lyons, 1964/65, p. 13), who engaged in generating knowledge based on new technologies. The project was strongly supported by “US specialists in human resource development, seconded by their universities” (Papadopoulos, 1994, p. 45), such as Frederick H. Harbison of Princeton University, who was involved in the development of the project as a consultant (OECD, 1961c). Herbert Parnes from the University of Ohio, who had conducted research on the labour market and the effect of economic change on occupational structures (Parnes, 2001), was contracted by the OECD to develop the methodology for the MRP. In 1963 the OECD received a $400,000 donation from the Ford Foundation to launch the Programme on Scientific and Human Resources for Development, which provided financial support for transferring the MRP experience to developing countries, especially to Latin America. The OECD, through its Development Centre, which was in charge of relations to non-member states, carried out pilot studies transferring the methodology to Argentina and Peru and held seminars on different continents (OECD, 1965b; OECD, 1968; see also Williams, 1987).5 In this regard it is important to mention that some of the big American philanthropic foundations formed an important part of the rising global governance structure of educational planning in developing countries. After World War II, the Ford Foundation represented the largest philanthropic organization in the world. The scientific underpinning of the social sciences was one of the key preoccupations of the Ford Foundation, as well as some other American philanthropic foundations, as

4

See also the Rapporteur-General, Mr. A. H. Halsey’s report on the Conference on Ability and Educational Opportunity in a Modern Economy held in Kungälv, Sweden in June 1961. Halsey’s report was circulated to participants at the Washington conference as a background document (OECD, 1961b). 5 For example, in Syria and Cairo (the latter was held in November 1966) (OECD, 1968).

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The 1961 Washington Conference and the Mediterranean Regional Project

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the basis of a “social-engineering approach to controlled change” (Arnove, 1980, p. 14; Gilman, 2003). Between 1951 and 1960, the Ford Foundation spent $74.8 million on economics and business studies in the United States (Berghahn, 2001), and the foundation played a major role in the promotion of a range of issues deemed socially relevant, including democracy, peace, the economy, behavioural sciences, and education (Bürgi, 2017a; Buss, 1980). The support for the expansion of the MRP to Latin America was in line with the Foundation’s active investment in the social sciences in Latin America; 25% of all funding in the region between 1960 and 1965 was devoted to the social sciences (Parmar, 2012). Just like the Marshall Plan had furthered the transfer of business management approaches to Europe, using the OEEC as the tool, Alliance for Progress promoted business and management approaches in Latin America through the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), greatly supported by Ford Foundation funds (Wanderley & Barros, 2020). Against this background, Fourcade (2010) considered the “imperialist expansion of modern economics” as “largely an American development” (p. 92). The Ford Foundation “threw [its] support and vast resources behind the discipline” (p. 67) and “embraced the. . .promise of efficiency, accuracy and mastery of the social and economic world” (p. 89). Ford Foundation officer Kermit Gordon visited the leading economist of education Theodore Schultz at the University of Chicago to discuss the foundation’s interest in “surveying the area of international and foreign economic studies” and “the contribution of economists to multi-disciplinary studies such as area and international relations programs” (Gordon, 1956). Also, federal support increased rapidly “through the National Science Foundation’s social sciences program and the systematic contractual use of economic research by military and civilian agencies” (Fourcade, 2010, p. 67). Both of these forms of support reached their peak in the 1960s and 1970s, in the wake of the Sputnik shock. Improving the capacity of American educational institutions and working relations with the government was a major concern at the time as “the U.S. educational establishment, particularly the colleges and universities” were considered the main “resource base for U.S. international educational activities” (Coombs, 1961, p. 3). The American foundations did not only fund universities at home, but also in developing countries, which “would help to sustain ‘the orderliness of economic growth’” (Rockefeller Foundation President Dean Rusk, cited by Berman, 1979, p. 157). American foundation officers and university staff were sent to developing countries, and future leaders from these countries were trained at American universities (Berman, 1979). As central knowledge hubs, the universities constituted a key factor in strengthening education as “a major ingredient of U.S. foreign relations” (Coombs, 1961, p. 1). The 1961 Washington Conference and the MRP were catalysts of the merging of education and economics, promoted by the US government and influential American foundations, which legitimized planners to make knowledge claims about the role of education and skilled personnel for economic development in the newly independent countries of the South. Apart from being an experiment in manpower planning, the MRP also “provided a training ground for about 100 young economists and social scientists” (Williams, 1987, p. 336) in the context of the OECD’s Human Resource

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Development Fellows programme. The training of educational planning specialists was instrumental given that “the number of Western economists competent to undertake assessments of human resources needs and priorities for educational investment is pathetically small” (OECD, 1961b, p. 4). With the support of the US government and powerful American institutions, the OECD was instrumental in establishing educational planning as “an attempt to regulate and control learning. . . [which] takes place as part of the public intervention strategies to change public policies, priorities, and individual choices in a direction considered desirable for social progress” (Varghese, 2011, p. 91). Notwithstanding the shortcomings of the manpower planning approach, such as inadequate data and methodological inaccuracies, the MRP played an important role in “sensitizing educational policy makers to the unquestionable, if elusive, relationship which exists between the education and the economic systems” (OECD, 1979, p. 8).

3.4

The Expansion of the Mediterranean Regional Project to Latin America

Educational planning activities in Latin America are a good illustration of the crossfertilizations between the periphery and the centre as well as the intersections between the OECD and UNESCO in the emerging system of global governance in the field of educational planning. Latin America constituted a laboratory of experimentation with a range of development strategies and ideas such as “integral educational planning”,6 which were circulated by experts and policy figures who were influential in Latin America and were active also on the international stage, such as Columbian Minister of Education, Gabriel Betancur Mejia,7 who later also served as Assistant Director-General for Education in UNESCO, and UNESCO’s Ricardo Diez Hochleitner, a Spanish national, who was highly involved in educational planning activies in Columbia in the 1950s (Ossenbach & Martìnez Boom, 2011). The case of Latin America shows the spread of development ideas “from the periphery towards the centre” (Ossenbach & Martìnez Boom, 2011, p. 680), in this case IOs such as the OECD and UNESCO, and from there to other countries and back to Latin America, taking a kind of “round trip” (p. 680). Educational planning was not merely imposed from outside, there was a very active production of ideas in Latin American institutions such as “CEPAL, the United Nations Commission for Latin America, which was at that time a very important, very dynamic organisation

According to Ossenbach and Martìnez Boom (2011), “the reference to integral planning alluded on the one hand to the necessity of covering the entire educational process, and on the other hand to the imperative that any educational plan must be inserted into general plans for development, as well as taking into account the exogenous factors which influence education” (p. 688). 7 Gabriel Betancur Mejia was Minister of Education in Columbia from 1955 to 1956 and then again from 1966 to 1968. 6

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which was placed in Chile” (Interview with Lucila Jallade, 2020).8 It is possible that Latin American countries had a particular affinity to educational planning as many had socialism-friendly governments in the 1950s and 1960s and were used to 10- or 15-year development plans. On the other hand, the terms “planeación” or “planeamiento” were used to signal a distance to the Soviet-style planning known as “planificación” (Ossenbach & Martìnez Boom, 2011, citing Moncada, 1982). Educational planning activities in Latin America are a good illustration of the intersections between the OECD and UNESCO in the emerging system of global governance in the field of educational planning. UNESCO’s involvement in planning activities in Latin America dated back to the organization’s “Major Project for the Extension and Improvement of Primary Education”, launched in 1957 for a period of 10 years. “In view of ever-increasing requests from Latin American governments for Technical Assistance in educational planning” (Diez-Hochleitner, 1963a, p. 6), UNESCO organized a series of training seminars in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in collaboration with the Organization of American States (OAS), the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), USAID and the International Labour Organization (ILO) (Diez-Hochleitner, 1963b). In 1957, Columbia initiated the first pilot experience of “integral planning of education” and launched a five-year education plan, which was supported by UNESCO (Ossenbach & Martìnez Boom, 2011). Several universities in Latin America carried out manpower studies with the aim of improving the skills of the population, some with support of OAS and the Ford Foundation. In the late 1950s and early 1960s UNESCO organized education conferences in all world regions (held in Addis Ababa, Karachi, Santiago de Chile, and Tripoli), which assessed the long-term development needs of the education sectors in those regions in order to inform educational policies and strategies and allocate funding to education (Jones, 1992). The US position for the UNESCO conference in Santiago, the Conference on Education and Economic and Social Development in Latin America, held in March 1962, in collaboration with ECLA, OAS, ILO and FAO, was prepared by Guy Benveniste, Special Assistant to Philip Coombs during his time as the first American Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs in the Kennedy administration. Against the background of the US government’s “Alliance for Progress” initiative, “the US Delegation was very heavily involved with the UNESCO Secretariat and the Director General in discussions of what a ‘plan for Latin American Education’ could be or could mean” (Benveniste, 2007, p. 3). The Santiago conference built on the development strategy that Latin American countries had agreed upon at the 1961 Punta Del Este conference in Uruguay, outlining a seven-point programme for educational development in the context of the “Alliance for Progress” initiative (Diez-Hochleitner, 1963a). ECLA, led by the 8

Argentinian Lucila Jallade worked for the Development Planning Council in Buenos Aires, the IIEP in Paris and the World Bank before joining the UNESCO-World Bank Education Financing Division (EFD) in 1978. After its termination, she worked for another 10 years in UNESCO’s Division for Policy and Sector Analysis (PSA) and as Director of the Division for Education Reconstruction and Development (ERD), which carried out education sector policy.

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economist Raúl Prebisch, got interested in what the OECD was doing in terms of economic growth, investments in education and educational planning, and the OECD was therefore invited to join the Santiago conference.9 Ron Gass represented the OECD. At a dinner organized by Philip Coombs, he asked the OECD for support in the context of a special fund UNESCO was trying to set up, an investment fund for Latin America and education, related to the “Alliance for Progress” programme (Interview with Ron Gass, 2017). Gass was later also invited to Columbia, and after the Ford Foundation agreed to fund activities to transfer the MRP to Latin America, the OECD established teams of Human Resource Development Fellows in some Latin American countries. As part of a series of conferences on educational planning in Latin America, organized mainly by UNESCO, ECLA and the OAS, the OECD took centre stage at a regional conference held in Lima in 1965 in the context of the pilot study in Peru,10 organized to “compare the experience of the European countries participating in the MRP with that of several Latin American countries on the subject of the long-term forecasting of manpower needs” (OECD, 1965b, p. 19). The conference was attended by representatives of several Latin American countries and international organizations, including UNESCO, ILO and the World Bank (p. 23). UNESCO was relegated to the role of observer, but given its authority in the field of educational planning, the UNESCO representative, Herbert Moore Phillips, was invited to deliver an opening statement. Phillips reminded the delegates of UNESCO’s leading position in educational planning by emphasizing the role of the “international agencies of the United Nations’ System” (OECD, 1965b, p. 17) and the creation of UNESCO planning institutes, in particular the IIEP and the Latin American Institute for Social and Economic Planning.11 He also distanced UNESCO from the OECD by emphasizing the “non-economic objects of education” and pointing out that “UNESCO by its very constitution. . . believes that the manpower approach is only one of the indicators and instruments of educational planning” (p. 18). According to one of our interviewees, Phillips, being one of the very few economists working in UNESCO, had a hard time integrating economic thinking in UNESCO, and he was told by his colleagues, “You talk like those fellows in the OECD”

Guy Benveniste referred to “the fiasco” of the Santiago Regional conference for Latin America. The UNESCO calculations for economic targets (and the development aid needed to achieve them) was based on a more conservative projection of economic growth, but the Americans (in particular Philip Coombs) insisted on using the more optimistic economic growth projections they had used for the Alliance for Progress program. Based on those projections, it turned out that Latin American countries did not even need development aid to achieve their educational targets, which meant that the whole rationale for the conference fell apart: “Therefore the whole Santiago conference had collapsed in a problem which was of figures which in any case are non-sense” (Interview with Guy Benveniste, 2017; see also Benveniste, 2007, 2010). 10 Another regional seminar for Arab countries was held in Beirut in November 1966. 11 This institute was established in 1962 in Santiago. In 1968, it became the Regional Institute for Educational Planning for Latin America (Bray & Varghese, 2011). 9

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(Interview with Louis Emmerij, 2018).12 In an article published in the UNESCO Courier, Phillips (1964), referring to the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Development Association (the World Bank) starting to grant loans for education, argued that “the newness of the economic approach to education calls for special understanding and collaboration between educators and economists” (p. 31) and called “for close international co-operation which it is Unesco’s role to sponsor” (p. 31). After retiring from UNESCO, Phillips worked as a consultant for the OECD, which resulted in a “friendly attitude towards UNESCO”, as observed in the correspondence between UNESCO and the OECD regarding a DAC meeting on educational aid in 1968, in which UNESCO expressed its appreciation for “the frequent constructive references to Unesco’s work in the high-quality papers distributed” (UNESCO, 1968). The hype around manpower planning, which “became for a while the fashion in Latin America” (Interview with Louis Emmerij, 2018), strengthened the role of the OECD among the group of IOs that gained legitimacy by promoting education as a key ingredient of development and economic growth. In retrospect, most former planners look back at the manpower planning approach as a “pioneer effort” (OECD, 1965a, p. 23), that proceeded “by trial and error” (p. 6) and was short-lived. According to Kjell Eide (1990), who worked for the OECD from the early 1960s, “as a whole the programme was a fiasco” (p. 22). It is therefore even more surprising that it played a key role in establishing a system of global governance of education that, despite some changes in terms of certain actors diminishing and others increasing in importance, persists to this day. The rise of the OECD, which was based on its claim to economic expertise, clearly challenged UNESCO’s traditional role as the global authority for education. Louis Emmerij considered the work of the OECD and of UNESCO two complimentary universes. . .one is the quantitative side, and the other one is the qualitative side. . .I saw it in that way, there was nothing wrong with UNESCO. . .the only thing that was wrong. . .was that they were so critical of the quantitative approach. . .that was their business, and we were doing our business. (Interview with Louis Emmerij, 2018)

This quote illustrates that the ideological differences between UNESCO with its humanistic orientation and the OECD that was underpinned by a more quantitative and economistic epistemology, conveniently played into the OECD’s (and as we will see, also the World Bank’s) expansion into activities that traditionally fell under UNESCO’s mandate.

12

Louis Emmerij was hired by Ron Gass to work on the Mediterranean Regional Project in the early 1960s. In 1986, he was appointed president of the OECD’s Development Centre. Between 1971 and 1976, he headed the World Employment Programme at the ILO.

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The Creation of the International Institute of Educational Planning (IIEP)

The Creation of the IIEP as a semi-autonomous UNESCO institute in 1963 is another example of the collaboration and competition between the dominant IOs in the field of educational planning at the time. Given the importance of skilled personnel, the idea of creating an educational planning institute for the training of educational planners was discussed at a lunch among Philip Coombs and representatives of the OECD and UNESCO, another idea for which the 1961 Washington conference served as a catalyst (Coombs, 1992; Benveniste, 2007). In the early 1960s, the idea of a planning institute that would have as its mandate the training of educational planners who work in agencies concerned with education, “top-level government officials” and experts (UNESCO, 1962), was floated around between UNESCO, the OECD, the World Bank and the Ford Foundation and had already come up at the 1960 Bellagio conference. The background of the perceived need of a planning institute was the decolonisation movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which left a vacuum of trained personnel in education in the newly independent postcolonial countries. University programmes offering training for education professionals were non-existent in developing countries and only beginning to emerge in the United States and the United Kingdom. The IIEP was thus created for the purpose of training educational planners in developing countries, and – despite some controversy – research was also included in the mandate of the institute (Coombs, 1992; Interview with Françoise Caillods, 2019).13 While the creation of the IIEP represented an instance of collaboration between some of the main actors of the emerging global governance structure of education, it also illustrated the fierce competition over the field of educational planning and was, to some extent, a consequence of turf struggles between UNESCO, the World Bank and the OECD. However, although the autonomy of the IIEP was considered vital and constituted a point of contention in the negotiation around its creation (Coombs, 1992), it was accepted that the institute became a part of the UNESCO structure. In the 1960s, UNESCO represented the main authority for education, and despite competition around the establishment of the IIEP, there was no real contestation that the institute should fall to UNESCO. As stated by Richard Demuth, a highranking World Bank official, “We thought that such an institute should be established and run by UNESCO” (The World Bank, 1984, p. 21). The World Bank supported the IIEP as it considered the collaboration with UNESCO in the field of educational planning the best way of proceeding in its emerging engagement with educational lending. The World Bank saw its support to the new institute as a kind of good will gesture to UNESCO and the first “concrete measure of cooperation” between UNESCO and the Bank before both organizations entered a Co-operative Programme (The World Bank, 1964). The OECD disengaged from 13 Françoise Caillods worked at the IIEP from 1969 to 2008, as a member of the professional staff and Deputy Director (Bray & Varghese, 2011).

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the project and, in 1968, created its own subsidiary structure with the Centre of Educational Research and Innovation (CERI). Both the IIEP and CERI received financial support from the Ford Foundation. CERI will be further discussed in Chaps. 6 and 7. Also, the US government considered the institute important in view of “analyzing problems of coordination between bilateral and multilateral programmes” (Delaguardia, 1963) and “systematiz[ing] the thinking about educational planning” (The World Bank, 1984, p. 21). This position is in line with Benveniste’s (2007) account, who maintained that the IIEP was created out of concerns about “potential conflict between international and bilateral missions sent to advise on education” (p. 3). The IIEP could not have been created without the United States backing the building of capacity for system-wide educational planning in newly independent countries. In fact, Coombs (1992) considered it “doubtful that the IIEP could have been created in any recent decade other than the 1960s” (p. 34). It is significant to note that the United States took the initiative to organize the first non-ministerial international conference on education, involving mostly researchers and experts, the International Conference on the World Crisis in Education, held at Williamsburg in 1967. This high-profile conference, called for by President Johnson, gave a central position to the IIEP, and Coombs’ book The world educational crisis: A systems analysis was launched at the conference (Caillods, 2011). Williamsburg, and by extension the US government, “arguably placed UNESCO at the heart of the move to make education central to development” (Draxler, 2022, p. 10; Perkins, 1968), while the OECD positioned itself as the key organization in charge of the rich countries.

3.6

The Role of Output-Oriented Governance of Education

From a global governance perspective, in those years educational planning was very much a top down approach, “a technical exercise taking place in the ministries of education” (Varghese, 2011, p. 94) that was legitimized by the claim to expertise and authority over what Srnicek (2013) has called “representational technologies”, defined as “material technologies which are being used to generate knowledge claims (in the form of numbers, maps, graphs, videos, and indicators) about complex situations” (p. 77). According to Varghese (2011), “educational planning represents an attempt to regulate and control learning. . .[it] takes place as part of the public intervention strategies to change public policies, priorities, and individual choices in a direction considered desirable for social progress” (p. 91). France’s planning tradition had an influence on the IIEP, as many French staff members worked at the institute, such as Raymond Poignant, who succeeded Philip Coombs as director. Poignant “was steeped in the French version of planification” (Interview with Hans

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Weiler, 2019);14 he had been instrumental in the drafting of the fourth education plan in France, and at the IIEP he initiated a research project on the financing of education, with the aim of examining under what circumstances countries could finance their expanding education systems in the context of economic growth (Caillods, 2011; Interview with Françoise Caillods, 2019). Philip Coombs (1970) defined “educational planning [as] the application of rational, systematic analysis to the process of educational development with the aim of making education more effective and efficient. . .” (p. 14). According to Benveniste (2007), who briefly followed Philip Coombs from the Kennedy administration to the IIEP and was involved in its creation, the planners believed that “‘rational integral planning’ would avoid the inevitable disorders, waste, corruption, or overlap of plain everyday politics” (p. 1) and “thought of planning as a technical professional activity divorced from politics” (p. 7). The planning fervour saw the rise of the “value-free development expert” (Berman, 1979, p. 161), of which Coombs, who claimed that “educational planning is ideologically neutral” (Coombs, 1970, p. 14), was a prime example.15 The managerial output-oriented governance model yielded power and legitimacy for planners: “The mark of planning is. . .the omnipresence of the expert, who embodies the coupling of rationalism and faith in technical feasibility” (Döring-Manteuffel, 2009, p. 399). The new experts of educational planning were trained in new study programs on educational planning and related programmes, such as economics of education, comparative education and business management, at American universities, such as Stanford, Harvard, Columbia and the University of Chicago, which were promoted by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, who invested large amounts of money in the support and expansion of social science departments (Berman, 1979; Sanders, 1965). These planners possessed rare skills that were high in demand. They were internationalists and worked in the newly created IOs, universities, governmental agencies and foundations, frequently moving between these organizations and travelling all over the world. Philip Coombs represents like no other the intersections and entanglements between the US government, philanthropic foundations, universities and the newly created IOs. Before being appointed, in 1961, as the first Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs in the Kennedy administration, he held the position of Director of Research of the Fund for the Advancement of Education of the Ford Foundation. He had also worked as a professor of economics at Amherst College and as a consultant to several business organizations (Rockefeller Archive Center, n.d.). Coombs was well connected with spheres of

14

The German Hans Weiler was director of the IIEP from 1974 to 1977, on a leave of absence from his academic position at Stanford University. 15 The claim that educational planning was “neutral” was controversial already at the time. DiezHochleitner (1963b), in his report on the International Conference on Educational Planning in Developing Countries, states that “planning could not be conceived without value judgments related to an existing social context and given situation. Thus planning implies normative decisions. However, there was no agreement whether there were no neutral planning techniques or whether every planning technique had a normative element once it was actually applied” (p. 2).

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power; he had contributed a paper on education to Nelson Rockefeller’s Special Studies Project (of which Henry Kissinger was the director) in 1956/57 (Coombs, 1956). Another example of a career between business, government and IOs akin to that of Philip Coombs is Robert S. McNamara who was an executive (and President) of Ford Motor Company, a trustee at the Ford Foundation and served as Secretary of Defense before becoming President of the World Bank (Berman, 1979). According to Erickson et al. (2013), McNamara was “perhaps the man most responsible for elevating the position of technocratic rationality within the US government in the 1960s” (p. 100). Both Coombs and McNamara were guided by a belief in a Cold War rationalistic approach to planning and played central roles in applying the output-oriented systems analysis model to education. In the late 1950s, the Ford Foundation invited researchers at the American RAND think tank to apply systems analysis to education, and the US Office of Education financed a large-scale quantitative study employing systems analysis to “determine relationships between school characteristics and educational output” (Kershaw & Roland, 1959, p. iii– iv). This initiative was sponsored by the Ford Foundation and led by Philip Coombs (Bürgi, 2017b). Robert McNamara, driven by his conviction “that systems analysis could help rationalize the economy within the margin of free choice” (Schlesinger, 1965, p. 647), used an output-oriented management tool designed by the RAND Corporation known as the Planning Programming Budgeting System (PPBS) in the Vietnam War. The Johnson administration mandated all federal agencies to implement this management tool, including the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) (Holden, 2018). PPBS was an output-oriented decision-making framework based on economic methods of cost-benefit analysis, systems analysis, and operations research that applied the methods of economics and econometrics to education policy issues. PPBS allowed planners to organize the budget in terms of programmes and desired output, in contrast to conventional budgeting, which started from the budget and then planned the programmes according to the available funds. Programme budgeting required the setting of strategic programme priorities. PPBS therefore became a decision-making tool and a policy instrument (Giovinazzi, 2022). Later, McNamara brought the PPBS to the World Bank, where it remains in place to this day (Natsios, 2010). The use of systems analysis to set new goals and priorities for education and the close links between military considerations and education in the Cold War context was manifested in the 1958 National Defense Education Act (NDEA) (Giovinazzi, 2022; Rudolph, 2002). It is therefore fair to say that “output governance’s epistemological foundation is to be found, among other things, in military research on war” (Bürgi, 2016, p. 409) and “forged primarily in and catalyzed by the United States” (p. 409), from where it was brought to the OECD. Following the student movement of 1968, both UNESCO’s IIEP and OECD’s CERI engaged with systems analysis principles, which furthered the managerial turn in institutional governance, illustrated by CERI’s project “Institutional Management in Higher Education” (IMHE) (Giovinazzi, 2022). In a 1969 UNESCO report mapping the OECD programme activities of interest to UNESCO, the work of the Committee for

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Scientific and Technical Personnel (CSTP)16 in educational statistics was characterized as “. . .the development of systems analysis and operations research techniques in educational planning” (UNESCO, 1969, p. 5). In 1971 the OECD carried out an experimental programme to examine applications of systems analysis. “which covered a variety of applications of management techniques” (OECD, 1979, p. 15).17 Giovinazzi (2022) sees the origins of the managerial turn in university governance in the Cold War planning movement, rather than – as commonly suggested – in the rise of neoliberalism. The systems analysis approach was a core feature of the methodological toolbox of educational planning, and comparison was an inherent building block of that approach, the rise of which must be ascribed to Cold War tensions “in the field of national economic and military competition” (OECD, 1979, p. 3). The report of the 1961 Washington conference gives a good sense of the context at the time: In the more advanced countries, economic growth has become a matter of competition, a yardstick for appraising the ability of different political systems to solve their economic and social problems. This competition has been sharpened by the fact that the Soviet Union has challenged the West in precisely these terms. . .The marked emphasis on education in the production effort of the Soviet Union has certainly contributed to a re-appraisal by the Western countries of the role of education in their social and economic development. (Svennilson et al., 1961, p. 12)

The report of the chairman of the 1967 Williamsburg conference stated: “Education is now a central preoccupation of every nation in the world, and. . .educational plans can be carried out with maximum success only if they are made in relation to educational systems in other countries” (International Conference on the World Crisis in Education, 1967). The Williamsburg conference report does not only establish comparison as a central tool of global governance of education, but also places the OECD and UNESCO at the centre of that system, assigning responsibility for developing countries to the latter: Besides continuing self-evaluation, educational systems should periodically subject themselves to friendly but critical external scrutiny by their peers. The feasibility and value of such “confrontations” have been clearly shown in the country studies arranged by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. For the developing regions of

16 The Committee for Scientific and Technical Personnel (CSTP) was established in the context of the Office for Scientific and Technical Personnel (OSTP), created in the OEEC in 1958 with the aim of increasing the supply of a scientifically and technically trained labour force (King, 2006). The initiative to create the OSTP came from the United States, as a reaction to the Sputnik shock (King, 2006; Papadopoulos, 1994). The CSTP was further institutionalized when the OEEC transferred into the OECD in 1961 (Bürgi, 2017a). Half of the CSTP’s budget was provided by the US Department of Defense, in support of the “new curriculum” movement for mathematical and scientific subjects (Bürgi, 2016; Papadopoulos, 1994). 17 The experiments with systems analysis resulted in several publications: (1) OECD, Efficiency in resource utilisation in education, 1969; (2) OECD, Systems analysis for educational planning: An annotated bibliography, 1969; (3) OECD, Decision-making in educational systems: The experience in three OECD countries, vol. 1: Synthesis and evaluation, 1977; vol. 2: Country reports, 1976 (OECD, 1979, p. 15).

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the world, a comparable process of mutual examination by neighbours might be arranged through UNESCO or an appropriate regional organization. (Perkins, 1968, p. 5)

The pursuit of comparison soon called for the development of representational technologies in the form of mathematical models, comparable statistics and indicators; the educational project was in dire need of data and statistics, an agenda that was heavily pursued by Philip Coombs (see also OEEC, 1960).18 A New York Times article of 1960 cites Francis Keppel, Dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education: “The time is clearly with us when educational assumptions and procedures. . .must be subjected to rigorous analysis” (Hechinger, 1960). The article continues that “in the field of statistics, it is far easier to ascertain the cost of raising pigs than the money spent on pupils.” Coombs frequently referred to education as “an undynamic, unprogressive industry”, in which unlike in other disciplines such as physics, “far too little prestige attaches to challenging and upsetting old practices or introducing radically new ones” (Hechinger, 1960). Efficient and rationalistic planning required new methods and representational technologies, for which the military, which represents the epitome of planning, was a source of inspiration. The heydays of educational planning represented the breeding ground for “the processes of standardization, comparison, and categorization that are essential to the scientific project” (Srnicek, 2013, p. 80). In this regard, the economistic quantitative approach that the OECD represented, was perceived as novel, dynamic and progressive, and the educational planners thought of themselves as “young radicals” (Interview with Ron Gass, 2017) who were breaking new ground. In our interview, Louis Emmerij reminisced about the attitude of the young radicals at the OECD: “So UNESCO should shut up and concentrate on the quality of the education. And let irresponsible people, like we were then, talk about the quantity of education at different levels” (Interview, 2018). This quote illustrates that the OECD’s empirical perspective was perceived as the avant-garde, while UNESCO’s humanistic-qualitative worldview was perceived as conservative and traditional. As we discuss in the concluding chapter of this book, this view of the OECD has certainly changed over the years. Today very few scholars (and we would speculate, even staff members) would perceive the OECD as a progressive force.

3.7

Conclusion

Revisiting the early years of educational planning is important because the representational technologies that emerged in the pioneering days of educational planning are ubiquitous today: Metrics, public management tools, and an outcome-oriented approach to educational planning. The planning experts whose knowledge claims were legitimized by the US government and American and UK universities, thought

18 The various methodological approaches to educational planning and their statistical implications were laid out in the OECD’s Educational Statistics Handbooks.

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of themselves as neutral, unpolitical and “value-free” agents of a better future, who applied their modern “transforming visions” (Scott, 1998, p. 86) to the developing world, equipped with numbers and new methodologies that were legitimized by the financial and symbolic power of American institutions and universities, and by IOs. Education became a central playing field for these transforming and modernizing visions, and was tied to geopolitics during the Cold War, illustrated by the strong role for education in the “Alliance for Progress” programme. International conferences, such as the first OECD conference in Washington, D.C. in 1961, the conference in Williamsburg in 1967 and the regional conferences held by UNESCO served as major catalysts of a new global governance structure of education guided by “a line of thinking concern[ing] the essential role of economists in assuring a sound balance in the aid given by the advanced to the developing countries” (OEEC, 1960, p. 4). Education was tied to the “imperialist expansion of modern economics” (Fourcade, 2010, p. 92), endowed by governments, universities and IOs with the authority of a scientific discipline. Through aid programmes, management approaches and technologies were transferred to developing countries. Just like the Marshall Plan had transferred business and management know-how from the United States to Europe, the Alliance for Progress programme introduced American management practices to Latin America. The 1960s with its unconditional faith in the societal possibilities of education, represented the heydays of educational planning, which enabled the emergence of a structure of global governance. The figure of Philip Coombs who moved between government circles, universities, foundations and international organizations illustrates the permeable boundaries of the emerging transnational governance space, such as between politics and science. Despite collaborations occurring between actors who knew each other and had common interests, competition was fierce, and UNESCO as an already established actor was challenged by new organizations. Differentiating itself from UNESCO, which was perceived as more old-fashioned in its qualitative orientation, the OECD positioned itself with its quantitative expertise at the forefront of a modernist vision of education as a driver of productivity. The OECD legitimized moving into UNESCO’s turf by tying education to the economy and claiming greater economic expertise. Although the OECD overreached into the field of development, it is clear that UNESCO was perceived as the main authority in that domain, illustrated by the fact that the IIEP was created as a UNESCO institute. The US government’s, and by extension, the American philanthropic organizations’ promotion of education as a key instrument in the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union, was instrumental in establishing these global governance structures. The US government’s and the Ford Foundation’s support to the IIEP backed UNESCO’s position as the agency responsible for developing countries, while the OECD was established as a key actor in educational planning in charge of the rich countries. This can be seen from the Williamsburg report and the Ford Foundation’s funding of CERI as a kind of OECD equivalent to the IIEP. The creation of CERI, which was more research-oriented, also exemplified the direction in which the OECD was moving – away from operational projects such as the MRP, which was ultimately perceived as a failure, to a role as policy agenda-setter. As Ron Gass put it,

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“what we were after is major policy ideas. . .we were not great believers in sending experts to countries as technical assistants. We were in favour of policy cooperation” (Interview with Ron Gass, 2017).19 UNESCO was pushed more and more into the role of an organization in charge of the developing world – a position it could not hold for long as it was challenged by the World Bank as will be shown in the next chapter. Although with the economic recession of the 1970s the belief “in education as an engine of growth and development and a great leveller in society remained a myth with only a few believers” (Bray & Varghese, 2011, p. 290), the planners of the 1960s have shaped to this day the possibilities within which our thinking of education is set.

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Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (1961a). Policy conference on economic growth and investment in education. Washington 16th–20th October 1961. OECD Publishing. OECD. (1961b, September 11). Directorate for Scientific Affairs, Policy conference on economic growth and Investment in Education, DAS/PD/61.9. OECD Archives. OECD. (1961c, May 24). Governing Committee for Scientific and Technical Personnel. Mediterranean Regional Project (STI-22). Note by the Secretariat. STP/GC(61)25. OECD Archives. OECD (1963). Press release from OECD (Press/A (63)70)”, dated 6 November 1963, Ministry of Education, International Office, 1959–1970, Cases Concerning International Organizations, box no. OE 53 1963–3 1964. Danish National Archives. OECD. (1964). Acts of the organisation (Vol. 3). OECD Archives. OECD. (1965a). The Mediterranean Regional Project. An experiment in planning by six countries. Country reports. OECD Publications. OECD. (1965b). Problems of human resources planning in Latin America and in the Mediterranean Regional Project countries. Long-term forecasts of manpower requirements and educational policies. Report on the Seminar held at Lima in March 1965 and complementary documents. OECD Archives. OECD. (1968). Committee for Scientific and Technical Personnel. Programme on scientific and Human Resources for Development. (Note by the Secretariat). Paris, 26th June, 1968. Ministry of Education, International Office, 1959–1970 Cases concerning International Organisations, OE38, 1968–1969, Danish National Archives. OECD. (1979, July 12). An historical overview of OECD work in educational planning. ED(79)15. OECD Archives. OEEC. (1960). Investment in education and economic growth. Organisation for European Economic Co-operation. Office for Scientific and Technical Personnel. I-22/675 E2. OECD Archives. Ossenbach, G., & Martìnez Boom, A. (2011). Itineraries of the discourses on development and education in Spain and Latin America (circa 1950–1970). Paedagogica Historica, 47(5), 679–700. Papadopoulos, G. S. (1994). Education 1960–1990. The OECD perspective (OECD historical series). Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Parmar, I. (2012). Foundations of the American century. The Ford, Carnegie, & Rockefeller Foundations in the rise of American power. Columbia University Press. Parnes, H. S. (2001). A Prof’s life. It’s more than teaching. Writer’s Showcase. Perkins, J. A. (1968). The international conference on the world crisis in education: Summary report of the conference chairman. The Journal of Educational Administration, IV(1), 3–12. Phillips, H. M. (1964). Investment in people. A new approach to economic development. The UNESCO Courier, October 1964, 17th year, pp. 9–11; 28–31. Read, G. (1966). The international educational act of 1966. The Phi Delta Kappan, 47(8), 406–409. Rockefeller Archive Center. (n.d.). Biographical sketch – Philip H. Coombs. The Ford Foundation: The Fund for the Advancement of Education. Ford Foundation Records, Series I, Subseries 3. FA# 740, Box 1. Rockefeller Archive Center. Rudolph, J. L. (2002). From world war to woods hole: The use of wartime research models for curriculum reform. Teachers College Record, 104(2), 212–241. Sanders, I. T. (1965, February 16). Irwin T. Sanders to John B. Howard. ITR Activities in Schools of Education. Ford Foundation. Series I: Subject Files. FA# 609, Box 1. Rockefeller Archive Center. Schlesinger, A. M. (1965). A thousand days. John F. Kennedy in the White House. Houghton Mifflin Company and The Riverside Press. Schmelzer, M. (2014). A club of the rich to help the poor? The OECD, “development”, and the hegemony of donor countries. In M. Frey, S. Kunkel, & C. R. Unger (Eds.), International organizations and development, 1945–1990 (Palgrave Macmillan transnational history series). Palgrave Macmillan.

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Schmelzer, M. (2015). ‘Kristensen, Thorkil’. In B. Reinalda, K. J. Kille, & J. Eisenberg (Eds.), IO BIO, Biographical Dictionary of Secretaries-General of International Organizations. www.ru. nl/fm/iobio Schmelzer, M. (2016). The hegemony of growth. The OECD and the making of the economic growth paradigm. Cambridge University Press. Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state. How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press. Srnicek, N. (2013). Representing complexity: The material construction of world politics. Doctoral thesis. The London School of Economics and Political Science. Svennilson, I., Edding, F., & Elvin, L. (1961). Targets for education in Europe. A study of policy considerations related to economic growth. Policy conference on economic growth and investment, Washington, 16–20 October, 1961. OECD. Teodoro, A. (2020). The end of isolationism: Examining the OECD influence in Portuguese education policies, 1955–1974. Paedagogica Historica, 56(4), 535–547. The White House (1961, February 27). Office of the White House Press Secretary. The Ford Foundation: The Fund for the Advancement of Education. Ford Foundation Records, Series I, Subseries 3. FA# 740, Box 1. Rockefeller Archive Center. The White House. (1967, October 8). Text of the remarks of the President at the Conference on World Education, Williamsburg, Virginia. HA NI Becker, Hellmut Teil Max-Planck-Archiv, Nr. 287. Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz. The World Bank. (1964, October 23). Statement from Mr Woods to the Unesco General Conference Paris October 23, 1964. Folder item No. 30151673. The World Bank Archives. The World Bank (1984, March 10). Transcript of interview with Richard H. Demuth by Robert Asher. The World Bank/IFC Archives Oral History Program. Tröhler, D. (2010). Harmonizing the educational globe. World polity, cultural features, and the challenges to educational research. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 29(1), 5–17. UNESCO. (1961, December 7). Meeting in preparation for a meeting with OECD officers. (7 December 1961, Director-General’s office). ODG/RIO/Memo/25.401 Annex. UNESCO Archives. UNESCO. (1962, August 20). General Conference, 12th session. 12C/PRG/19. Paris: UNESCO. Ford Foundation Records, Grants U-Z. FA# 732I. Reel 0679, Folder 1963 July 1–1965 June 30. Rockefeller Archive Center. UNESCO. (1964a, October 30). Relations avec l’O.C.D.E. Memo confidentiel de Alfonso de Silva à M. Paul Bertrand. RIO/ORG/Memo 27.974. UNESCO Archives. UNESCO. (1964b, October 30). Relations avec l’OCDE, RIO/ORG/41/3.1, 330.2 A 01 OECD 18 Part I, document reference: RIO/ORG/Memo 27.975 (UNESCO external relations office). UNESCO Archives. UNESCO. (1968). Letters regarding Meeting on educational aid with attachments, RIO/ORG/41/ 3.4, 330.19 A 02 OECD, document reference: RIO/ORG/Memo 3642. UNESCO Archives. UNESCO. (1969). Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). RIO/ORG/ 41/3.1, 330.2 A 01 OECD 18 Part I. UNESCO Archives. Vaizey, J. E. (1962). The economics of education. Free Press (Macmillan). Varghese, N. V. (2011). State is the problem and state is the solution: Changing orientations in educational planning. In M. Bray & M. V. Varghese (Eds.), Directions in educational planning. International experiences and perspectives (pp. 89–108). IIEP. Wanderley, S., & Barros, A. (2020). The Alliance for Progress, modernization theory, and the history of management education: The case of CEPAL in Brazil. Management Learning, 51(1), 55–72. Williams, G. (1987). The OECD’s Mediterranean regional project. Economics of Education. Research and Studies, 335–336.

Chapter 4

The Struggle Between UNESCO and the World Bank Over Education for Development

4.1

Introduction

This chapter examines the relationship between the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the World Bank between the 1960s and approximately the year 2015 by focusing on two important periods in the history of education for development: The Co-operative Program (hereafter CP) between the two organizations that was established in 1964 and lasted officially until 1989; and the Education for All (EFA) initiative that was launched in 1990. The chapter shows that especially the 1960s and 1970s represented a period of intense collaboration and turf struggles between UNESCO and the World Bank, in the course of which the Bank challenged and overtook UNESCO as the leading international agency for education. Long before the CP with UNESCO was officially terminated in 1989, the World Bank arguably developed into the biggest external funder and most influential policy shaper in education in developing countries (Mundy & Verger, 2015; Klees, 2012), while the influence of UNESCO declined (Burnett, 2010; Elfert, 2018). EFA further illustrated UNESCO’s struggles to reaffirm its legitimacy as the designated UN agency for education and find its place in the complex landscape of global governance of education for development dominated by the World Bank. Both the CP and EFA illustrate some of the challenges and consequences of global governance structures in education, such as the lack of country ownership (despite rhetoric to the contrary), standardization, homogenization and narrowing of education. The chapter is structured in two sections: The first section focuses on the evolution of the UNESCO-World Bank CP, and the second part examines the modes of governance of EFA. The conclusion summarizes the main findings of our analysis and offers a critical discussion of the effects that these initiatives had on the position of the World Bank and UNESCO in the landscape of global governance of education, as well as on educational norms, policies and practices.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Elfert, C. Ydesen, Global Governance of Education, Educational Governance Research 24, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40411-5_4

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The Struggle Between UNESCO and the World Bank Over Education for Development

The UNESCO-World Bank Co-operative Program, 1964–19891 The Establishment of the Co-operative Program: Rationale and Challenges

The central role accorded to UNESCO in the 1960s in the field of education for development, discussed in the last chapter, is part of the reason why the World Bank sought collaboration with UNESCO when it started to grant educational loans. When the World Bank, initially created with the mandate of financing the reconstruction of Europe, turned its lending activities to the developing world, it focused on infrastructure development and industrial production. However, in the 1960s, the high time of decolonisation, fuelled by educational and manpower planning and human capital theory, the Bank got drawn into the hype of educational expansion, and in September 1962, the World Bank granted its first educational loan to Tunisia in the amount of five million dollars for “secondary and technical school construction” (Office of Information, 1964). Although World Bank officials were initially reluctant to get involved in education, some saw this move favourably as a way of “taking the stain out of” the profits the Bank was making (The World Bank, 1986, p. 8).2 The financing of education also became possible due to the World Bank establishing, in 1960, a “soft loan” scheme with the creation of the International Development Association (IDA), which was financed mostly by member state contributions (Benveniste, 2007). In contrast to UNESCO’s humanistic and human rights-driven approach to education, the interest of the World Bank in education was closely tied to the rise of the field of the economics of education and increasing debates on the economic benefits of education in terms of investment in human capital and as a factor of productivity. As formulated in a statement to the Executive Directors’ Board by Hugh B. Ripman, Assistant Director in the Projects Department, Whereas previously great stress had been laid on the basic human right of people to receive the benefits of education. . .more recently the emphasis has changed, and it has become fashionable to pay attention to the aspect of education which is called the development of human resources. (Ripman, 1962, p. 2)

Along these lines, the Bank’s educational investments were geared towards manpower and economic development in member countries. It was recommended that the IDA prioritize the secondary level, which had so far been treated as the 1

With permission by Elsevier, this section reproduces/heavily draws on Elfert, 2021. It has been suggested that one of the reasons why the World Bank turned to “soft” aid (education) were corruption charges associated with “hard” aid (such as building bridges and roads). However, it is doubtful that education is less prone to corruption and financial leakages. Fear of corruption was one reason why India was reluctant to borrow for education for a long time. Finally, in 1991, India accepted a structural adjustment loan from the World Bank for the District Primary Education Project (DPEP). 2

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“Cinderella” in many countries but was considered most critical for the training of teachers and staff needed for the economy (Ripman, 1962, p. 5). A memorandum from the Bank’s President George Woods of October 1963, titled “Proposed Bank/ IDA Policies in the Field of Education”, therefore limited the Bank’s educational lending to projects “in the fields of (a) vocational and technical education and training at various levels, and (b) general secondary education” (The World Bank, 1971, p. 12). When the World Bank started giving loans for education, it seemed the obvious solution to draw on the expertise of UNESCO, the UN’s specialized agency for education which in addition to general expertise in education, had an Economic Analysis and Educational Planning Division. To formalize this relationship, in 1964 the World Bank and UNESCO signed a Co-operative Agreement, out of which the Education Financing Division (EFD) was established, a joint unit located in UNESCO, with the purpose of carrying out technical missions to assist governments in the identification and preparation of projects and the formulation of funding requests to the World Bank. The CP lasted officially until 1989. As will be described below, the relationship between the two organizations changed in the 25 years of the duration of the CP. It started as a somewhat equal partnership, in which UNESCO assumed the role of preparing the educational projects financed by the Bank. From the 1970s onwards, however, the World Bank built its own staff resources in education, and its partnership with UNESCO progressively eroded. World Bank staffers gave some thought to what the Bank’s contribution to education could be “without danger of intruding on aspects of education which are properly the responsibility of other agencies” (Ripman, 1962, p. 5). Given the concern that it might step on the turf of other organisations, the World Bank closely cooperated with other agencies during the time when it started educational lending. An example of this cooperation was the creation of the International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP), discussed in the previous chapter. Apart from the Bank’s interest in training educational planners and building capacities of education ministries in developing countries, its support to the IIEP was also to some extent a kind of good will gesture to UNESCO, and the Bank saw it as the first “concrete measure of cooperation” between UNESCO and the Bank (The World Bank, 1964a). In internal memos and strategy papers, the Bank legitimized its entry into education by emphasizing the technical-managerial know-how that the World Bank could bring to the task of supporting developing countries in building their education systems, in terms of budgeting, administration, and improving educational statistics and other data as the basis for good planning (Ripman, 1962, p. 11). UNESCO also had its reasons to collaborate with the World Bank. In the context of the United Nations Development Decade (1960–1970) the UN strongly encouraged international organizations to work together, as “a source of increasing efficiency” (Thant, 1965, p. 9). Against the background of increasing duplication of work among UN organizations, the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) pressured UNESCO to implement the UN’s 1964 Economic and Social Council resolution 984 on the UN Development Decade, urging the specialized agencies and member governments to promote “close inter-relationships among the

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worldwide and regional planning institutes, so as to ensure complimentary action and avoid undesirable overlapping and competition” (United Nations, 1964). As a UNESCO staff member wrote in a memo to a colleague, “The time may well be approaching when we should bring pressure on the Bank for the use of joint missions which would eliminate the need for doubling up as at present” (UNESCO, 1961). Enhancing UNESCO’s technical capacity and getting the organization more involved in the broader UN efforts with regard to development, had already been a major concern for UNESCO in the 1950s. It was particularly important for UNESCO to collaborate with the UN Expanded Program of Technical Assistance (EPTA) and later the UN Special Fund (which merged in 1965 to form the United Nations Development Programme/UNDP), allowing the organization to access extrabudgetary funds and widen its activities in light of notorious underfunding (Jones, 1988). After René Maheu took office as Director-General of UNESCO in 1962, he “led the organization deeper into the realm of action than ever before” (p. 101). Another reason for UNESCO’s cooperation with the World Bank might have been its declining relationship with the UNDP, the main funding agency of UNESCO’s operational projects at the time, leading the organization to look for a new partnership with a potentially powerful funder. Some of our interviewees also suggested that René Maheu thought UNESCO could “use the World Bank to promote education. . .once people can read and write, they can think” (Interview with Michel Bourgeois, 2016).3 Despite the obvious reasons for a collaboration between the World Bank and UNESCO in the field of education, World Bank staffers perceived significant ontological differences with UNESCO and were reluctant to engage closely with the organization. The first head of education at the World Bank, Ricardo Diez Hochleitner, was seconded from UNESCO’s educational planning office in early 1963 and functioned as a mediator between the two agencies (Diez-Hochleitner, 1997; Jones, 1992). Duncan Ballantine’s participation as the World Bank’s representative in UNESCO’s 1963 General Conference, recommended by Diez Hochleitner, was a contested issue. Around the same time there was some debate among World Bank staffers whether President George Woods should speak at the Annual Meeting of the United States Commission for UNESCO. Bank staffers concluded that the reason why the Bank’s presence in UNESCO events seemed desirable was to let people “know about the broadening scope of the Bank’s interest and to realize that the Bank is not just a lending agency” (The World Bank, 1964b). In a hand-written comment Richard H. Demuth expressed his approval of Wood’s participation in the meeting: “I don’t believe our reputation in Wall St is so fragile – or UNESCO’s is so malodorous – that your participation in this meeting would affect our ability to sell bonds” (The World Bank, 1964b). The marriage between the two organizations was not an easy one as they represented very different logics of governance and were bound to different

3

Michel Bourgeois was a member of the professional staff of the EFD from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s.

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constitutional requirements. UNESCO’s education sector was staffed predominantly with educators and philosophers and directed by Ministers of Education, Culture and Science; the World Bank’s staff consisted mainly of economists, and the organization was directed by Ministers of Finance. UNESCO’s work was underpinned by approaches from the humanities and broader social sciences, while the World Bank was guided by the expanding – but narrower – field of economics. While UNESCO had to accommodate the political claims of the newly independent countries of the “Third World”, the World Bank was closely aligned with the foreign policy priorities of the United States to prevent communist influence in those countries, supported by the US government and actors close to the government such as the big American philanthropic foundations, notably the Ford Foundation, which funded the new study programmes of educational planning and economics of education that emerged in some of the leading American universities, such as Harvard, Stanford and the University of Chicago (Fourcade, 2010; Elfert, 2020). The World Bank was a “chosen instrument” (President Kennedy, cited in Oliver, 1989, p. 1) of the mission of the Kennedy administration to promote international development as a foreign policy issue that had identified aid and education as important tools to expand American influence (Oliver, 1989), illustrated by the fact that the Kennedy administration played an instrumental role in conceptualizing the United Nations Development Decade (1960–1970), founded the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in 1961 and built education into its foreign assistance programmes, such as the “Alliance for Progress” programme for Latin America. The main ideological tension lay in UNESCO’s belief in education as a right and public good, while the Bank considered education primarily as a means to an end, namely as an investment in productivity and economic growth. An example of the ideological tension between the two organizations was their disagreement on the approach to literacy. Literacy had been high on UNESCO’s agenda since the beginning, and it represented a priority for René Maheu (Maheu, 1964). After UNESCO’s 1962 General Conference approved a universal literacy campaign, UNESCO submitted, in 1963, a proposal for the realization of such a campaign to the UN General Assembly, which was meant to be UNESCO’s contribution to the United Nations Development Decade. However, the proposal lacked support, especially by the United States, forcing UNESCO to downscale its plans, which resulted in the Experimental World Literacy Programme (EWLP), announced in 1965 (Elfert, 2018; Jones, 1988). People in the World Bank were taken aback when René Maheu spoke about UNESCO’s aspiration for a universal literacy campaign before the UN General Assembly in 1963. Demuth wrote to George Woods: “I think it is very unfortunate he gave renewed support at this juncture to the universal literacy movement” (Demuth, 1963). While UNESCO dreamt of universal literacy campaigns to “make the universal right to education a living fact” (Maheu, 1964, p. 8), the World Bank’s move into education, a field that was outside of its original mandate of post-war reconstruction, was related to the recognition of the “third factor” (the residual factor) of economic growth and thus the need of developing countries to invest in education. Guided by a managerial approach to education, endowed with scientific authority, the World Bank was instrumental in reducing the

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view of education to skill acquisition (Cowen, 2018). An example was the promotion of “diversified” curricula, including practical rather than academic subjects, such as woodshop for the boys and electric cookers for girls, to ensure that students would find a job. As formulated in a memo in relation to an education project in Malaysia, the “underlying principle is to achieve a movement from ‘white collar’ education to ‘blue collar’ training” (Calika, 1969). Although World Bank staffers perceived UNESCO as strange and commented on some of its idiosyncrasies, such as the long speeches held by country representatives at the General Conference, it is clear from the tone of the correspondence that the Bank respected UNESCO’s expertise. In the 1960s UNESCO was clearly in a position of authority in the field of education. According to a UNESCO officer who worked for many years as the chief administrator of the EFD, “at that time UNESCO had a lot of credibility. It was a rising star” (Interview with Dimitri Argyropoulos, 2017).4 As George Woods wrote to René Maheu, “we hope to take full advantage of Unesco’s knowledge and experience in evolving our approach to education” (Woods, 1963).5 In the 1960s the tone was often cordial, and many professional officers were on a first name basis. Although UNESCO was considered the authority in education at the time, both World Bank and UNESCO staffers felt that, at the operational level, the World Bank could bring a “structure” and effectiveness to UNESCO that the organization was missing: “The World Bank had a system for all of its projects and applied the same system for education. . .structurally, it was coherent” (Interview with Dimitri Argyropoulos, 2017). The educational lending project cycle, from the identification to the implementation of a project, which lasted approximately five years, illustrates the bureaucratic structure that the World Bank applied to its lending operations (Elfert, 2021). The project cycle consisted of six stages: (i) project identification; (ii) the preparation mission; (iii) project appraisal; (iv) project negotiation and approval; (v) project implementation; (vi) project completion and evaluation. The World Bank’s “structure” was enabled by corporate output-oriented management tools such as the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS), that had been developed by the RAND Corporation (Natsios, 2010). The Bank was guided by the “logic of the economic field”, defined by Bourdieu (1996) as “the exclusive attention to production and productivity” (p. 120). Through its lending operations, the Bank diffused the new paradigm of education as human capital across the developing world. Its claim to rationalistic-technocratic expertise remained an important aspect

4

Dimitri Argyropoulos started to work in UNESCO in 1962. After the launch of the UNESCOWorld Bank CP, he joined the EFD where he worked for 27 years, holding positions as assistant director (1979–1985) and acting director (1985–1987). 5 The World Bank’s Education Director Duncan Ballantine mentioned that the Bank admired the statistical work of UNESCO: “when we. . . got into more statistical approaches to the development process, especially when we wrote that 1974 education paper, we found the statistical branch of Unesco to be by far the best thing there was” (The World Bank, 1986, p. 14). The struggle over statistics will be the focus of the next chapter.

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of its self-identity and legitimization and drove its expansion towards a development agency. This expansion came at the price of intense field struggles with UNESCO.

4.2.2

Shifting Dynamics in the 1970s

In the late 1960s a series of circumstances gave a new impetus to the CP. In 1968 Robert McNamara took office as President of the World Bank. In his first official speech he declared that he regarded “the World Bank as something more than a bank, as a development agency” (Sharma, 2017, p. 3). He broadened the scope of educational loans, increased lending in education and placed the focus on the poorest countries. In the aftermath of the World Bank’s report Partners in Development, otherwise known as the Pearson Report, published in 1969, which meant to address prevailing “aid fatigue” (Woods, 1967; The World Bank, 1983), “education lending grew strongly during the 1970s, from $163 million annually in 1970-1974 to $336 million in 1975–77 ($590 million annually in 1980–1984)” (Kapur et al., 1997, p. 3460). This time of increased lending for education resulted in an intensification of the work of the EFD. While UNESCO presented the World Bank as a mere funder of educational efforts driven by UNESCO (McEwing, 1971), the World Bank’s 1974 Education Sector Working Paper revealed the World Bank’s claim to moving from a funder to an intellectual authority in education. Among other things, the paper added the importance of social dimensions to the mere emphasis on economic growth as the path to development (Williams, 1975), a point that UNESCO had made all along. In UNESCO, the 1974 Education Sector Working Paper was met with irritation. Staffers within and outside the EFD at UNESCO and some countries felt that they should have been consulted. In retrospect, Duncan Ballantine conceded that the Bank displayed a certain arrogance: “You know, they probably were right. We were being a little bit Bank-ish and high-handed” (The World Bank, 1986, pp. 16–17). Reorganizations at the Bank further played a role in diminishing UNESCO’s influence in defining lending programmes in countries. The division of the Education Projects Department into smaller regional divisions (The World Bank, 1986) increased the operational capacity of the Bank in the regions. Prior to this change, UNESCO’s regional representation had given UNESCO an advantage. Another major point of contention throughout the 1970s was that the Bank wanted to have more leeway to assign consultants to work on World Bank projects (IBRD/IDA, 1969; UNESCO, 1969), while UNESCO insisted on its position as the UN’s designated organization for education, as this letter written by René Maheu to Demuth illustrates: In the United Nations system the provision of technical assistance in the field of education is the responsibility of Unesco. . . . In no circumstances could Unesco agree that its views on technical matters, including the competence of educational experts, should be subject to the approval of the higher instances of any other institution not specialized in education. (Maheu, 1969)

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Under the new Director-General Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, who succeeded René Maheu in 1974, tensions between UNESCO and the World Bank increased. Although M’Bow expressed his determination to strengthen the CP (M’Bow, 1974) and supported it for a while, he was under pressure from the Russians, who were suspicious of the programme because they considered it an American influence in UNESCO. Another point of contention was a management-style review of the CP that the World Bank demanded after 10 years of the programme’s duration, that UNESCO perceived as disrespectful. In a memo commenting on the draft report of the 1976 review of the CP, Richard Johanson (1976) of the World Bank wrote that “unless. . .measures are taken to improve quality, I believe the CP will become increasingly irrelevant and useless to the Bank”. UNESCO’s status was degraded to a “labor pool” (The World Bank, 1977, p. 3), and there was increasing doubt in the Bank that UNESCO’s work would be “responsive to the Bank’s needs” (World Bank/IFC, 1976, p. 2). The 1970s were characterized by constant turf battles between the two organizations, and in the course of the decade, the World Bank overtook UNESCO as the authority for education in developing countries. The Bank expanded its educational lending programme, built resources and expertise, and the cooperation with UNESCO, from the perspective of the Bank, became more and more of a straitjacket. UNESCO desperately tried to remind the Bank of its mandate in education, but the Bank displayed ever greater self-confidence in dismissing UNESCO’s claim to be the main authority for education. In a response to a draft provided by UNESCO for a proposed “guide” on World Bank technical assistance for education, the Bank commented that “it is not entirely accurate to attribute Bank lending for education solely to Unesco’s powers of persuasion” (World Bank, 1979, p. 2), and “it will not be surprising that we take exception that Unesco is the only agency of the United Nations competent in the field of education” (p. 6). By the mid-1970s it was clear that the CP had entered a period of crisis (Stewart, 1976), and that the Bank was making concessions to use the CP for diplomatic reasons as it did not know how to end the arrangement. UNESCO shifted from claiming to be the main authority in education to making do with a status of equal partner, which it had never been in the eyes of the World Bank. By the end of the 1970s the Bank viewed the CP with UNESCO as an administrative nuisance rather than a productive and mutually benefitting collaboration.

4.2.3

The Expansion of Education in the World Bank

The 1980s marked the final phase of the decline of the CP, accelerated by an epistemic shift in the World Bank. Up until the late 1970s, the Bank’s methodology had been dominated by manpower forecasting, which was quite controversial among renowned economists of education (Blaug, 1970; Interview with Francis Lethem,

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2017).6 Under pressure from some professionals in the Bank such as Stephen Heyneman who had been trained in the rate of return approach, the new Education Director Aklilu Habte established, in 1978, an External Advisory Panel on Education, with David E. Bell, Executive Vice President of the Ford Foundation, as the Chair, Frederick Champion Ward of the Ford Foundation as the coordinator, and Louis Emmerij, at the time President of the OECD Development Centre, and MaryJean Bowman as members. The purpose of the panel was “to lay the intellectual groundwork for diversification of methodology” (Interview with Stephen Heyneman, 2018).7 The 1980 policy paper which followed, known as the Bell Report, recommended that the Bank should diversify its approach and expand its investments to primary education, secondary and general higher education, and education research. This expansion of areas of investment could not have been justified under the manpower forecasting approach. The Bell Report opened up potential for increased collaboration between the World Bank and UNESCO, but also provided a legitimization for the Bank to move away from UNESCO. Based on the Bell Report, in 1980, the Bank published another Education Sector Report, which diversified the field of activities for the World Bank and made it easier to give loans for primary and secondary education and invest in education research (Interview with Stephen Heyneman, 2018; see also Kapur et al., 1997). Another key event was the highly critical evaluation of education projects carried out by the Bank’s Operation Evaluation Department (OED), Review of Bank Operations in the Education Sector, launched in 1978, which “brought to light many project deficiencies later seen to be common in Bank operations” (Kapur et al., 1997, p. 346) and “recommended the Bank ‘systematically address the broader needs of the education systems rather than those of the project’” (p. 346). As a consequence of the report, the Bank “shifted from concrete and delimited projects to sectorwide institutions and national policies” (p. 346). The Bell Report, the 1980 sector policy paper and the OED evaluation facilitated the expansion of education in the Bank. UNESCO desperately tried to hold on to some influence, using the argument that it was an organization of the United Nations, whose technical assistance “cannot be treated at the same level as the assistance that universities or institutions can provide that do not pursue the same aims” (UNESCO, 1982a). As noted by a World Bank officer, the “long-running problem with UNESCO [is] their belief that Unesco’s ‘mandate’ in education gives them some special status regarding all Bank loans (and advice) in that sector” (Riley, 1983a). The Bank’s position was that it was up to the borrowing country to decide who should carry out the technical assistance component (Riley, 1983b). The gist of the Bank’s position was formulated in a World Bank memo:

6 Francis Lethem worked at the World Bank between 1964 and 1994. Among other positions he was Division Chief for Education projects in Western Africa (1972–1975) and projects advisor, Eastern Africa (1988–1994). 7 Stephen Heyneman joined the World Bank in 1976, where he worked for 22 years, among other positions as Division Chief for Eastern Europe.

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Since 1964, the Bank has developed its own expertise in respect of education projects and no longer needs to rely on Unesco for such expertise. . .Unesco would like to retain the advantageous position accorded to it by the Memorandum of Understanding, whereas the Bank’s objective. . .is to make use of Unesco’s expertise when this is appropriate. . . .(World Bank/IFC, 1982)

At the time, the Bank had changed its regulations in a way that the use of EFD staff was no longer free to the World Bank but had to be budgeted. According to a former World Bank official, “that was really the end of the program”, because it was more cost-efficient to hire consultants, who were more flexible and could be hired short term (Interview with Alexander ter Weele, 2017).8 Not only did “the division chiefs resent that a big part of their budget was taken out and given to UNESCO” (Interview with Birger Fredriksen, 2018),9 but they also complained increasingly about UNESCO’s performance, such as going over budget, delays in starting the missions and lack of expertise of UNESCO personnel. Two reviews that were carried out in 1983, one of the Bank/UNESCO CP and the other one of Technical Assistance in Education Projects financed by the World Bank, stirred up tensions and resentment between the two organizations. From the perspective of the World Bank, the terms of the cooperation provided in the original Memorandum of Understanding were outdated and should be modified to reflect the evolution of its role and expertise in educational lending and project planning (World Bank/IFC, 1982). UNESCO officials were worried that they might have to accept calls for proposals, meaning that UNESCO would not automatically be the designated agency anymore for World Bank educational lending and considered ways to improve its efficiency, lower costs and provide more specialized personnel (UNESCO, 1982b). While at the time of the Bell Report, UNESCO’s strategy was to persuade the World Bank, referring to its authority and experience, in the negotiations of the reviews, UNESCO, becoming increasingly anxious and still holding on to the idea of being “equal partners” (World Bank/IFC, 1983), shifted its strategy to blaming and shaming the Bank in terms of not having respected the original agreement between the two organizations.

8

Alexander H. ter Weele worked for the World Bank between 1974 and 1999. Among other positions, he was Division Chief for East Asia and West Africa, and Deputy Director of the Bank’s Economic Development Institute. 9 Birger Fredriksen served for 20 years, until the end of 2004, as education planner and later Director for Human Development for Africa in the World Bank. Before joining the Bank, he spent two years as a researcher at the OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) and ten years in various positions at UNESCO. Between 2005 and 2015, he served as a member and chair of the Governing Board of the IIEP.

4.2

The UNESCO-World Bank Co-operative Program, 1964–1989

4.2.4

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An “Alien Body”

The second half of the 1970s and the 1980s were difficult years for UNESCO. M’Bow’s sympathy for the New International Economic Order (NIEO), which called for greater autonomy for developing countries from Western corporations, made the organization more vulnerable to the heavy attacks launched against it by ultra-conservative forces in the United States, such as the Heritage Foundation.10 Around the time when the Bell panel was set up, UNESCO established the MacBride Commission on Communications, which produced the report Many Voices One World (UNESCO, 1980). The report, which represented UNESCO’s contribution to the NIEO, proposed a “New World Information and Communication Order” (NWICO), meant to reduce Third World dependency on American-Western and Russian news agencies. The United States was hostile towards the initiative and used it as a pretext to withdraw from the organization in 1984.11 In this highly divisive atmosphere, the EFD was seen by many in UNESCO even more than before as an “alien body” (The World Bank, 1975), or “un état dans l’état” [a state within a state], as a former EFD professional put it (Interview with Lucila Jallade, 2020).12 The Russians disliked the unit as they considered the World Bank a capitalist and American tool. “It was a US influence on UNESCO’s – a powerful influence on a powerful sector, which was education and manpower” (Interview with Dimitri Argyropoulos, 2017). Also, in terms of its epistemological orientation, the EFD was perceived as different, a field “homologous” with the World Bank, in the Bourdieusian sense, defined as “a resemblance within a difference” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 106). As a former officer of the EFD, an economist, said: “Overall all this business of planning and economics, capital, human capital and so on, was not that important to the rest of UNESCO” (Interview with Lucila Jallade, 2020). The whole approach of educational planning was controversial in UNESCO, and there was “ideological opposition to. . .planning as neo-colonialism” (Interview with Lucila Jallade, 2020). Members of the EFD were “looked upon as the bank people” (Interview with Dimitri Argyropoulos, 2017), also because they were highly paid and were sometimes travelling first class, in accordance with World Bank regulations at the time. Another issue was that in the EFD recruitment occurred on

The Heritage Foundation presented UNESCO as an organization “that goes beyond cultural aspirations to ideological advocacy. . .[is] biased increasingly towards socialist economics and a utopian strain of internationalism that is unsympathetic (often hostile) to the free enterprise system” (Heritage Foundation, 1982, p. 1). 11 The scholarly literature has considered the withdrawal of the United States as an intentional act pursued by a small group of ideological zealots in the US government (Coate, 1988; Preston et al., 1989; Wanner, 2015). 12 Argentinian Lucila Jallade worked for the Development Planning Council in Buenos Aires, the IIEP in Paris and the World Bank before joining the UNESCO-World Bank Education Financing Division (EFD) in 1978. After its termination, she worked for another 10 years in UNESCO’s Division for Policy and Sector Analysis (PSA) and as Director of the Division for Education Reconstruction and Development (ERD), which carried out education sector policy. 10

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the basis of qualifications rather than geographical considerations (IBRD/IDA, 1969), which diverted from the general recruitment policy in UNESCO: “It wasn’t popular. . .EFD people. . .were concerned all the time that they weren’t going to get budget.” (Interview with Alex ter Weele, 2017). In the 1980s the relationship between the World Bank and UNESCO had turned sour. “To Unesco’s chagrin, the Bank has declined to accept the proposition that Unesco must be accorded a status of something more than a ‘consulting firm’” (Riley, 1983c). The tone of the correspondence had become much more reserved and even frosty compared to the 1960s, when World Bank and UNESCO officials had been on friendly terms. Bank staffers had made up their mind that the collaboration with UNESCO was no longer beneficial to them. As Duncan Ballantine said in 1986: “The Bank is paying two million dollars or more per year for something that doesn’t give it one penny worth of benefit” (The World Bank, 1986, p. 14). Other issues contributed to the deterioration of the relationship, such as personnel matters. The EFD dwindled to 15 P-513 staff at the end of the 1980s; from 35 at its peak in the 1970s. This reduced the work capacity of EFD to a level which made it insignificant for the Bank. Although by the 1980s, the CP was considered a deficit project by the Bank, it was politically delicate to end the agreement. As stated by a former World Bank official, the Bank “saw it as a necessary cost on the political side, that we couldn’t shut UNESCO out. . .” (Interview with Alex ter Weele, 2017). However, there was more and more talk in the Bank of terminating the CP, and in internal memos, this recommendation was made to the Bank management. Finally, in a letter dated August 22, 1988 to Federico Mayor, who succeeded M’Bow as DirectorGeneral of UNESCO in 1987, World Bank President Barber Conable officially terminated the CP as of June 1989, arguing that “the CP format is no longer appropriate in light of changing world development requirements and evolving Bank/UNESCO capacity” (The World Bank, 1988). The fact that the World Bank fired UNESCO was softened by offering the prospect of collaboration in a wider range of areas, not only education but also “science and technology” and “management of natural resources and the environment”. In Mayor’s response, dated 13 September 1988, he went along with framing the termination of the CP as an expansion of the collaboration between the two organizations, but could not help to include a critical remark, in that “Unesco is considered [by national authorities] as a partner who is not at the same time a judge and a party in discussions on educational strategies” (UNESCO, 1988). This was a hint at the inappropriate power the World Bank had acquired as both funder and policy shaper. As formulated by Richard Sack (1988) in a paper that circulated among UNESCO staff at the time, the World Bank had assumed the position of both judge and party (“juge et partie”), resulting in countries becoming “doubly dependent on the World Bank – financially (for mobilizing its own resources and those of the other agencies it influences); and

13

P-5 is the highest salary range for professional staff in the United Nations system. It is only surpassed by the D-levels (director level for senior professional staff). P-5 employees often hold a doctoral degree.

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intellectually (for policy analysis on which financial packages are increasingly based)” (p. 2).

4.3 4.3.1

Education for All From the International Working Group on Education (IWGE) to Dakar

The termination of the Co-operative Program did not mean a complete disruption of the interactions between the World Bank and UNESCO. In UNESCO, the EFD was morphed into the Division for Policy and Sector Analysis (PSA), which continued to carry out externally financed sector analysis projects. Throughout the 1990s, the PSA continued to work with the World Bank, as well as other partners, such as the UNDP, UNICEF and regional development banks (Interviews with Klaus Bahr, 2017, and Antoine Schwartz, 2017).14 UNESCO and the World Bank also continued to collaborate outside the structures of UNESCO headquarters in the context of the International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP), in particular the International Working Group on Education (IWGE), which the IIEP coordinates. The IWGE emerged from the meetings of the “Bellagio group”, launched in 1972 at the initiative of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations as a forum of exchange for donors active in the field of education (Champion Ward, 1974). The origins of the Bellagio group go back already to the times when Philip Coombs became director of the IIEP as a kind of backchannel for informal exchanges that allowed the IIEP to negotiate with donors outside of the official UNESCO structures. It represents a loose group of agencies active in education for development that serves as a forum of coordination and exchange (IIEP, n.d.). As described by one of our interviewees, “this group was very powerful. . .because [it] established the agenda in education” (Interview with Jacques Hallak, 2019).15 It was in the context of this group that UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Bank, later joined by the UNDP, cooked up the Education for All (EFA) initiative to give a major push to basic education. One of the factors that opened up a policy window for EFA were good personal relationships among the personnel of the IOs. In the late 1980s Jacques Hallak had just been appointed director of the IIEP. Hallak had often functioned as a mediator

14 Klaus Bahr worked for the OECD and the World Bank before joining UNESCO in 1972. He was a member of the EFD and later headed the Policy and Sector Analysis Division (PSA) until 1993. Antoine Schwartz worked for the World Bank from 1976 to 1998. In the 1990s, on leave from the Bank, he worked as a consultant for UNESCO’s PSA on a UNDP financed education project in Burma. 15 Jacques Hallak spent most of his professional career at UNESCO and the IIEP, from 1988 in the position of Director. From 1987 to 1988, he did a brief stint at the World Bank. Between 1998 to 2000, Hallak was also Director of UNESCO’s International Bureau of Education (IBE), and in 2000, he served as UNESCO’s interim Assistant Director-General for Education.

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between UNESCO and the World Bank. Since he had joined the IIEP in 1965, Hallak had established very friendly relationships with World Bank officers and was frequently called upon to train World Bank staff. In the second half of the 1980s, he also joined the EFD for a short period of time, where he attempted to repair the broken relations between UNESCO and the Bank, but then ended up accepting a position at the Bank. He returned to UNESCO in 1988 when he was offered the job as director of the IIEP (Interview with Jacques Hallak, 2019). Hallak’s appointment and his good relationship with the chief of the Education Division at the World Bank, Wadi Haddad, was one of the reasons why the World Bank turned to the IIEP as the main reference point in the UNESCO structure. The collaboration between UNESCO and the World Bank on EFA was also enabled by the fact that M’Bow, who had become “persona non grata” for the World Bank education officers, had been succeeded as UNESCO’s Director-General by Federico Mayor, who had different priorities and gave a lot of leeway to Jacques Hallak to run his own initiatives. It is therefore fair to say that to some extent EFA was enabled by friendly relationships between a small group of professionals working in bilateral and multilateral development agencies, many of whom had a great deal of influence in their respective organizations. This group of development professionals formed an “epistemic community”, defined as “a network of professionals with recognized expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policyrelevant knowledge within that domain. . .” (Haas, 1992, cited by Chabbott, 2003, p. 103). The favourable circumstances enabled by good personal relations was coupled with a momentum for basic education, an issue everybody could agree on and that required attention as the economic recession of the 1980s had led to a decline of investments in education and enrolment rates in developing countries (Brock-Utne, 2001). In the second half of the 1980s, discussions in the IWGE shifted from a focus on higher education towards basic education as the World Bank was highly influenced at the time by rate of return studies showing that primary education yielded the highest returns from an economic point of view. The new interest in primary education in the World Bank was due to the influence of Georges Psacharopoulos, who assumed the position as head of the Bank’s Education Department’s Research Unit in 1981. Looking at increasing lending for primary education, the Bank was hoping that a major initiative would increase financial commitments from countries and donors to supplement bank loans. UNICEF had just launched a global health programme and was very interested in a major basic education initiative driven by the conviction that women’s education was the most important factor for improving the health and survival of children (Chabbott, 2003). For UNESCO as the UN’s lead agency for education, basic education had been a priority all along and the new Director-General Federico Mayor was looking for opportunities to raise the profile of the organization. All of these factors taken together built up a dynamic that yielded the EFA initiative. In February 1989, UNICEF’s Executive Director James Grant convened a meeting of various stakeholders in education, followed by a call to the four key

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multilateral organizations (UNICEF, UNESCO, UNDP and the World Bank16) to organize the World Conference on Education For All (WCEFA), which was to be preceded by a series of regional consultation meetings (Little, 2008). An InterAgency Commission was established at UNICEF, involving an Executive Committee and Executive Secretariat, which was headed by the World Bank’s Wadi Haddad (Little & Miller, 2000), who was “absolutely committed to this activity” (Interview with Marlaine Lockheed, 2022).17 In 1990, the World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA) was held in Jomtien, Thailand. It was attended by delegates from 155 member states, 33 intergovernmental organizations and 125 non-governmental organizations. Apart from the four convening agencies, several other bilateral organizations and governments became involved as co-sponsors of the conference (Little & Miller, 2000). Jomtien aimed to garner policy support and funding for basic education, but the convening agencies had different ideas about what basic education meant. UNESCO had a strong orientation towards non-formal education, and especially because the WCEFA in Jomtien was also meant to be a contribution to the International Literacy Year, UNESCO had initially highlighted literacy, as illustrated by the emphasis placed on literacy by UNESCO’s Director-General, Federico Mayor, and the Assistant Director-General for Education, Colin Power, at the International Conference on Education (ICE) held in Geneva in 1989 (Power, 2015, p. 32). But the World Bank pushed for primary education (Chabbott, 2003),18 and UNICEF promoted its focus on children and mothers. The UNDP, which joined the triangle as sponsor of EFA, was more “hesitant to formulate a precise position on EFA” (Jones & Coleman, 2005, p. 165), but had good reasons to join the partnership, given the organization’s long-standing background in funding educational projects and interest in the role of basic education for the workplace.19 The Jomtien Framework for Action reflects that UNESCO formally prevailed with its broader vision of basic education, which involved primary education, adult literacy and skills training for young people and adults, but “the Bank has never sat easily with the outcome” (Jones, 1997, p. 374) and never adjusted its priorities in line with that vision. The WCEFA in Jomtien raised the profile of UNESCO, but the group of convenors did not trust UNESCO with the follow up mandate. The World Bank made concrete suggestions about taking a leading role in the follow-up process by coordinating the development of countries’ education plans. The Bank was backed up by the United States, who had withdrawn from UNESCO in 1984 and was 16

The United Nations Populations Fund (UNFPA) joined the group of EFA convenors in 1998. Marlaine Lockheed worked at the World Bank from 1985 to 2005, where she held various senior management positions, including responsibilities for education policy and lending for the Middle East and North Africa region. 18 A key contribution of the World Bank to the Jomtien conference was a study on improving primary education in developing countries (Lockheed et al., 1991; Interview with Marlaine Lockheed, 2022). 19 It is noteworthy that at the time the UNDP and the World Bank were engaged in turf struggles over their respective areas of responsibility. 17

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opposed to UNESCO taking the lead in the coordination of EFA. But the Scandinavian aid agencies, the European Union and UNESCO opposed the World Bank’s idea as too “top down” (Little & Miller, 2000, p. 8). Colin Power, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Education from 1989 to 2000, recalls: UNESCO’s role in the follow-up to the World Conference. . .was the only issue that did provoke a battle. . .The representative of the USA, John Bolton, argued that the responsibility for the co-ordination of EFA should be given to the World Bank or UNICEF (i.e. an organisation located in, and to a large degree, controlled by the USA). (Power, 2015, p. 54)

Although UNICEF and the World Bank, and in particular Wadi Haddad, were instrumental in organizing the WCEFA in Jomtien, UNESCO was given the role as lead coordinator for EFA: In Jomtien. . .it was the deal. You know, education naturally in the UN system should be UNESCO and UNDP was there in Jomtien, a strong player. And UNDP would not accept anyone else but UNESCO. UNICEF, part of the UN, should follow UNDP. And the World Bank would not mind because. . .they trusted Mayor. (Interview with Jacques Hallak, 2014)

The compromise solution was that the four convenor agencies would set up an interagency secretariat that was hosted by UNESCO, “but not part of UNESCO” (Little & Miller, 2000, p. 7). Michael Lakin, an American UNESCO officer who had already been part of the Executive Secretariat, was charged to head the secretariat. UNESCO provided the staff, and the operational budget was provided by the other convening organizations and additional bilateral agencies. The unit that was set up was named the Secretariat of the Inter-Agency International Consultative Forum, mostly known as the Education for All Forum, described as “the representative body established to guide, coordinate and monitor EFA through the 1990s” (UNESCO, 2000, Preface). The EFA Forum was conceived as a series of meetings between EFA partners to discuss progress and issues arising in the EFA progress. It was tasked with the mandate of keeping basic education on the development agenda, monitoring the progress of countries in implementing the Jomtien Framework for Action, and promoting cooperation among the EFA partners (Little, 2008). Another operational unit that was set up was the Forum Steering Committee, established to give guidance to the Forum Secretariat. Also, in terms of the interpretation of “basic education”, UNESCO had to make compromises. Its expanded vision of basic education, including non-formal and informal education, was de facto reduced to primary education: It is a matter of historical accuracy to recall how the World Bank and UNICEF both reduced the Jomtien notion of EFA, more or less immediately after Jomtien, to focus almost exclusively on primary schooling. This was simply for corporate convenience. Non-formal education and literacy were seen as too small and too difficult to measure progress, too fragile administratively to absorb large amounts of agency funds, too weak as a political priority. UNESCO was left as a sort of non-formal and adult education agency, joined by UNDP with its concern for basic training related to the world of work. (Little & Miller, 2000, pp. 27–28, citing one of their interviewees)

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Notwithstanding these compromises, the 1990s were characterized by a fairly good inter-agency collaboration. Overall, the evaluation of the EFA Forum conducted by Angela Little and Errol Miller (2000), considered the Forum to be “appropriate by design” (p. 21) and emphasized that, although the Forum “cannot claim to have been the driving force in EFA”, it has represented “the symbol of the shared global vision and the arena in which that shared vision has been kept alive” (p. 21). Of course, there were challenges, many of which were related to the EFA Forum’s unclear mandate and responsibility. For example, at the first post-Jomtien meeting organized by the EFA Forum, held in 1991 in Paris, co-ordination and progress monitoring were explicitly included in the mandate of the Forum although it was unclear how monitoring should be done, and there was no capacity in place for this task. At the next meetings held in 1993 and 1996, delegates were unhappy with the lack of reliable data on progress of the EFA agenda (Little & Miller, 2000), for which many implicitly blamed UNESCO. Against this background, Little and Miller (2000) considered it a remarkable achievement that the Forum managed to keep the EFA process alive throughout the 1990s and that all agencies united under the EFA logo (Interview with Ulrika Peppler Barry, 2014).20 In financial terms, the bilateral agencies gained in importance, and especially the Nordic agencies, the Netherlands and USAID, later also Germany and DFID (UK) contributed significantly to the EFA process. As stated by a former Executive Secretary of the EFA Secretariat, “By the time of the mid-decade review, most of the Forum funding came from the bilateral agencies” (cited in Little & Miller, 2000, p. 27).21 The EFA Forum convened three EFA meetings involving a range of relevant agencies, representatives of governments, and NGOs, in Paris in 1991, New Delhi in 199322 and Amman in 1996. At Amman, where a mid-decade assessment of EFA was conducted, it became painfully clear that progress towards the achievement of the goals set in the Framework for Action was unsatisfactory. Towards the end of the 1990s things were gearing up towards the next big EFA event, the World Education Forum, held in 2000 in Dakar, Senegal. As Little and Miller (2000) observed in their evaluation of the EFA Forum: “While the excitement and expectations of WCEFA in 1990 can probably not be matched or surpassed, the end-of-decade EFA activities have generated a new vigour and vitality for EFA” (p. 17).

20

Ulrika Peppler Barry worked at UNESCO from 1990 to 2012. Among other positions, she was Deputy Executive Secretary of the EFA Forum. 21 For a discussion of the contributions and priorities of the bilateral agencies after Jomtien, see Buchert (1995). 22 A key outcome of the New Delhi meeting was the creation of the alliance of the E-9 countries (low-income countries with populations of over 100 million).

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The Struggle Between UNESCO and the World Bank Over Education for Development

The 2000 World Education Forum in Dakar and Its Follow-Up

In spite of the excitement leading up to the summit in Dakar, the World Education Forum put a damper on the good relations between the convening agencies. There were several diplomatic hiccups at Dakar that undermined trust between the organizations. One was that UNESCO’s new Director-General, Koïchiro Matsuura, without consulting anyone, had made a revision to the text of the Dakar Framework for Action, which over-emphasized UNESCO’s leadership and did not acknowledge the strong role of the other agencies in the EFA process (Interview with Ulrika Peppler Barry, 2014, see also Power, 2015, p. 75). A World Bank representative at Dakar recalled, “there were arguments about who would speak at what event. . .there was definitely tension” (Interview with Marlaine Lockheed, 2022). The key partners and some of the bilateral agencies lost their appetite to continue the EFA Forum. An evaluation commissioned by the EFA Steering Committee (Little & Miller, 2000), which recommended to retain the EFA Forum – albeit with modifications – was disregarded. A high-level UNESCO officer described the atmosphere as follows: In Dakar it stopped being pure. It became invaded with politics. It started being invaded with shows. . .It started becoming openly lobby management, the Africans, the Arabs, etc. It was a poison among the. . .multilaterals, a lot of fights between UNESCO and UNICEF and the World Bank and so on. The World Bank was against leaving it [EFA] with UNESCO because they were disappointed with the performance. The British [DFID]. . .wanted everything but not UNESCO. (Interview with Jacques Hallak, 2014)

Another challenge that was not new, but became more divisive at Dakar, was that EFA meant different things to the different agencies involved. In her speech at Dakar, the Director of UNICEF, Carol Bellamy, focused on “girls’ education”, and after Dakar, UNICEF launched the girls’ education initiative. The World Bank was interested in expanding programme lending for education guided by a narrative of poverty reduction and “drifted into lending for all causes” (Psacharopoulos, 2006, p. 335). The UNDP gave up education altogether after Dakar. The role of UNESCO was to look at the big picture and to mediate between these interests: “We were promoting a holistic view. . .UNESCO should have the role of balancing the message” (Interview with Jacques Hallak, 2014). Against the background of these challenges, in Dakar, it was much more difficult for UNESCO to assume the leadership for the EFA process. A “Futures Group” put in charge at Dakar to devise the future governance structure of EFA proposed a “mechanism. . .expressly designed to avoid UNESCO’s taking on the global coordination of Dakar+15” (Torres, 2001, para. 16). As UNESCO’s former Assistant Director-General for Education recalled, “UNESCO took everyone by surprise in being given charge of EFA at the Dakar Forum” (Interview with Sir John Daniel, 2014).23 A key factor was the support for UNESCO by the governments of Global

23

Sir John Daniel was Assistant Director-General for Education at UNESCO from 2001 to 2004.

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South countries, many of whom had more trust in UNESCO as UNESCO’s role in these countries has traditionally been more disinterested than that of other organizations such as the World Bank who offered support that was tied to conditions (Interview with Jacques Hallak, 2014) – however, those who spoke out in favour of UNESCO also called for a restructuring of the organization (Torres, 2001). On the other hand, most of the partners and bilateral donors involved in EFA did not have much confidence in UNESCO’s capacity to lead the EFA initiative. Although UNESCO managed to obtain the overall coordination, the World Bank de facto took the lead of a parallel financial strand with the launch, in 2002, of the Fast Track initiative (FTI), whose aim was to ensure that donors would fulfil their commitment made at Dakar that no country should be prevented by insufficient resources from achieving EFA.24 The Secretariat of the FTI, which included the European Union, UNESCO, UNICEF, the multilateral development banks and 15 bilateral development agencies, was established within the World Bank (Takala, 2003). This meant the establishment of two parallel structures, one led by UNESCO, the other one by the World Bank. In the aftermath of Dakar, the EFA Forum was dissolved and replaced with a more flexible “High Level Group”, which UNESCO was called upon to convene annually. As calls for a more robust and systematic monitoring of progress of the EFA process became louder, the 2001 meeting of the High-Level Group in Paris led to the decision to create an independent international team charged with preparing an annual EFA Global Monitoring Report, which was housed in UNESCO, but was to remain independent of it, and was funded by bilateral agencies, in particular DFID (Edwards et al., 2017, 2018). The Global Monitoring Report, “got launched under very strong leadership, and I think that provided the opportunity for UNESCO to move back into a stronger role” (Interview with Marlaine Lockheed, 2022). The EFA Global Monitoring Report continues to be published once a year to this day (in 2015, it changed its name to Global Education Monitoring Report (GEM)). The establishment of the EFA Global Monitoring Report signifies the move towards greater accountability, monitoring and benchmarking that Dakar represented. “I think Dakar was more operational in a sense, more realistic. People realized that it’s not enough to do good declarations, you have to follow it through. More need for monitoring, for pinning down things, for benchmarking” (Interview with Jacques Hallak, 2014). What is evident in the development between Jomtien and Dakar is a shift of the foundations that held EFA together. Jomtien was built on personal relationships of an epistemic community who shared an optimistic outlook on what could be achieved: “In Jomtien, anything seemed possible, the future looked promising, quality and equity were somewhat new words, and made for credible goals” (Torres, 2001, para. 20). Dakar was much more disenchanted as so little had been achieved since Jomtien, and “both agencies and national delegations inevitably arrived with a

24 “No countries seriously committed to education for all will be thwarted in their achievement of this goal by a lack of resources” (World Education Forum, 2000, paragraph 10).

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feeling of failure” (para. 20). From Dakar onwards, EFA became more of a selfserving development apparatus, driven by targets, monitoring mechanisms and accountability. As one of our interviewees captured the mood of the Dakar conference, “let’s keep this focussed so that we can achieve something” (Interview with Sir John Daniel, 2014). The direct collaboration of the key agencies in the EFA Forum was replaced by a looser and more intransparent “High Level Group”. As it was impossible to avoid UNESCO, the calls for a “restructured UNESCO” (Torres, 2001) were responded to by creating independent structures such as the Global Monitoring Report and the UNESCO Institute of Statistics (UIS), established in 1999. As will be discussed in the next chapter, the creation of the UIS allowed UNESCO to reassert legitimacy in the field of data collection after UNESCO had been criticized for the lack of quality of its statistics and education data (Fontdevila, 2021; Heyneman, 1999). To attract donors and inspire trust, the UIS had to be established as an organization financially and administratively autonomous of UNESCO, which “was consolidated by the decision to locate the UIS outside UNESCO’s headquarters (specifically, in Montreal), as well as by the almost total re-staffing of the Institute in the early 2000s” (Fontdevila, 2021, p. 38). The EFA governance structure was fragmented, with UNESCO coordinating the High Level Group, and the World Bank coordinating the FTI, which became “the forum of choice for global policy actors in education” (Faul & Packer, 2015, p. 30; see also Fontdevila, 2021), overshadowing EFA.

4.3.3

The Top-Down and Parallel Global Governance Structures of EFA

In this section, we would like to discuss two interrelated issues that are particularly noteworthy about EFA from a global governance perspective. The first is the tension between the global governance structures that have characterized EFA and the development community’s claims that development agendas be “country-driven”. The second is the parallel process of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the FTI that came to overshadow EFA. Governance structures were heavily debated during the EFA process. An issue that Little and Miller (2000) highlighted as a “hotly contested debate in the Steering Committee” (p. 50) was whether the EFA Forum “should acquire some authority and responsibility for achieving EFA” (p. 49): This would be exercised through making available to countries financial resources tied to various conditions, thought to be essential to the achievement of EFA. From this perspective, the achievement of EFA globally, within any reasonable time frame, requires a hard edge delivered through compliance with conditions tied to access to additional resources. This view has been challenged both by countries and agencies, probably for different reasons. Several voices from countries have been adamant that not only does responsibility for EFA rest primarily with countries, but it would be highly undesirable for EFA to become the province of international agencies or organizations of civil society. Understood in its most

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elemental form, basic education is about the mobilization of people to some future end. That international agencies could acquire the power to directly mobilize national populations with scant regard for national authority is anathema to most countries. (p. 50)

Against this background, it is important to remember that EFA was a process that was initiated and steered by four international organizations to further strategic interests (Chabbott, 2003). EFA represented “largely an international construct conceived as being of in the national interest” (Packer, 2007, p. 4), which led to “national education policies [being] produced in response to international standards rather than to local conditions and resources” (Chabbott, 2003, p. 10). According to Little and Miller (2000), “national agencies had neither played, nor were about to play, a strong role in the international process” (p. 11). The overall weak role of national governments is illustrated by the fact that “members of national government agencies were not, at any point in the decade, invited to join the Steering Committee” (Little & Miller, 2000, p. 32). Apart from the IOs that represented the “convenors” of EFA, some bilateral development agencies and regional representatives were part of the Steering Committee,25 but while “agencies virtually have open-door access to the Steering Committee. . .countries and organizations of civil society have been much more restricted in access” (p. 50). When the EFA Forum was replaced by the High Level Group, it was the FTI that de facto took on the role of “making available to countries financial resources tied to various conditions” (p. 49), implementing a top-down approach that had previously been dismissed by countries and agencies involved in EFA. It is likely that many developing countries spoke out for UNESCO at Dakar to take the lead of EFA specifically because they wished to avoid the “tied money” mechanisms that the World Bank represented. The involvement of UNESCO – the organization most trusted by many developing countries – in the FTI was very limited, as was the representation of NGOs, developing countries, and another key convenor of EFA, UNICEF. As pointed out by Fontdevila (2021, drawing on Bermingham, 2011), “UNESCO only joined the FTI-SC [the Steering Committee of the FTI] in 2004 but was not included in the trust fund meetings where key decisions were being made. UNICEF only became a member in 2006” (p. 40). In this regard it is important to note that the FTI was not even established in the context of EFA, but as part of the broader development agenda of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) pursued by the G8 Group and the 2002 Monterrey Conference on Financing for Development. Despite FTI being a part of a different “center of gravity” (Fontdevila, 2021, p. 265), it became a “prominent and influential voice” in the overall EFA architecture (Packer, 2007, p. 21; Interview with Sir John Daniel, 2014). Endorsed in April 2002 by Ministers of Development and Finance in the Development Committee of the World Bank and the International Monetary

25 After the New Delhi meeting of 1993, even more bilateral agencies were invited to participate in the Steering Committee. According to Little and Miller (2000), “this open door policy worked well in attracting more members to Committee meetings, but it became increasingly difficult to obtain clear decisions, or even clear guidance” (p. 41).

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Fund (IMF), the FTI primarily focused on the realization of MDG 2, which aimed at achieving universal primary education (Takala, 2003). The MDGs go back to the International Development Goals (IDGs) formulated in the report Shaping the twenty-first Century: The Contribution of Development Co-operation, launched by the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in 1996 at the High Level Meeting of Ministers of Development Cooperation. Much like the World Bank’s Pearson Report of 1969 aimed at breathing new life into the development agenda at the end of the first United Nations Development Decade, the OECD/DAC’s report was meant to address the “aid fatigue” of the mid-1990s (Hulme, 2009). Although the list of IDGs was inspired by some of the UN summits held in the first half of the 1990s, which gave them “a form of democratic legitimacy” (Hulme, 2009, p. 15), it “emerges from a small club of rich nations, and not from the global community as such” (Saith, 2006, p. 1170). The IDGs were subsequently endorsed at several OECD ministerial meetings and by the G7 at its 1996, 1997 and 1998 meetings. They were also promoted by some influential development agencies, such as DFID (Hulme, 2009). The MDGs derived from a reconciliation process between the OECD/DAC’s IDGs and the “Millennium Declaration Goals” that stemmed from the UN’s 2000 Declaration We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the twenty-first Century (Hulme, 2009; Saith, 2006). The MDG process thus involved negotiations between two camps of “global governors”, the UN and its specialized organizations on the one hand, and the global financial/economic organizations, including the World Bank, the IMF and the OECD, on the other hand, which had already endorsed the OECD/DAC’s IDGs. The parallel structure of “global governance of education” dominated by the global financial and Bretton Woods institutions, exemplified by the FTI, which was backed up by the “strong global political forces” (Bermingham, 2011, p. 564) behind the MDGs, further contributed to the narrowing of education, which could already be observed after Jomtien when the broader vision of “basic education” was effectively reduced to primary education. As Torres (2000) argued, “the expanded vision of basic education espoused at Jomtien – central to the proposal and the most innovative and potentially revolutionary aspect of EFA – did not translate into the design (and practice) of educational policies and reforms implemented in the 1990s” (p. 8). The MDGs represented “a Third Way-type ‘politics of what works’, not a normative or ideological belief in human rights” (Hulme, 2009, p. 21). MDG 2 aimed at universal enrolment in primary education, a perspective that has been described as “mindlessly myopic” (Saith, 2006, p. 1173) because it distorts the reality of education in developing economies. The FTI followed the model of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) pursued by the World Bank and the IMF in the context of the MDGs. Countries were obliged to produce a PRSP and implement an education sector programme as conditions for being selected for funding under the FTI (Takala, 2003).26 This

26 In addition to the PRSP, countries are also obliged to produce an Education Sector Plan (ESP). This could be potentially a valuable exercise involving consultations with a range of stakeholders in

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process represents the managerial-bureaucratic approach already manifest in the earlier educational planning project cycle. It constitutes exactly the “hard edge delivered through compliance with conditions tied to access to additional resources” that were so adamantly rejected in the debates of the EFA Steering Committee as pointed out by Little and Miller above. Although the FTI was established as a partnership that included multi-lateral and bilateral agencies and regional development banks, it was de facto dominated by the World Bank (Bermingham, 2011). This is why some bilateral agencies such as DFID objected to the FTI as they saw it as “a centralised initiative which would undermine local decision-making” (p. 560). These developments went hand in hand with a shift towards policy-based lending, which gave the Bank and the group of donors greater influence on national education policy. According to Bennell and Furlong (1998), policy-based lending was “closely linked to a greater reliance on policy performance requirements and other types of donor conditionalities” (p. 53). Another phenomenon of global governance of education is the institutionalization of structures that change their purpose overtime. Just as the World Bank started off as a funder of education and then expanded its role to that of a policy shaper, the FTI developed a life of its own, as expressed by Packer (2007): “Does FTI remain a major donor of last resort (a function of the World Bank in the past) or a significant proactive agency and facility in its own right as a fund?” (p. 28). Inherent in a body expanding its role and purpose is a loss of accountability. The same can be observed for the structures that were set up among the international organizations for the coordination of joint activities, such as the High Level Group: “The High Level Group in particular has no report back mechanism so that its findings and recommendations are scrutinized in terms of whether action has or has not been taken” (Packer, 2007, p. 25). In terms of the impact of the EFA movement, it has certainly strengthened awareness for basic education in the development discourse, and according to the 2004 Global Monitoring Report, aid for basic education increased from US$1.8 billion in 2000 to US$3.4 billion in 2004 (Packer, 2007). However, it is questionable whether this increase can be attributed to EFA: It seems probable that aid to education would have risen anyway as a result of the overall increases in aid (and debt relief) consequent upon the Millennium Declaration, the Monterrey Consensus on Financing for Development and the increased weight given to development assistance by G8 and OECD-DAC countries culminating in major new aid commitments in 2005. (Packer, 2007, p. 21)

A mixed picture emerged in terms of donor priorities. The World Bank significantly increased lending for the education sector, and in particular to primary education, the country. However, de facto, these plans are often produced by consultants. “All of these valuable elements of an ESP, I see that in some countries they are put aside because the focus is on producing a plan that is sufficiently credible to get funding. And. . .if that is the focus, then the risk is that countries may choose the easiest shortcut, namely to get a few consultants on board and let the consultants prepare a credible plan” (Interview with Anton de Grauwe, former Senior Programme Specialist at the IIEP, 2019).

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after Jomtien. According to Bennell and Furlong (1998), “the Bank has lent a total of US$6.2 billion for primary and other basic education projects which amounts to slightly over 50% of all lending to the education sector for 1991-96” (p. 51). This illustrates the strong policy-shaping capacity of the World Bank. However, World Bank funding dropped again in the second half of the 1990s. In terms of bilateral funding, a few countries (e.g. Germany) strongly increased funding for basic education, but “among the majority of bilateral donors the actual response to ‘the challenge of Jomtien’ has been either negative or fairly minimal” (p. 55), and overall, “aid for the education sector from bilateral donors was. . .lower in the mid 1990s than before Jomtien” (p. 46). It appears that many donors were more interested in funding public sector reform and private sector development. As Packer (2007) summarized, “There is certainly little sign that the main components of EFA architecture have been either greatly interested or successful in putting the total EFA package on the political and aid tables of the world” (p. 20). Given the lack of country ownership and the rather modest progress that results from the EFA process, the question arises whether global governance processes such as EFA, fuelled by continually renewed global agendas, goals and benchmarks, characterized by Li (2007) as the “structure of ‘permanent deferral’” (p. 15), serve primarily the interests of international organizations and development professionals.

4.4

Conclusion

This chapter focused on the relationship between UNESCO and the World Bank in education for development, which became an important field of collaboration and competition for the two international organizations. Through global development agendas, international conferences and the rise of a professional group of development and planning experts a landscape of global governance emerged, in which UNESCO and the World Bank represented two divergent modi operandi of global governance: UNESCO governed through norm-setting, coordination of global agendas, but also to some extent through capacity-building and monitoring, while the World Bank’s influence on education in developing countries derived from its funding power and claims to managerial-scientific efficiency, exemplified by its managerial tools, such as the highly bureaucratic lending cycle and the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers. Contrary to the World Bank, UNESCO is not a funding agency, has a very small budget and relied on extra-budgetary resources for operational work, while money is at the core of the World Bank’s structural power, an issue that was brought up by several informants: “They [UNESCO] didn’t have the money. It’s a different way of doing things. They had word of mouth. They could convince. They could propose. But ‘put the money on the table and let’s do the project’, they couldn’t do that. . .” (Interview with Alex ter Weele, 2017). During the 25 years of the duration of the Co-operative Program with UNESCO, the World Bank built its own intellectual and research capacities and expanded its role from a funder to a policy shaper, assuming the role of both juge et partie (Sack, 1988) for

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education in developing countries, leading to the Bank’s monopoly as the “architect of global education policy” (Klees, 2012, p. 62), while UNESCO, the organization that had been endowed by the Post-World War II order with the mandate for education, lost influence. As observed by Heyneman (2003), by the 1990s, “the Bank virtually had the field of education policy to itself” (p. 329). This development was furthered by the linking of education and economics, which was endorsed by powerful states such as the United States as well as funding bodies and universities. As stated by a former World Bank officer, the period of the cooperation between UNESCO and the Bank marks the economization of the field of education: “I view the EFD as one of the steps in the evolution of control over education research and policy-making from educators to economists” (Personal communication with Ward Heneveld, 2017).27 While in the 1960s UNESCO was considered the “gold standard” for education, from the 1970s onwards the Bank, through its lending power, gained the upper hand in determining what was considered good principles and practice in the field of educational planning and positioned itself as the epistemic authority. The literacy controversy between the two organizations demonstrates how UNESCO pursued literacy as a public good while the World Bank viewed education in economic terms as a factor of productivity and thought of development as a technocratic activity (Jones, 1997). The claim to scientific authority marked a division with UNESCO where “this business of planning and economics, capital, human capital and so on, was not that important” (Interview with Lucila Jallade, 2020). The World Bank’s approach to working with the lending countries was characterized by a highly managerial five-year planning cycle, with which the Bank exercised bureaucratic and epistemic control over countries. As was already the case with the OECD in the 1960s, the World Bank legitimized its expansion into UNESCO’s territory by linking education to the economy and constructing itself as better equipped to tackle social problems due to its scientific approach and management structures. While the World Bank became one of the chosen instruments of the US government to expand the liberal-American hegemonic project of free-market capitalism to developing countries, the United States dealt a blow to UNESCO by withdrawing from the organization in 1984.28 The financial and epistemic power represented by the World Bank can also be observed in the EFA process. While UNESCO managed to some extent to assert its legitimacy as the lead agency for EFA, throughout the 1990s the agenda of universal primary education, backed up by the World Bank and the MDG process further reduced UNESCO “to a sort of non-formal and adult education agency” (Little & Miller, 2000, p. 27). The World Bank asserted its agenda of primary education and prevailed over UNESCO’s broader interpretation of basic education and took the

27

Ward Heneveld joined the World Bank in 1991, where he worked for most of the 1990s. The United States returned to UNESCO in 2002, but has officially withdrawn from UNESCO again as of January first, 2019. Since 2011, as a reaction to the adoption of Palestine as a full member to UNESCO, the United States had not been paying its membership dues. At the time of writing, the US government has just announced its intentions to rejoin UNESCO.

28

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lead of a parallel financial global governance process, the FTI, which was aligned with the MDGs that were endorsed by the United Nations and backed up by stronger political forces, including the governments of OECD countries and the international financial organizations – a power structure that UNESCO only has limited access to. As Packer (2007) has opined, “bodies such as the World Bank, G8, the international INGOs and projects such as FTI and UNAIDS carry much more weight politically than anything that UNESCO can currently facilitate” (p. 27). UNESCO got caught up between a double dilemma. While on the one hand the organization tried to maintain authority by associating itself with powerful organizations, such as the World Bank, these alliances resulted in weakening UNESCO’s autonomy and diluting its vision. UNESCO with its universal membership and humanistic worldview represented a challenge for the World Bank and other EFA stakeholders. As its legitimacy is hard to dismiss, collaboration between the agencies was also enabled through the creation of outgrowth structures, such as the IIEP, the EFD, the EFA Forum, the Global Monitoring Report and the UIS, which are associated with UNESCO, but remain independent of it. These independent structures allowed to circumvent the UNESCO structure, which was perceived as inefficient, bureaucratically cumbersome, and politically difficult to navigate. However, the early years of the CP and EFA show that collaboration between UNESCO and the World Bank was possible and has worked during certain periods of time when certain conditions were in place, and the most important of these conditions seemed to be a cross-organizational “epistemic community”. The establishment of the CP was enabled by relationships of trust between a small circle of high-level staff who had a similar professional ethos. Professionalization drives processes of normative isomorphism, defined by Di Maggio and Powell (1983) as “the collective struggle of members of an occupation to define the conditions and methods of their work” (p. 152). This was expressed by one of our interviewees in relation to the CP: “The relationship was always good on the personal level. . .We were all working in the same area. We were all professionals. . .we were all trained technically very similarly. . .we were all going in the same direction and trying to get to the same place” (Interview with Alex ter Weele, 2017). Similarly, the EFA initiative was built on personal relationships between like-minded people who shared the same professional training and worldview. The common vision that bound together the group of professionals that met in the IWGE and the leadership of UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Bank was able to overcome all kinds of constraints on the partnership, such as different mandates, governing systems and financial resources available to the different partners. But the partnership became more strained when it was not anymore sustained by personal relationships. Considering the effects of the CP and EFA from a global governance perspective, both have contributed to the standardization of educational norms, policies and practices. The economic discourse, endowed with the legitimacy of science and rationality, had become the dominant principle that shaped the education agendas of powerful actors such as the World Bank. Global agendas such as EFA led to the prioritization of educational targets, which derived from the managerial turn that was evident already in the educational planning period of the 1960s and the CP. The

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focus on primary education – which de facto means the Western model of schooling – and measurable targets has led to an impoverishment and “shrinking” (Torres, 2000) of education. Brock-Utne (2001) has argued that the narrow EFA agenda of Western primary education had detrimental effects on the “communal character of African indigenous education” (p. 277) and African indigenous languages. Our analysis shows that UNESCO, with its democratic governing structures and idealistic epistemic underpinnings, “the UN organization institutionally most directly responsive to the majority of its members” (Samoff, 1996, p. 267), represented a force that had to be reined in to enable the global homogenization of education that the CP and the EFA process represented. UNESCO’s priorities, such as literacy and adult education, were effectively crowded out by “the Bank’s. . .aversion to funding adult education” (Bennell & Furlong, 1998, p. 46). We have also pointed to the tensions between the governance structures and procedures of the CP and EFA and “the rhetoric of national self-reliance and country ownership” (King, 2007, p. 383).29 The narrowing of education was advanced by the parallel structure of global governance of education dominated by the global financial institutions, exemplified by the FTI. Research from Global South countries confirms our argument that the “politics of convergence” pursued by global agendas are not suited to serve the interest of countries. As Bhatta (2011) argued in relation to Nepal’s Education for All strategy financed by the World Bank, “‘national’ education policy-making has become relatively unimportant if not meaningless because the documents produced within the parameters of global education targets have become the de facto policies” (p. 11). The global governance of education agenda, which has developed more and more into a measurement machinery, is backed up and legitimized by representational technologies and instruments, of which statistics are a key pillar. The struggle between the OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank over educational statistics will be the topic of the next chapter.

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Mundy, K., & Verger, A. (2015). The World Bank and the global governance of education in a changing world order. International Journal of Educational Development, 40, 9–18. Natsios, A. (2010). The clash of the counter-bureaucracy and development (Essay). Center for Global Development. Office of Information. (1964, June 5). Incoming wire. INTBAFRAD for Harold graves. Folder item 30151673: Liaison UNESCO 1963–1965 – Correspondence – Volume 1. World Bank Archives. Oliver, R. W. (1989). George Woods and the World Bank (Humanities working paper, 139). California Institute of Technology, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences. https:// authors.library.caltech.edu/27862/1/HumsWP-0139.pdf Packer, S. (2007). International EFA architecture: Lessons and prospects; a preliminary assessment. Background paper prepared for the Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2008. 2008/ED/EFA/MRT/pi/57. UNESCO. Power, C. (2015). The power of education: Education for all, development, globalisation and UNESCO. Springer. Preston, W., Herman, E. S., & Schiller, H. I. (1989). Hope and folly: The United States and UNESCO 1945–1985. University of Minnesota Press. Psacharopoulos, G. (2006). World Bank policy on education: A personal account. International Journal of Educational Development, 26, 329–338. Riley, V. J. (1983a, May 9). Vincent J. Riley to Shahid Javed Burki. Unesco cooperative program. Folder item 1242188. World Bank Archives. Riley, V. J. (1983b, May 11). Vincent J. Riley, IRD to Richard Johanson, EDC. Proposed joint study of Unesco technical assistance. Folder item 1242188. World Bank Archives. Riley, V. J. (1983c, October 14). Office memorandum. Vincent J. Riley, IRD to Mr. Shahid Javed Burki, director IRD. Folder item 1242188. World Bank Archives. Ripman, H. B. (1962, September 11; Reprinted January 30, 1963). Educational projects and problems. Statement to the executive directors’ board by Hugh B. Ripman, assistant director, Department of Technical Operations. International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/ international development association. Private collection of Francis Lethem. Sack, R. (1988, Maye). An historic opportunity for UNESCO. Unpublished paper. Saith, A. (2006). From universal values to millennium development goals: Lost in translation. Development and Change, 37(6), 1167–1199. Samoff, J. (1996). Which priorities and strategies for education. International Journal of Educational Development, 16(3), 249–271. Sharma, P. A. (2017). Robert McNamara’s other war: The World Bank and international development. University of Pennsylvania Press. Stewart, J. J. (1976). Memo to Mr. Duncan S. Ballantine. Folder item 1056391. The World Bank Archives. Takala, T. (2003, January). Analysis of the education for all fast-track initiative. Prepared for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland. https://www.dvv-international.de/fileadmin/files/ analysis_of_the_education_for_all_fast_track_initiative.pdf Thant, U. (1965). Turning point. The United Nations development decade is 5 yrs old. How has it fared? U Thant gives a frank answer. UNESCO courier (October, 1965), 4–9. The World Bank. (1964a, October 23). Statement from Mr Woods to the UNESCO general conference Paris October 23, 1964. Folder item no. 30151673. The World Bank Archives. The World Bank. (1964b, November 17). Memo Harold graves to Mr Woods. Unesco annual meeting. Folder item no. 30151673. The World Bank Archives. The World Bank. (1971). Review of World Bank policies and operations, 1963–1971. Records of the Education Sector. World Bank Group Archives Holdings. Available at http://documents. worldbank.org/curated/en/149071468338353096/text/729770WP00PUBL0ector0working0 papers.txt The World Bank. (1975, April 11). Memo Michael L. Hoffman to Duncan S. Ballantine. UNESCO cooperative program. Folder item no. 1056391. The World Bank Archives.

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The World Bank. (1977). Cooperation between the World Bank and UNESCO. Report of the joint task force to the joint steering committee. Discussion draft, January 1977, annex I. folder item no. 30045056. The World Bank Archives. The World Bank. (1983, October 4). Transcript of interview with William Clark by Patricia Blair. The World Bank/IFC Archives Oral History Program. The World Bank. (1986, November 21). Transcript of interview with Duncan S. Ballantine by Phillip Jones. The World Bank/IFC Archives Oral History Program. The World Bank. (1988, August 22). Letter by Mr Barber B. Conable to Mr. Federico Mayor. Property of Mr Klaus Bahr. Torres, R. M. (2000). One decade of education for all: The challenge ahead. IIEP-Buenos Aires. http://www.iiep.unesco.org/en/publication/one-decade-education-all-challenge-ahead Torres, R. M. (2001). What happened at the world education forum? Adult Education and Development, 56, 45–66. https://www.dvv-international.de/en/adult-education-and-develop ment/editions/aed-562001/literacy-and-basic-education/what-happened-at-the-world-educa tion-forum/ UNESCO. (1961, October 20). Memo C. D. Ewers to H. M. Phillips. File 37 a 56/01 IIEP 10 61/64. UNESCO Archives. UNESCO. (1969, February 5). IBRD/UNESCO Cooperative Programme. Thirteenth Periodic Review Meeting, Paris, 7–8 January 1969. Folder item 1057348. The World Bank Archives. UNESCO. (1980, May 6). Back-to-office report – Mission to the World Bank. April 14–18, 1980. From D. Argyropoulos to Mr. S. Tanguiane. File on UNESCO-World Bank division. Box 1323. B7S2.11–056. UNESCO Archives. UNESCO. (1982a, 15 juin). Etude jointe Unesco/BIRF sur les composantes d’Assistance technique dans les projets d’éducation finances par la Banque Mondiale. Memo ED/OPS/LAC/82/328. File on UNESCO-World Bank division. Box 1323. B7S2.11-056. UNESCO Archives. UNESCO. (1982b, le 14 juin). Joint study by Unesco and the World Bank of technical assistance in education projects financed by the World Bank. Memo ED/OPS/LAC-mtb. File on UNESCOWorld Bank division. Box 1323. B7S2.11-056. UNESCO Archives. UNESCO. (1988, September 13). Letter by Federico Mayor to Mr Barber Conable. Property of Mr Klaus Bahr. UNESCO. (2000). Education for all 2000 assessment. Global synthesis. International consultative forum on education for all. UNESCO (EFA Forum Secretariat). Retrieved from https://unesdoc. unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000120058 United Nations. (1964, March 16). Letter Martin Hill, deputy under-secretary for economic and social affairs, to René Maheu. BRX/RIO 24.3. UNESCO Archives (Bonvin). Wanner, R. E. (2015). UNESCO’s origins, achievements, problems and promise: An inside/outside perspective from the US (CERC monograph series in comparative and international education and development, 12). The University of Hong Kong: Comparative Education Research Centre. Williams, P. (1975). Education in developing countries: The view from Mount Olympus. Prospects, 5(4), 457–478. Woods. (1963, October 2). Wire Woods to Maheu. Message authorized by Richard H. Demuth, development services. Folder item no. 30151673. The World Bank Archives. Woods, G. D. (1967, October 27). Development – The need for new directions. Address to the Swedish bankers association. International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. http:// documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/259101542178912241/pdf/Development-the-Need-forNew-Directions-Address-by-George-D-Woods-President-World-Bank-Group-at-the-meetingof-the-Swedish-Bankers-Association-at-Stockholm.pdf World Bank. (1979). World Bank comments on Unesco draft “the World Bank’s technical assistance for educational projects”. Folder item 1242188. The World Bank Archives. World Bank/IFC. (1976). Office memorandum._From a. P. Cole, R. K. Johanson, G. Pennisi, J. J. Stewart, and R. M. Thint to Richard B. Lynn. Folder item 1056391). The World Bank Archives. World Bank/IFC. (1982, October 15). Office memorandum. From C. M. Southall, legal adviser, technical assistance, LEG. Through D. M. Goldberg, assistant general counsel, operations, LEG. To Mr. Aklilu Habte, director, EDC. Folder item 1242188. The World Bank Archives.

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World Bank/IFC. (1983, May 2). Office memorandum. From R. K. Johanson to files. Unesco – Discussions on review of the cooperative program. Folder item 1242188. The World Bank Archives. World Education Forum. (2000). The Dakar framework for action. Education for all: Meeting our collective commitments. UNESCO.

Chapter 5

The Turbulence of Statistics in Education

5.1

Introduction

Sir Hugh Ennor1 asked me this afternoon if I could get an evaluative comment from some officers in the Department of Education and Science concerning the relative value of the statistics which emanate from OECD and from UNESCO. (. . .) The reply from DES was a categorical yes to the question that the OECD statistics are superior to those which come from UNESCO. (Australian Education Liaison officer, D.W. Hood, 21 October 1971)

This quote stems from a letter in which Australia attempts to navigate the options of developing the country’s education policies right after Australian ascension to membership of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in June 1971 (Ydesen & Bomholt, 2020; Ørskov, 2019). The quote suggests a concern with the value and quality of education statistics and that statistics was a bone of contention between international organizations (IOs), in this case between the OECD and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The purpose of this chapter is to delve into the historical role and development of education statistics as a particular area of negotiations, resistances, inertias, and modifications in the UNESCO-OECD-World Bank triangle. The constructions and contingencies of education statistics – and the development of indicators, numbers, and metrics on which the statistics are built – are touchstones in the workings of the contemporary governing complex in education (Grek, 2009; Resnik, 2016, Ydesen, 2019). They are what in previous chapters, drawing on Srnicek (2013), we referred to as “representational technologies”. In this sense, the chapter offers important insights into the very engine room of how IO-driven education programmes have been constructed historically.

1

Sir Hugh Ennor (1912–1977) was appointed Secretary of the Australian Government Department of Education and Science in February 1967.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Elfert, C. Ydesen, Global Governance of Education, Educational Governance Research 24, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40411-5_5

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The chapter begins with a brief literature review offering insights into how we may understand the role of data, indicators, and statistics in the architecture of UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank. Then follows a chronological analysis of key dimensions, events, and trajectories in the development of education data, indicators and statistics as they appear in the landscape in and around the three organizations. The concluding discussion sums up key findings and reflects upon the educational paradigm shift that the datafication of education represents.

5.2

Understanding the Role of Data, Indicators and Statistics in the Architecture of IOs

Data, indicators, and statistics stand central in modes of governance in contemporary global education (Addey, 2018a; Borer & Lawn, 2013; Hansen & Porter, 2012; Nordin & Sundberg, 2014). The reason is that the inherent assumptions, selected variables, conceptual definitions, categories, logarithms, and modes of counting contain considerable power in terms of setting standards for what is considered education in general and good education in particular (Addey, 2021; Gorur, 2018a). In this sense, Lindblad et al. (2015) argue that “. . .numbers can be thought of as a social technology that seems to instantiate a consensus and harmony in a world appearing differently: uncertain, ambiguous and contentious” (p. 35). It is therefore no wonder that IOs have built their power and legitimacy to some extent on these “representational technologies”. A necessary condition for governing by statistics is the establishment of comparability, i.e., the idea that entities can be made comparable by applying the same measurement (Pettersson & Popkewitz, 2019). A key development in this respect was Adolphe Quetelet’s (1796–1874) statistical study of the development of human physical and intellectual qualities from 1835 which prompted him to coin the concept of ‘the average man’ (Stigler, 1986). In their longue durée perspective, Cardoso and Steiner-Khamsi (2017) argue that the idea and initial attempt to develop comparative indicators and statistics in education goes back to Marc-Antoine Jullien de Paris’ (1775–1848) and his work Esquisse d’un ouvrage sur l’éducation compare [Plan and preliminary views for a work on comparative education] from 1817. As part of the formation of nation-states in the long nineteenth century “. . .confidence in numbers and statistics as objective and thus reliable sources of both information on the current state of affairs and the need for reform” (Tröhler & Maricic, 2021, p. 138) gained traction and became interwoven with the governance function of the state. In this sense, Hacking (1990), in his seminal book about the history of statistics, emphasized how, “the systematic collection of data about people has affected not only the ways in which we conceive of a society but also the ways in which we describe our neighbour. It has profoundly transformed what we choose to do, who we try to be, and what we think of ourselves” (p. 3). In other words, data,

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Understanding the Role of Data, Indicators and Statistics in. . .

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indicators, and statistics are at the core of the styles of reasoning shoring up policy initiatives and what is viewed as politically sensible. In the twentieth century calls for research-based optimization of education using statistical data appear ubiquitous in the history of education archives and even continues to this day. Often, they appear in connection with criticisms of how other types of education research are faring. In 1915, Christian Hansen Tybjerg (1873–1956), chairman of the Danish Society for Experimental Pedagogy [Foreningen for Eksperimentalpædagogik] argued in favour of increased spending on experimental pedagogy by comparing it with the development of and practical results offered by agricultural studies: “But is there not something strangely backward in the fact that while the raising of domestic animals is minutely studied and calculated, the rearing of children is largely left to coincidence” (cited in Ydesen, 2011, p. 69). In a New York Times article from 1960, Francis Keppel, Dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, used a similar argument for raising a critique of education research claiming that it lagged far behind others in terms of quantitative methodology (Hechinger, 1960). In the modern field of education governance, the condition for statistics serving as the guiding tool for identifying good education in policy and practice is the formation of an international governance-by-comparison, reference-based, and benchmark-setting regime (Nóvoa & Yariv-Mashal, 2003). As pointed out by Krejsler (2019), contemporary global education policy is characterized by a fearof-falling-behind logic among nation-states dictating that they will lose the global competition between knowledge economies if they fail to optimize their human capital, i.e., produce “employable” or “career-ready” adults who participate in the economy. Fuelled by the production of data, indicators and statistics, this logic emerges from powerful extrapolated nationalisms (i.e. the extrapolation of national agendas and interests into IOs) and development narratives which create hegemonically defined ideas about which paths to choose and how to achieve best practices in education (Ydesen, 2021; Tröhler, 2020). We have already seen multiple examples in the previous chapters. These ideas offer naturalized meaning, orientation and direction to actors working to shape education in both local, regional, national, and global settings (Antonsich & Skey, 2017). In the context of IOs – and as pointed out in Chap. 1 – these points find resonance with what Berten and Kranke (2019) have dubbed “anticipatory global governance” which is defined “as a diverse set of transnational practices of producing, contesting and implementing global present futures” (p. 3). Nevertheless, the current evolution and workings of a statistics-oriented governing complex does not take place in a flat-earth scenario where IOs can operate at the global level dictating or mediating agendas, policies, and priorities. Nation-states, research institutions, actors, edu-businesses, philanthropic organizations and foundations, local education authorities, and schools remain vital players in shaping the configurations of the global education space, the enactment of education policies, funding, and to some extent agenda-setting. Contemporary education is a multi-stakeholder landscape. But to a large extent, IOs often find themselves in a privileged governing position because they are the producers of data, indicators, and statistics, have transnational

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legitimacy and the ability to operate across borders. An important milestone in this respect is the establishment of the Global Education Cooperation Mechanism (GCM) in July 2021 aimed at accelerating the implementation of the education target SDG 4 (“Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”) by promoting the use of research evidence for policy, by using more data, and by mobilizing more financial resources. The new GCM is supposed to improve the coordination among IOs as well as between IOs and governments by promoting “the effective use of evidence for making appropriate policies and implementation strategies at the country level” (UNESCO, 2021). As suggested by Addey et al. (2017), the nature and quality of data, numbers and statistics are core components behind the authority that IOs wield. They form what Gorur (2017) has called the “global infrastructures of comparative measurement” (p. 261). As we have seen in the previous chapters, UNESCO, OECD, and the World Bank have taken up towering positions in the development and shaping of education globally in the post-World War II era. One reason is precisely that they have been heavily involved in the production of data, indicators, and statistics, although not always in an orderly and aligned fashion. For example, according to the education comparativist and long-time World Bank employee Stephen Heyneman (1999), UNESCO was world leading in education statistics in the late 1950s, but during the 1960s and 1970s the organization fell behind in terms of statistics quality. Similarly, Addey argues that the OECD and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) found statistical legitimacy in measuring learning outcomes and monitoring education progress at an increasingly global scale, whilst UNESCO lost statistical legitimacy (Addey, 2018a). At the same time, the World Bank has been a strong protagonist of performance indicators in education (e.g. World Bank, 1995) and a provider of quantitative data culminating with the launch of the Systems Approach for Better Education (SABER) programme in 2011 (Steiner-Khamsi, 2012). However, the position of the World Bank in education has more recently been challenged by the OECD (Edwards & Storen, 2017; Mundy & Verger, 2015). These insights from the literature and the most recent developments suggest that the role of IOs and the construction of data, indicators and statistics occurs in complex multi-actor spaces defined by certain meanings fuelled by narratives about development, progress, and best practices. The implication for our analytical journey in this chapter is then to explore how geopolitical, national, and organizational interests have served as catalysts for the development of education statistics itself but also how the constructions, uses and purposes of statistics have shifted over time. We therefore venture to open the black box of the UNESCO-OECD-World Bank triangle to investigate the inter-organizational relations in the construction of data, indicators, and statistics.

The Struggle for Accurate Education Statistics in the Context of. . .

5.3

5.3

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The Struggle for Accurate Education Statistics in the Context of Changing Geopolitics, 1945–1960s

An important development in the history of education statistics after 1945 was the establishment of a statistical service within UNESCO. The Committee on Educational Statistics met for the first time in UNESCO in April 1947 (UNESCO, 1947a). The service was the result of a US proposal to the UNESCO preparatory commission culminating with the establishment of a clearinghouse service at the Fourth UNESCO General Conference in 1949. The idea was to build a database of available national statistics but also to provide member countries with different kinds of comparative information of relevance to national education planning (UNESCO, 1949; Heyneman, 1999). Gorur (2018a) points out that the clearinghouse mainly served the purposes of “building up a database of available national statistics and mobilizing and facilitating experts to enable standardization and thus international comparability” (p. 98). In the early 1950s, the systematic collection of educational statistics was seen as central in the UNESCO portfolio of activities and the organization became the towering education statistics institution in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1952, UNESCO published the World Handbook of Educational Organisation and Statistics and in the same year, the UNESCO Institute for Education (UIE) was created in Hamburg. It was a hub for early discussions about education statistics, indicators, and the very establishment of comparability between education systems (Elfert, 2013). Even though discussions about the importance – but also challenges – of standardization and terminology in education statistics had been discussed already at the first UNESCO General Conference in late 1946 (UNESCO, 1947b), it soon became evident that the quality of numbers and data used in education statistics suffered from significant limitations and flaws. As such, caveats regarding the quality of statistical data appear in the 1955 UNESCO World Education Survey: The table has many gaps and, even where figures are known, they are based on such varied procedures as to lack comparability. To improve the situation much more study and compilation are needed at the international level and also a great deal of concerted action by the nations to standardize their procedures. (UNESCO, 1958, p. 15, cited in Heyneman, 1999, p. 67)

Leading scholars, educational psychologists, sociologists, and psychometricians met at the UIE in Hamburg to discuss the problems. The Swedish researcher Torsten Husén (1916–2009) took an active part in the activities at the UIE, and at a meeting in the late 1950s, he and a group of other researchers discussed the possibility of conducting a major international comparative study focusing on the academic performance of students (Postlethwaite, 1993, p. 6). The group successfully conducted a pilot study involving 12 countries between 1959 and 1961. This led to the establishment of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) which would later evolve into a key player in terms of comparative education data, indicators, and statistics (De Landsheere, 1997; Husén & Postlethwaite, 1986; Landahl, 2017).

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As discussed in Chap. 4, the World Bank, in the first decades of the Cold War, very much relied on UNESCO’s authority in education sealed through the partnership agreement between the two organizations. In 1958, UNESCO adopted a recommendation to develop “. . .certain definitions, classifications, and tabulations in order to improve the international comparability of their data” (UNESCO, 1958). But the problem of statistical inaccuracies and incommensurabilities between datasets did not seem to disappear. Testifying to the recurrent nature of this problem in education statistics, a whole section on the limitations of statistics entitled “progress and dead ends” appear in the 1972 Faure Report (Faure et al., 1972, pp. 24–25; Robertson, 2022). These challenges of obtaining adequate and comparable statistical data have been a salient issue throughout the history of education statistics. For instance, comparative statistics around levels of literacy and illiteracy proved to be particularly challenging (see e.g., UNESCO, 2008). There is some evidence to suggest that the problem was predominantly prevalent in UNESCO because of the organization’s close engagement with very diverse national contexts. In our interview with a former head of UNESCO statistics, he made a point about the extremely uneven quality of statistical data between rich countries and poor countries emphasizing how the problem of statistical reliability was always smaller for the OECD which traditionally has dealt more with affluent countries equipped with better statistical services (Interview with Gabriel Carceles Breis, 2021).2 But the problems of accuracy in education statistics even resonated in the OECD. An indicative article in the OECD Observer (1967) epitomized the challenges experienced in the organization: Developments in educational planning of a kind that OECD is seeking to foster depend on a major improvement in educational statistics. At the present time such statistics are deficient in several important respects: they are defined and collected without any clear formulation of the policy questions to which they are relevant; they are based on a static view of the educational system, and therefore do not serve the purposes of policies during a period of rapid educational growth; they bear little relationship to economic and manpower data, and therefore throw little light on how the educational system is functioning in relation to social and economic development as a whole; and, finally, they are not collected in relation to any overall conceptual framework of the educational system, so that they do not give national authorities any clear idea of how the educational system as a whole is developing. (p. 18)

5.3.1

Geopolitics, the Sputnik Shock and Education Statistics

As we have seen in Chap. 2, the emergence of the Cold War in general, and the so-called Sputnik shock in 1957 in particular, meant that education increasingly came to be viewed from a geopolitical and economistic perspective; not least in the OECD and World Bank (Bray & Varghese, 2011; Morgan, 2009; Ydesen &

2 Gabriel Carceles Breis worked in UNESCO’s Office of Statistics from 1965 to the early 1990s, including as its director.

5.3

The Struggle for Accurate Education Statistics in the Context of. . .

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Bomholt, 2020). This approach to education was fertile soil for increasing focus and funding for the development of education statistics which seemed to promise a more efficient education sector and a stronger alignment between education and the needs of the economy. The United States became a leading force in this turn as it scrambled for new scientific methods for developing and optimizing educational policies and practices considering economic growth and human resource development (Bürgi, 2019; Elfert & Ydesen, 2020; Tröhler, 2015). Due to its leading role, the United States was often successful in setting the parameters within which other governments determined their course of action (Gindin & Panitch, 2012) and thus set the standard for how to develop education in the Western world. An internal memo from 1960 from the US administration informs us that, Education must become the foundation of American foreign policy. This view is strongly supported by a growing sentiment among many economists, who teach that the development of human resources through education must be the first step toward economic and political advancement. . .education is the foundation of national power. (Caldwell, 1960)

Two years earlier – and 1 year after the launch of the Sputnik satellite – the US Congress had notably passed the National Defense Education Act, which aimed to enable the country’s educational system to sustain the national ability to compete with – and preferably surpass – the competing Eastern Bloc, particularly in the areas of science and technology (Porter, 2018). The trend was to emphasise the scientific disciplines, primarily in the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). With strong financial support from the Ministry of Defense, a “new curriculum movement” was launched. In terms of education statistics, the National Defense Education Act is particularly interesting because Title X of the act called for the ‘Improvement of statistical services of State educational agencies’ which led to a reorganization of the Office of Education and thus highlighted the perceived importance of developing nationwide comparable statistics for the improvement of education in the United States (Flynt, 1962). The reorganization of the Office for Education was guided by “The National Cooperative Survey of Education” of 1960 which among other things called for “standardization of terminology, definitions and classifications to assure comparability of data from different sources” (United States Office of Education, 1960, p. 12) and raising statistical standards. In relation to IOs, the United States often took a position as their most important funder, and it did not refrain from using this position for advancing its priorities and agendas. This approach to US engagement with IOs in education is among other places indicated in another memo from the US administration from 1963 reflecting a discussion and strategy for how the Office of Education could connect with OECD programmes, With the increasing number of OECD projects in the field of education, the United States should take great care to bring its educational as well as its economic and scientific resources to bear upon the formulation of OECD policy and program. (Caldwell, 1963)

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Similarly, in the process of working with its Manual of Education Statistics, UNESCO had made a note of the development in the United States and its work with standardization of terminology and procedures in education statistics (UNESCO, 1961). Within UNESCO this work tapped into the process of developing education statistics that had been ongoing since 1947 and which had reached its initial culmination with the 1958 declaration. It was this process that would later turn into the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED).

5.3.2

Statistics and Indicators in Education Planning and Systems Analysis

As we have shown in Chap. 3, educational planning and systems analysis were promoted by the Ford Foundation and the RAND think tank as the most important new methodological tools for education research in the 1960s. Comparable education statistics and indicators represented inherent building blocks of these tools (Bürgi, 2016; OEEC, 1960; Kershaw & Roland, 1959). To no small extent, American work on the development of instruments and methods for interstate comparison formed an important background for these early initiatives and the development of education statistics and indicators in the United States came to serve as a source of inspiration and model for a host of international education programmes under the auspices of IOs. For instance, one of the key objectives of the OECD Programme for Educational Investment and Planning in Relation to Economic Growth launched in 1962 was to gather comprehensive statistical data from member countries and to develop comparative data for the OECD countries (Grek & Ydesen, 2021). A key concern was ‘The Identification and Education of Scientific Talent’ which was the title of project STP-18 under the OECD Committee for Scientific and Technical Personnel (CSTP). To launch the project a conference entitled “Ability and Educational Opportunity in a Modern Economy” was held in Kungälv, Sweden, in June 1961. One of the outcomes of the conference was a monograph bearing the telling title Methods and statistics on the potential supply of talent (Rasmussen & Ydesen, 2020). But it was not just the United States that pushed this agenda. The Western European countries were also behind it. In 1964 the European Ministers of Education called for a statistical framework for educational investment and planning and the OECD heeded their call by producing a handbook on the topic (OECD, 1965). As explained in the OECD Observer (1967), The purpose of this Handbook, prepared at the request of the Conference of European Ministers of Education, was twofold: first, to formulate the statistics needed for effective educational planning; and secondly, to ascertain the use that can be made of international comparisons as an aid to such planning by Member countries. It is hoped that the progressive application of the proposals in the Handbook will lead to better education statistics and therefore to more efficient policy-making. (p. 18)

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The following year, the CSTP in the OECD established a working party with Kjell Eide as chairman.3 As reflected in a note from the CSTP secretariat, “Although UNESCO has a statistical bibliography, some further work could be done in this field” (OECD, 1965, p. 20). The background for this initiative was discontent with UNESCO’s statistical work fuelled by the idea that the CSTP could do a better job. What came out of the work was precisely a handbook on education statistics that competed with the UNESCO handbook from 1952 that had so far represented the state of the art in the field. Published in 1967, the OECD handbook was entitled “Methods and Statistical Needs for Educational Planning”. When the working party began, the OECD secretariat noted that, thorough and internationally comparable statistics on research and development activity are essential for more rational policy making at the national level and for more effective exchange of information and experience internationally. These statistics are still grossly inadequate. (. . .) These differences make international comparisons difficult and have led to an increasing need for some attempt at standardisation. (Ministry of Education, 1965)

As described by Clara Morgan (2009), “the Handbook was used to reclassify each member state’s educational system into an OECD standardized classification scheme. These were published in a series of volumes entitled Classification of Educational Systems from 1972 to 1975. The classification system acted as a boundary object – it helped coordinate OECD work with its member states” (p. 95). But while IOs to some extent served as vehicles for the spread of these ideas to the rest of the world and the Western world in particular (Abella, 2009; Gilman, 2003), they were also arenas where different views and agendas clashed or were challenged. In her analysis of UNESCO’s history, Chloé Maurel (2010) refers to two blocs in the first years of UNESCO: the “Latin clan” and the “Anglo-Saxon clan”. The former was led by France while the Americans and the British dominated the second bloc, with support from the Scandinavian countries. After the Soviet Union joined UNESCO in 1954, the “clan structure” was joined by a third leg, and with the large number of newly decolonized states that followed, the mosaic of agendas, interests and priorities became even more complex. According to Finnemore (1993), this meant that no one state could achieve absolute control within the organization and that “. . .while the Americans succeeded in replacing intellectuals of dubious leanings with patriots and loyalists, they failed in their ultimate goal of making the organization a tool of US foreign policy” (p. 580). In this sense, there were always alignments, but also negotiations and resistances, in the interactions between member-states and IOs. Nevertheless, it is still possible to see the contours of a common paradigm evolving around data, indicators, and statistics in education research in the family of IOs. The alignment between the United States and the rest of the West was a formidable force for promoting systems analysis as the holy grail of establishing

3

Between 1961 and 1964, Eide headed the OECD’s work on education planning, and he served as the first chairman of the Governing Board of the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) after its formal establishment in 1968.

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synergies between education and the economy. In the first decades after WWII there was a clear emphasis on input-output oriented statistics driven by a strong education planning and forecasting agenda hinging on human capital theory.4 The strength of this agenda must be considered in light of the Sputnik shock mentioned above, and it is visible across all three organizations. As pointed out by Heyneman (2003), all education investments supported by the World Bank between 1962 and 1980 required justifications based on manpower demands. By the time of the late 1950s and 1960s, systems analysis had established itself as the sine qua non of efficient education planning (see e.g. Kershaw & Roland, 1959).

5.4

Reorganizing Alignments and Breakthroughs in Education Statistics and Indicators in the 1970s

The 1970s framed a couple of landslide developments in terms of education statistics and indicators. One came from the ranks of UNESCO with the formation of the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) and the other stemmed from the OECD in the shape of the Social Indicator Development Programme. At the same time, the 1970s also showed a strong tendency towards reorientation among IOs in the field of education statistics. In 1973, the OECD Working Party on Educational Statistics for Planning published A Framework for Educational Indicators to Guide Government Decisions. In a follow-up report, an attempt was made to develop a set of social indicators to evaluate educational system performance (Morgan, 2009; Wyatt, 1994). This connection between social indicators and education performance ushered in a strong focus on output indicators which would characterize education policy and governance for many decades to come. Centeno (2017) argues it was precisely the economic turbulence of the 1970s caused by the oil crises that prompted the OECD to “shape its identity as the producer of league tables, benchmarking, and statistics that interlinked social, economic, and political issues” (pp. 110–111). Retrospectively, Eide (1990) described the OECD Social Indicator Development Programme as a crucial shift in terms of statistics. The programme reflected, (. . .) increased efforts in member countries for better statistics on the living conditions of their populations. A part of the ideology behind this movement, adopted from national accounting, was a strong focus on “output measures”. Statistical data collected previously had mainly reflected “inputs” in social processes; now statistics on ‘output’ should be the main concern. (pp. 33–34)

As explained by Fasano (1994), this paradigm emerged from the “input-output analysis developed by [Wassily] Leontieff in the 1940s, itself based on the concept of production functions. These paradigms introduced the assumption that the education system was engaged in a production function by which variously defined inputs were transformed into variously defined outputs as efficiently as possible in order to maximise the input/output ratio” (p. 59). 4

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In the broader landscape, the same ideas were also expressed in the so-called “school effectiveness movement”, which originated in the 1970s and played a special role in the United States and England (Goldstein & Woodhouse, 2000; Townsend, 2007). The school effectiveness movement was concerned with the idea of creating “effective” schools and learning environments, understood as schools that, in educational and financial terms, could most effectively support children’s academic development in school, as this could be measured by different types of tests (Amigo, 1982). The tool to achieve such knowledge was large comparative international studies. The movement thus represented some of the same ideas that had originated in UNESCO, and which were subsequently channeled into the creation of the IEA. The school effectiveness movement was formally established as an organization in 1988 under the name “International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSEI)” (Goldstein & Woodhouse, 2000; Townsend, 2007). These new developments where other IOs and initiatives sought to develop their own tools and approaches to education statistics sparked a response from UNESCO which saw an increased need for standards in statistics, not least for the purpose of establishing comparability. Using the already ongoing process about statistical developments, UNESCO created the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) which was adopted by all UN countries in 1975. Dubbed “ISCED 76”, the new instrument essentially provided a classification structure for, “assembling, compiling and presenting statistics of education both within individual countries and internationally” (UNESCO, 1976, p. 1, cited in Morgan, 2009, p. 107). According to Rutkowski (2008), the creation of ISCED can also be seen as, “an attempt for UNESCO to solidify its position as the gold standard in educational indicator collection and reporting” (p. 174). In this sense the launch of ISCED also had an unequivocal dimension of competition and self-preservation. To some extent the manoeuvre was successful. ISCED met the long-time demand of linking education statistics with economic statistics (Gorur, 2018a) and in subsequent years ISCED came to serve as a standard format within the United Nations System (UNESCO, 1992). Several countries – among them, England and Wales, Sudan, and France – prepared ISCED handbooks for achieving comparability between their own reporting systems and that of UNESCO (Wanner, 1979). The OECD Working Party of the Education Committee on Educational Statistics and Indicators launched efforts to harmonize OECD, UNESCO and SOEC (Statistical Office of the European Communities) approaches to educational statistics. A series of meetings between the technical staff of the three organizations took place in the late 1970s with a view to exploring the possibilities of harmonizing their approach (OECD, 1979). But in some ways ISCED 76 was already outdated when it was launched. As described in the programme document, “ISCED should facilitate the use of education statistics in manpower planning and encourage the use of manpower statistics in educational planning” (UNESCO, 1976, p. 1). We have already discussed in Chap. 4 how the Bank around 1980 moved away from the manpower planning paradigm and, as argued by Morgan (2009), the OECD would soon follow suit with the

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abandonment of the Keynesian paradigm in favour of a neoclassical supply-side orientation which focused on reducing government regulation (Seitzer et al., 2021).

5.5

The Resurgence of Geopolitics in the Shaping of Education Statistics and Indicators in the 1980s

The 1980s constituted a decade where market-driven policy solutions sprang to the fore in most of the Western World. A strong focus on economic growth, competition, and the remoulding of the public sector in the image of the private sector were some of the indicative hallmarks (Harvey, 2011). These winds of change accelerated the agenda of return of investment and comparative output indicators in education.5 As reflected in the OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI)‘s draft work programme in 1982, there was a strong notion of shifting priorities already from the early 1980s, education has to continue to be viewed in relation to the wider spectrum of economic, employment and social policies and shifts in priorities are needed in response to both overall resource constraints and new challenges for education arising from the conditions which will prevail in OECD countries in the period ahead. (CERI, 1982)

At the same time the competitive bipolarity of Cold War geopolitics remained a conspicuous companion of the IO arenas and it continuously shaped the outlook and priorities of decision-makers. In the United States, the interest in comparative indicators and statistics surged with the publication of the report A Nation at Risk in 1983 which essentially portrayed the American education system as a hazard in the geopolitical race with Japan and the Soviet bloc. Largely in response to pressure from the United States and France, the OECD created the International Indicators of Education Systems (INES) project, a precursor of PISA, in the late 1980s (Grek & Ydesen, 2021; Martens, 2007; Papadopoulos, 1994). This pressure is clearly reflected in Kjell Eide’s retrospective reflections on his experiences working with the OECD: By the mid 80s, the US changed its role in the educational collaboration of the OECD from passivity to aggressive missionary activities, characterized by ‘fight against communism’ and religious fundamentalism. In the eyes of the new US delegates, Western Europe mainly consisted of semi-communist countries. . . . (Eide, 1990, p. 48)

The United States took the lead in shaping the INES programme and the development of international comparative indicators based on its experiences comparing states’ educational performance using standardized tests. The American experiences stemmed from a tool within the Department of Education called “The Wall Chart”. According to Bryk and Hermanson (1993),

See for instance the 1986 background paper “Changing Standards of Performance and the Quality of Education” written for the OECD by Professor John Keeves (1986).

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The Wall Chart prompted the CCSSO [The Council of Chief State School Officers] to begin work on a fairer set of indicators and to create the State Educational Assessment Center. In the following year the National Research Council recommended that data collection and reporting be reorganized under a stronger federal agency. International efforts on educational indicators received a boost in 1987 with U.S. government support for a cross-national indicator project within the OECD in Paris. (p. 451)

The inspirational role of the US experiences becomes very clear in a paper to the INES general assembly, written by Rolf K. Blank from the CCSSO arguing that, Lessons learned through the development of State-by-State education indicators in the U.S. can be useful for considering key issues for implementing indicators that involve different governments and in identifying important steps for building a co-operative system for collecting and reporting data. (Blank, 1991)

The agenda had top priority for the American administration and in 1988 the Board on International Comparative Studies in Education (BICSE) was created by the National Research Council. The board was tasked with monitoring American involvement in international assessments and providing expertise in the IO arenas (Morgan, 2009). According to one of the members of BICSE, The impetus for the creation of BICSE was to upgrade the quality of data collection and analysis in the US and to see to it that the US participated on a regular basis with adequate funding. That led to the parallel idea of upgrading the quality of data in other countries and to enhance the participation of more countries. Think about this from a shift in focus from expanding enrollments to increasing what is learned in schools. There is a strong assumption about the value of lessons learned from other countries and the probability of best practices. (Interview with Francisco Ramirez, 2021)6

Similarly, the agenda of developing international comparative indicators in education combined with priorities of economic growth found strong resonance among Western policymakers. As pointed out by Heyneman (1999), “it became evident in the 1980s that evidence of economic competitiveness required an answer to the question, how good are our schools?” (p. 68). The point is also confirmed by Eide (1990), although in a more critical form: The US representatives had more success in selling their ideas about evaluation and indicators in the educational sector. This caught the interest of several member countries, and resulted in CERI work with exchange of experience on national indicators, and in the Education Committee on the possible extension of its system of comparative statistics. The lessons from the work on social indicators in the 1970s were forgotten, and we got a new round of activity with no theoretical foundation. The experience in some countries gradually proved that governance through statistical indicators is a rather primitive form of policy making, and that strengthening the qualitative information basis for policy decisions would be a more meaningful objective. However, the work of the OECD on comparative statistics, somewhat neglected over the years, was vitalized. (p. 47)

Although the work to harmonize OECD, UNESCO and SOEC approaches to educational statistics continued well into the 1980s, the pendulum of education statistics was clearly swinging in the direction of the OECD and away from

6

Stanford Professor Francisco Ramirez was a member of BICSE.

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UNESCO. For instance, the OECD took the lead in updating and revising common questionnaires to countries and it was decided that the OECD would give priority to improving the indicator templates. Already in the early 1980s, the OECD started to regard ISCED with considerable scepticism, It must be pointed out that the ISCED does not permit a very detailed analysis because it does not show the special features of certain types of education, does not properly differentiate fields of study, particularly in higher education, and does not distinguish clearly enough between vocational and technical education. These essential points will therefore have to be reconsidered in the future. (OECD, 1981, p. 2)

The OECD representatives found that the information collected by the successive UNESCO questionnaires was “not only of very limited use and made international analysis very difficult but could also be misleading since there was no set of common definitions or comparable data on teachers” (OECD, 1981, p. 4). By the time of the 1990s, Tom Alexander, Director of the OECD Social Affairs, Manpower and Education division, found that, The experience of the indicators work so far, as well as on educational attainment of the labour force, and the joint work on training statistics, show that there is a strong demand both within and without the Secretariat for educational statistics not currently on file. (CERI, 1991, p. 5)

In a parallel process, the UNESCO Division of Statistics was dramatically downsized throughout the 1980s. Roser Cussó (2006), who worked at UNESCO’s statistical services from 1994 to 2001, points out that the number of employees decreased from 51 staff in 1984 to 33 staff in 1994. The implication was that “the office could barely manage the load of raw data from the explosion of member countries” (Heyneman, 1999, p. 68). At the same time BICSE pushed for the collection of more detailed data than what UNESCO could provide (Heyneman, 2012). This development signals the advent of the crisis surrounding UNESCO statistics in the 1990s.

5.6

Reshuffling Positions in the IO Arena in the 1990s

By the 1990s it became increasingly clear that the collection of internationally comparable statistics across UNESCO Member States was a formidable and continuously challenging task. An important milestone was the World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien, Thailand, discussed in Chap. 4. At that conference it was agreed that universal access to education would be measured, not based on school attendance, but based on learning outcomes. Heyneman (1999) points out that UNESCO’s data gathering mechanisms were not geared to sustain that ambition. In September 1991, Jeffrey Puryear, director of education operations for the Ford Foundation in the southern cone of Latin America, presented a report to BICSE about UNESCO’s statistical data which he had been tasked to produce by the World Bank and UNICEF. Puryear found that the statistics disseminated by UNESCO were

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too narrow, unreliable, and not easily accessible (Cussó, 2006; Puryear, 1995). While the erratic quality of data and different interpretations of categories and concepts among member countries explains some of these problems, the critique of UNESCO statistics also reflects the shift towards output performance data for education systems. In her thorough analysis of a follow-up report on UNESCO statistics by BICSE (the so-called Guthrie & Hansen Report from 1995), Cussó (2006) argues that, For BICSE, the relationship between education and international economic competition is not a topic of debate, but a reality, which must be taken into consideration when designing statistical programs. This is, in fact, one of the most important aims of the report: to encourage change of function and policy orientation of international education statistics for the sake of ‘the altered human capital needs of member states, growth in internationalism among private-sector companies, and the emergence of major third-party agencies concerned with social infrastructure planning and development throughout the world (Guthrie & Hansen, 1995, p. 47, 537)

In that sense the critique of UNESCO statistics also represented a clash between the epistemology embedded in ISCED and the new demand for performance data. UNESCO tried to respond to the criticism precisely by arguing that, “ISCED cannot be expected to support international statistics of a type which it was never designed to support” (UNESCO, 1994, p. 9). But at the same time UNESCO’s DirectorGeneral co-financed the BICSE review of its statistics with the World Bank, the American National Center for Education Statistics and the American National Science Foundation (Cussó, 2006). Alarmingly, this review – the Guthrie & Hansen Report – pointed out that, Unless external agencies perceive a meaningful commitment by UNESCO to its statistics program, they are unlikely to view the organization as the most appropriate vehicle through which to fund and implement their own ideas for improving education statistics and indicators. (Guthrie & Hansen, 1995, p. 6)

In other words, the very status of UNESCO statistics was at stake. The outcome of the situation was the reconfiguration of the UNESCO Division of Statistics in 1999, which was transferred from UNESCO headquarters in Paris to Montreal in 2001 and restructured as the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) (Fontdevila, 2021). While this whole reshuffling process in education statistics has been told as a story about organizational derailment in the sense of falling quality and outdated methodologies unable to meet demands for statistics on education performance, the question why such a derailment took place remains. Clearly part of the story are the recurring financial problems of UNESCO. For instance, in the final report of the “Meeting of Experts on Education Indicators and the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED)” that took place in Paris in June 1992, UNESCO was urged to “mobilize additional extrabudgetary resources for assistance to developing countries in strengthening their national education statistics systems” (Puryear, 1995, p. 90). Albert Tuijnman elaborated eloquently on the dire situation of statistics in UNESCO:

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Back in 1985, UNESCO had a statistics unit comprising only a handful of people equipped with a couple of outdated IBM personal computers and electrical Olivetti typewriters. They were called technicians whose duty was maintaining elementary time series such as gross enrolments or public education expenditure and supplying some data tables whenever the next UNESCO report was to be drafted. They were sitting in a dead-end corridor in the basement of the Place de Fontenoy building stuffed with stacks of dusty paper questionnaires, reports and computer printouts, and were co-located with other support services such as building maintenance, the printing office, and furniture storage. There was no vision, no competence, no budget, no expectation and no hope. This was the bleak reality that had frustrated many leading academics at the time and led to a political dynamic in the US and elsewhere to engage with OECD to launch the INES project on international education statistics and indicators. And of course this is what eventually led to the creation of the separate UIS in Montreal. (Personal communication, March 2023)

Resonating this bleak picture, Guthrie and Hansen (1995), in their report, pointed out that only 1.2% of the UNESCO budget and 1.5% of the UNESCO staff were allocated to statistics. For that reason, Heyneman (1999) argued that there was a need for “moving the statistics function out of UNESCO altogether to an environment more conducive to quality and professionalism” (p. 72). In this sense, the establishment of UIS in Canada represented a major rupture in the development of UNESCO statistics. This is not least reflected in the so-called Thompson Report commissioned by UNESCO and tasked with making recommendations about the future institute’s staff policy, structure and functions of which the majority entailed a radical break with previous practices (Fontdevila, 2021). But the contours of a geopolitical agenda also emerge in the question of UNESCO statistics. The United States – followed by the United Kingdom and Singapore – had withdrawn its UNESCO membership in 1984. The US Secretary of State declared reasons “relating to ideological orientation, budget and management” (Conil Lacoste, 1993, p. 208), but in fact the reasons given for the withdrawal were “made up” (Interview with Raymond Wanner, 2021).7 Coate (1988) argued that “the withdrawal of the US was an intentional action initiated and carried out largely by a small group of ideological zealots” (p. 157), who did not see any value anymore in supporting an organization that was too difficult to use as an instrument of American foreign policy (see also Wanner, 2015, p. 44). The US withdrawal clearly meant significant budget cuts to UNESCO. According to Cussó (2006), the budget decreased by 30%, “while almost a further 20% of extra-budgetary funds were cut off between 1983 and 1987” (p. 534). At the same time the reviews of UNESCO statistics were largely produced by American organizations while the United States strongly backed and supported the INES project in the OECD. There seems to have been a considerable discontent with UNESCO’s administration of its role as the leading provider of education statistics

7 Raymond Wanner worked for the US Department of State for 30 years, mostly in charge of international organizations, in particular UNESCO, where he served for 6 years in Paris at the US diplomatic mission to UNESCO. In the 2000s, he also served as chair of the Governing Board of the IIEP.

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(Addey, 2018b).8 Cussó (2006) pointed out how Heyneman (1999), as member of BICSE in those years, insisted on the urgent need for reform and modernization of the statistical services. He strongly criticized, among other things, UNESCO’s reticence in revising the role – in his opinion marginal – which education statistics were given, especially in terms of measurement and cross-national comparability of learning achievement. Considering that UNESCO tended to be used ‘as a battleground for cold war politics’, Heyneman suggested that the influence of ‘Marxist academics’ and the intergovernmental and political nature of the Organization could explain this reticence. (p. 533)

The implication of these developments was that the OECD and IEA were assuming leading roles in the development of comparative statistics on education. In her analysis of the events, Fontdevila (2021) contends that, one of the few recommendations advanced by the Thompson Report in relation to data production concerned the harmonization of the UIS methods with the OECD guidelines – a development that confirmed the growing influence and dominance exerted by OECD in the field of international education statistics. (p. 38)

In our interview with Gabriel Carceles Breis (2021), he explained how UNESCO sought to recover good relationships with the United States and the United Kingdom. For that purpose, Canada played a leading role, and it was felt that Canada needed to get something in return. Essentially, Breis’ argument is that the UIS went to Canada to win the Americans and British back and compensate for Canada not getting a UN regional office. Other countries such as France and the UK were also interested in hosting UIS, but as the first choice for the director of the new statistics office was the prominent British social statistician Dr. Denise Lievesley of the Royal Statistical Society (UNESCO, 1999), it would have been impossible to also give the institute to Britain. France had made too many enemies by pulling out of the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS),9 so it was decided to move the new institute to Canada at the behest of Scott Murray who was Director General, Institutions and Social Statistics, in Statistics Canada at the time (Interview with Albert Tuijnman, 2019).10 This was also a way of appeasing the World Bank that had threatened to build its own division of statistics, and the World Bank ended up supporting and

8

Addey (2018a) argues that the US backing of INES was due to the poor American performance in the Second International Mathematics Study (SIMS) conducted by the IEA between 1980 and 1982. These results angered the US government which found that sampling made by the IEA had not been cleared by any government agency. This situation prompted the government’s call for precise definitions, systematic methodology, and standardized procedures around international comparative performance indicators in education. 9 France withdrew from IALS when the results of the survey turned out to be unfavourable (“the results for France were just a disaster”). Having to remove all the French data from the reports turned out to be “a nightmare” for those involved (Interview with Albert Tuijnman, 2019). 10 Albert Tuijnman was Principal Administrator in the Education and Training Division at the OECD from 1992 to 1998. He was the main OECD contact for IALS and led one of the networks that conducted the INES project. He was the lead author of the first three Education at a Glance report, published since 1992.

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funding the UIS, which was not too far from Washington and in the same time zone (Interview with César Guadalupe, 2021).11 A major rationale for moving the UIS to North America was also the interest of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to have UIS close by (Personal communication with Albert Tuijnman, 2023). Against this background, there seems to have been a distinct geopolitical dimension in the restructuring of UNESCO statistics and also a strong push for aligning UNESCO statistics with the new epistemological ambitions of collecting comparative data on education performance (Cussó & D’Amico, 2005). In this respect, Heyneman (1999) mentioned the International Program for the Improvement of Educational Outcomes (IPIEO) sponsored in 1996 by the World Bank, which had three purposes, to assist countries hoping to participate in international education surveys through IEA, or educational indicators through OECD, and to assist UNESCO in establishing an autonomous institute of education statistics. (p. 72)

Interestingly, Cussó (2006) pointed out how the president of the steering committee formed in 1998 for the transformation of the Division of Statistics into the new Institute had major responsibilities within the World Bank and how the new UIS was almost entirely restaffed at the management level with people who had previously participated in OECD activities. It seems that the more market-oriented organizations were encroaching on the UNESCO turf and a stronger alignment between the organizations in the area of education statistics was in the making.

5.6.1

The Scramble for Developing International Comparative Statistics and Indicators

Intertwining with the UNESCO statistics affair a scramble for developing international comparative statistics and indicators took place involving the whole family of IOs. On 21 January 1993, a letter from Tom Alexander, director of the OECD Directorate for Education, Employment, Labour, and Social Affairs (DEELSA), addressed to the Education Committee of the CERI Governing Board informed members of the outcome of consultations with other IOs to improve the collection, analysis, and publication of CERI indicators and educational statistics. In the opening address at the second General Assembly of the OECD Project on International Education Indicators, held in Lugano-Cadro, Switzerland, on September 26 and 27, 1991, Alexander (1994) made a general claim about the value of international comparisons within individual national politics:

11

César Guadalupe was Senior Programme Specialist at the UNESCO Institute for Statistics from 2007–2012. Prior to that, he had worked for UNESCO as consultant and regional advisor for Latin America on education statistics.

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The general wave of educational reforms that has been apparent in most of the OECD Member countries since the 1980s and which is characterized by an overriding concern with the effectiveness of schools seems to have brought with it a new interest in comparability issues. International comparisons of educational conditions and performance are now perceived as a means of adding depth and perspective to the analysis of national situations. References to other nations’ policies and results are beginning to be routinely used in discussions of education, and comparability now belongs with accountability to that changing set of driving words which shape the current management paradigm of education. (p. 17)

Indeed, the OECD’s and UNESCO’s work on indicators was acknowledged as a context for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s (APEC) interest in developing indicators of school effectiveness. In 1995, UNESCO, the OECD, and Eurostat joined forces in collecting data on key aspects of education, thus consolidating a liaison formed when the OECD adapted the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) Systems, originally developed by UNESCO and adopted by all UNESCO (and hence OECD) member states in 1978 (OECD, 1991; Papadopoulos 1994).12 This collaboration, although fraught with difficulties, as suggested by Henry et al. (2001), managed to explore common definitions, the use of criteria for quality control, and improved data documentation to improve international comparisons of educational statistics. But in this partnership, the OECD took a more prominent position than had been the case in the 1970s (Rutkowski, 2008). When the ISCED was revised – and adopted by UNESCO in November 1997 – the OECD had greatly influenced the revision process. According to Cussó (2006), “this influence can be seen, for instance, in the introduction of level 4 (post-secondary nontertiary education) and in the definition and classification of educational programs according to their orientation: towards the labor market or towards more advanced studies” (p. 535). Another important development reflecting the strengthened position of the OECD was IALS conducted between 1994 and 1998. Statistics Canada and the American National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) absorbed most of the costs involved in the survey (Morgan, 2009). The methodological expertise for the study came from Statistics Canada and the American Educational Testing Service (ETS),13 building on the same team of statisticians that had already worked on previous American and Canadian literacy studies (Elfert & Walker, 2020). IALS was then conducted as a pilot study cooperatively between Statistics Canada and the OECD. The OECD was brought in to give the project international legitimacy. Initially the OECD had no expertise in test development; it was in charge of the overall coordination, recruiting countries, and planning and framing the reports and products that came out of IALS (Elfert & Walker, 2020; Interview with Albert 12 The objective of the joint UNESCO-UIS/OECD/EUROSTAT (UOE) data collection on education statistics was to provide internationally comparable data on key aspects of formal education systems, especially on the participation and completion of education programmes, as well as the cost and types of resources dedicated to education. 13 The American Educational Testing Service (ETS), headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey, is a private nonprofit organization with approximately 3000 employees devoted to educational measurement and research, see https://www.ets.org/about/faq/

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Tuijnman, 2019). IALS was the first-ever, large-scale, international comparative assessment designed to identify and measure a range of adult skills and to help assess the impact of literacy in the participating global economies. Although the OECD came to this project through the side door, in many ways IALS enabled the groundwork – both institutional and infrastructural – for advancing the INES project which had already resulted in the publication of the annual Education at a Glance (EAG) report since 1992. Aimed at informing policy makers about the state of education in their respective countries and worldwide, the EAG was a milestone in the development of education data, indicators and statistics. Following the publication of the first EAG, the Policy Review and Advisory Group was joined by three invited consultants in its January 1993 meeting: Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institute, Claus Moser, director of the UK Central Statistical Office, and François Orivel, director of the Institut de Recherche sur l’Économie de l’Éducation. These consultants concluded that the first edition of EAG marked “a major step in the development of international education statistics and indicators” (National Research Council, 1995, no page numbers in original). They suggested that the “INES study serves an important function in driving improvement in data collection at the national level” (no page). Contrary to some of the input from external associates of the INES programme at the Lugano conference in 1991, where the first draft edition of EAG was presented, these consultants to a large extent viewed education through an economic lens. In fact, in some of his later works, one of Hanushek’s most significant claims has been that improving PISA scores improves economic growth (Hanushek & Woessmann, 2015). This economistic strand of the INES programme was promoted by distinct contextual developments in the early 1990s. The second set of educational indicators (appearing in the second edition of EAG in 1993) emerged when OECD member countries faced serious problems of sluggish growth and rising unemployment. The 1993 edition of EAG therefore included economic, social, and demographic contexts of education; the outcomes of education; and information on costs, resources, and processes. Thirty-eight indicators offered a body of information on crucial aspects of education policy related to the economy, including investment levels, financing and staffing, decision-making, participation levels, student tracking, student achievement in key subjects and graduation rates, and whether some levels and types of education offer better protection than others against unemployment. More importantly, EAG was presented not as a historical study, but as an instrument for monitoring and guiding educational policy. Therefore, repeated suggestions were made for the data to be processed quickly and published “without delay” (NRC, 1995). One of the arguments for the superiority of INES was that EAG should reflect “reality”, suggesting that the changing conditions of education in a complex international environment must be considered. The participating OECD member countries committed themselves to continuous updates of national data, involving not only substantial improvements in data collection, processing, analysis, and reporting procedures, but also, and perhaps more crucially, the regular, continuous gathering of such national statistical data. As is often the case, when such data

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were not previously gathered or even in existence, they had to be created by constructing new classifications and definitions, following the example of the leading participant countries. Thus, the year 1993 was devoted to improving procedures for data collection and transfer. The regular production of comparable international educational indicators was one of the major long-term objectives of the INES project and therefore signalled a critical juncture in the development leading up to PISA. The development of the OECD set of international educational indicators and the publication of EAG generated a series of studies at national levels that complemented the international perspective. National indicator studies were conducted in Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, and the United States. This decisive development should not be downplayed; the policy relevance of any interpretation of the OECD indicators depended largely on whether the international data were supplemented by countryspecific, within-system information. Therefore, INES was not only instrumental in producing international data, but also crucial in constructing and maintaining national education data. The IEA was also heavily involved in the development of the methodology used in the INES programme. But according to Ron Gass, his successor as director of CERI, Tom Alexander, “. . . pulled off a major coup because he succeeded in absorbing. . .” IEA methodology into the INES programme, allegedly because “. . .the IEA fell into difficulties financially” (Interview with Ron Gass, 2017).14 According to Morgan (2009), Alexander, at a meeting in 1995, expressed a desire to gain full access to the IEA international database. Based on interview data, Morgan explains how “the IEA refused to comply with these demands” and that “the IEA found itself compromising its autonomy as a nongovernmental institution” (p. 143). She also points out how US Department of Education officials “believed that an OECD-based study would provide them with more direct control over the design of the assessment, which they did not have with the IEA studies” (p. 143). PizmonyLevy (2013) has shown how in 1990, the American National Center for Educational Statistics pressured the IEA into developing their ILSAs into a math and science study which would allow the United States to compare with countries relevant for the United States in return for financial support. The OECD and Eurostat agreed to jointly publish the INES Technical Handbook in 1995. This was an important step in the two organizations’ collaboration, as it would guarantee that the definitions, calculation procedures, and technical criteria used were fully compatible. And given the interest of the European Commission, Eurostat was also tasked with carrying out a feasibility study concerning the production of educational indicators particularly suited to the needs of the European Union (Brøgger & Ydesen, 2023). According to our interview with Jørn

14 Ron Gass joined the OEEC in 1958 and worked for the OECD until his retirement in 1989. He was the first director of the OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI).

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Skovsgaard (2021),15 who was the Danish member of the INES Strategic Management Group, this was the platform that allowed for the development of PISA. By the time the INES project was completed in 1996, the OECD and its member countries had succeeded in setting up an international database containing up-todate, relevant educational statistics and indicators; a fully computerised on-line network for collecting and disseminating data; and cost-effective procedures for processing the data. One year later, in 1997, PISA would be launched. In response to what had been for a long time only a data dream for many, INES now offered the tools, cultures, and momentum to turn such data into a statistical reality. In 1997 and perhaps reflecting the INES project’s status, the secretariat was requested by the OECD Council of Ministers to commence exploratory work on developing comparative indicators of human capital investment. Henry et al. (2001), quoting from an interview with an individual in the secretariat, stated this would be the first step in developing an international set of indicators to answer the interests of policy makers and, I suppose, people in education and employment ministries. People are under pressure to justify their expenditure, so they want data to show that education and training outpays investments rather than consumption activities. (p. 164)

This led to the launch of the OECD’s “Definition and Selection of Key Competencies curriculum framework” (DeSeCo) in 1997 which would run as an auxiliary project tasked with turning the data from PISA into research evidence for policy action. According to the executive summary, the aim of the DeSeCo project was to provide, a sound conceptual framework to inform the identification of key competencies and strengthen international surveys measuring the competence level of young people and adults. This project, carried out under the leadership of Switzerland and linked to PISA, brought together experts in a wide range of disciplines to work with stakeholders and policy analysts to produce a policy-relevant framework. (OECD/DeSeCo, 2005)

This brings us to the threshold of the 2000s where imaginaries about human competences were to become the new currency of education and schooling.

5.7

Aligning IO Efforts in Education Statistics and Indicators in the 2000s

From a helicopter perspective, the 2000s represent an era where IOs seem to come together around key programmes in education such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (2000) and, since 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),

15

Jørn Skovsgaard was senior adviser at the International Secretariat (2001–2018) and head of division (1996–2001) in the Danish Ministry of Education. Between 2001 and 2018, he represented Denmark on several committees and working groups at the OECD. For example, Skovsgaard was the Danish delegate in the OECD Education Policy Committee and member of the CERI Governing Board.

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in particular the Education 2030 agenda revolving around the education target SDG 4 (“Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”) (Niemann, 2022). Hinging fundamentally on education statistics and indicators, these programmes connect with the data produced in the OECD’s development of the PISA programme – including its offspring products (Lewis, 2019) – and the World Bank’s flagship education policy platform SABER (Systems Approach for Better Education Results) launched in 2011.16 Following from this observation the recent Global Education Cooperation Mechanism (GCM) may be seen as the culmination of this collaboration while the fact that Eurostat, the European Commission and UNESCO are observers to the OECD’s INES programme also provides a case in point (Kellow & Carroll, 2022). Gorur (2018b) as well as Fontdevila and Grek (2021) point out how a whole testing industry nourished by a demand for increased data and indicator use follows in the wake of the SDGs fostered by UNESCO. Similarly, in their recent analysis – and referencing the 2018 World Bank Development Report on education – Grey and Morris (2022) contend how, over the last seven years, the World Economic Forum (WEF), UNICEF, UNESCO, the World Bank and the OECD have used the identical language of twenty-first century skills and called for ‘salient metrics’ to facilitate evidence-based reform and introduce twenty-first century skills into schools. (p. 5)

5.7.1

Intra- and Interorganizational Struggles

Nevertheless, several struggles and opposing views within and between IOs have played out behind the scenes of this apparently blissful landscape. For instance, profound disagreements over the nature of evidence-based policy research (EBPR) existed in CERI in the early 2000s (Ydesen, 2021). Between 2004 and 2006, four OECD conferences on EBPR in education were held.17 Especially, the first conference entitled “OECD – U.S. Meeting on Evidence-Based Policy Research” held in Washington D.C. in 2004, was characterized by a clash of agendas between the United States and the bloc of Scandinavian countries in terms of how to understand

16

The World Bank has expanded its databank progressively from 116 indicators in April 1989 to 1600 indicators in October 2018, https://datatopics.worldbank.org/world-development-indicators/ stories/world-development-indicators-the-story.html. This development should not least be viewed in light of a new strategy under the presidency of James D. Wolfensohn (1995–2005) redesigning the World Bank as the “Knowledge Bank” (Niemann, 2022, p. 136). 17 OECD-U.S. Meeting on Evidence-Based Policy Research in Education, Washington D.C., 19–20 April 2004; Evidence-based Policy Research: The Interaction Between Policy Makers and Research in Education, Stockholm, 27–28 January 2005; Linking Evidence to Practice, The Hague, 14–15 September 2005; Final Workshop for Evidence-based Policy Research in Education, London, 6–7 July 2006.

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EBPR. In our interview, a former Director-General in the Swedish Ministry of Education explained, I remember well that there was a stormy meeting in Washington where we Europeans pointed out that the Americans were almost crazy because they strongly claimed evidencebasing as the only true religion in the educational field. . . Nor were the Americans interested in the learning that takes place in schools outside the school subjects, such as the development of independence, solidarity, tolerance. (Interview with Mats Ekholm, 2021)18

The conference itself was organised by CERI in cooperation with the US Education Department’s Institute of Education Sciences and the American organization “Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy” dedicated to increasing government effectiveness through the use of rigorous evidence about ‘what works’.19 It is a clear indication of the strong US involvement in the shaping of the OECD approach to EBPR in subsequent years. One of the speakers at the conference was Jon Baron from the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy. Baron contended that evidence-based policy research in education is needed because of the American experience with the difficulty of improving performance in spite of large financial injections. Baron advocated the use of randomised trials and argued that they are the gold standard in many other areas such as medicine.20 In a session entitled “Comparing Experiences: Various approaches to evidencebased policy research in OECD member countries”, the Danish delegate Lars-Henrik Schmidt, Dean of the Danish School of Education, expounded that in a Danish context, the concept of evidence-based education must be nuanced and that it cannot be reduced to Randomized Control Trials (RCTs). Schmidt argued that educational research is a practised form of knowledge unable to escape different kinds of beliefs. According to the note about the conference, the Q&A session following Schmidt’s talk reflects that many conference participants disagreed and found Schmidt’s argument very provocative. However, more Scandinavian delegates made their critical voices heard. Mats Ekholm criticised the conference’s one-sided focus on RCTs. He found that there was a certain dogmatism where everyone was expected to be strong believers in RCTs, which, he contended, are only one way of gathering systematic knowledge. It is noteworthy that Jørn Skovsgaard from the Danish

18

Mats Ekholm was Professor of Education at the University of Karlstad, Sweden. While serving in the capacity as Director General of the Swedish National Agency for Education, Ekholm was appointed as the Swedish delegate in the CERI Governing Board between 2000 and 2010. During this period Ekholm was also a member of the INES Strategic Management Group. 19 http://coalition4evidence.org/mission-activities/ (accessed 3 March 2021). The section on the debates over EBPR is a paraphrase of pages 12–14 in Ydesen (2021). Footnotes and references have been retained. 20 Note about OECD conferences on Evidence-Based Policy Research entitled ‘Notat om OECDkonferencer om EBPR’, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, November 2005. Private Archive. The document is an extended summary of the document ‘OECD (2004) OECD-U.S. meeting on evidence-based policy research in education. In: Forum proceedings, OECD, Paris, 19–20 April’. This original source document has been impossible to obtain either via the OECD archive or interlibrary loan.

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Ministry of Education approved of Ekholm’s speech, agreeing that there is a need to develop the toolbox with a plurality of evidence types. Ole-Jakob Skodvin, a representative of the Norwegian Ministry also spoke out in favour of a more holistic approach and emphasized the need to consider that contexts and approaches vary between countries. After these comments, some participants referred to the “Nordic Coalition”. For example, Tom Schuller, head of CERI, who talked about “the US/Scandinavian dialogue” and another delegate portrayed the Nordic countries as “special cases”, arguing that these countries have relatively homogeneous populations and public databases with a lot of microdata on the individuals minimizing the need for control groups compared to other countries (Ydesen, 2021). Thus, the OECD conference gives the impression of a discrepancy between the Scandinavian and American participants on methodology. In our interview with Jørn Skovsgaard (2021), he explained that, The Americans were very frustrated with some of us because we did not buy into their agenda, and we were very critical of their bombastic behaviour. They came up with a somewhat violent rhetoric, such as that their proposal based on ‘randomised controlled trials’ was ‘a gold standard’ and they talked about a ‘coalition of the willing’.

The debate taking place in the OECD between an American and a Scandinavian agenda regarding EBPR constitutes essentially a dispute over which education research practices should be prevalent in the OECD’s work on education. The issue at stake is what kinds of knowledge and experiences deriving from national contexts should be recognised in the OECD arena. In subsequent years, the American approach prevailed. In terms of inter-organizational struggles, the 2000s still bear witness to reminiscences of the turbulence over education statistics in the 1990s. In her empirical work, Addey (2021) has found how OECD staff continued to take a critical stance towards UNESCO and positioned the OECD as superior. For instance, in one of her interviews an OECD staff member explained that UNESCO needs OECD “far more than the OECD needs UNESCO” while another OECD staff member stated that UNESCO does not have the expertise to develop ILSAs, that “it would just be impossible for it to create that expertise”, and that UNESCO’s measurement endeavors are “contrary to good practice” (p. 8). At least according to OECD staff, the OECD has now become the global point of reference for data on learning outcomes, even for UNESCO: UNESCO, and UIS, and the Global Monitoring Report use OECD data and information for their own reporting, certainly for UIS reporting, basically all the OECD member countries, they just simply take our data and use it. And on learning assessment they do not have anything, so for whatever they want to say, well, they have got LAMP,21 but that is it really, so whatever they want to say about learning outcomes and measuring, they have to turn to us and the other assessment programmes. (cited in Addey, 2018b)

21

In 2003, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) set out to develop the Literacy Assessment and Monitoring Programme (LAMP) to measure adult literacy levels across low- and middle-income countries in a context-sensitive way.

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In this sense, a picture can be drawn of the OECD and World Bank being the hegemonic providers of education data, numbers and statistics. Interestingly, the UIS made a rebuttal of using Education at a Glance as the accepted standard for monitoring the SDG 4 in 2016 (Li & Morris, 2022). Nevertheless, Li and Morris (2022) find that the OECD has used PISA-D as a lever in recent years to successfully position itself as the key monitor of SDG 4.1. It seems that significant steps of alignment in the field of data, numbers and statistics have taken place in the 2000s establishing an international governance-by-comparison, reference-based, and benchmark-setting regime. But the struggles over power, authority, resources, direction and agendas between UNESCO, OECD and the Bank undoubtedly lurk underneath the surface.

5.8

Concluding Discussion

In this chapter we have uncovered the turbulence around education statistics and indicators playing out in the post-WWII period. We have seen how negotiations, resistances, inertias, and modifications have been symptomatic in the UNESCOOECD-World Bank triangle but also how other organizations played into the development and how member-states – not least the United States – have significantly pushed their agendas and influenced the historical trajectories of education statistics and indicators. This history has included significant reshufflings in the division of labour in and between the IOs. The most prominent examples of such reshufflings are the push to develop international comparative indicators under the auspices of the OECD from the late 1980s culminating with the launch of PISA in 1997, the increasing independence and self-awareness of the World Bank from the 1980s onwards, and the dethroning of UNESCO as the leading international body for education statistics during the 1990s. These developments can only be explained by taking the intra- and interorganizational struggles and agenda settings into account. But the history also contains a distinct geopolitical dimension which resonates with previous studies. For instance, in his analysis of the Cold War period, Tröhler (2015) has argued the presence of a social engineering and statistical planning paradigm springing from the United States, which was instrumental in triggering the type of technocratic culture characterized by international organizations. Our analysis has also shown how the quest for achieving solid comparability remained an unattainable fata morgana. The history of education statistics is a history about the lack of adequate and comparable statistical data. In the process of trying to overcome the problem of statistical inaccuracies and incommensurabilities between datasets, numbers became a bone of contention between IOs. The launch of ISCED in the 1970s was an attempt to overcome such contentions and make sure that all involved education systems would report comparable data using the same definitions and modes of counting. ISCED even sparked some attempts to establish collaboration between IOs as demonstrated in efforts to align the OECD,

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UNESCO and SOEC (Statistical Office of the European Communities) approaches to educational statistics. But it soon proved a highly problematic endeavour and IOs increasingly embarked on a path to collect data themselves in large-scale international programmes and assessments. This development saw the re-emergence of the struggle over which organization would play first fiddle in terms of education statistics and indicators. The narrative about the poor quality of UNESCO statistics and the rise of the OECD and to some extent also the World Bank as the leading organizations of education statistics and indicators is particularly salient across the literature and in our empirical data. As shown in our analysis this reshuffling in the UNESCO, OECD, World Bank triangle encompasses many layers and explanations, such as the academic field of statistics itself, the role of key actors, organizational conditions, resources, and geopolitics, that need to be taken into account. But it also demonstrates how a new solution was found that was acceptable to all the organizations, namely the establishment of UIS in Montreal, which has come to serve as a forum of collaboration, also in the context of SDG 4. Here attention should be drawn to the Technical Advisory Group which is chaired by the UIS, and which recruited experts from UNESCO, the OECD, and the World Bank and was “tasked with the preparation of a series of recommendations for what came to be known as ‘post-2015 indicators’” (Fontdevila, 2021, p. 164). Even so, the OECD – and the IEA – have been especially prolific in following the data collection path while the World Bank has launched a tightly defined conceptual framework and diagnostic tool for different policy domains with its SABER programme. In this sense, the OECD, IEA and World Bank have pursued a clear paradigm of standardized solutions fuelled by narratives about development, progress, and best practices in order to establish comparability. In her analysis of the assessment culture of IOs, Addey (2018a) – drawing on Henry et al. (2001) – notes a distinct movement in education statistics from “philosophical doubt to statistical certainty” (p. 379). It is a journey from negotiations between stakeholders – and a dash of humbleness – to an assertive assumption about certainty and the datafication of education. In terms of understanding where this trajectory has taken education, we might perhaps update René Descartes’ (1596–1650) ontological theorem cogito, ergo sum [I think, therefore I am] to metitur, ergo est [it measures, therefore it is]. The leading programmes in contemporary global education – like the Education 2030 agenda – certainly seem to warrant such a conclusion.

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Chapter 6

From Lifelong Learning to the Measurement of Skills

6.1

Introduction

This chapter builds on Chap. 2, where we outline the divergent traditions that shaped education in the post-World War II era, the humanistic-idealistic tradition that underpins the worldview of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the more utilitarian economistic approach that characterizes the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank. The chapter also picks up some threads from Chap. 3, where we discuss the turf struggles between the OECD and UNESCO during the heydays of educational planning, and Chap. 5, where we trace the dynamics and conflicts around statistics in the UNESCO-OECD-World Bank governance triangle. But rather than focusing on the differences between their programmes, this chapter will discuss how both UNESCO and the OECD have engaged with a similar idea, lifelong education (éducation permanente) in the case of UNESCO, and recurrent education in the case of the OECD. We will argue that the egalitarian idea of lifelong learning represented a counter-perspective to the technocratic-rationalistic approach to education. Although some residues of lifelong learning are still alive, as an overarching policy idea it was abandoned both by UNESCO and the OECD, where it was overshadowed by the indicators movement. This chapter also sheds light on the role of subsidiary structures created by international organizations (IOs) that allow them to pursue activities that fall outside of their core business and do “boundary work” (Kranke, 2022). The chapter will depart from the 1961 OECD Conference on “Economic Growth and Investment in Education” in Washington, where the overarching problem of education in the post-World War II decades was outlined in the introduction to the report by leading European educationists that set the stage for the debates. In light of the social demand for education, the report discussed the rationale for the expansion of education, and what represented a reasonable target for that expansion in the decade to come. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Elfert, C. Ydesen, Global Governance of Education, Educational Governance Research 24, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40411-5_6

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In the past, education has not been made available to everyone who was especially gifted and talented; there have been social barriers which have meant personal handicaps and unjust discrimination. Apart from this loss to the individual, there has been a loss to society which, in modern conditions, cannot afford to leave unused so large a part of its human resources and skills. (Svennilson et al., 1961, p. 11)

The response to this major societal question about equality of education, the tapping of lost potential and equal participation in society, shifted throughout the 1960s. As has been discussed in Chap. 3, the 1960s were the decade of the boom of educational planning. Towards the end of the decade a certain disenchantment set in as the strong faith and investment in education of the post-World War II era had not yielded the expected social and economic outcomes. Economic growth began to stall and there were indications that the labour market would not be able to absorb the growing numbers of graduates. Despite vastly increased public spending on education, not much had been achieved in the struggle against inequalities (Husén, 1979; Karabel & Halsey, 1977). Just as at the 1961 OECD conference in Washington, economists had declared “the fight for education [as] too important to be left solely to the educators” (Walter Heller, cited in Ydesen, 2019, p. 1; see also OECD, 1962), a decade later educationists came to the realization that “education is too complicated to trust to the planners” (Williams, 1972, cited in Bürgi, 2017a, p. 151). This period has been characterized as a “crisis before the crisis” (Schmelzer, 2012), referring to the oil and economic crisis of the 1970s. The dampening of the uncritical optimism about what education could deliver in terms of individual, economic and societal benefits concerned both the OECD and UNESCO at the end of the 1960s. The 1967 Williamsburg conference, for which the International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) provided many of the background papers, declared a “world educational crisis” (Coombs, 1968). Many impulses came from the Williamsburg conference: It marked the departure from the input-output orientation of the educational planning years towards a more systemic, comprehensive approach to education, and also a more qualitative approach involving sociological perspectives (Bürgi, 2017a, b). It spurred greater interest in comparative, cross-national education studies and journals, such as UNESCO’s journal Prospects, which was launched in 1970. Also, the UN initiative to declare 1970 as the International Education Year was launched at Williamsburg (Fernig, 1970). The conference “Policies for Educational Growth” held in Paris in 1970, the importance of which has been compared to that of the 1961 Washington conference (OECD, 1979), took stock of the educational planning activities of the 1960s and concluded that not much had been achieved in terms of mitigating inequality, and that “the impact of education on the life of children had remained heavily determined by their family and class origin” (OECD, 1979, pp. 16–17). The 1968 student protests against capitalism and the encrusted and elitist education system compelled the OECD to raise questions about the “problems of the modern society”1 (Schmelzer, 2012) in terms of the costs and benefits of economic

1 This phrase refers to a paper written by the OECD’s Secretary-General Thorkil Kristensen presented at the 1969 Ministerial Council Meeting.

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The Establishment of CERI

145

growth and the balance between economic growth and the welfare state. Within UNESCO, there was growing awareness that the export of educational models from the “First World” did not meet the needs of the “Third World” countries (Faure et al., 1972). Europe was further haunted by fears of falling behind the United States in terms of technological development. Books such as Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber’s bestseller “Le défi américain” (“The American Challenge”) stoked anxieties among Europeans that Europe might sink into oblivion if it did not manage to catch up with the United States (Bürgi, 2017a, p. 148). Situated in Paris, both UNESCO and the OECD were strongly affected by the 1968 “événements” in France. Both organizations responded to the “crisis before the crisis” by engaging with a policy concept that has come to be widely referred to as lifelong learning, but was known under a variety of names at the time. UNESCO engaged with the concept of éducation permanente (lifelong education), rooted in popular culture and cultural democracy, which spread in French policy circles in the post-WWII period (Elfert, 2018; Hake, 2018). The OECD, especially its Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), established in 1968, got interested in the concept of “recurrent education”, which was brought into the organization by Swedish policy-makers and staff members, in particular Gösta Rehn and Jarl Bengtsson.

6.2

The Establishment of CERI

The story of recurrent education in the OECD is remarkable as it represents an important period in the search for an identity of the organization that from today’s vantage point seems to have been lost. The engagement with recurrent education coincided with significant institutional changes in the OECD with the establishment of an independent research institute in the form of the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI). At that time, education was still not yet firmly established in the OECD. It was not quite certain in which direction the OECD’s educational activities would develop, and there was controversy within the OECD and also among some of its member states about its future orientation. After the educational planning hype faded, only the country reviews were working well for the OECD, and it was not clear what the OECD should do next. As explained by the Norwegian civil servant and temporary OECD staff member Kjell Eide (1990): The gradual decline in the collaboration on educational planning created, however, problems in defining OECD’s role in the education field. The economics of education had fallen somewhat in disrepute, and the sociological approach to democratizing education, through arguments about better utilisation of the potential of youth, was out of fashion. (p. 23)

A UNESCO memo dated 1964 states: The current tendency of the OECD is to pay more and more attention to the economic aspects of development and hence less attention to the ‘social’ aspects to which the OECD has ascribed a great deal of attention in the past few years. That will result in a gradual transfer of educational activities towards the Council of Europe, which, according to my

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interlocutor, has already seized and appropriated on several occasions ideas or projects of the OECD. (UNESCO, 1964, authors’ translation from French)

This memo points to another organization in the European educational policy space that played an influential role in Europe at the time, the Council of Europe, that was created in the post-World War II context with the mandate of safeguarding human rights and democracy and whose work in certain areas also overlapped with the activities of UNESCO, and to some extent the OECD. In the 1960s, both UNESCO and the Council of Europe promoted the concept of éducation permanente (Hake, 2018). At the meetings of the Standing Conference of European Ministers of Education coordinated by the Council of Europe, collaboration between IOs and duplication of work was frequently discussed (Centeno, 2017). The creation of CERI shows parallels to the creation of the IIEP. As in the case of the IIEP, which was affiliated with UNESCO, but set up as an independent institute, CERI was established as a side arm of the OECD to allow the organization to engage in activities that did not constitute core OECD business. As in the case of the IIEP, a former Ford Foundation officer secured initial funding and support from the Ford Foundation. For the IIEP, it had been Philip Coombs, for CERI it was Michael Harris, who – prior to his appointment as Deputy Secretary General at the OECD – had been in charge of the Ford Foundation’s activities in Indonesia. He was instrumental in CERI’s creation. Ron Gass explained how Harris . . .was asked to have a look at these activities going on, which the Americans were beginning to say are not so central to what the OECD should be doing. He reached the conclusion that the education work had been very useful but perhaps it should be carried on in an institution linked to the OECD but not in the OECD. (Interview with Ron Gass, 2017)2

The Ford Foundation granted one million US dollars as initial funding for CERI.3 The Ford Foundation envisaged CERI as a “sister institute” to the IIEP, responsible for the “developed” part of the world (Bürgi, 2017b, p. 298).4 The Ditchley Park seminar in 1966 about challenges of educational expansion and innovation in OECD countries, which was held in collaboration with the Ford Foundation, had “substantial bearing on the proposal we anticipate making to the Ford Foundation to support a Centre for Educational Innovation” (Harris, 1966). The correspondence between Michael Harris and the Ford Foundation’s Frank Bowles reveals that both agreed that educational innovation should be the main purpose of CERI and that the number 2

Ron Gass joined the OEEC in 1958 and worked for the OECD until his retirement in 1989. He was the first director of the OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI). 3 In the case of the IIEP, the Ford Foundation’s grant involved $200,000. 4 As has been discussed in greater detail in Chap. 3, the Ford Foundation was a very active promoter of European education research and policy at the time. As an example, the Ford Foundation also funded the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), which had started its activities in the UNESCO Institute for Education in Hamburg before it moved to Stockholm. The Ford Foundation’s Frank Bowles, in his memo about his “European trip” in 1967, considered the IEA’s work led by Torsten Husén as “the most exciting and valuable educational research operation since the Eight-Year Study.” It is clear that Frank Bowles thought very highly of Husén and was keen on providing funding to his projects (Bowles, 1967).

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The Establishment of CERI

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of participating countries should be limited “to five or six” at first (Bowles, 1966). As Frank Bowles wrote in a letter to Michael Harris in preparation of a meeting in Paris on the creation of CERI: “Educational reform is the principle purpose the main reason the Ford Foundation is interested in it. I am prepared to make this amply clear, leaving room for consideration of educational research as a step on the path to innovation” (Bowles, 1966). The establishment of CERI was related to the overall re-evaluation of education within the OECD, which concerned in particular the activities of the Committee for Scientific and Technical Personnel (CSTP). “The CSTP’s entire programme was thus subjected to evaluation, a ‘number of activities were entirely discontinued’” (Centeno, 2017, p. 148, citing Papadopoulos, 1994). Harris had pushed for the 1964 review of the operational activities of the OECD (King, 2006): Harris admired the work of the CSTP and encouraged the Secretariat to complement the quantitative approach (which had been imposed by its own review for the purposes of budgetary cuts) with a qualitative approach to educational policy planning. . . .The CERI was born from this perceived need for qualitative accounts and, equally important, on the basis of a two-year grant that Harris obtained through his Ford Foundation connections. (Centeno, 2017, p. 149)

As Papadopoulos (1994) further explained: “The integration of CERI into the OECD structures was part of a package deal which included the transformation of the CSTP into the Education Committee” (cited in Centeno, 2017, p. 63). In the 1970s, the CSTP, which had shifted its focus from the shortage of scientists and engineers to school-related issues, such as curriculum development, was transformed into the Education Committee, and education received greater legitimation (Eide, 1990). However, according to Eide (1990), “the distribution of functions between CERI and the Education Committee has always been somewhat unclear” (p. 29). CERI was supposed to be a “free zone” (Centeno, 2017, p. 125), more independent, researchoriented and free from political influence. This is confirmed by Eide (1990): “In principle, CERI shall be more oriented towards research, and be more free to adopt new ideas. . .” (p. 29). CERI could also accept voluntary contributions, which made it potentially more independent and flexible (Eide, 1990). Ron Gass managed to double the Ford Foundation’s contribution with a grant by the Royal Dutch Shell Foundation (Bürgi, 2016; Interview with Ron Gass, 2017), providing a lifeline for the new Centre as some of the OECD’s member states were initially opposed to the creation of CERI, which had to be started as a pilot (Eide, 1990). The period around the creation of CERI coincided with one of the dominant figures in the OECD, Alexander King, who headed the Directorate for Scientific Affairs, leaving the organization. As Ron Gass was a sociologist and not a scientist, he could not become his successor and pursued the establishment of a “social arm, as a counterweight to the dominant economic arm” (Gass, 2016). As outlined by Centeno (2017), administratively, CERI had a unique profile: it had a GB [Governing Board], which the other divisions did not, and officially answered directly to the SG [Secretary-General]. In practice, however, the director of the CERI was the deputy director of the DSA [Directorate for Scientific Affairs], who was also the head of the Secretariat of the EDC [Education

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Committee] (Ron Gass). As such, the CERI was very much connected with the DSA, and it was operated almost as one of its units. (p. 265; square brackets added)

It is not by accident that CERI was established in 1968, at the time of the “youth revolts” in France (Bengtsson, 2008). As Alexander King (2006) wrote in his memoirs, some in the OECD felt that the organization that represented “the high tabernacle of economic growth” (p. 293), had to respond to the “malaise of society” (p. 292) that the student uprisings were an expression of. People such as Ron Gass were “down in the streets with the students, enquiring and debating as to the cause of their actions” (p. 274). Ron Gass organized a meeting between the student leaders and the OECD: “We went around discussing, all these student radicals, the OECD Secretariat – and it was a fabulous week” (Interview with Ron Gass, 2017). CERI thus represented a more social innovative and policy-oriented strand of work. As expressed by Kjell Eide (1990), the work of CERI was “intellectually and politically more interesting than that of the Education Committee” (p. 37). CERI’s former head Jarl Bengtsson (2008) saw the Centre as a “space to identify the up-coming big questions that will define the new challenges for education” (p. 4). CERI’s Governing Board was composed mainly of academics, while the Education Committee’s board was composed of government officials. People in CERI, which represented part two of the budget, had more of a research perspective, while part one of the budget, consisting of member states contributions, was “don’t rock the boat kind of stuff” (Interview with Albert Tuijnman, 2019).5 As summarized by Papadopoulos (1994), “Taken together, these changes represented a deliberate act to give formal legitimization to the educational role of the Organization” (p. 63). This development was of course observed with suspicion in UNESCO. In a memo to all Assistant Director-Generals of UNESCO’s sub-sectors, the Director of UNESCO’s Division of Relations with International Organizations invited them to comment on “the possible implications on Unesco’s programme” of a “General Statement”, presented on behalf of the OECD Ministerial Council to the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe: OECD’s educational activities will be concentrated on such studies of general policy as democratization, educational planning and reform of higher education. The instrument for carrying out such projects will be more and more the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI). . .The whole tendency of this statement made before politicians seems to be the preparation of the organization’s expansion in the field of social sciences. Stressing repeatedly the interdependency of science, technology, economic and social development, the statement concludes that, although the OECD’s mission is “primarily economic”, it has however, ‘appeared increasingly necessary. . .to carry discussion beyond the narrowly economic, dipping into questions of technology and of sociology’. (UNESCO, 1969a)6

5

Albert Tuijnman was Principal Administrator in the Education and Training Division at the OECD from 1992 to 1998. He was the main OECD contact for IALS and led one of the networks that conducted the INES project. He was the lead author of the first three Education at a Glance report, published since 1992. 6 There were also turf struggles between the two organizations in other domains, such as science. A letter by J.M. Harrison, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Science to the OECD’s

6.3 Éducation Permanente and Recurrent Education

149

After a period of overlap between UNESCO and the OECD in the field of educational planning that we discussed in Chap. 3, in the early 1960s UNESCO believed that the OECD was developing more into an economically oriented organization as illustrated by UNESCO’s 1964 memo cited above. However, by the late 1960s, with the establishment of CERI, it was clear that the OECD was expanding in the field of social sciences, “the qualitative aspects of growth and towards broader concepts of welfare. . .” (UNESCO, 1973, p. 2), moving into UNESCO territory. In a 1970 confidential memo Manuel Jiménez, Director of BMS/RIO, the division in charge of UNESCO relations with member states and international organizations, regarding a meeting on “the future OECD programme in education”, wrote: “. . .I have received some confidential information on a new approach of OECD in the field of education which you may wish to pass on to the Director-General” (Jiménez, 1970). The new approach Jiménez was referring to was the transformation of the CSTP to the Education Committee, and the extension of CERI for another 5 years. The tone of the memo and the fact that a meeting was held on the future orientation of the OECD strongly indicates that UNESCO closely followed every move of the OECD and felt threatened by the development of the organization.

6.3

Éducation Permanente and Recurrent Education

Although UNESCO’s concept of éducation permanente and the OECD’s concept of recurrent education shared some similarities, they had different roots. Éducation permanente was an idea that stemmed from the French popular education movement, which had been revitalized in the post-World War II Résistance. Many of the staff members UNESCO recruited had been active in the Résistance, such as Paul Lengrand, who became the main theorist of lifelong education in the organization.7 Lengrand was one of the founders of the organization Peuple et Culture, which offered popular education to workers, guided by the idea of a new society built on popular culture across class divides. This was very much the idea of a learning society, which “required a break with ‘the intellectualist teaching in the bourgeois university’ and with the ‘methods of the school’” (Peuple et Culture, 1945, cited in Elfert, 2018, p. 82). These ideas later found their way into UNESCO’s work, such as the Second International Conference on Adult Education (CONFINTEA II), which was organized under Lengrand’s lead in Montréal, Canada, in 1960, and in UNESCO’s 1972 report Learning to be (aka the Faure Report), which emerged

Alexander King, dated 20 August 1973, expressed irritation about the OECD’s activities regarding an “International Science Policy Information System” and the OECD’s seeming unawareness of UNESCO’s activities in this domain. Harrison concluded his letter with the comment: “Perhaps this is the moment at which we should streamline the work of our respective organizations, as we discussed some time ago” (Harrison, 1973). 7 It is interesting to note that Lengrand took a year off from his duties at UNESCO in the late 1950s to participate in the OECD’s Mediterranean Regional Project in Sardegna, Italy (Lengrand, 1994).

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from the International Commission on the Development of Education, mandated by UNESCO’s General Conference to produce a report on the future of education. The Commission was chaired by Edgar Faure, French Minister of Education from 1968 to 1969, who had also been a member of the Résistance. Its report, which was published in 1972, promoted éducation permanente (“lifelong education” in the English translation) as the new “master concept” for the planning of education in both industrialized and developing countries (Faure et al., 1972). “Recurrent education” on the other hand derived from a Parliamentary Commission on Higher Education (U68 Committee) in Sweden, established in 1968 with the task of reforming post-secondary education in the 1970s. The Swedish Education Minister (later Prime Minister) Olof Palme presented the recurrent education strategy at the European Education Ministers’ meeting in Versailles 1969 – at the same meeting, Edgar Faure presented the concept of éducation permanente (Bengtsson, 2013). Palme understood recurrent education as “an interplay between education and other work all through life” and thought the concept would “help [. . .] on the way towards equality in society” (cited in Centeno, 2017, p. 145). While both of these concepts reflected the idea that learning should extend throughout life, there were significant differences. Lifelong education was broader and more philosophical. In an article published in the UNESCO Courier in 1970, titled “Education put to the question”, Lengrand (1970) defined lifelong education as representing the rallying cry of the “battle between traditional forces and innovation” (p. 28). It stood for a questioning of the traditional conservative education system that “paralyses innovation” (p. 28) and produces docile subjects. Lengrand argued in that article that education must support “a way of being in the world” (p. 29). The purpose of education, according to the UNESCO pioneer, was to create the “questioning spirit”: It is this spirit that produces the. . .democratically minded citizen, in short, the adult human being who, by definition, is far from docile, difficult to indoctrinate and capable of relying on his own judgement for vital choices and decisions. (Lengrand, 1970, p. 28)

UNESCO’s lifelong education emphasized the perspective of “an integrated whole” (Wain, 1987, p. 41), including formal, non-formal and informal learning, encompassing all age groups. It basically stood for a transformation of learning and society – which is why Cropley (1979) referred to it as the “maximalist” vision of lifelong learning. UNESCO emphasized the aspect of equity and democratic participation in society, and éducation permanente was promoted by culturallyoriented circles such as the Council of Europe (Hake, 2018). The idea of recurrent education was also debated at the Council of Europe’s ministerial meetings, but, as pointed out by Centeno (2017), “it was neither the Council of Europe. . .nor the Swedish authorities that developed and diffused RE [recurrent education] as an encompassing reform idea internationally; it was the OECD” (p. 197).8

8

When from the mid-1960s onward, the European Economic Community (EEC) started to engage with educational matters, the Council of Europe lost influence (Bürgi, 2017a). The Belgian Minister

6.3 Éducation Permanente and Recurrent Education

151

Recurrent education was more pragmatic than UNESCO’s lifelong education and related to active labour market policy (Interview with Albert Tuijnman, 2019; see also Tuijnman, 1991). The initial idea behind recurrent education as it was discussed in the Swedish Royal Commission was driven by pragmatic planning considerations against the background of the escalating costs of the explosive expansion of higher education during the 1960s, and concerns about imbalances in the labor market. As observed by Rubenson (1997), “recurrent education was commonly promoted as a system that would yield economic gains, benefit the labor market, lead to increased equality, and stimulate students’ search for knowledge” (p. 5). By spreading the period of education over the individual's whole life-cycle, rather than concentrating in the early years of life, recurrent education was a strategy to ensure an optimal interaction between student profiles, the skills of the labor force, and the needs of the labor market (Lindensjö, 1981, cited by Rubenson, 1997). To achieve this, it was even discussed to restrict the number of students entering higher education, and it was felt that a restriction would be more acceptable when embedded in a philosophy of recurrent education. The OECD and other organizations that engaged with the concept of recurrent education, such as the International Labour Organization (ILO) were interested in the links between education and training and employment (Stoikov, 1975). But notwithstanding its pragmatic orientation, both éducation permanente and recurrent education were guided by an egalitarian ethos. As Ron Gass put it in relation to recurrent education, “the driving force was egalitarian” (Gass, n.d.). The concept also challenged the traditional education system in that it emphasized the importance of a second chance education for adults who had missed out on education and could benefit from the opportunity to postpone formal education to a later stage of life: “Recurrent education aims to spread the period of formal education over a person’s entire lifetime” (Gannicott, 1971, cited in Stoikov, 1975, p. 2). In the case of UNESCO, the Faure Report served as a catalyst for a research programme on lifelong learning that was carried out at the UNESCO Institute for Education (UIE) in Hamburg, under the leadership of Ravindra Dave who had joined UIE from the International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) (Elfert, 2013, 2018). During the 1970s, Dave and colleagues engaged in research projects, organized seminars and published a series of monographs and other publications with the aim of conceptualizing lifelong education from an interdisciplinary perspective (Dave, 1973, 1976; Cropley, 1979). What is striking about UIE’s research programme is that the broad conception of lifelong education, which covered all stages and dimensions of education, was at odds with its strong focus on the pedagogical and curriculum aspects of primary and secondary education. Some of the work was also highly philosophical, such as the contributions of Bogdan Suchodolski (1976), whose writings on lifelong learning brought together ideas from Greek philosophy, the Enlightenment and existentialist philosophy. For

of Education Henri Janne was commissioned to produce a report outlining an initial strategy for a European education policy (Commission of the European Communities, 1973; Blitz, 2003).

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Suchodolski, the tension between functionality and freedom represented “the basic problem of modern humanism” (p. 93). The influence of existentialist philosophy was also notable in the Faure Report. Although the report was acknowledged by other IOs, such as the World Bank, member states perceived the report as too philosophical, and many commentators were taken aback by the strong critique of the school system in the report. Developing countries hardly took any notice of the report and regarded lifelong education as a luxury of the developed world (Torres, 2002). There was some selective influence on specific countries, for example on Australia’s Technical and Further Education system. As pointed out by Henry et al. (2001), the 1975 Kangan Report, the report published by the Australian Committee on Technical and Further Education, drew on both recurrent education and the Faure Report. The influence between the IOs and their member states flowed both ways as recurrent education represented a broader trend at the time. However, that trend was short-lived as the political economy shifted in the 1970s. The work of the OECD on recurrent education continued throughout the 1970s, but as a policy paradigm recurrent education faded into the background, and with the exception of Sweden, countries never gave it any serious consideration (Rubenson, 2006). While to this day lifelong learning is ubiquitous as a guiding principle of education policy, it has been reduced in scope and co-opted by the neoliberal agenda of efficiency and employability (Elfert, 2018).

6.4

The Shift Towards Education Indicators

At the end of the 1970s the interest in recurrent education in the OECD and more broadly, had faded. This was related to two important trends in education in the 1980s/1990s that diverted attention away from the egalitarian agenda that characterized the recurrent education movement. First of all, since the late 1970s significant changes in the political climate made themselves felt in the OECD. As Eide (1990) recalled, “Towards the end of the 1970s, the role of OECD as a kind of uncommitting political think-tank was gradually replaced by the task of legitimating the policies of conservative governments” (p. 38). The oil and economic crisis of the 1970s led to greater austerity, and “the education sector got more than its share of budget reductions” (pp. 38–39). While the Nordic influence on the educational work of the OECD was felt strongly from the early 1960s through most of the 1970s – and it was the Swede Jarl Bengtsson who led the activities in the field of recurrent education – it weakened in the course of the 1970s. By the 1980s the political and intellectual climate had changed, the thinking of the 1980s was more conservative, and “equality issues had no high standing” (Eide, 1990, p. 44). This shift in the political economy was also reflected in the role of the United States in the OECD: “By the mid-80s, the US changed its role in the educational collaboration of the OECD from passivity to aggressive missionary activities, characterized by ‘fight against communism’ and religious fundamentalism” (Eide, 1990, p. 48).

6.4

The Shift Towards Education Indicators

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In the context of the shift towards neoliberal governance in the 1980s, in the OECD/CERI the recurrent education movement was overshadowed by the indicators for education movement, which was output-oriented and had strong connections to the systems analysis approach, “US-inspired organizational theories” and “programme budgeting” (Eide, 1990, p. 35; see also Bürgi, 2016; OECD, 1979). The OECD had already presented a framework for educational indicators in 1973 (OECD, 1973). However, at the time the belief in the functionalist, scientific and rational approach to societal questions had waned, and the idea to develop a set of education indicators was abandoned. Bottani and Tuijnman (1994) refer to the “deep feeling of disenchantment that followed the previous euphoria about the role of formal education in the building of a just, affluent and democratic society, which had characterised most of the 1960s and early 1970s” (p. 22). However, the 1980s with its discourse of accountability, efficiency and cost-effectiveness created a favourable climate for a return of the indicators programme. As already outlined in the previous chapter, the 1983 report A Nation at Risk in the United States played a big part in the re-emergence of the debate on educational statistics, indicators and comparative data (Bottani & Tuijnman, 1994). The United States put pressure on CERI to work on outcomes indicators, at one point even “threatening. . .to withdraw support from CERI if its demands were not met” (Henry et al., 2001, p. 87). One of our informants, a former CERI Board member, recalled that the “US agenda. . .took the whole place and we were whispered that we shouldn’t be so aggressive towards the US because they. . .paid half of the bill of the OECD” (Interview with Jørn Skovsgaard, 2022).9 The United States was backed in this endeavour by France, “with its bureaucratic interest in statistical data collection” (Henry et al., 2001, p. 87). Before approaching the OECD about the indicators project, the United States had approached UNESCO: So, how come the United States put all this pressure on resources on OECD to develop the education indicators project?...Because of course they had first come to UNESCO. And they told UNESCO, look we want to improve international education statistics. The mandate for this was a UNESCO mandate. And of course the United States first went and talked to UNESCO, even promising resources for this. . .UNESCO was. . .not interested. And this was in the Reagan years. . . .When they pulled out of UNESCO they said okay now where can we get some more friendly countries that are willing to work with us and the answer was of course let’s go to the OECD. . . . And OECD didn’t necessarily want to do it either, because it’s very difficult to collect comparable statistics and so on, a very difficult thing to do. . .but there was too much pressure. And basically in 1988 it was clear, the writing was on the wall, either OECD got some serious thinking in education statistics or the US would undermine the Education Committee. I mean, they had already left UNESCO. . .CERI. . .could not have survived without US funding. CERI was part two of the budget and the US contributed probably one-third if not more of the budget of CERI. (Interview with Albert Tuijnman, 2019)

9

Jørn Skovsgaard was senior adviser at the International Secretariat (2001–2018) and head of division (1996–2001) in the Danish Ministry of Education. Between 2001 and 2018, he represented Denmark on several committees and working groups at the OECD. For example, Skovsgaard was the Danish delegate in the OECD Education Policy Committee and member of the CERI Governing Board.

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Based on this context and Tuijnman’s statement, it could be speculated that UNESCO’s unwillingness to respond to US demands for comparative educational data was part of the bigger picture of the withdrawal of the United States from UNESCO during the Reagan years. It is possible that the OECD/CERI gave in to the pressure put on the organization to embark on the indicators programme as OECD staff thought they could suffer the same fate as UNESCO did (Martens & Wolf, 2006, p. 166). Ultimately, it was the OECD that started the International Indicators of Education Systems (INES) programme that was positioned within CERI.10 As Ron Gass recalled: At a certain point in time it was the Neo-conservatives, Reagan, etc., and they had a very different view of how policies were made – I sum it up by saying: It’s a “what-works” view. . .So they came up with a proposal to set up an education indicators programme. OECD indicators, to see what works, you see. Meanwhile, at that time, the Americans were making sort of negative noises about the future of CERI. So in the Education Committee, where they put it. . ., I knew they wouldn’t get anywhere, because this business of developing indicators is highly complex, takes a lot of money, it takes a lot of capacity to develop... So I said: “Okay, but this is a development project, it should be in CERI.” So that was agreed, that it should go to CERI, which meant that the Americans could not kill their pet-project, so that took the pressure off CERI. CERI developed a very successful and interesting program on educational indicators. . . But when it was set up, I insisted. . .that there should be a policy group, that is to say: “Okay, we do the indicators, but then we have a group of policy makers, reflecting on, okay, what do they mean for policy. . .” But this was dropped. (Interview with Ron Gass, 2017)

Initially, the indicators movement was still infused with influences from the egalitarian recurrent education and adult education/literacy movement that UNESCO represented. The web of policy influence and converging trends in education at the time can be traced in the figure of Albert Tuijnman, who was intellectually situated in the Swedish recurrent education movement and whose doctoral dissertation – an empirical study modeling both active market labor policy and recurrent education,

10

That does not mean that there were no activities in relation to education indicators in UNESCO at all. Since 1992, UNESCO in partnership with UNICEF had run a Monitoring Learning Achievement (MLA) programme, assisting member states, in particular African countries in developing national systems for monitoring learning outcomes (Chinapah et al., 2000; Chinapah, 2003). As both UNESCO and the OECD were working in this area, there were a series of meetings to which representatives of the other IO were invited, and some voices within UNESCO suggested that UNESCO and the OECD should work together on this file as they could have benefited from each other’s strengths – the OECD was better set up professionally, and UNESCO could have provided the international networks. However, when MLA data were presented at the World Education Forum in Dakar in 2000, they were highly controversial as countries were being compared on the basis of what many perceived to be non-comparable data. As a consequence, the MLA programme was closed down (Interview with Richard Sack, 2020). There were also attempts in the IIEP to get involved and link up with headquarters and secure a position for UNESCO in the international measurement endeavour. “But it didn’t work out because there was no response, there was no professional and no reliable response from headquarters” (Interview with Richard Sack, 2020). This is consistent with Jakobi’s (2009) finding that UNESCO member states were opposed to the idea of international education indicators (p. 57).

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The Shift Towards Education Indicators

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titled Recurrent Education, Earnings and Well-being, published in Stockholm in 1989 – had attracted the attention of the OECD. Tuijnman was recruited to the OECD/CERI in 1992 to work on the INES programme that had gained momentum after an International Conference on Educational Indicators organised jointly by the OECD and the United States Department of Education in November 1987 (Interview with Albert Tuijnman, 2019).11 The indicators project was carried out by four networks, and one of them, Network B on Education and Labour Market Destinations, was very much under the Swedish influence – this network was led by Albert Tuijnman – while Network A on outcomes of education, with a focus on student achievement, was American-led and more output-oriented. The indicators movement coincided with a general interest in data on adult literacy in industrialized countries, an issue that also preoccupied UNESCO. In November 1991, the UIE in Hamburg held an expert meeting on “Functional Literacy in Eastern and Western Europe”, which several people attended who would later work together on the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) survey, including Tuijnman. UIE’s new director, Paul Bélanger, brought from his previous position as head of a Canadian civil society organization on adult education,12 the interest in data on functional literacy among adults and good connections to Canada. In 1989, in response to a previous survey that had found lower than expected literacy levels among adults, the Canadian federal government had commissioned Statistics Canada to carry out the LSUDA – Literacy Used in Daily Activities – survey (Elfert & Walker, 2020). Statistics Canada, represented by Scott Murray at the Hamburg meeting, was interested in the educational surveys the United States had been carrying out for some time, in particular the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) that had been conducted mainly by the Educational Testing Service (ETS). The Americans felt it was time to compare their data and benchmark NALS against other countries. Archie Lapointe, NAEP’s executive director, who was also at the meeting, saw the opportunity of upscaling the NALS towards an international comparative survey. Some people thought it would be a good idea to involve OECD as a coordinator and policy facilitator. So IALS was launched as a pilot exercise to explore if this would work and if this kind of data would be useful to feed the indicators project (Interview with Albert Tuijnman, 2019). It was initially conceived as a pilot survey that was carried out under the chairmanship of Network B, which was run by Sweden. IALS was one of many interrelated activities with regard to adult literacy and represented the three dimensions of policy interest that characterized the 1990s: labour market, literacy and adult education (Interview with Albert Tuijnman, 2019). In this context, certain actors within OECD/CERI were interested to revitalize lifelong learning in the organization. The 1996 Meeting of the Education Committee at Ministerial Level, which would have laid the groundwork for the OECD and

11 About the International Indicators of Education Systems (INES) programme, see also Bottani, 1990; Bottani & Tuijnman, 1994; Grek & Ydesen, 2021. 12 The Institut canadien d’éducation des adultes (ICÉA).

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CERI programmes of work for the next 5 years, was held under the theme “Lifelong Learning for All” (OECD, 1996). According to one of Jakobi’s (2009) informants, the theme was to some extent inspired by “parallel activities of UNESCO” (p. 79) related to lifelong learning – 1996 was the year of the launch of the report Learning: The Treasure Within, aka Delors Report, which brought lifelong learning back on UNESCO’s agenda. Although the theme “Lifelong Learning for All” was applauded by many countries at the Ministerial Meeting, it was also met with harsh resistance; “The US but also France and the Netherlands had no time for lifelong learning” (Personal communication with Albert Tuijnman, 2022) and prioritized a programme for the OECD focused on the assessment of skills and competencies. After Andreas Schleicher had become the Education Director, the Lifelong Learning for All report was not only not reprinted, it was effectively buried and no longer referenced by OECD staff. In terms of adult education, one consequence of the OECD’s 1996 Council of Ministers meeting on “Lifelong Learning for All” was the launch of the Thematic Review of Adult Learning (OECD, 2003) and a conference on how adults learn, co-organized by the OECD and the US Department of Education in 1998. This meant temporarily greater attention to adult education and training as a pillar of an active labour market policy. In this context, research for policy was driven by a push for data on the skills of adults with a view to their participation in the labour market. According to Albert Tuijnman, “to placate Canada, Sweden and like countries, IALS/ALL13 was ‘allowed’ to continue in the form of PIAAC,14 but under similarly centralised political, budgetary and personnel controls as PISA”15 (Personal communication, 2022). IALS represented an important milestone on the OECD’s trajectory towards PISA and PIAAC. At the time IALS was carried out, it was not yet located in the OECD, it was a collaborative pilot effort of a group of people and countries who were interested in “producing this data, believing that this would allow us to improve policy” (Interview with Albert Tuijnman, 2019). It was only after Tuijnman moved to another file in 1996 (and then in 1998 left the OECD) and Andreas Schleicher took over the INES programme and the creation of the Education Directorate in 2002 that the large-scale assessment surveys became institutionalized in the OECD. The American Educational Testing Service (ETS) that had conducted much of the methodological work for IALS, sold the methodology to the OECD, where it formed the basis for PISA and PIAAC. The push for data on people’s skills was also supported by the World Bank who promoted the establishment of student assessments in the 1990s in loan-receiving countries, for example in all of Latin America where the pursuit of educational statistics was related to loan operations with the

13

ALL stands for Adult Literacy and Lifeskills Survey. PIAAC stands for Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. 15 Programme for International Student Assessment. 14

6.4

The Shift Towards Education Indicators

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World Bank (Interview with César Guadalupe, 2021).16 The Bank had a grants programme that enabled low-income countries, for example in North Africa and the Middle East, to join the IEA assessments, such as TIMSS and PIRLS,17 and components of World Bank loans were targeted at national or international learning assessments (Interview with Marlaine Lockheed, 2022).18 As we have discussed in Chap. 5, the push for data also put pressure on UNESCO’s statistical division, which was perceived as not up to the task, and the World Bank threatened to start its own work in statistics. The pressure was relieved by creating an independent UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) in Canada that was supported and also partly funded by the World Bank. The indicators movement derived from two different strands that were characteristic of the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall. On the one hand we saw the rise of the neoliberal “what works”, output-oriented approach represented by Working Group A of the OECD’s indicators project.19 On the other hand, the echoes of the recurrent education movement and the more social policy oriented approach that CERI had represented were still resonating as some of the actors who conceived IALS had their roots in the lifelong learning and recurrent education tradition, exemplified by the involvement (at least in the early stages) of the UIE. The key role UIE had played in the conceptualization of lifelong learning was the reason why Albert Tuijnman, who later worked on the INES programme and produced the first Education at a Glance reports, had established contact with UIE. This is emphasized by Tuijnman in this statement, comparing IALS with PIAAC: IALS was conceived, developed, implemented, reported on in a different policy context. . .In 1991/1992 we had these discussions about starting IALS. This was a couple of years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. There were still all these open possibilities on improving society, improving the economy. . . . The dividend of the end of the Cold War was real. . . . We are not passive, captive in our environment. We are active. I mean we have an active role to play, by being responsible and responsive we can actively help to actually improve things. That was the attitude. . . . Now, of course if you look at what PIAAC is doing today, that is of course a far cry from where we were 20, 25 years ago. And even these policy questions that we had then are not asked anymore now. . .[The adult education dimension] by the way in PIAAC and so on is also totally gone so there’s adult education, but this you know, this lifelong learning agenda, adult education agenda, all of these things that we cared about 20 years ago are completely gone. (Interview with Albert Tuijnman, 2019)

16 César Guadalupe was Senior Programme Specialist at the UNESCO Institute for Statistics from 2007 to 2012. Prior to that, he had worked for UNESCO as consultant and regional advisor for Latin America on education statistics. 17 TIMSS stands for Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, PIRLS for Progress in International Reading Literacy Study. 18 Marlaine Lockheed worked at the World Bank from 1985 to 2005, where she held various senior management positions, including responsibilities for education policy and lending for the Middle East and North Africa region. 19 The “what works” approach was also reflected in the school effectiveness movement arising in the late 1970s, which focused on ‘effective schools’ and aimed to identify best practices in pedagogy and school leadership (Goldstein & Woodhouse, 2000).

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The UIE meeting in Hamburg illustrates an intellectual climate where people from a range of different institutions, such as UNESCO, the OECD, ETS, and Statistics Canada came together because they were interested in producing data to improve policy. At the time of the IALS, the OECD was one partner among many, and IALS still had the spirit of social innovation that CERI initially represented. That spirit has faded with the appropriation of PISA and PIAAC by the OECD and its institutional establishment in the Education Directorate. As stated by Henry et al. (2001), “the 1990s saw some remarkable shifts in the development of educational indicators within the OECD: from philosophical doubt to statistical confidence” (p. 90).

6.5

The Resistance to Lifelong Learning and Its Revival in a Neoliberal Guise

Overall, neither UNESCO’s “maximalist” lifelong education policy concept nor the OECD’s recurrent education were a success, and both UNESCO and the OECD abandoned their progressive lifelong education agendas. That is not to say that these organizations do not work on lifelong education anymore or that the lifelong education movement had no influence on country policies at all. Certain components of the lifelong education agenda made their way into labour and education policies, such as paid educational leave that was implemented in many European countries. Other initiatives that derived from the lifelong learning movement are community colleges and the opening up of the formal system for adult learners. Especially in Scandinavian countries, which have a strong folk high school tradition, there is a vibrant lifelong learning strand in the education system, commonly called “continuing education”. However, the overarching idea of the learning society signified in particular by UNESCO’s concept of éducation permanente remained unrealized. Many have referred to lifelong education and recurrent education – the idea that adults could receive education and training after they had entered the labour market – as a “revolutionary idea” (Interview with Albert Tuijnman, 2019). Tom Schuller, who was head of CERI from 2003 to 2008, wrote about the 1972 OECD/CERI report on recurrent education that was referred to as the “Clarifying Report” (OECD/CERI, 1973): The 1973 ‘Clarifying Report’, as it came to be known, was radical in its implications. The principal arguments deployed are now all too familiar: the need to continually update knowledge and skills, and the obligation to provide second and third chances for those who did not succeed first time round. It is easy now to underestimate just what a direct challenge this posed to the ‘front-loading’ character of the education system, which sought constantly to retain young people for as long as possible and paid little attention to what happened later. Arguably, indeed, the radical implications of the proposal, for funding and organisation, continue to be underestimated; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they have been stifled by the vested interests of institutions and by an intellectual conservatism still dominated, perhaps sub-consciously, by the front-loading model. (Schuller, in Boeren et al., 2022)

6.5

The Resistance to Lifelong Learning and Its Revival in a Neoliberal Guise

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Rubenson (2006) also pointed to the radical nature of this idea, which might have hindered its popularity as a wide-ranging policy paradigm: “The radical form of recurrent education could. . .be seen in the context of a class war” (p. 66).20 Louis Emmerij, head of the ILO’s World Employment Programme from 1971-1976, referred to recurrent education as one of the greatest ideas of his time; however, it “died a quiet death in the OECD”, as it required “changing the system” (cited in Elfert, 2020). In a similar vein, one of the pioneers of lifelong education, Arthur Cropley (1979), also emphasized the “fundamental transformation of society” (p. 105) that the “maximalist” idea of lifelong learning entailed. These observations underscore that lifelong learning – at least in its original iteration –represented too many challenges to established institutions to gain traction as a policy idea. Torsten Husén (1983) made similar experiences in the late 1960s when he engaged with critics of the school as an institution (he mentioned Ivan Illich and Everett Reimer) – which influenced the lifelong education movement. He himself wrote a book called “The crisis in our schools” (published in 1972), in which he argued that “the schools and the school systems were tending to become increasingly institutionalised and bureaucratic, and thus more isolated from society around them” (Husén, 1983, p. 104). He had the impression that the book was “received with restrained disapproval” (p. 104): “Criticising the school was obviously rather like attacking a sacred cow” (p. 104). These comments are significant as the critique of the school system and traditional formal education systems was inherent in the lifelong learning movement. In the view of Paul Lengrand (1975), lifelong learning was meant to be an “instrument of equality” (p. 152) that challenged the principle of competition that prevailed “in the school system [where] each pupil is put on a particular rung of a ladder above one category of pupils and below another” (p. 153). The fate of the lifelong education movement shows that the prioritization of formal education and the thinking about education in categories are difficult to overcome. Assessment and recognition of knowledge acquired outside the formal education system poses “a major challenge to the established hierarchy and traditional validation of different kinds of knowledge” (Schuetze & Casey, 2006, p. 280). This also explains the marginalization of adult, non-formal and informal education. As formulated by Asher Deleon, who was an adult education expert in UNESCO and Secretary of the Faure Report, Adult education was and still remains, in spite of all its achievements and the genuine fervour of its promoters, only a marginal educational and societal activity (. . .). The powerful societal forces, in most cases, do not wish to risk losing their dominance, monopolistic and privileged position by encouraging a wide, democratic movement of adult education. The world as it is, with its imbalances and irrationalities, may need and tolerate adult education activities as small, fragmentary palliatives, or as philanthropic

20 Rubenson (2006) is referring here to the conflict between unions over recurrent education in Sweden. It was in particular the white collar workers union that was pushing for recurrent education. The union for blue collar workers was favourable, but not overly interested in the idea. It was the academic union that felt threatened by recurrent education and opposed it.

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schemes. But adult education as a wide, overall movement, genuinely democratic, corresponds to a quite different type of society and to a transformed world. (Deleon, 1978)

As a result, at the end of the 1970s neither recurrent education nor lifelong education had much visibility in the educational policy landscape. Under a different guise, the 1990s saw the breakthrough of lifelong learning as a ubiquitous education policy concept. After UNESCO’s Delors Report and the OECD’s report Lifelong Learning for All (OECD, 1996), the European Union (EU) adopted lifelong learning as its key policy paradigm. Under the influence of “Third Way” politics that combined the tenets of neoliberalism with a more traditional politics of social justice, the EU promoted lifelong learning as a policy concept that balanced market and welfare state perspectives not only for employability, but also for social purposes and citizenship, as illustrated by a series of White papers including Growth Competitiveness and Employment (European Commission, 1993) and Education and Training: Teaching and Learning Towards the Learning Society (European Commission, 1995), and the EU’s Memorandum on Lifelong Learning (Commission of the European Communities, 2000). However, the more balanced “Third Way” approach did not last very long. After the financial crisis of 2007–2008, only the skills and employability dimension of lifelong learning survived. Ultimately, it was not the “maximalist” concept of lifelong learning that made its way into education policies across the globe, but the neoliberal market-oriented version of lifelong learning as the guiding principle of continuous reskilling and upskilling. After the momentum created by the publication of the Delors Report that was reflected in other UNESCO initiatives such as the Fifth International Conference on Adult Education (CONFINTEA V) and other activities pursued by the UNESCO Institute for Education,21 UNESCO’s humanistic lifelong learning agenda was overshadowed by Education for All, which dominated UNESCO’s work from 1990 onwards, as discussed in Chap. 4. The inclusion of lifelong learning, in 2015, in SDG 4, the education goal of the Sustainable Development Goals (“ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”), represents the first instance of lifelong learning being “articulated as an international development priority” (Benavot, 2018, p. 5; see also Elfert, 2019). However, there is little evidence to suggest that the prominence of lifelong learning in SDG 4 has brought greater attention to adult education or to a more humanistic approach to education. On the contrary, indications are mounting that lifelong learning will be increasingly shifting towards an agenda of permanent training, upskilling and reskilling, as a “new governing rationality” (Deuel, 2021, p. 9; see also OECD, 2019a, b). The World Bank employed the lifelong learning discourse to some extent as well. Its shift to lifelong learning in the early 2000s denoted an extension of the World Bank’s “traditional approach to education, in which subsectors [were] examined in isolation” (The World Bank, 2003, p. xiii), and the lifelong learning framework

21 In 2007, the UNESCO Institute for Education (UIE) was renamed as UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL).

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conveniently allowed the World Bank to widen its scope, for example to higher education. In its 2002 report, Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary Education, the World Bank referred to the OECD’s 1996 theme of “lifelong learning for all” (The World Bank, 2002, p. 27). In line with the Bank’s economistic outlook, lifelong learning was defined as “education for the knowledge economy” (The World Bank, 2003, p. xiii) and as a market-oriented policy “to enhance choices available to learners. . . and increase competition in the learning marketplace” (p. 79).

6.6

Concluding Discussion

This chapter examined how the OECD and UNESCO, two IOs with different intellectual roots and historical trajectories, engaged with two iterations of the policy concept of lifelong learning, recurrent education in the case of the OECD, and lifelong education (éducation permanente) in the case of UNESCO. The concept was carried into both organizations from the outside, which points to a role for IOs as absorbers, facilitators and mediators rather than instigators of policy ideas. Neither UNESCO nor the OECD were successful in gaining sustainable policy support for their idea of lifelong learning, and only a reduced and utilitarian version of lifelong learning, deprived of its transformative potential, was mainstreamed, which speaks to the limited capacity of IOs to promote ideas characterized as “radical” against the mainstream of political economic trends. With the indicators programme and the institutionalization of large-scale assessment surveys, in particular PISA, the OECD shifted towards a more conservative “what works” approach, as OECD pioneer Ron Gass put it in our interview, which he considered “really in a sense a consequence of the American neo-conservatism movement” (Interview with Ron Gass, 2017). Despite resistance within the OECD to go down this path, PISA has become the hegemonic marker of the OECD’s identity, prevailing over the more progressive social innovation ambitions CERI had represented. UNESCO, after an attempt to revive lifelong learning with the Delors Report in the 1990s, discontinued its conceptual work on lifelong learning and focused on the Education for All initiative. The story of lifelong learning therefore supports the findings of Chap. 4 on Education for All that schooling has prevailed as the dominant educational agenda. The creation of CERI allowed the OECD to establish education as its core business at a time – in the late 1960s – when this was still a controversial idea within the OECD. It worked on very similar issues as UNESCO – a development that was justified by a common funder, the Ford Foundation, in terms of the IIEP being in charge of developing countries, and CERI for the “developed” part of the world. The lens of “boundary work” is useful to understanding how IOs handle overlapping spheres of authority. According to Kranke (2022), “boundary work by IOs serves two loosely coupled functions: demarcation and cooperation” (p. 453). The establishment of CERI would fit Kranke’s category of “indirect boundary work”, which involves “a third party”. The creation of independent structures such

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as CERI and the IIEP enabled “boundary” work in terms of IOs working together or differentiating themselves from one another. As shown in Chap. 4, the IIEP allowed for UNESCO and the World Bank to collaborate after the formal cooperation of the World Bank with the “core” of UNESCO had been terminated. At the same time, both CERI and the IIEP are examples of demarcation as the creation of these independent structures enabled more “progressive” work that does not quite fit with the core business of the organization, and bypass encrusted institutional structures. Neither CERI nor the OECD have been good at working with other IOs. Asked whether the OECD collaborated with other IOs, Albert Tuijnman responded: “It didn’t. . .Because OECD had this umbrella as intangible organization entirely dedicated to intellectual capital, it always felt in another league compared to other international organizations. So, OECD in that sense is unique and there simply is no competition.” One of Henry et al.’s (2001) informants said something similar: “There are some people [from OECD and UNESCO] working in the same area who have never met. . .for example, the OECD is developing work on Russia without using the high level expertise which exists in UNESCO.” There were always loose but limited relationships between the two organizations. For example, the OECD was invited to the General Conference of UNESCO, but not to the meetings of the Executive Board. Both organizations invited each other occasionally to relevant meetings and conferences, but UNESCO was not generally invited to meetings of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC). This was partly explained by the “solidarity among the industrialized member states of the OECD who prefer to discuss their specific problems among themselves” (UNESCO, 1969b; our translation from French). There was also an “exchange of information and documents” (UNESCO, 1973), and even high-level luncheons between UNESCO’s Director-General and the OECD’s Secretary-General, but ultimately the overlap and competition between these two organizations was too extensive to allow for good relationships (UNESCO, 1971). The institutionalization of the indicators programme in the OECD is an example of how the organization usurped a territory that was occupied by a range of other actors, in particular UNESCO – which would have potentially been a candidate for such an agenda – and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) – the (very limited) cooperation and demarcation between the IEA and the OECD is still underresearched (see Fontdevila, 2021). There are some examples where the OECD worked with other organizations when it added something that the OECD does not have. For example, the OECD/CERI and UNESCO collaborated on “World Education Indicators”, which allowed the OECD to cover a wider range of countries that were not members of the OECD but of UNESCO (Henry et al., 2001, p. 12). The World Bank was also involved in that initiative as it funded the participation of the non-OECD member states. As argued by Kuehn (2004), “a UNESCO project could also have provided an opportunity for a different approach to indicators, one which is based on getting data to understand

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relationships within education, not just outcomes” (p. 5). But the initiative was discontinued after the last publication in 2005.22 Although it is surprising that, despite lots of convergent rhetoric and similar agendas, there was little contact and cross-fertilization between UNESCO and the OECD while they both worked in parallel on the lifelong education agenda, the story of lifelong learning also holds some lessons about the relational dimension in the educational work of IOs insofar as it shows how ideas spread across the IOs and through a much wider web of policy circles. Significant in that regard is the influence of member states, in particular Sweden, and the role of conferences as catalysts of policy ideas – of which the 1967 Williamsburg conference, the European Education Ministers’ meeting in Versailles 1969 and the literacy meeting held at UIE are examples. Ideas also got transported by individuals who moved between the organizations. A particularly prominent example of this is “the fifty-year long dialogue between Rehn and Delors” (Anxo et al., 2001, p. 2). Gösta Rehn, who was head of the OECD Directorate of Manpower and Social Affairs (1962–1974), had a strong influence on Delors, and “during the 1960s, Delors, invited by Rehn, participated in OECD expert groups on education and wrote a number of reports” (Anxo et al., 2001, p. 8; Interview with Ron Gass, 2017). Jacques Delors, who was a fervent supporter of social rights and remained a lifelong activist of éducation permanente, was later instrumental in revitalizing the lifelong learning agenda in UNESCO, when he took over the chairmanship of the Commission that produced the 1996 Delors Report. As President of the European Commission from 1985 to 1995, Delors was also a major influence on the EU. The late 1960s and 1970s when the OECD and UNESCO engaged with lifelong learning could be characterized as a crossroad. The years following this period ushered in the rise of neoliberal policies. There can be no doubt that we would live in a different society today if the original lifelong learning movement had continued. The story of lifelong learning in education is the tale of a policy idea which was shaped, reconceptualized and reconfigured through processes dictated largely by economic priorities increasingly nourished by a discourse of necessity in light of labour market and work requirements driven by globalization and technological change. As already in previous chapters, the United States played an instrumental role as a shaper of educational agendas. The withdrawal of the United States from UNESCO was an important step enabling the OECD to take the lead of the indicators movement that yielded the demise of lifelong learning, the hegemonic role of PISA and the homogenizing and depoliticizing effect it has had on education around the world.

22 As discussed in Chap. 5, the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) is another example where the OECD drew on UNESCO’s work.

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Chapter 7

Knowledge Brokers and Actor Entanglements in the OECD, UNESCO, and World Bank Triangle

7.1

Introduction

In preparation for the UN Habitat II conference in Istanbul in June 1996, the member countries of the OECD supporting the urban affairs programme wanted to prepare a common position in anticipation of the negotiations over a final declaration. To that end, the Urban Affairs Division, which I then headed, carried out research, and sought synergies with the programmes of other intergovernmental organisations. Co-operation with the EU and the World Bank led to joint conferences and seminars, but UNESCO was unreceptive. Now Gabriela Ramos, the former chief of staff of the OECD, is Assistant Director-General of UNESCO. I have known Gabriela since 1996. If I were to see her today, I would ask her how things are different now.

The quote stems from our interview with Josef Konvitz, former OECD Head of the Regulatory Policy Division from 2003 to 2011, and it suggests the importance of which actors are placed in which positions as well as personal connections and networks across international organizations (IOs) in terms of access, leverage, and mutual understandings when it comes to apprehending interactions and relations between IOs. In fact, as we pointed out in Chap. 2, “the human make-up of international organizations tends to reflect and reproduce power hierarchies.” This resonates with Niemann (2022), who argues that “IOs are influenced by different endogenous and exogenous factors. These factors include member state composition, staff, global developments, disruptive external shocks, and the like” (p. 129). In our analyses in preceding chapters, we have explored most of these factors as they appear historically in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the World Bank triangle albeit the staff – or actor – dimension has been mentioned only as an auxiliary mode of explanation. In this chapter we seek to explore the full potential of this dimension in a number of select arenas for understanding the development of the global architecture of education by bringing the significance of interactions, relations, and entanglements at the actor level between UNESCO, OECD, and the World Bank to the fore. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Elfert, C. Ydesen, Global Governance of Education, Educational Governance Research 24, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40411-5_7

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Knowledge Brokers and Actor Entanglements in the OECD, UNESCO, and. . .

Drawing on the notion of knowledge brokers – understood as key intermediaries who facilitate the exchange of knowledge between individuals or organizations (Weber & Yanovitzky, 2021) – we will trace the appearances and influences of some key actors working in or being affiliated with these IOs in key positions. This will allow us to shed light on at least some of the “revolving doors”, coordination efforts, power positions, and in this sense also the boundary work (Kranke, 2022) that goes on between the organizations. In the Bourdieusian tradition, boundary work reflects the struggles over meanings, definitions, and purposes between research, politics, and practice, as well as the negotiations of the boundaries between these fields (Eyal, 2013; Medvetz, 2015; Ydesen, 2021a). In other words, the chapter unravels the antagonisms and collaborations within and between epistemic communities (Haas, 1992), the negotiations and the boundary work invested in the formation of epistemic communities, and thus the constituencies shaping the course and structures of global governance in education. To achieve this aim, we find inspiration in the spatial turn in the social sciences which on the one hand “connects ideas, individuals, organisations and places” (Grosvenor, 2009, p. 232) and on the other hand seeks to identify spaces of exchange, i.e., the arenas that are constitutive for the formation of interorganizational, transnational and epistemic communities as well as boundaries between communities as they emerge through inclusive and exclusionary practices. More specifically, we focus on the creation and development of networks across the three organizations inspired by the methodological approach of prosopography. Prosopography is a variant of Social Network Analysis which systematically examines the structures that emerge from “social patterns with the objective of understanding the ways in which this structure contributes to specific outcomes” (Pizmony-Levy & Baek, 2022, p. 60). Prosopography means the investigation of collective biographies understood as networks and organizations offering the potential of situating agents, events, and practices spatially. This opens the possibility of looking at spatial distributions of knowledge and thus the re-interpretation and rearticulation of knowledge, ideas, practices both within and beyond institutions (Verboven et al., 2007). For the purpose of our analysis, the use of prosopography also indicates a focus beyond an intra-organizational frame of reference and allows the tracing of interorganizational and transnational imaginative spaces that intersect with multiple places.

7.2

The Actor Perspective in International Organizations

IOs – of various sorts – are obvious objects for this kind of analysis because they by their very mode of operation are hubs that bring together diverse actors and networks from different arenas (e.g. member states, civil society organizations, interest groups and experts from various institutions) and bureaucratic echelons (Christensen & Ydesen, 2015). If we briefly take UNESCO as an example, Michael Omolewa (2007), in his analysis of UNESCO as a network organization, pointed out how

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UNESCO has extensively used conferences as a vehicle for establishing an “interaction between actors concerning knowledge” (p. 212) and based on analysis of the Director-General’s speeches, Omolewa finds that “UNESCO from the outset was eager to serve as a coordinating mechanism, facilitating partnerships and cooperation, sharing ideas and disseminating information” (p. 217). Similarly, in his analysis of the interactions between UNESCO and the US education arena under the “education for international understanding” programme, Ydesen (2016) draws attention to the presence of a transnational epistemic community moving into and out of a space of exchange constituted by UNESCO and a number of influential American educational organizations. Another UNESCO-related example on the role and importance of key actors comes from Klaus Bahr (2020), former staff member of the OECD, the World Bank, and UNESCO, who, with the support of UNESCO’s Director-General, Federico Mayor, was the leading hand in the transformation of the Education Financing Division (EFD), the operative unit of the UNESCO-World Bank Co-operative Program (see Chap. 4), into the Policy and Sector Analysis Division (PSA) in 1990. Notably, the PSA was organizationally placed outside the Education Sector and attached to the Bureau of Operational activities where it had similar administrative autonomy as had been enjoyed by the EFD. Bahr explains how the “PSA’s relative freedom of action, particularly its approach to serve specific country needs (rather than unconditionally apply General Conference resolutions) was perceived as disturbing the mission of the ED Sector” (p. 3). With the retirement of Bahr as PSA director in 1993, “this person-based, basic understanding ended” and “PSA was transferred into the ED Sector, thus losing its independence of action” (p. 4). In 1996 PSA was closed, with the consequence that UNESCO’s capacity to provide sector analysis services to member states was significantly reduced. As Richard Sack explained, “the problem. . .is that UNESCO. . .never understood that sector analysis in education should be part of its core mandate” (Interview, 2019).1 Another example from the World Bank is Stephen Heyneman’s account of his and the Education Director Aklilu Habte’s role in the Bank’s methodological shift from manpower planning to the rate of return approach (Interview with Stephen Heyneman, 2018,2 see Chap. 4). Finally, in her dissertation about the OECD, Morgan (2007) has unravelled what she describes as a “knowledge network” behind the construction of PISA, for instance highlighting the European Network of Policy Makers for the Evaluation of Education Systems founded in 1995 and how “The OECD’s educational activities were integrated into regional and global educational networks” (p. 242). These

1

Richard Sack has worked for many decades as a consultant for international organizations in the field of education for development, including the World Bank and UNESCO. From 1995–2001 he was Executive Secretary of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), which was, then, hosted by the IIEP. 2 Stephen Heyneman joined the World Bank in 1976, where he worked for 22 years, among other positions as Division Chief for Eastern Europe.

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examples from the IO historiography serve as inspiration for our analysis in this chapter.

7.2.1

Methodology and the Construction of a Spatial Venn Diagram

Evidently, the historical contexts in which the organizations treated in this book have evolved constitute a vastness of human actors, interactions, and networks the complete analysis of which clearly lies beyond the scope of this chapter. As we have demonstrated in the previous chapters, all three organizations are highly complex with their comprehensive portfolios of programmes, organizational and legal structures, member states, and shifting external partnerships. We therefore start our analysis with some general observations about actor analysis based on social network analysis before delving into a number of chronological case arenas in which key actors engaged in cross-organizational activities appear, and where salient and defining organizational developments or programmes in global education were negotiated and shaped. In this latter part of our analysis, we demonstrate three different kinds of approaches – revolving around each of our three organizations – each highlighting different aspects of our theoretical framework described above. The first case arena has a distinct organizational focus with the creation of the International Institute of Educational Planning (IIEP) as a semi-autonomous UNESCO institution in 1963. The second case arena zooms in on the late 1960s/ early 1970s travels and correspondence by Mats Hultin, a former head of department at the Swedish Ministry of Education and World Bank staffer between 1965 and 1984. The third case arena explores the role of Andreas Schleicher in the formation of the International Indicators of Education Systems (INES)/PISA complex. Each of these case arenas reflects a development where fundamental new tracks were laid for the design of the contemporary course and content of global governance in education. The concept of boundary work has served as a criterion for selecting our cases in which negotiations and struggles about understandings, definitions, and purposes between research, politics, and practice play out. In this sense, the defining organizational developments or education programmes become boundary objects crisscrossing between organizational settings. Star and Giesemer (1989), who coined the concept, define a boundary object as, “any object that is part of multiple social worlds and facilitates communication between them; it has a different identity in each social world that it inhabits” (cited in Grek & Ydesen, 2021, p. 125). Prior to our identification of our three case arenas, we created a baseline list of actors who appeared to be populating the UNESCO, OECD, and World Bank triangle with a specific focus on overlaps and cross-organizational activities and affiliations over time. We then searched our archival documents and the interview transcriptions in our inventory for appearances of these actors and noted all the

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arenas in which these actors appeared. This is a way of doing social network analysis of the spaces in which these actors operated over time. Nevertheless, we do not pretend that this is an exhaustive investigation. It is merely a qualified sample of actors whose names have been checked in archival documents across the three organizations. We then investigated further the overlapping names – what their role, position and agendas were in the three organizations – and with which education programmes these actors were engaged. This procedure has allowed us to create a spatial Venn diagram of the three organizations as a visual way of elucidating the diachronic appearances of key actors (knowledge brokers) and the overlaps across organizational boundaries (Fig. 7.1).

7.2.2

Some General Analytical Observations

As indicated in the Venn diagram, important actors of what could be called a fellowship of international bureaucrats – or even public intellectuals – populate the UNESCO, OECD, and World Bank triangle and several of them operate in interorganizational arenas over time. A good example is the ubiquitous Swedish educationist Torsten Husén (1916–2009) who was a prominent figure in UNESCO committees and a regular consultant to the OECD, the IIEP and the UNESCO Institute for Education in Hamburg for almost five decades (Pettersson & Popkewitz, 2019). In addition, Husén was chairman of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) between 1962 and 1978 and he also took part in international reviewer teams appointed by the OECD for the review of national education systems.3 Other examples are: 1. Ricardo Diez Hochleitner was appointed as programme specialist to the educational planning programme in UNESCO in 1958, where he was in charge of the Major Project for Latin America. In 1963, on leave from UNESCO, he was seconded to the World Bank, where he was the first head of education and functioned as a mediator between UNESCO and the World Bank during the period when the Co-operative Program between the two agencies was established. He was director of UNESCO’s Department of Educational Planning and Administration (1964–1968) and member of UNESCO’s Executive Board from 1970–1976 (Diez-Hochleitner, 1997). 2. Jacques Hallak who worked in the French Ministry of Finance before being appointed to the IIEP in 1965 as a Programme Specialist. In this capacity, Hallak participated in OECD meetings on the Educational Investment and Planning

3

For instance, the 1978 OECD review of education policy in the United States was conducted by a team consisting of professors P. Karmel, chairman of the Tertiary Education Commission in Australia; H. von Hentig, University of Bielefeld in West Germany; T. Husén, University of Stockholm in Sweden; and Lord Young, director of the Institute of Community Studies in London (Ydesen & Dorn, 2022).

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Fig. 7.1 The Venn diagram represents a qualitative selection of people who played central roles in the historical events we discuss in this book. After having made a baseline selection based on our research, we systematically consulted archival documents, scholarly articles and books, reports and webpages to trace whether these names came up in the context of UNESCO, the World Bank and the OECD, for example at meetings or as authors of reports. A “pin icon” in a specific colour has been assigned to each name to indicate where their primary affiliation was. A blue “pin icon” represents the World Bank, red represents UNESCO and yellow the OECD. The purple pin icon represents overlap between UNESCO and the World Bank, and those people who have a purple pin icon have worked in both organizations or had a strong involvement with both organizations, such as Werner Moller and Lucila Jallade, who were UNESCO staff, but led the Education Financing Division (EFD) that carried out work related to World Bank loans. The IIEP is located in the middle (grey area) showing that it had overlap with all 3 organizations. It has a purple pin to show that it is a site of boundary work between UNESCO and the World Bank. An orange pin icon stands for individuals who were affiliated with both UNESCO and the OECD, such as Herbert Moore Phillips who was an economist in UNESCO and worked as a consultant for the OECD after his retirement. A grey “pin icon” as assigned to Birger Fredriksen and Klaus Bahr indicates that these individuals have worked for all 3 organizations. Those who have no pin such as Hellmut Becker were not primarily affiliated with any of the organizations, but had some kind of secondary affiliation. Hellmut Becker, who was Director at the Max-Planck Institute for Educational Research in Berlin, was board member of the IIEP and very well connected especially in the UNESCO/OECD realm

Programme (EIP), and the Mediterranean Regional Project (MRP) as a representative of the IIEP (OECD-DAS-EID, 1968). Hallak did a brief stint at the World Bank from 1987 to 1988 after which he became Director of the IIEP in 1988. As described in Chap. 4, in his role as host of the International Working Group on Education (IWGE), he was a key figure in the run up and implementation of

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Education for All. Hallak was also Director of UNESCO’s International Bureau of Education (IBE) between 1998 to 2000. In 2000, he served as UNESCO’s interim Assistant Director-General for Education. 3. Birger Fredriksen, who since 1971 largely worked on promoting achievements of the Universal Primary Education goals for 1980 agreed in the early 1960s, and the Education for All and Millennium Development Goals of 1990 and 2000. His work has focused on sub-Saharan Africa, serving for 20 years until 2004 as education planner and later Director for Human Development for Africa in the World Bank. Before joining the World Bank, he spent 2 years as a researcher at the OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) and 10 years in various positions at UNESCO. Between 2005 and 2015, he served as a member and, later, as chair of the Governing Board of the IIEP.4 4. Nicholas Burnett who served as Director of the EFA Global Monitoring Report (2004–2007), UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Education (2007–2009) and Chair of the Governing Board of the IIEP (2016–2021) with a background in the World Bank, where he was human development sector manager (1983–2000). Between 1976 and 1977, he was economic adviser in the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Arguably, staff mobility in IOs is generally relatively high. Ringel-Bickelmaier and Ringel (2010) contend that, “a large part of staff . . . is employed on fixed-term contracts which generally run up to three years with the possibility, but not the obligation, of renewal” (p. 525). In fact, the case of the OECD is particularly interesting, since it has had “annual turnover rates sometimes as high as 40 per cent for certain staff” (p. 526). Therefore, the “revolving doors” of IOs thus seem to suggest that staff often move across the organizations or may even occupy multiple positions simultaneously (Ydesen & Grek, 2019). What facilitates these movements is among other things their competencies, profiles, personal connections, project funding possibilities and fixed-term project employments. While most of IO actors have their main affiliation with one of the organizations, they often appear in interorganizational fora or write reports, participate in working groups or provide other sorts of input for other organizations. One such example is Kjell Eide whose main affiliation was with the OECD for many years but who wrote several reports and articles for UNESCO and the Council of Europe (e.g. Eide, 1969, 1973, 1979, 1986). Another example is Wadi Haddad who had a long career in the World Bank education division between 1976 and 1996 but kept close affiliations with UNESCO where he served as Special Advisor to the Director-General of UNESCO (1997–1998) and contributed to UNESCO reports.5 The Venn diagram also reveals the IIEP as a site of intense boundary work between UNESCO and the World Bank in particular. After the termination of the Co-operative program between UNESCO and the World Bank, collaboration 4 This information is partly based on a newspaper article, ‘Fra Gamvik til Verdensbanken’, Finnmarken, Wednesday July 7th, 1993, p. 13. 5 https://www.techknowlogia.org/TKL_Documents/WDHResume08F.pdf

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between the two organizations continued in the orbit of the IIEP, for example through the IWGE, which the IIEP coordinates, as discussed in Chap. 4.6 The IIEP is a case of what organizational theorists have called a “linking-pin” organization, defined as an organization that has “extensive and overlapping ties to different parts of a network” (Aldrich & Whetten, 1981, p. 390) and “may serve as communication channels between organizations in the networks, may link third parties to one another” (Jönsson, 1986, p. 43). The diagram further shows other interesting points in terms of the actor communities of the three organizations. The absence of women is striking, with the exception of Lucila Jallade who was hired by UNESCO to work in the EFD, against the background of her prior experience working with the World Bank. Even though the diagram does not provide an exhaustive picture, the Western dominance in the UNESCO, OECD, and World Bank triangle is another noticeable feature. The Global South seems to be mostly present in UNESCOrelated arenas whereas the prominent names appearing in the OECD- and World Bank arenas are largely of Western origin. One of the strengths of the OECD has been its “ability to create a flexible space for participating states (i.e. their political leaders, civil servants, diplomats, and professionals) to engage in programmes, initiatives, and discussions with peers about a host of agendas” (Ydesen, 2021a, p. 147). Given that the OECD’s membership consists of rich industrialised countries, the group stays quite homogenous. This point is reflected in a 1964 British dispatch describing the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC), whose primary role is to evaluate donor programmes, as, An essential organ in which, untrammeled by hysterical speeches from the Afro-Asian bloc or subversive maneuvers from behind the Iron and Bamboo curtains, the Western Powers can study the real substance of aid problems in all objectivity and think out a coordinated line to take at New York and Geneva (cited in Leimgruber & Schmelzer, 2017, p. 44).

But the diagram also indicates how different regions of the Western bloc are represented. For instance, it is striking how the Nordic countries take a ubiquitous role across the UNESCO, OECD, and World Bank triangle. Our archival sources and interviews even suggest that the Nordic members of the IOs would discuss – and sometimes even align – their priorities before official meetings (Vejleskov, 1982; Interview with Hans Vejleskov, 2020).7 Focusing on the OECD, Eide (1990) argues that the Nordic states as such have punched above their weight in the development of the OECD. For instance, Denmark provided the organization’s first Secretary-General, the economist and Liberal-Conservative politician Thorkil Kristensen (1899–1989), in office between 1961 and 1969. The economist Henning Friis (1911–1999), director of the Danish Institute for Social Research [socialforskningsinstituttet], became the first chairman of the Governing Committee for Scientific and Technical Personnel (1958–1965), while the Swedish Professor Jarl Bengtsson served as a consultant in

6

More recently, the IIEP also collaborates frequently with UNICEF (Interview with former IIEP Director Suzanne Grant Lewis, 2019). 7 Professor in Development Psychology, Hans Vejleskov (1936–2022) served as the Danish member of the CERI Governing Board from 1977.

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the OECD from 1975 and headed CERI between 1989 and 2002 during which time he recruited Andreas Schleicher for the PISA programme (Interview with Josef Konvitz, 2022).8 Arguably, the three Scandinavian states Denmark, Norway and Sweden historically have served as reference societies in the OECD arena and they had the self-confidence to engage with global education issues from an understanding that their model of society was worth following for other nations and states (Ydesen, 2021b). Nevertheless, when pursuing the actor perspective in the analysis of IOs, one should not overlook the formal and informal, institutionalised and not institutionalised connections and channels between IOs and local and national contexts. In other words, it is fruitful to include a focus on the national and local spaces. For instance, a key focus for understanding the workings and impact of PISA are the knowledge brokers operating between the OECD and the participating “economies”. For instance, since 2017, the OECD has increased its support for strengthening the analytical capacity of National Centres and Ministries of Education more generally, as well as that of municipalities and other education stakeholders at the national level, through its PISA Lead Analysts programme (Auld et al., 2020). A constructive angle to explore in this connection are also the shifting consortia tasked with conducting the PISA surveys which perform the boundary work that goes on between the organizations, the national political arenas, and sometimes even in the public debates and news landscape.9 As pointed out by Morgan (2007) in her analysis of how PISA has been organised, A National Project Manager acted as the link between the International Project Centre and the participating country. National Centres implemented other international assessments such as those relating to adult literacy (IALS) and IEA studies. National Project Managers mediated between the local school level, the national level and international level of the project. At the local level, School Coordinators were assigned to each school and Test Administrators were trained to administer the PISA assessment. (p. 170)

For instance, in the case of Denmark the long-time chairperson of the PISA consortium and national project manager, Professor Niels Egelund of the Danish School of Education, wrote an influential report, “Danish Youth in International Comparison” [Danske unge i en international sammenligning] in the domestic scene based on the results of PISA 2009. Egelund has been very vocal in public debates and an oftenused expert by mainstream media where he would be arguing from OECD perspectives in general and with the use of PISA results in particular. He was also a member of the Government Agency for the Quality Development of the Public School established in 2006 which allowed him to connect OECD programs and data with Danish educational policy making (Ydesen et al., 2022). 8

Josef Konvitz joined the OECD’s Urban Affairs Division as Principal Administrator in 1992, and became Head of Division in 1996. From 2003 to 2011, Konvitz was head of the OECD’s programme on regulatory policies. 9 See the annex “PISA contractors, staff and consultants in the PISA reports” in the PISA technical reports, e.g. https://www.oecd.org/pisa/sitedocument/PISA-2015-Annex-I-PISA-ContractorsStaff-Consultants.pdf

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Another important dimension in this boundary work between international organizations and national arenas are the IO’s local branches and representation offices which play important roles in knowledge brokering and even lobbying activities. In our interview with Josef Konvitz, he emphasized how the OECD Centres in Berlin, Mexico City, Tokyo, and Washington serve as distribution centres for OECD publications and reports and even offer a diplomatic presence where leading staff members often hold a convening power in relation to national decision-makers and/or can liaise between key national actors and OECD committees.10 Similarly, UNESCO operates some 53 national, regional, cluster and liaisons offices around the world11 while the World Bank has a presence in more than 170 countries.12 These arenas constitute fruitful areas of investigation for future research on the importance of actor networks between IOs and national contexts. Another relevant dimension springing from these initial observations is the question about whether the identified actors serve as experts – ideally only loyal to the professional field to which they belong – or whether they take the role of national representatives serving the political priorities and agendas of their respective homelands. For example, in his exposition of the OECD history in education, Papadopoulos (1994) on several occasions describes the Scandinavian “encampment” as for instance “. . .social-democratic ideology, of the Scandinavian type. . .” (p. 97). As also briefly described in Chap. 2, this dichotomy between experts and representatives has been a recurrent issue in the workings of IOs.13 For instance, the US government in the 1950s stipulated that experts joining various UNESCO projects were to act as government representatives, not as freewheeling agents devoid of any political allegiances. In other words, a space of tension emerged between the expert rule and the rule of governments via appointees (Ydesen, 2016). If we look at the general trend across IOs over time, we see a diachronic movement from experts in the early years to national representatives towards more recently experts/regional/ cultural representatives. As discussed in Chap. 2, the 1993 reform of UNESCO’s Executive Board, “aimed at improving the efficiency of the work of the Executive Board” (UNESCO, 1992), entailed that the Executive Board was no longer composed of autonomous experts who were appointed by governments, but that member states were elected directly. As a consequence, diplomats instead of experts, or to put

10

https://www.oecd.org/general/oecdcentres.htm (accessed 11 January 2023). https://en.unesco.org/fieldoffice (accessed 11 January 2023). 12 https://www.worldbank.org/en/where-we-work (accessed 11 January 2023). 13 As argued by Dussel and Ydesen (2016), Julian Huxley, the first UNESCO Director-General, had wanted an Executive Board of outstanding intellectuals paying no obedience towards the country of origin. Jaime Torres Bodet, the second UNESCO Director-General, was aligned with Huxley’s views on this matter and, according to Chloé Morel (2010), even suggested that UNESCO should be considered a “universal ministry of education” (p. 54), a proposition that led him to clash not only with the United States and the United Kingdom but also with Jean Piaget, who was by then the director of the International Bureau of Education in Geneva. The schism is evident in a confidential 1947 report by William Benton, chairman of the US delegation of the UNESCO General Conference in Mexico City 1947, in which Benton calls the idea of individual experts a “half-fiction” (cited in Dussel & Ydesen, 2016, p. 153). 11

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it differently, technocrats instead of intellectuals, assume the seats in the Executive Board and the committees, who change quite frequently and lack the expertise to understand the issues that are discussed. The UK delegate in his speech at the General Conference held in 2013 asked the question, “How many of us actually understand any of these processes? How can we take the right decisions if we don’t?” (United Kingdom Statement, 2013). This statement which says something about the latitude of actors in IOs, relates to an issue that emerged in our interview with Jørn Skovsgaard, who was the Danish member of the INES Strategic Management Group. Skovsgaard contended that the national representatives of the INES programme often acted without any other mandate than the fact that they were appointed. The reason, according to Skovsgaard, was that the textual corpus associated with the work constituted such a magnitude that only very few people in national ministries became even vaguely acquainted with it (Interview with Jørn Skovsgaard, 2020).14 Actors are always embedded in a particular context and history in terms of their experiences, ideas, values, and professional outlook. Whether inadvertently or intentionally, actors are bringing local and national perspectives into an IO. In that sense, the role and importance of actor networks or knowledge brokering activities is rooted in or connected with previous experience and the contemporary policy picture both of which essentially contain local and national dimensions even if the actor operates strictly in a transnational arena under the auspices of an IO. In Chap. 6, we have referred to the role of Albert Tuijnman in the OECD, who had completed his doctoral dissertation on recurrent education in Sweden and brought his intellectual and research interests into the OECD and the INES programme. In the following section, we present three historical episodes that emerged from our research that we have called “case arenas” as a way of emphasizing the transnational and interorganizational dimensions of the cases. A case is commonly understood as a specific context that is being investigated, but an arena adds a connotation of highlighting interactions and transversal movements, which is exactly what we intend to do in this chapter.

7.2.3

Case Arena 1 – The Creation of the International Institute of Educational Planning (IIEP)

Chapter 3 has offered a thorough policy analysis of how the IIEP came into existence not least emphasizing how the background of the perceived need of a planning

14

Jørn Skovsgaard was senior adviser at the International Secretariat (2001–2018) and head of division (1996–2001) in the Danish Ministry of Education. Between 2001 and 2018, he represented Denmark on several committees and working groups at the OECD. For example, Skovsgaard was the Danish delegate in the OECD Education Policy Committee and member of the CERI Governing Board.

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institute was the decolonisation movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which left a vacuum of trained personnel in education in the newly independent countries of the South. What this analysis adds is a focus on the actors playing a leading role in the creation of the IIEP. An important starting point setting the scene was UNESCO’s Director-General René Maheu’s invitation to Philip Coombs, who had resigned from the US State Department in 1962, to become the IIEP’s first director. Recruiting him for the position helped to secure the funding from the World Bank and the Ford Foundation, which acted as a “midwife” (Benveniste, 2007, p. 5) and granted $200,000 to the IIEP for the first 2 years. The grant was justified against the background of “the insufficient knowledge about the role of human resources. . .and lack of qualified persons who can contribute to human resource planning and development”; and “a genuine need for an overall effort to pull together activities in the field of educational planning” (Ford Foundation, 1962). The State Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) supported the creation of the IIEP. Coombs’ nomination as director was also instrumental in securing the support of the US government: “Unless the United States Government takes a positive role in favour of the Institute. . .it is highly probable that the Institute’s leadership will fall into non-United States hands” (Battle, 1962). The role – and symbolic value – of Coombs in this process testifies to the distinct geopolitical dimension in the development of the global architecture of education but it also reflects the strategic agency of Maheu in playing UNESCO’s cards right. The necessary condition for this kind of agency is the existence of an epistemic community, i.e. a common mindset or style of reasoning that cuts across organizations and the bureaucratic and political echelons of powerful member states. In this case, the epistemic community is formed by a belief in the value and promise of educational planning and also a common agenda for its global expansion as a sine qua non mode of operation for achieving proper development and good governance. Expanding our lens in the UNESCO, OECD, and World Bank triangle, the OECD was also involved in the preparations for the establishment of the IIEP. Initially there was talk about creating the IIEP as a partnership between UNESCO and the OECD (Interview with Guy Benveniste, 201715; Benveniste, 2007; Bürgi, 2017a). However, the OECD withdrew from the IIEP, pushed out by UNESCO who was opposed to its involvement with the argument that the OECD was an organization of the rich, industrialized countries (Interview with Klaus Bahr, 2017).16 UNESCO fast-tracked its establishment to steal a march on the OECD – laying 15

Guy Benveniste was Special Assistant to Philip Coombs during his time as Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs in the Kennedy administration. After Coombs’ resignation from the post, Benveniste was hired by the World Bank. He briefly joined Coombs again when he became director of the IIEP, but then left the IIEP to pursue an academic career. 16 Klaus Bahr worked for the OECD and the World Bank before moving to UNESCO, where he was a member of the Education Financing Division (EFD), the joint UNESCO-World Bank unit. After the termination of the EFD around the year 1990, he became head of the Division for Policy and Sector Analysis (PSA).

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bare the significance of interorganizational rivalry (Bürgi, 2017b). Instead, the OECD went on to strengthen its own projects pursuing research in educational planning, such as the Mediterranean Regional Project (MRP) and the Programme on Educational Investment and Planning in Relation to Economic Growth (EIP) (Bürgi, 2017b), and later, in 1968, the OECD’s CERI, which was also funded by the Ford Foundation, as it envisaged CERI as a “sister institute” to the IIEP, responsible for the “developed” part of the world (Bürgi, 2017b, p. 298). Interestingly, Philip Coombs invited Ron Gass to become his deputy at the IIEP. When he declined, Raymond Lyons, who had been in charge of the MRP at the OECD, accepted the position. In this sense, the creation of the IIEP illustrates the close collaboration and loose boundaries between the major actors in the emerging field of global governance of education at the time. Educational planning experts were a rare species, and they formed a small circle of people who basically all knew each other and moved between organizations. The planning fervour saw the rise of the “value-free development expert” (Berman, 1979, p. 161), of which Coombs, who claimed that “educational planning is ideologically neutral” (Coombs, 1970, p. 14), was a prime example.17

7.2.4

Case Arena 2 – Mats Hultin’s Travels and Correspondence in the Late 1960s/Early 1970s

Another approach to explore the actor-driven intersections between the three organizations and the boundary work between national and IO contexts is to delve into the travels and correspondence by a concrete actor. In this case arena we have chosen Mats Hultin, a former head of department at the Swedish Ministry of Education and World Bank staffer between 1965 and 1984, as the object of our analysis. Our archival sources concerning Mats Hultin reveal multiple relevant insights. The first pertains to organizational development and the struggle between organizations. To add some context a clear example stems from the relations between UNESCO and the OECD who both operated their activities out of their respective Paris headquarters. In July 1962, the Swedish OECD delegation wrote a letter to the OECD Secretary-General stating that “the OECD – no longer a solely European organization – should in our view adapt their salaries to the levels and scales applied by UNESCO for their staff in Paris” (OECD, 1963, p. 341). The delegate observed that “due to the two organizations having based their operations in the same location, a certain level of competitiveness had been noted between the OECD and UNESCO The claim that educational planning was “neutral” was controversial already at the time. DiezHochleitner (1963), in his report on the International Conference on Educational Planning in Developing Countries, states that “planning could not be conceived without value judgments related to an existing social context and given situation. Thus planning implies normative decisions. However, there was no agreement whether there were no neutral planning techniques or whether every planning technique had a normative element once it was actually applied” (p. 2). 17

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in terms of their abilities to attract staff” (cited in Ydesen & Grek, 2019, p. 11). But the World Bank was also a player in this conundrum, which is visible in the formation of a staff association within the World Bank which came into existence in 1972. Hultin played an important role in the process leading up to the establishment of the staff association, and it seems that standards set by other organizations played a role – both as an object of consideration and as an argument within the World Bank organization. Hultin explains how in the process, “There were some comparisons, you know, with the organizations, the United Nations and OECD. . .we learned, of course, that if you wanted to be a serious organization we should do a bit more, like they had in the United Nations and in some of the organizations in Europe” (Hultin, 1989, p. 16). The quote demonstrates that IOs would compare themselves to their counterparts and that the ability to attract qualified staff was an issue. According to Hultin, World Bank President Robert McNamara supported a staff association “because he wanted to have a channel to the staff” (p. 4), which was also an important management tool. In terms of knowledge brokering and network cultivation it is relevant to highlight how Hultin – as a World Bank representative – moved across organizations as an arbiter between IOs, government agencies, and expert committees in three highly diverse contexts. In the autumn of 1969, Hultin’s itinerary and report to Mr. Duncan S. Ballantine, head of the World Bank Education Department (1964–1977), reveals a great deal about which connections were drawn. Hultin’s first port of call was CERI which he visited in September 1969. Here he met with Ron Gass to “become better acquainted with their activities” (Hultin, 1969, p. 2). After the meeting Hultin wrote a rather detailed list of CERI activities and concluded in his report, “The CERI research program appears over-ambitious. However, considering earlier useful OECD studies, the Education Projects Department should keep in close touch with CERI’s activities, and this applies both to the projects in education economy and in higher education” (Hultin, 1969, p. 2). Even though he seems to question whether the CERI research program was realisable, Hultin’s note also reveals a distinct admiration for OECD activities and programmes in education and the potential for future collaboration. Following the CERI meeting Hultin participated in an IIEP conference “to discuss the ongoing survey of cost analysis in education” (Hultin, 1969, p. 3). Here he found some inspiration for the World Bank’s own programs and noted in his report, “I have gone into some detail on the above issues since they are also relevant to many IBRD education projects and are not always dealt within our work” (p. 3). After the IIEP conference he met with Professor Seth Spaulding who was in charge of UNESCO’s Department for the Advancement of Education. The following couple of days, Hultin spent in London paying a visit to the British Ministry of Overseas Development and the Department of Science and Education to discuss “curriculum development, teaching technology and the possible use of British consultants’ services” (p. 5). Finally, Hultin returned to Stockholm to give an address to the Swedish Labour market Vocational Council on “Ways and Means to Rationalize Education” (p. 6). Hultin’s trip testifies to a host of interactions where

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he both picked up and disseminated knowledge while exploring future avenues for the World Bank to operate more efficiently in terms of promoting its agendas. But the corpus of Hultin’s correspondence also reveals other interesting aspects. For instance, he would provide confidential reflections to Mr. Ballantine about Torsten Husén’s suggestions for names of possible candidates for head of IIEP (Hultin, 1972). Again, to anticipate what might happen in the global architecture of education and would allow the World Bank to operate with due care. Interestingly, Hultin’s correspondence also contains evidence of UNESCO animosity towards the World Bank. In a letter from Dr. Wilhelm Tham, President of the European Association of Manufacturers and Distributors of Educational Materials (EURODIDAC), to Hultin dated November 14, 1975, it reads, I will, however, in confidence inform you that the UNESCO representative in the Brussels meeting, to my great surprise, was very repulsive to the Bank’s presence in Dakar and gave me an almost bizarre reprimand because the EURODIDAC had been in touch with the Bank. I do not know what lies behind this attitude, but I felt that I should inform you about it. (Hultin, 1975)

Again, this confidential note testifies to conflicts and turf struggles between IOs. There seems to be a constant flux of ambivalence when opening up the black box of IOs. Some offices and departments might fare well with their counterparts or partners in neighbouring organizations while the opposite could hold true for other offices and departments. Undoubtedly, the role of actors and personal relationships is significant in explaining these sometimes conflictual and sometimes harmonious relations. Picking up this thread of shifting collaborative relations and Hultin’s apparent respect for the OECD’s work at a time when the World Bank was still closely involved with UNESCO, one of Hultin’s later trips stands out as particularly relevant. As we saw in Chap. 4, the World Bank had relied heavily on its co-operative program with UNESCO launched in 1964 but by the late 1960s it had also grown increasingly self-aware in terms of its education activities. Hultin was a central figure in the World Bank beginning to search for statistical work and tools beyond the UNESCO arena. On a mission to Paris, Dijon, and Brighton in 1973, Hultin reported back to chief education economist Jean-Pierre Jallade of the World Bank Education Department. Hultin made some interesting observations about indicators in education following his visits to both the UNESCO and the OECD. His first visit was in the UNESCO headquarters from which he reported the following observations: While in Paris, I also paid visits to Mr. Bodart and Mr. Reiff, who are doing some work on indicators for education. I must say that I was puzzled by the lack of focus of their work. I am sorry to say that, after a one-hour and a-half conversation with them, I am not in a position to answer a few simple questions such as what objectives is this research supposed to achieve, how and why? (Hultin, 1973, p. 2)

From UNESCO, Hultin continued to the OECD headquarters where he seems to have been quite impressed with the work that was undertaken there:

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Angus Maddison and his OECD colleagues, whom I visited after UNESCO, are somewhat more advanced in this indicators business. They have been gathering more sophisticated data on enrolments, expenditures and the like than usual. For instance, data on enrolments include new entrants, full-time and part-time pupils, degrees awarded etc. On expenditures, they are presently circulating a joint questionnaire with UNESCO in an effort to raise data by levels of education, sources of finance, etc. They have also produced two or three papers on higher education finance which could be of some use to us. (Hultin, 1973, p. 2)

It is hard to find a “smoking gun” in terms of what Hultin’s input precisely meant in the World Bank organization, but as we have seen in Chap. 4 it is beyond doubt that the World Bank found a new will to work more independently in education research in subsequent years. This intention clearly comes to the fore in the Bank’s first Education Sector Policy Paper from April 1980 (World Bank, 1980). According to the prominent education economist George Psacharopoulos (1981), who served as a long-time senior advisor in the World Bank, The 1980 Policy Paper does not only reflect the fact that Bank operations are now increasingly based on the results of research, but also that the Bank conducts research of its own and will continue to do so in the future. This is extremely welcome for the Bank has access to a wealth of comparative education material outsiders could not even dream about. (p. 144)

In many ways, the 1980 policy papers meant that the Bank effectively left the manpower planning and forecasting paradigm in favour of focusing on rates of return in human capital investment (Heyneman, 2019; Niemann, 2022). The implication in terms of statistics was an increasing focus on performance indicators in subsequent years. Hultin seems to have been an active cog in that machinery.

7.2.5

Case Arena 3: Andreas Schleicher in the Formation of the INES/PISA Complex

Conducting an in-depth investigation of the transorganizational and transnational epistemic community surrounding the INES/PISA complex is a huge undertaking. Based on her interview data, Clara Morgan (2007), in her PhD dissertation, explains how “until 1996, the INES Project operated as a vast network consisting of three hundred to five hundred people worldwide” and how “The INES Project remained a decentralized project and was never integrated into the OECD as a centralized program” (pp. 132–133). Nevertheless, it is relevant to at least attempt to contribute to solving the jigsaw puzzle of how INES/PISA became embedded in the OECD because it constitutes such an important development in terms of the design, functionality, and mode of operation of the contemporary global governance regime in education. From a helicopter perspective – and with the privilege of knowing the significance of PISA on global education governance after 2000 – a key actor to follow in the 1990s is arguably the statistician Andreas Schleicher, who is currently Director

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for Education and Skills and Special Adviser on Education Policy to the SecretaryGeneral at OECD and responsible for managing and administering the PISA and INES projects. As argued by Pettersson and Popkewitz (2019) in their historically informed actor analysis of changing expertise in education, Schleicher is in fact not only an educational entrepreneur, a skilled technician or really good in disseminating educational knowledge, but (together with others) has taken educational sciences out of the hands of ‘experts’ in academia and placed the dominant expertise on education in the hands of entrepreneurs, technicians and statisticians. (p. 29)

Schleicher is an interesting object of analysis because he adds to our knowledge about what kind of expert or type of international bureaucrat populate the UNESCO, OECD, and World Bank triangle. Schleicher himself also has a history of a crossorganizational career. Before joining the OECD as a project manager at CERI in 1994, he was a data manager and later Director for Analysis at the IEA. As all other actors, Schleicher operated in a context defined by certain historical conditions. We have seen in Chap. 5 how the paradigm of developing comparable international indicators was guided by ideals about efficiency and economic growth which hinged on the establishment of comparability and the setting of standards. The American 1983 report A Nation at Risk was a turning point in that respect. But adding to the historical analysis in Chap. 5, an important context for this endeavour also stems from 1989–1990, when the executive heads of UNICEF, UNDP, UNESCO and the World Bank agreed to jointly convene the World Conference on Education For All (EFA) in Jomtien, which took place in 1990 and produced a “Framework for Action to Meet Basic Learning Needs” (Kellow & Carroll, 2022). As mentioned in Chap. 5, the outcome of the Jomtien conference stipulated that universal access to education would be measured on learning outcomes. This is an important development for understanding the preoccupation in subsequent years with the measurement of learning outcomes in various international large-scale assessments, which intersected with the INES programme, the Education at a Glance (EAG), and the whole history behind that programme as we have described in earlier chapters. Against this background, the INES project brought a set of diverse actors together in the making of a boundary infrastructure, hosted within the wider measurement infrastructures of the OECD, CERI, and IEA at the time. The group, despite disagreements and doubts, slowly became a community of practice that worked on developing and constructing the new set of educational indicators, leading to the publication of the first EAG report in 1992. (Grek & Ydesen, 2021, p. 12)

In this context, the IEA was already engaged in the Reading Literacy Study (RLS) from 1985 – a project headed by Warwick B. Elley and Neville Postlethwaite (Elley, 1998). Conducted in 1991, the RLS assessed 9- and 14-year-old students in 32 educational systems and Schleicher assisted with the collection and processing of data from the participating countries. Postlethwaite acted as a kind of mentor to Schleicher and also introduced him, in the early 1990s, to key actors in the field like Jacques Hallak, head of IIEP since 1988 (Personal correspondence with Jacques Hallak, 2023).

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In collaboration with Schleicher, the Danish Pedagogical Institute designed the necessary Rasch procedures18 for the assessment of test item responses and the calculation of student proficiency to be aligned with the demands of the Rasch model (Allerup, 2015). It was in this process that Schleicher got hands-on experience with the methodology of international large scale assessments (ILSAs). Schleicher co-authored a report to UNESCO and UNICEF about the conditions of primary schools in the least developed countries (Schleicher et al., 1995). The purpose of the report was to explore how indicators could be designed based on survey data collection methods; the fieldwork was coordinated by UNICEF representatives. As we saw in Chap. 5, this was a time when the IEA was criticized for not being policy relevant enough (Pettersson, 2014). For instance, the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) from 1993 came under criticism for being poorly managed. In this process, Schleicher left the IEA to take up a position as project manager at OECD/CERI where he became involved in the INES project (Pettersson & Popkewitz, 2019). As “there was a long history of personal contacts between IIEP staff members and some of the key movers in the IEA” (Interview with Albert Tuijnman, 2019),19 he had been interviewed also by the IIEP. Jacques Hallak explained how he, Postlethwaite and Ken Ross [with whom Schleicher had studied at Deakin University in Australia and who was later hired by the IIEP] were “a bit sad that Andreas established PISA at the OECD and not at the IIEP.” But he also made the important point that if Schleicher had joined the IIEP instead of the OECD, he could not have developed the same PISA as he did in the OECD countries for at least two reasons: the countries would have not accepted to join and fund; the IIEP and OECD are two different institutions on many grounds; in addition the IIEP was not supposed at all to carry work on evaluation which was considered to be the task of the IBE in Geneva. (Personal correspondence with Jacques Hallak, 2023)

Hallak’s point is interesting because it testifies to the organizational constraints and opportunities offered to actors in the global education architecture. In that sense, it is an excellent example of how structure and agency come together in the contingent formation of policy instruments among IOs. Nevertheless, Schleicher has managed to optimize his role and significance after he became affiliated with INES and the development of PISA. Pettersson and Popkewitz (2019) explain how, Schleicher advanced within OECD by working on this task and in 1997 became the manager of OECD’s Indicators and Analysis Division, Directorate for Education. In this role, he became a spokesperson when the first PISA study was presented. Since 2002 he has been responsible for the PISA programme but has also been an important ‘expert’ in other educational research. (p. 29)

Rasch analysis – named after the Danish statistician and psychometrician Georg Rasch (1901–1980) – is key to any kind of ILSA design (see e.g. Karlin & Karlin, 2018). 19 Albert Tuijnman was Principal Administrator in the Education and Training Division at the OECD from 1992 to 1998. He was the main OECD contact for IALS and led one of the networks that conducted the INES project. He was the lead author of the first three Education at a Glance reports, published since 1992. 18

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In that sense, Schleicher has been able to build a platform that has allowed him to orchestrate a tremendous boost to the OECD’s reach in education. As several of our interviewees emphasized, Schleicher proved to be a skilled networker of the OECD governing structures: [He] was very skilled in actually manoeuvring between these committees and governing boards and advisory boards and if he couldn’t have it his way in one committee, he would turn his attention to another committee where it was easier to promote his agenda, he is very very pragmatic in this sense. (Interview with Mats Ekholm and Jørn Skovsgaard, 2021)20

Part of this story is also Schleicher’s appearances in other important fora such as Pearson’s advisory panel where he was joined by Michael Barber, chief education advisor to Pearson, formerly at McKinsey, and Eric Hanushek of the conservative Hoover Institution (Ravitch, 2014), two of the most influential actors of global education policy, and in the orbit of philanthropic foundations and business leaders. In an interview with Addey of 2015, Schleicher explains his approach to understanding the works and interplay between IOs in education which is essentially very market-driven, The world will judge us by the work that we do. I think this thinking of mandates is very arcane way of parceling out the world into who does what. I strongly believe in competition. I don’t want the OECD to become the organization with education, I am happy for other organizations doing the same, we collaborate well, we work well with UNESCO, the European Commission. The best ideas will prevail, we can learn a lot from the academic front, we can collaborate and compete at the same time. International organizations or governments have this idea that we have to draw a line and then we discuss this line for ages, it’s not helpful. So, does the OECD need a mandate? No, the mandate will come with what we do. The world will judge us by that. (reproduced in part in Addey, 2021, p. 7)

The implication is that the global education landscape of IOs, member-states, partners, foundations, businesses, and other stakeholders is a playing field – although not a levelled playing field – for actors who are able to gain traction and leverage through connections, networks, and partnerships. In this environment, acquiring the right kind and sufficient level of funding and commanding the necessary capital to establish mutual understandings, problem definitions as well as the development of tools and instruments – that we have referred to, drawing on Srnicek (2013), as representational technologies – is crucial. In this process the importance of the human factor must not be underestimated.

20 Mats Ekholm was Professor of Education at the University of Karlstad, Sweden. While serving in the capacity as Director General of the Swedish National Agency for Education, Ekholm was appointed as the Swedish delegate in the CERI Governing Board between 2000 and 2010. During this period Ekholm was also a member of the INES Strategic Management Group. Jørn Skovsgaard was senior adviser at the International Secretariat (2001–2018) and head of division (1996–2001) in the Danish Ministry of Education. Between 2001 and 2018, represented Denmark on several committees and working groups at the OECD. For example, Skovsgaard was the Danish delegate in the OECD Education Policy Committee and member of the CERI Governing Board.

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Concluding Discussion

The aim of this chapter was to explore the analytical potential of scrutinizing the actor dimension in a few selected arenas affiliated with UNESCO, OECD, and the World Bank. These diachronic arenas – one in the early 1960s, one in the late 1960s/ early 1970s, and one in the 1990s – served as demonstrative examples of three different kinds of approaches affiliated with the theoretical underpinnings of the chapter consisting of the concepts “knowledge brokers”, “epistemic communities”, the “spatial turn”, and prosopography. The first case arena about the formation of the UNESCO-IIEP had a distinct organizational focus which highlighted the importance of strategic agency as well as the close collaboration and loose boundaries between major actors in the emerging field of global governance of education. The IIEP is an interesting case of a “linking-pin” organization in which members of different networks overlap and engage with each other. The case of the IIEP also showed the strong affiliations of one of the key actors, Philip Coombs, with influential US institutions, such as the Ford Foundation; he acted, in fact, as a broker of these institutions in Europe. As we have discussed in Chap. 3, Coombs was shaped by planning approaches and management tools that originated in the United States. The second case arena about the travels and correspondence by World Bank staffer Mats Hultin featured the correspondence about and between organizations and suggests that actors operating across organizational spaces have some leeway to push agendas or direct efforts in certain directions. Finally, the third case arena about the career of Andreas Schleicher in the formation of the INES/PISA complex had a close focus on a key actor and the conditions under which he was able to succeed in terms of gaining traction and leverage through connections, networks, and partnerships. Obviously, the chapter is far from offering an exhaustive analysis of actors and their agency in the UNESCO, OECD, and the World Bank triangle. In fact, the chapter only touches the tip of the iceberg and offers little more than a small preview of the topic. However, if the analysis we offer in this chapter is viewed in connection with and complementing previous chapters, we gain some more comprehensive insights into the design of the inner workings of the global governance of education. We have provided examples of how key actors have moved across organizational boundaries and even how actors’ networks and connections (formal and informal, institutionalised and not institutionalised) allow them to act strategically in a way that can either boost or impede certain agendas and organizational developments. We have also identified a number of salient issues pertaining to the role of actors operating in global IO spaces such as uneven power structures and positions, the power of knowledge, or the power vested in simply being a member of a sparsely populated caste of bureaucrats which has an edge in terms of interaction with national and local echelons and arenas. The chapter has further shed some light on the identity and allegiance of IO actors be that as national representatives, experts in a certain field or as a particular type of stakeholder that offers legitimacy to a programme or an agenda.

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The chapter confirms the findings from previous chapters that IOs are often ambivalently engaged in rivalries and partnerships/collaborations. This came out very clearly in Camilla Addey’s interview with Andreas Schleicher about competition between IOs. But the chapter has also offered some insights from behind the scenes into the very production of expertise as well as into how programmes, methodologies, and assumptions that are seemingly objective are actually produced by a (usually) well-meaning caste of experts who are not necessarily aware of the inherently ideological dimension of their work. That is why the role of agency in the design and workings of global education governance must be scrutinized critically.

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Kellow, A., & Carroll, P. (2022). The organization for economic cooperation and development and education. In D. A. Turner, H. Yolcu, & S. P. Hüsrevşahi (Eds.), The role of international organizations in education (pp. 135–154). Brill. Kranke, M. (2022). Exclusive expertise: The boundary work of international organizations. Review of International Political Economy, 29(2), 453–476. Leimgruber, M., & Schmelzer, M. (2017). Introduction: Writing histories of the OECD. In M. Leimgruber & M. Schmelzer (Eds.), The OECD and the international political economy since 1948 (pp. 1–22). Springer. Medvetz, T. (2015). Field theory and organizational power: Four modes of influence among public policy ‘think tanks’. In M. Hilgers & É. Mangez (Eds.), Bourdieu’s theory of social fields: Concepts and applications (pp. 221–237). Routledge. Morel, C. (2010). Histoire de l’UNESCO: Les trente premiéres années 1945–1974. L’Harmattan. Morgan, C. (2007). OECD Programme for international student assessment: Unraveling a knowledge network. PhD dissertation,. School of Public Policy and Administration, Carleton University. Niemann, D. (2022). International organizations in education: New takes on old paradigms. In K. Martens & M. Windzio (Eds.), Global pathways to education: Cultural spheres, networks, and international organizations (pp. 127–161). Springer. OECD. (1963). Acts of the organisation (Vol. 2). OECD Archive. OECD-DAS-EID. (1968, May 8). Educational Investment and Planning Programme – OECDDAS-EID 68.38. Joint Meeting of EIP-MRP Directors and Country representatives. OE-STP13. Ministry of Education, 3rd Department, The International Office, Cases Concerning International Organisations, OE16 1968, Danish National Archive. Omolewa, M. (2007). UNESCO as a network. Paedagogica Historica, 43(2), 211–221. Papadopoulos, G. S. (1994). Education 1960–1990. The OECD perspective (OECD historical series). Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Pettersson, D. (2014). The development of the IEA: The rise of large-scale testing. In A. Nordin & D. Sundberg (Eds.), Transnational policy-flows in European education: Conceptualizing and governing knowledge (Oxford Studies in Comparative Education). Symposium Books. Pettersson, D., & Popkewitz, T. (2019). A chimera of quantifications and comparisons. In C. E. Mølstad & D. Pettersson (Eds.), New practices of comparison, quantification and expertise in education: Conducting empirically based research (pp. 18–36). Routledge. Pizmony-Levy, O., & Baek, C. (2022). Exploring the architecture of policy knowledge: A methodological note. In I. B. Karseth, K. Sivesind, & G. Steiner-Khamsi (Eds.), Evidence and expertise in Nordic education policy (pp. 59–76). Springer. Psacharopoulos, G. (1981). The World Bank in the world of education: Some policy changes and some remnants. Comparative Education, 17(2), 141–146. Ravitch, D. (2014, December 2). Pearson created the international PISA test for 2015. Diane Ravitch’s blog. https://dianeravitch.net/2014/12/02/pearson-created-the-international-pisa-testfor-2015/ Ringel-Bickelmaier, C., & Ringel, M. (2010). Knowledge management in international organisations. Journal of Knowledge Management, 14(4), 524–539. Schleicher, A., Postlethwaite, N., & Siniscalco, M.T. (1995). The conditions of primary schools - a pilot study in the least developed countries. A report to UNESCO and UNICEF. https://unesdoc. unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000133474?posInSet=4&queryId=aede77dc-afb1-4c58-8c48-95e4 882b3bb5 Srnicek, N. (2013). Representing complexity: The material construction of world politics. Doctoral thesis. The London School of Economics and Political Science. UNESCO. (1992). 140th session of the executive board. 140 EX/14. 26. Paris, 27 July 1992. Implementation of 26 C/resolution 19.3 (III). Report by the director-general on the subject of the review of all constitutional and statutory texts. UNESCO. United Kingdom Statement. (2013, November 7). 37th general conference of UNESCO. General policy debate. [no longer available on the internet].

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Vejleskov, H. (1982, April). Written note to Ministry of Education, ‘Correspondence regarding contacts for Finnish and Swedish board members for coordination of priorities’, Ministry of Education, 3rd Department, The International Office, 1981–1987 Journal cases, International Cases, Journal Group 8. Danish National Archive. Verboven, K., Carlier, M., & Dumolyn, J. (2007). A short manual to the art of prosopography. In K. S. B. Keats-Rohan (Ed.), Prosopography approaches and applications. A handbook (pp. 35–69). Unit for Prosopographical Research (Linacre College). Weber, M. S., & Yanovitzky, I. (2021). Knowledge brokers, networks, and the policymaking process. In M. S. Weber & I. Yanovitzky (Eds.), Networks, knowledge brokers and the public policymaking process (pp. 1–25). Palgrave. World Bank. (1980). Education sector policy paper. World Bank. https://documents1.worldbank. org/curated/en/366981468182955979/pdf/PUB268000REPLA000PUBLIC00Box114061 B.pdf Ydesen, C. (2016). Debating international understanding in the Western world: The American approach to UNESCO’s educational campaigns, 1946–54. In A. Kulnazarova & C. Ydesen (Eds.), UNESCO without borders: Educational campaigns for international understanding (pp. 239–255). Routledge. Ydesen, C. (2021a). Crafting globalization – A Bourdieusian historical approach to studying international organizations and global governance in education. In S. Robinson, J. Ernst, O. J. Thomasson, & K. Larsen (Eds.), Pierre Bourdieu in studies of organization and management: Societal change and transforming fields (pp. 134–154). Routledge. Ydesen, C. (2021b). Extrapolated imperial nationalisms in global education policy formation: An historical inquiry into American and Scandinavian agendas in OECD policy. In D. Tröhler, N. Piattoeva, & W. Pinar (Eds.), World yearbook of education 2022: Education, schooling and the global universalization of banal nationalism (pp. 119–135). Routledge. Ydesen, C., & Dorn, S. (2022). The no child left behind act in the global architecture of educational accountability. History of Education Quarterly, 62(3), 268–290. Ydesen, C., & Grek, S. (2019). Securing organisational survival: A historical inquiry into the OECD’s work in education during the 1960s. Paedagogica Historica, 56(3), 412–427. Ydesen, C., Kauko, J., & Magnúsdóttir, B. R. (2022). The OECD and the field of knowledge brokers in Danish, Finnish, and Icelandic education policy. In B. Karseth, K. Sivesind, & G. Steiner-Khamsi (Eds.), Evidence and expertise in Nordic education policy (pp. 321–348). Springer.

Chapter 8

Contemporary Agendas and Shifts in the Global Governance of Education

8.1

Introduction

The aim of this book was to shed light on the intersections between three international organizations (IOs), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the World Bank, that were created in the post-World War II world order and that arguably have evolved into key actors of the global governance of education. UNESCO was specifically created with a worldwide mandate for education, and the OECD and the World Bank both entered the realm of education in the Cold War context of the 1960s, when education was proclaimed a driver of economic development and a pillar of foreign policy. As we have explained in the introductory chapter, our focus on these three IOs has its limitations. With its focus on UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank in the era of US American dominance, the book has neglected other important organizations as well as the educational governance architecture of the Soviet Empire. It has certainly not paid adequate attention to microperspectives, in terms of how global influences play out in countries, and how national and local actors engage with or/and resist these influences. The triangular perspective we have chosen in this book contributes to the understanding of the dynamics of the system of global governance that emerged in the post-World War II world, but it necessarily means that many perspectives are missing. After a theoretical introduction into the concept of “global governance of education” in Chap. 1, Chap. 2 outlined the divergent institutional and epistemological foundations of these three IOs – UNESCO represents the ethos of internationalism in terms of the promotion of international understanding, while the OECD and the World Bank represent the logic of globalization and promote a liberal-competitive worldview aligned with market capitalism. Despite these differences, these three IOs have engaged with similar ideas and approaches, collaborated when it served their interests and struggled for influence in the global governance of education. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Elfert, C. Ydesen, Global Governance of Education, Educational Governance Research 24, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40411-5_8

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Chapter 3 has covered the heydays of educational planning in the 1960s. During the Cold War, education was given prime importance to raise economic competitiveness and productivity and draw developing countries into the orbit of Americancapitalist influence. This was the period of what McMichael (1996) calls the “Development Project”, covering the late 1940s to the early 1970s, “when all countries tried to develop their national economies with the help of international development agencies and institutions” (Sklair, 1999, p. 158). Many of the “representational technologies” (Srnicek, 2013, p. 10) that still dominate the global education agenda today, such as large-scale assessment surveys and public management tools, emerged during that formative period. A professional class of experts was trained in elite American and UK universities to work in governments, foundations, think tanks, academia and IOs, forming powerful networks of influence that spread the gospel of modernization, based on the “economics of education” approach, which an OECD representative compared to the discoveries of Galileo (OECD, 1965). During that period, UNESCO, created as the specialized agency of the United Nations for intellectual affairs including education, was challenged by the OECD, which – in a geopolitical climate characterized by a competitive race between the capitalist and communist worldviews – positioned itself as key expert in the new economics of education approach in charge of productivity and economic growth in the industrialized countries belonging to the American sphere of influence, while UNESCO to a large extent was left with the field of development. This is illustrated by the fact that the Ford Foundation supported the creation of the International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) as a UNESCO institute and the creation of the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) as an autonomous body of the OECD. But UNESCO’s position as the leading authority for education in developing countries was soon challenged by the World Bank, as we show in Chap. 4. When the World Bank started to give educational loans in the early 1960s, it sought to collaborate with UNESCO, which had the expertise for education that the Bank was still lacking at the time. In 1964, UNESCO and the World Bank launched a Co-operative Program and implemented the Education Financing Division (EFD) in UNESCO, which provided technical and operational support to the World Bank’s educational loans. But especially throughout the 1970s, when under the presidency of Robert McNamara (1968–1981) the World Bank expanded to a development agency, the Bank built its own resources and expertise in education, effectively overtaking UNESCO as the leading policy shaper for education in low-income countries. The consequences of this development cannot be overstated. Through its educational lending, often tied to structural adjustment programmes, the Bank exerted considerable epistemic and bureaucratic influence over countries, resulting in “entrenchment of the hegemonic Eurocentric, capitalist, and neoliberal norms and practices in international development” (Saffari, 2016, p. 36). The World Bank was a major driver of the “Globalization Project”, which followed the “Development Project” from the 1980s forward, “when development [was] pursued through

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attempts to integrate economies into a globalized world market” (McMichael, 1996, p. 158). UNESCO and the World Bank also worked together on the Education for All (EFA) initiative, launched in 1990 at the World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien, which was facilitated by good personal relationships and an “epistemic community” of like-minded professionals. However, in the long run the global governance structure of the World Bank-led Fast-Track-Initiative (FTI) came to dominate EFA. The World Bank steered the EFA agenda towards the expansion of primary education, which was based on rate of return studies, while UNESCO with its broader vision of education took the back seat. We have shown that both the Co-operative Program and EFA have contributed to the standardization and homogenization of educational norms, policies and practices, and greater reliance on measurable targets. The economistic-technocratic approach to education pursued by the World Bank prevailed over UNESCO’s more humanistic and holistic approach to education. In Chap. 5 we unpack the workings of the global governing mechanisms emerging in the UNESCO, OECD, and World Bank triangle where data, indicators, and statistics stand central. One of the key drivers behind this type of governance was always the quest for establishing comparability between schooling activities – at the level of the student, school, local authority or the national level – where benchmarks and standards were viewed as engines for optimization, improvement, and achieving better outcomes. The history of how education data, indicators, and statistics developed after World War II up until today very much reflects the overall developments among the three IOs in terms of the role they assumed, the approach they took and the geopolitical dynamics at play. But to no small extent, the representational technologies in terms of data, indicators, and statistics harboured in the three IOs also defined their organizational and epistemological development. In that sense the various programmes – such as the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) and the international large-scale assessment surveys (ILSAs) – constituted sites of collaboration and contestation between the IOs – and powerful member states and other supranational organizations like the EEC/EU – and they even resulted in the birth of a new parallel organization in the shape of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). The 1980s and 1990s appear as particularly tumultuous, as a period in which the tracks for global education governance were negotiated and eventually formed. In contrast, the 2000s onwards seem to be a more harmonious era in which the IOs came together around a key paradigm where indicators and statistics in relation to defining global education agendas – in particular the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (2000) and, from 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – came to be the boundary objects defining the relations between the three IOs and their modes of operation. But we also demonstrate that, despite the appearance of harmony and collaboration on the surface, disagreements within and between the organizations and their constituencies remain. Chapter 6 addressed the engagement of both UNESCO and the OECD with the policy concept of lifelong learning. In both cases, this engagement was to some

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extent a reaction to the clashes between the traditional societal order and progressive forces, resulting in intense political tensions and calls for educational reform during the 1960s and early 1970s. UNESCO started to engage with the broader and more citizenship-oriented idea of éducation permanente in the early 1960s, while the OECD focused on opportunities for learning in the course of the lifelong cycle of work, under the label of recurrent education. The research and policy work on recurrent education was influenced by Sweden and carried out by the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), established at the height of the student revolts in France, which represented a more innovative and progressive strand in the OECD. However, with the economic crisis and change of the political climate in the second half of the 1970s and 1980s, and under pressure from the United States, the lifelong learning movement was crowded out by the pursuit of education indicators and the measurement of skills, from which the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) emerged. As one of our interviewees explained, PISA was enabled by the promises of globalization at the time, which stimulated a spirit of competitiveness among OECD member states (Interview with Josef Konvitz, 2022).1 In UNESCO, the publication of the Delors Report in 1996, which brought lifelong learning back on the agenda, could not prevent that lifelong learning was overshadowed by EFA and the push – in large measure instigated by the World Bank – towards the expansion of primary schooling. The United States withdrew from UNESCO in 1984, turning to the OECD as the organization of choice for the implementation of the skills measurement agenda. Chapter 7 investigates historically the actor landscape in the UNESCO, OECD, and World Bank triangle as a way of unpacking the role and significance of actor interactions, relations, and entanglements in the shaping of defining global education agendas. The chapter offers insights into how the role of individuals may be understood and which dimensions and salient issues come to the fore in the analysis of actors operating at the global level while at the same time being connected to national and local contexts. Using social network analysis and the notion of knowledge brokers, the chapter explores a selection of arenas from the 1960s to the present day. The first case arena has a distinct organizational focus with the creation of the IIEP as a semi-autonomous UNESCO institution in 1963. The second case arena zooms in on the late 1960s/early 1970s travels and correspondence by Mats Hultin, a former head of department at the Swedish Ministry of Education and World Bank staffer between 1965 and 1984. The third case arena explores the role of Andreas Schleicher in the formation of the INES/PISA complex. Our analysis in this chapter provides insights into how key protagonists have moved across organizational boundaries and how actors’ formal and informal networks and connections allow them to pursue or impede certain agendas and developments. The chapter also sheds light on how actors assume the role of knowledge brokers, who facilitate the

1

Josef Konvitz joined the OECD’s Urban Affairs Division as Principal Administrator in 1992, and became Head of Division in 1996. From 2003 to 2011, Konvitz was head of the OECD’s programme on regulatory policies.

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exchange of knowledge between individuals or organizations, which is enabled by arenas and institutions where actors can engage in boundary work and negotiate and/or struggle over the meanings and priorities of educational agendas and policies. Finally, this concluding chapter ties together the key conclusions from the previous chapters and expands our main findings by relating them to contemporary developments and initiatives pursued by UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank, as well as to the main theoretical perspectives we have outlined in Chap. 1. It will also address contemporary shifts in the global governance of education and offer some speculative reflections on its future dynamics and agendas.

8.2 8.2.1

Relating Some Key Findings of the Book to Contemporary Developments UNESCO Lost Out Against the OECD and the World Bank

One of the key findings of our research is that UNESCO, the most democratically governed IO and the one in which developing countries have the most say, was crowded out by the expansion of the OECD and the World Bank, which arguably represent a much smaller circle of rich countries – the World Bank has universal membership, but has always been US-dominated (Elfert, 2021). Many hopes were pinned on the founding of UNESCO, but from the outset there were indications pointing to the gap between its potentialities and what the circumstances would actually allow the organization to become. UNESCO was unable to realize its early ambitious educational programmes, such as Fundamental Education and a mass literacy campaign. The OECD’s move into education in the 1960s set in motion a dynamic that would relegate UNESCO to the IO in charge of developing countries. This development was exacerbated by supranational organizations such as the Council of Europe and later the European Union asserting themselves as key forums for the governance of education in Europe, leaving little room for UNESCO in the European educational policy space. One of our interviewees argued that the Western countries preferred to work with the OECD and the World Bank because “the UN and UNESCO and the Commonwealth, where developing countries are in the majority and increasingly sort of vocal have less and less sort of traction with the developed world” (Interview with Peter Williams, 2014).2 Since the 1970s, UNESCO’s authority as the lead IO for education for development was challenged by the World Bank, and as we have shown in Chap. 4, in the EFA process UNESCO

2

Among many other positions, education expert Peter Williams worked as planning adviser in the Ministries of Education of Kenya and Ghana (1966–72); Lecturer at the University of London Institute of Education (1973–84), and Director of Education, Commonwealth Secretariat (1984–94).

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was further reduced to a “non-formal education” organization. UNESCO’s role further diminished after the end of the Cold War, a period in which the organization served as an important forum of exchange: “For three decades, western states considered that UNESCO was needed. . .because it was the only place where the East and the West could meet” (Interview with Jacques Hallak, 2014).3 UNESCO was further weakened by reforms of the Executive Board, which entailed the replacement of individual experts by member states representatives, resulting in a deprofessionalisation of the organization and advancing the often invoked “politicization” that has been used as an argument to discredit UNESCO (Elfert, 2018). For reasons of legitimacy, UNESCO continues to be a major actor in the global governance of education, especially in a coordinating and convening capacity – the organization is formally in charge of coordinating the SDG 4 agenda –, but its autonomy has been jeopardized by heterogenous forces brought into it by the economization of education, and by the constraints of having to accept “tied money”, on which UNESCO increasingly relies after having lost a significant proportion of its budget due to the withdrawal of the United States. UNESCO depends on project money tied to agendas that the donor countries or bodies are interested in pursuing (Personal communication with Nick Burnett, 2019),4 which erodes the integrity of the organization – an issue we will expound upon below.

8.2.2

Interactions Between IOs and Powerful States

Another finding is related to the role the United States played in the creation of all three organizations and in shaping their agendas. The United States used the OECD and the World Bank to pursue its national and geopolitical interests and secure its dominant position in the world. The OECD, which was originally created to administer the Marshall Plan on behalf of the US government, was used to spreading the American “productivity saga” (King, 2006), business management methods and the “economics of education” approach to European countries (Elfert, 2020). Furthermore, the World Bank was a chosen instrument of the US government to expand the American project of free-market capitalism to developing countries (Elfert, 2021). UNESCO, an organization the United States helped to create, turned out to be too heterogenous to steer in one direction, especially since the strong influx of post-colonial countries in the 1960s. Considered increasingly a difficult and

3

Jacques Hallak spent most of his professional career at UNESCO and the IIEP, from 1988 in the position of Director. From 1987 to 1988, he did a brief stint at the World Bank. Between 1998 to 2000, Hallak was also Director of UNESCO’s International Bureau of Education (IBE), and in 2000, he served as UNESCO’s interim Assistant Director-General for Education. 4 Nicholas Burnett served as Director of the EFA Global Monitoring Report (2004–2007), UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Education (2007–2009) and Chair of the Governing Board of the IIEP (2016–21) with a background in the World Bank, where he was human development sector manager (1983–2000).

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unreliable partner, the United States lost interest in UNESCO, which furthered the rise of the OECD and the World Bank. The departure of the United States in 1984 not only weakened UNESCO financially, but also contributed to positioning the OECD to take the lead of the indicators movement that yielded PISA. The United States pressured the OECD to an extent that CERI, the OECD’s side-arm that undertook the indicators programme, “had no choice but to concede” (Henry et al., 2001, p. 87). Since its launch in 2000, PISA – including its offspring programmes such as PISA for Development (PISA-D), PISA for Schools, PISA4U and the International Early Learning Study ‘Baby PISA’ (Kellow & Carroll, 2022; Lewis, 2020; Ydesen, 2021) – has assumed a hegemonic role in shaping the global imaginary of good education, unfolding homogenizing and depoliticizing effects on education globally (Gorur, 2015, 2016), to the detriment of the lifelong learning movement. These developments illustrate how a powerful state has used IOs to legitimize and carry out initiatives on its behalf. Tröhler et al. (2021) have called this phenomenon the “extrapolation of nationalism”. But also less powerful and middle power states have interacted with IOs to pursue national priority agendas, as illustrated by the Swedish role in the OECD/CERI’s recurrent education programme. A contemporary example of how IOs are entangled in national and geopolitical interests is the strategic participation of selective provinces of China and the emergence of Shanghai as the new PISA “poster child”. China is “using PISA as a lever for improvement in other provinces” (Sellar & Lingard, 2013, p. 468), as well as a tool to build symbolic capital and foster its position as the new global power (Candido et al., 2020). As stated by one of our informants, “Chinese involvement in PISA is an interesting case study because. . .the arrangements under which China participates [are] perhaps not exactly the same as other countries. The Chinese are pretty tough negotiators, and they only do things on their own terms shall we say. And they negotiated a pretty good deal” (Interview with William Thorn, 2021).5 The media coverage of Shanghai’s performance in PISA, for example a story in the New York Times quoting President Obama making references to “Sputnik”, reinforces this interpretation. But also from the OECD’s perspective, the participation of China is strategically significant as it boosts PISA’s global influence and the profile of the OECD as a testing Empire (Sellar & Lingard, 2013). The growing influence and positioning of PISA as a marker of belonging to an international community has greatly contributed to strengthening the role of the OECD as a global educational policy shaper. China is also increasingly gaining influence over UNESCO, filling the void left by the withdrawal of the United States from the organization (Lynch & Groll, 2017). China is currently the member state that pays the highest membership dues, and the Deputy Director-General is a Chinese national. UNESCO officials are looking to

5

William Thorn is a former Senior Analyst in the Directorate for Education and Skills at the OECD. Among other tasks, he was in charge of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC).

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China as a revenue source, and China uses UNESCO to legitimize projects of interest such as initiatives in the area of artificial intelligence (AI) (UNESCO, 2022a), higher education (UIL & Shanghai Open University, 2023), and STEM education (Ministry of Education, 2023). The United States has in fact cited Chinese influence as the motivation why it wants to rejoin UNESCO (Jankowicz, 2023).6 Other countries that have stepped up their game in UNESCO are the Gulf States. To compensate for the loss of the United States membership dues after UNESCO’s General Conference adopted Palestine as a full member in 2011, UNESCO had established a multi-donor emergency fund to which Arab countries made the most important contributions. Saudi Arabia and Qatar paid 20 million respectively (Hüfner, 2015), and cooperations with institutions in that region have intensified, for example with the Qatar-based Education Above All Foundation and the Qatar Fund for Development (UNESCO, 2022b). Many other voluntary contributions are project-bound, which jeopardizes the autonomy of the organization as the donor countries determine its programme (Hüfner, 2015).

8.2.3

The Role of Global Agendas

A key instrument of the global governance of education are global targets that aim at uniting all relevant actors – national governments, IOs, non-governmental organizations and other non-state actors – behind a supposedly universal agenda of critical significance. Global agendas have a long history and go back to the United Nations Development Decade of the 1960s. The contemporary global framework for education since 2015 is SDG 4, under which IOs are taking pains to position themselves. As the United Nations organization with a mandate for education, UNESCO formally leads the coordination of SDG 4. UNESCO’s coordinating role entails the convening of governing bodies such as the SDG 4 Education 2030 High-Level Steering Committee (HLSC) and the Global Education Cooperation Mechanism (GCM) and meetings such as the 2022 Transforming Education Summit (UNESCO, 2022c). UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics (UIS) also formally coordinates the statistical monitoring of SDG 4. However, it is the World Bank and the OECD that “have used their perceived technical expertise to solidify their position” (Benavot & Smith, 2019, p. 248). Both the World Bank and the OECD are promoting “assessment for all” under the SDG 4 banner. With financial support from the World Bank, the OECD is currently expanding into low- and middleincome countries with PISA-D (Addey, 2016, 2017; Auld et al., 2018). To enable this move and position PISA as a suitable measurement tool, the OECD had to gain a seat at the SDG 4 table and shape SDG 4 to lower secondary level, creating demand and “constructing a strong sense of membership and belonging to the global PISA community” (Li & Morris, 2022, p. 5). Reacting to criticism relating to the lack of

6 Given the current tensions between the United States and China, the return of the US may mean a challenging balancing act for UNESCO.

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innovation of the PISA survey that has been stretched too much, the OECD also uses PISA-D as a way to make the instruments more relevant to the context of low-income countries and incorporate out-of-school children (Li & Auld, 2020). The World Bank supports the expansion of PISA by funding the participation of low- and middle income countries: “Something like PISA fits in quite well with the World Bank’s. . .agendas, particularly the focus on measuring outcomes. So they do provide quite a lot of money to encourage countries to participate in these kind of studies” (Interview with William Thorn, 2021). In fact, the OECD and the World Bank have co-published a publication about the participation of middle-income countries in PISA (Lockheed et al., 2015). As shown in Auld et al.’s (2018) study on the implementation of PISA-D in Cambodia, UNESCO and UNICEF were opposed to the introduction of PISA-D, maintaining that countries would be better served to focus on their own national and regional tests and invest in more useful matters, such as teaching guides. It therefore took the OECD some manoeuvring to implement PISA-D against the resistance not only of other IOs with greater legitimacy in education for development, but also of countries targeted by the OECD to participate in PISA-D. Cambodia was initially not interested in participating in the survey and had to be convinced by the OECD with the argument that PISA-D served as a measure for SDG 4.1., although at the time PISA-D had not officially been endorsed by the UIS as one of the metrics for the monitoring of SDG 4.1. World Bank pressure and funding, for example for the hiring of consultants, did the rest (Auld et al., 2018). The World Bank’s assessment agenda in the context of SDG 4 is also reflected in its Education Sector Strategy 2020, Learning for All (World Bank, 2012): “Between 1998 and 2009, the World Bank funded 166 projects with an assessment focus across 90 countries. In a quarter of the countries, the Bank funded participation in an international assessment” (Benavot & Smith, 2019, p. 248). Other initiatives pursued by the World Bank are the Human Capital Index and the Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) instrument, which aims at producing comparative data on countries’ education policies and performance and grades countries, also against their participation in learning assessments, acting “as a normative guide to the ‘right’ kind of reform” (p. 248). According to Seitzer et al. (2023), SABER is an example of the World Bank’s “vertical” approach to policy learning that “seeks to identify the single best solution that is then disseminated and funded in its target countries” (p. 16). SDG 4 has thus been a welcome opportunity for the OECD to expand its area of influence into the realm of development, and for the World Bank to pursue its assessment agenda by aligning itself with another IO, as it did in the 1960s when the Bank cooperated with UNESCO. As discussed in particular in Chap. 3, the OECD has already played a role in development in the 1960s, when its Mediterranean Regional Project was spread into Latin American countries. But most importantly, the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) has always functioned as an influential forum of donors that have shaped development practices and priorities, as can be seen from its role in defining the MDGs, outlined in Chap. 4. What is new in the context of SDG 4 is that the OECD “shifted its position from the

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margins to the centre of the network involved with delivering SDG 4” (Li & Morris, 2022, p. 14). The OECD has sought to legitimize this move by building affiliations with other IOs, in particular the World Bank and UNESCO. However, it is with the World Bank that the OECD shares an epistemic worldview, while UNESCO “flounders around to some extent” (Interview with William Thorn, 2021). Squeezed by financial constraints and declining influence in the global governance arena, UNESCO pursues contradictory agendas that are sometimes at odds with its humanistic tradition and ontology. On the one hand, UNESCO is asserting its intellectual authority with humanistic visions such as the Futures of Education initiative that produced a new “flagship” report in 2021 (UNESCO, 2021). On the other hand the organization flows with the current trends of “techno-solutionist” visions, as reflected in another report coming out of one of UNESCO’s education institutes, which promotes the role of neurosciences in education (UNESCO MGIEP, 2022; Bryan, 2022, Vickers, 2022). At the same time UNESCO also produces accounts that are rather sceptical of techno-solutionist visions (UNESCO, 2023), which reflects UNESCO’s heterogeneity. As discussed in Chap. 4, already in the course of the Co-operative Program between the World Bank and UNESCO, the World Bank overtook UNESCO by claiming greater technical and managerial expertise and epistemic authority for its economics of education approach. In the era of SDG 4, the OECD and the World Bank are now collaborating on the “assessment for all” agenda that suits both of their interests. As one of our interviewees put it, In terms of education the relationship is probably stronger between the OECD and the World Bank than between UNESCO but that’s partly because the culture of the OECD and the culture of the World Bank are. . .closer. They’ve got highly technically orientated staff, much more economic worldview than perhaps the people in UNESCO have. And at the same time, you have lots of cooperation obviously with things like the Sustainable Development Goals. (Interview with William Thorn, 2021)

The UNESCO-led SDG 4 framework is providing the impetus for the OECD and the World Bank to pursue agendas that are counter to UNESCO’s philosophy. You have opportunistic behaviour by a number of organizations including the OECD seeing it as a way of pushing their own agenda, which in the case of the OECD is PISA and soft skills. . . .and then you have the World Bank in there as well. They’re promoting their measurement agenda... They want everyone to do national education assessments. They’re pushing very hard for that and again the Sustainable Goals are doing that for good reasons.... (Interview with William Thorn, 2021)

This quote points to SDG 4 as a self-serving agenda for IOs. More research is needed on whose interests global goals such as SDG 4 actually serve, behind the glossy and inclusive rhetoric. Counter to the discourse of inclusiveness, the OECD represents a small homogenous group of countries: “UNESCO’s hampered too to some extent, it’s an organization of all the United Nations states in which everyone has to have a point of view from the poorest to the richest countries, whereas the OECD. . .has a relatively small membership. Thirty-seven countries now. Most countries are the same level of development, so quite a clear focus” (Interview with William Thorn, 2021). The same applies to the World Bank that has always been a US-oriented IO

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(Elfert, 2021). In addition to allowing for the OECD to expand its testing Empire and the World Bank to implement its outcome-oriented ideology, “assessment for all”, re-cast as a public good and human right (Auld et al., 2018), SDG 4 may benefit corporate interests over the interests of low-income countries that the global agenda is allegedly serving. As argued by Auld et al. (2018), The OECD and World Bank agendas can now be pursued under the auspices of UNESCO’s globally-sanctioned goals, with national development agencies, international organisations and corporations becoming largely indistinguishable in the promotion of Assessment for All. . ., extending, entrenching and legitimating the Global Education Industry. (p. 17)

8.2.4

Boundaries

Another aspect of the global governance of education we addressed in this book are processes and areas of “demarcation and cooperation” in the boundaries between IOs (Kranke, 2022, p. 453). In Chaps. 6 and 7, we have employed the concept of “boundary work”, which was often enabled by independent outgrowth structures such as the OECD’s CERI and UNESCO’s IIEP. These independent structures created by IOs allow for “indirect boundary work” between IOs, which involves “a third party” (Kranke, 2022, p. 466). As we have shown in Chaps. 3 and 4, the IIEP represents an organization that is somewhat outside of the ideological field of UNESCO and homologous to the economically-oriented field of the World Bank. The IIEP’s activities in education are underpinned by the human capital approach to educational planning that also guides the work of the OECD and the World Bank, which was resisted by the core of UNESCO – the IIEP is more of a “professional entity”, as Richard Sack7 put it in our interview (2019), while UNESCO is a political body. CERI is a good example of demarcation within an organization as its creation enabled more “progressive” and innovative initiatives that would have been difficult to realize in the context of the core of the OECD. These boundary structures of course cause a lot of tension between the core organization and the subsidiary body – as several of our informants told us, both the IIEP and CERI have constantly been in tension with the “mother organization”, and their autonomy has been challenged. One such contemporary outgrowth structure is the UIS, which, since the adoption of the Education 2030 Framework for Action, formally holds the coordinating role for the monitoring of SDG 4 (Fontdevila, 2021). As shown in Chap. 5, the UIS was established as an independent UNESCO institute after UNESCO’s statistical knowhow had been challenged for a long time. Although the World Bank had worked on building its own statistical capacities, the Bank supported and contributed to funding the creation of the UIS. In 2019 the World Bank and the UIS signed a Memorandum 7 Richard Sack has worked for many decades as a consultant for international organizations in the field of education for development, including the World Bank and UNESCO. From 1995–2001 he was Executive Secretary of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), which was, then, hosted by the IIEP.

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of Understanding which, according to Fontdevila (2021), was “devised as a means to show clarity of purpose and demonstrate a cooperative (rather than competing) attitude – both to the global education community and to donor circles” (p. 245). As one of Fontdevila’s informants, a World Bank staffer, explained the collaboration, “we benefited a lot from their knowledge” (p. 245). We cannot help but see the similarities between this contemporary cooperation to the UNESCO-World Bank Co-operative Program established in 1964, discussed in Chap. 4. While the World Bank initially used the Co-operative Program to draw on and learn from UNESCO’s expertise in educational planning, it soon built its own resources to ultimately overtake UNESCO. Along these lines, Fontdevila (2023) points out that the World Bank’s Human Capital Index (HCI), and the launching of a Learning Target and a Learning Poverty Indicator in 2019 threaten the role of the UIS: “The production of global learning data has gained considerable prominence in the World Bank organizational agenda – a phenomenon perceived as an instance of ‘mission creep’ within UNESCO and UNESCO-adjacent circles” (p. 9). Other spaces for boundary work are the networks of policy influence that span across organizations. Throughout the book, we have repeatedly pointed to the important role of international conferences that served as platforms for the positioning of global actors or the launch of new policy ideas. The seminal OECD conference in Washington, D.C. in 1961, the conference in Williamsburg in 1967 and the regional conferences held by UNESCO throughout the 1960s served as major catalysts of a new global governance structure of education and the legitimization of the “economics of education” approach to educational policy-making. Today, conferences such as the 2022 UN Transforming Education Summit, but also forums at national and regional level such as Education Sector Working Groups where donors coordinate their activities (Auld et al., 2018) and coordinating bodies in the SDG 4 process, such as the Global Education Meeting and the SDG4-Education 2030 Steering Committee, serve this function.

8.2.5

Homogenizing Effects and Isomorphic Tendencies

Another major finding of this book is the homogenizing effect of the global governance of education. Despite its shortcomings, there has never been a real reckoning of the technocratic approach taken by the educational planners of the 1960s; on the contrary, it has been taken forward to this day. Isomorphic processes compelled all IOs including UNESCO to adopt results-based management that fits the World Bank’s outcome-oriented worldview, but clashes with UNESCO’s normative mandate. It is hard to see how the SDG 4-driven measurement and “assessment for all” agenda will contribute to the supposedly transformative vision of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, “Transforming our world” (United Nations, 2015). As argued by Benavot and Smith (2019):

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The enormous time and effort expended to operationalise SDG 4, primarily by assessing reading and mathematics proficiency levels on a GLM [global learning metrics], means that many quality and equity issues have taken a back seat. Improving equity in tested reading and mathematics levels does little to improve broader quality and equity concerns in education. (p. 255)

In the name of “false universalism[s]” (Táíwò, 2022, p. 8) such as “education for all” and now “assessment for all”, proclaimed as universal goals, IOs are in the business of self-preservation and perpetual expansionism. As Elfert (2021) has shown in her study on the World Bank-UNESCO relationship, the World Bank’s evolution illustrates “the expansionist, homogenizing and isomorphic tendencies of structural power” (p. 15). These tendencies are also visible in the historical trajectory of the OECD that has constantly reinvented itself in order to find new areas of activity and legitimacy. One of the key findings of Li’s (2021) research on PISA-D and the OECD’s expansion into low- and middle-income countries is that “the OECD. . .is highly adaptive, expansionist, and self-serving” (p. 81). Global agendas display “matrix-like effects”, as argued by Tamatea (2005) in his study of the Dakar Framework for Action. Tamatea contended that, while employing a humanistic rhetoric, the Framework put forward a common-sense discourse, such as the imperatives of “quality,” “transparency” and “accountability” that contribute to the homogenization of global education. The “structure of permanent deferral” (Li, 2007, p. 15) ensures that there is always the next agenda, the next goal and the next conference that legitimizes the existence of IOs such as the OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank. Although for reasons of legitimacy, IOs place considerable emphasis on the participatory process of setting these global agendas, our analysis in Chap. 4 of the process that led to the MDGs, which emerged from a reconciliation process between the OECD/DAC’s International Development Goals (IDGs) and the United Nations’ Millennium Declaration Goals, casts some doubt on the discourse of “country ownership”.8 As was also apparent in the EFA process, country involvement in decision-making bodies was limited. After the legitimacy problem of the MDGs, an effort was made to democratize the SDG process, and the consultations leading up to the SDGs have involved countries and civil society organizations to a higher degree and were more transparent and inclusive than the MDG process (Fukuda-Parr & McNeill, 2019). However, “it was inclusive predominantly for those who knew to follow it from the beginning and how to engage with the UN system” (Wulff, 2019a, p. 61). Wulff suggests that the participation of countries and Ministries of Education in the negotiation of SDG 4 was surprisingly limited, and “civil society present at the negotiations at the UN seemed to have more access to the OWG [Open Working Group] than. . .national education policymakers” (p. 62). She further notes that it was hard to gauge who member states drew on for advice, suspecting that “the World Bank and the OECD shaped the thinking of many member states” (p. 62).

8

On the point of “country ownership”, see also Cammack, 2002.

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In the context of the production of global metrics for the monitoring of SDG 4, multi-stakeholder structures have been created, such as the Global Alliance to Monitor Learning (GAML), established in 2016 to support the production of learning indicators and assessment tools for monitoring progress toward SDG 4, and the Technical Cooperation Group (TCG), which has a political mandate to debate and develop the SDG 4 thematic indicator framework (Fontdevila, 2021; Benavot & Smith, 2019). Both groups are being coordinated by the UIS. The World Bank has supported the GAML, which was seen by many as a positive development towards collaboration rather than competition (Fontdevila, 2021). However, as was already the case with the EFA governing forums, there is a lack of country participation in the GAML, raising questions about whose interest is served by pursuing learning assessment. As observed by Fontdevila (2021), “certain countries represented in the TCG perceived that their input had not been sufficiently taken into consideration – but simply used for rubber-stamping purposes” (p. 165). While the UIS has since made some efforts to include country voices and democratise its working procedures, these global structures raise serious concerns about the democratic and participatory nature of IOs and the global agendas that legitimize their work. Universal technical solutions potentially disempower countries as they are untransparent and difficult to grasp. As one of the informants of Fontdevila’s (2021) study explained, “There’s such a speed that goes on and kind of a pressure to make a decision” (p. 165). One of the ways that IOs and other actors of global governance legitimize their existence is by building up supposedly superior technical and bureaucratic expertise that remains unquestioned as it is difficult to understand. This was the case with the highly bureaucratic educational planning cycles and empirical studies and calculations that underpinned the manpower planning approach, discussed in Chaps. 3 and 4. In the context of the pursuit of global learning metrics, “only a few savvy players were able to navigate and fully decode” (Fontdevila, 2021, p. 208) what was being proposed in the meetings of the GAML. As one of Fontdevila’s informants put it, “it’s hard to tell what’s going on” (p. 209). In that regard, “large-scale assessments both prompt the search for ready-made solutions and act as ready-made solutions themselves” (Benavot & Smith, 2019, p. 247). The focus on assessment and data speaks to the reductionist view of education “as a ‘technical’ science that can be studied, rationalized, and quantified” (p. 247). As we saw in Chap. 5, ideas about research-based optimization of education using statistical data appear ubiquitous in the history of education. As already extensively criticized in relation to PISA, these universal metrics are contrary to the rhetoric of country ownership and pluriversality. Global learning metrics construct learning as “independent of national context – for example, independent of education structure, curricular policy, language of instruction, and level of development” (Benavot & Smith, 2019, p. 239). As further argued by Benavot and Smith (2019), Drawing on the growing rhetoric of a ‘global learning crisis’ and informed by innovative yet problematic technical work, we argue that the powerful movement to construct GLMs [global learning metrics] has several ‘unintended’ outcomes. These include the effective narrowing of the comprehensive global agenda on education (SDG 4), the undermining of a

8.3

Recent Shifts in the Global Governance of Education

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carefully negotiated country-led process to promote lifelong education opportunities for all, the devaluing of learning that is not measurable or comparable, and the weakening of the principle of educational equity. (p. 239)

The homogenizing effects of the global governance of education is also reflected in the dominance of the schooling agenda. UNESCO’s pursuit of universal literacy was considered too political and replaced by a focus on schooling, which was reinforced by global agendas such as EFA, the MDGs, and more recently, SDG 4. The focus on a global learning metrics, in particular the global indicator for Target 4.1. related to schooling, is backed up and reproduced by results-based financing (Costin, 2015). For example, the financing of the UIS through earmarked contributions specifically for measuring learning outcomes, “shifts the focus to the outcomes of schooling and embraces the mantra of results-oriented policymaking” (Benavot & Smith, 2019, pp. 238–239; see also Wulff, 2019b). As already during the 1960s, when human capital was transferred to developing countries, IOs diffuse visions that are structurally impossible to realize in developing economies, which is what prompted Saith (2006) to contend that “setting up targets which focus simply on primary level enrolments [is] so mindlessly myopic as to be near-blind to the needs of education over a medium-term time frame” (p. 1173).

8.3

Recent Shifts in the Global Governance of Education

Multi-stakeholder groups established in the context of SDG 4 such as the GAML, the TCG and the Global Education Cooperation Mechanism (GCM) are indicative of a shift in the global governance of education from multilateralism to multistakeholderism. Other examples of this shift are transnational public-private partnerships such as the Global Partnership of Education (GPE) (Menashy, 2016, 2019), which grew out of the World Bank-driven Fast-Track Initiative discussed in Chap. 4, and which represents today the most important funding organization for education, in particular school education for children in developing countries. The structure of the GPE is a partnership involving donor and recipient country governments, IOs, civil society organizations, private companies and philanthropic foundations (Menashy, 2016). Although the GPE was established as a funding mechanism, it assumes intellectual leadership: “In quite a few countries I’ve seen (unfortunately, but almost unavoidably) how representatives of the GPE secretariat are listened to, not because of the quality of their message but because, oh if we listen to them, you know 50 or 60 million dollars will come” (Interview with Anton de Grauwe, 2019).9 Another example of such a transnational global policy network is the Network of Foundations Working for Development (netFWD), created by the OECD’s

9 Anton de Grauwe is an independent consultant and former Senior Programme Specialist at the IIEP (where he worked for 26 years).

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Development Centre in 2012, as “an innovative and informal forum for continuous policy dialogue and knowledge sharing” (Viseu, 2022). The post-war multilateral system, built on the centrality of the nation-state, in which IOs implemented decisions taken by national governments, is making way for a system of multistakeholder governance, characterized by powerful transnational actors who have no obligation to report their activities to – or to take instructions from – national governments or the intergovernmental community. As Gleckman (2018) argues, “the advent of multistakeholderism means that the international community now has a proposal for an institutional structure that can complement or replace the centrality of the nation-state in global governance” (p. xv). The rise of multistakeholderism is commonly explained as a consequence of globalization, which has created global problems which nation-states are unable to deal with on their own, such as the instability of the financial system, climate change, and security issues. Another key factor for the rise of multistakeholder governance is the growing power and influence of transnational corporations (TNCs), who “see the nation-state as a minor actor in the governance of globalization. . .and consider themselves and the free market to be legitimate actors in setting global agendas and in creating solutions for global problems” (Gleckman, 2018, pp. 2–3). Philanthropic foundations, in particular venture philanthropists, can be considered the governance instruments of TNCs. Since the rise of neoliberalism, private philanthropy is playing an ever greater role in forming networks of influence. The influence of philanthropy is exemplified by stakeholder conferences such as the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos and WISE in Qatar, and policy agendas such as the Common Core Standards and the Charter school movement in the United States promoted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Ravitch, 2014). The Gates Foundation also supports the World Bank’s measurement initiatives, such as the learning poverty targets (Beeharry, 2019). Menashy (2016) has emphasized the central role of civil society organizations (CSOs) such as the Global Campaign for Education in the global governance of education and in organizations such as the GPE. She maintains that “although many CSOs do operate as grass-roots advocacy organizations, others are seen as indicative of overarching neoliberal forces, where the rise of CSO influence coincides with a curtailing and delegitimization of the state. CSOs can thereby be considered as a manifestation of privatization” (pp. 100–101). The blurring between corporate actors and CSOs goes back to their inclusion in the United Nations Global Compact, which was created in 2000 as an initiative to foster connections between the UN and the corporate world (Gleckman, 2018). Coalitions of businesses such as the Global Business Coalition for Education are another manifestation of this trend (Menashy, 2016), which has accelerated during Covid. As a response to the Covid crisis, UNESCO launched the “Global Education Coalition”, representing a network of 175 members, including other UN organizations, NGOs, civil society, academia and the private sector, that focuses on digital learning and promotes “technologies of saving” (Shultz & Viczko, 2021). In this context the private financing of education is ever more accepted. As reported by Wulff (2019b),

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During the SDG negotiations, the World Bank received a lot of attention for its claim that a shift from billions to trillions was necessary to achieve the SDGs, emphasising the need for private finance. . .This made for a discourse in which public responsibility and financing were framed as unfeasible and it was considered unreasonable to suggest that any government could do it on its own. Private sector participation was seen as a precondition for success. . . . (p. 13)

This reasoning represents the mentality of the World Bank that “as long as education is provided, it does not matter who the provider is” (p. 13), obfuscating the implications that the sources of funding have on the governance and provision of education. Wulff argues that placing private financing on equal footing with public financing for the realisation of the SDGs entails “a radical reimagining of the role of the state”, granting the private sector an “expanded role in public policy implementation” (p. 14). Private actors tend to apply business and market-based approaches to education and development, emphasizing short-term results and effectiveness (Seitz & Martens, 2017), that stand in the way of longer-term and structural changes. Another indication of this trend is the rising influence of the private sector and philanthropic foundations in the global educational agendas such as SDG 4 (Draxler, 2019), and in the OECD and UNESCO (Ridge & Kippels, 2019; Interviews with Ron Gass, 2017,10 and William Thorn, 2021). Both UNESCO and the OECD have entered collaborations with a range of non-profit and corporate organizations. An example is the Asia Society, an organization that was originally funded by the Rockefeller family and comprises a network of the most influential business and consultancy companies. The Asia Society’s Centre for Global Education has played a leading role in promoting SDG 4.7. and in the development and promotion of the OECD’s global competence framework for teaching and learning, an initiative that has involved “a network of actors and agents with different interests, resources and expertise; from US-based experts at Harvard University to commercial brokers at Arizona State University, key initiatives within Asia Society, the US Department of State, and global foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies” (Robertson, 2021, p. 179). UNESCO also collaborates with the Asia Society on the realization of SDG 4.7. (UNESCO, 2022d). Another example of involvement of private philanthropic foundations in the OECD is the funding provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for PISA for Schools (Lewis, 2020) and by the Porticus Foundation for the OECD’s work on social and emotional learning (SEL) (McBrian, 2022). The American Christian neoconservative Templeton Foundation, also a strong promoter of SEL, has supported OECD’s happiness indicators (Interview with William Thorn, 2021). As argued by Williamson (2021), “these think tanks and their networks are crucial actors in making SEL into a policy-relevant science, in particular by synthesizing psychological and economics expertise and statistical evidence, along with particular political agendas, into standardized formats for propulsion into policy spaces” (p. 138; see also Williamson & Piattoeva, 2019). However, IOs are not always 10 Ron Gass joined the OEEC in 1958 and worked for the OECD until his retirement in 1989. He was the first director of the OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI).

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transparent about their involvement with these powerful non-state actors as a full disclosure of their influence could jeopardize their legitimacy. In relation to the origins of the OECD’s Global Competence framework, Robertson (2021) observes, These connections operate in the shadowlands of the OECD’s formal structures, and we detect multiple efforts to obfuscate the links between the sources of the idea of global competence, and the sites of influence. It could be argued that some of the OECD’s legitimacy is derived from its claim that it is an intergovernmental organisation, and that it is the member countries, and more recently partners, who direct the work of the OECD. (p. 179)

One of our interviewees expressed concern about the growing role of philanthropic foundations in the OECD: The other thing that you need to think about is the relationship not only of the OECD with global plutocrats as it were. The Davos Forum for example, the OECD always turns up at that and if you look at for example Andreas [Schleicher]‘s use of time, he spends an awful lot of his time at these kind of forums involving philanthropic organisations,. . .business men or business women who have come to have views on education and like to talk about it. And you could say that to some extent the interaction with that kind of. . .non-government constituency, has actually grown quite considerably over time. And also that you’ll find, not necessarily everywhere but to some extent the denigration of the academic constituency in this as well. The privileged interlocuters have become business foundations etcetera and governance, you know. And there is a debate that goes on about how much influence these non-governmental organisations should have. (Interview with William Thorn, 2021)

These networks are reminiscent of the policy networks of the 1960s in which philanthropic foundations such as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations played an important role, however, there are differences. As pointed out in Chaps. 3 and 7, while in the heydays of educational planning, there was an entanglement of government representatives, universities and private foundations, today we are seeing less government involvement and a tendency towards a decreasing influence of universities. This was suggested by the above comment by William Thorn about the “denigration of the academic constituency”. The latter point is also made by Deuel (2021), although he writes about the role of higher education from a different perspective, observing a repositioning of the role of higher education by IOs that are increasingly challenging higher education as “culminating site of formal education” and “diminishing the traditional role of the national higher education complex” (p. 9). Finally, in their comparative historical actor analysis of William Thorndike, Torsten Husén and Andreas Schleicher, Pettersson and Popkewitz (2019), argue that Schleicher (among others), “. . .has taken educational sciences out of the hands of ‘experts’ in academia and placed the dominant expertise on education in the hands of entrepreneurs, technicians and statisticians” (p. 29). On the surface these new governance dynamics appear to be “ostensibly non-hierarchical” (Menashy, 2016, p. 99) as opposed to the previous traditional nation-state dominated model of governance, but they represent new forms of hierarchies that challenge democratic structures as decisions are made and policy directions shaped in circles of influence that are not transparent to the public, or even to the staff of IOs. In contrast to the multilateral system, state governments are no

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Connections to Theoretical Perspectives

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longer in the driver’s seat, and “it is not clear if governments as institutions are even invited into the new global governance room” (Gleckman, 2018, p. 71).

8.4

Connections to Theoretical Perspectives

We would argue that all the theoretical perspectives presented in the first chapter contribute to the understanding of the interrelations and intersections between UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank analysed in this book. Constructivistideational explanations that focus on the norms and visions generated by IOs are certainly helpful to understand the considerable legitimacy IOs have built as autonomous agents that have shaped global imaginaries of educational ideas, instruments and practices. However, they are limited in capturing the “long arm of the state” function of IOs that we have still found to be relevant in particular in relation to the OECD and the World Bank, which served very much as extensions and instruments of American state power. IOs may develop a life of their own as bureaucratic organizations, but as shown in Chap. 6 about the engagement of UNESCO and the OECD with the concepts of éducation permanente and recurrent education, they have functioned rather as absorbers, facilitators and mediators than as instigators of policy ideas. This is confirmed by Mundy (2021), who also contends that “international organizations are rarely first movers when it comes to changing values or mental models among governments” (para. 6). Despite an abundance of rhetoric about innovative and “transformative” visions and agendas, IOs tend to promote ideas that are already part of mainstream thinking or that are “in the air”. UNESCO is certainly the most progressive voice among the IOs, which is related to its intellectual mandate and the strong influence of intellectuals in particular in the first decades after its creation. But on the whole, the organization has been unsuccessful in promoting progressive ideas such as lifelong education (in its original iteration) and has been more and more restricted in its intellectual capacity by external pressures. The relational perspective that we took in this book has allowed us to understand how UNESCO’s influence has been curtailed by the rise of competing organizations, such as the World Bank and the OECD, and the animosity of the United States, which has accelerated the selling-out of the organization to “tied money” and private and corporate stakeholders, “eroding the multilateral character of the system and undermining democratic global governance” (Seitz & Martens, 2017, p. 48). PISA is an interesting example of both internal and external factors that have played a role in how policy ideas take hold in IOs. PISA resulted from US pressure, but also coincided with the appearance of Andreas Schleicher at the right moment, as discussed in Chap. 7. Albert Tuijnman, who worked at the OECD at the time when Schleicher was hired, made a similar point. “[PISA] would never have happened at that junction in time had it not been for Andreas Schleicher, I’m convinced about

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this. . .Schleicher played the cards very well” (Interview, 2019).11 Another one of our interviewees suggested that the OECD offered Schleicher a stage for his expansionist ambitions that he probably could not have realized in other organizations such as the IIEP had he been hired there. “Andreas Schleicher had a very big personal role in . . . leading that and creating the conditions that led to the establishment of PISA” (Interview with William Thorn, 2021). Materialist theories of global governance help explain the powerful role of representational technologies in fostering the power of IOs and the “politics of convergence” (Cammack, 2022) they represent. IOs are powerful bureaucracies that draw their legitimacy from their institutional set-up, and their specialized knowledge and expertise of managerial tools, such as indicators, statistics and models. Examples of these representational technologies are the World Bank’s lending cycles and planning tools, and of course the OECD’s PISA instrument, on the basis of which the organization has built a “testing empire” (Li & Morris, 2022, p. 1). As the case of Andreas Schleicher exemplifies, the OECD’s “testing empire” could only have been built under particular circumstances, when the interests of a powerful state converged with the emergence of an expansionist actor. While the World Bank’s relations with external partners build greatly on these technologies, UNESCO’s relationships are organized to a much greater extent on the basis of meetings and discussion forums such as the General Conference and the intergovernmental conferences UNESCO organizes. As discussed above, these global technologies, targets and benchmarks have a homogenizing and standardizing effect as they serve as the blueprint all countries and organizations must follow as they are tied to funding and legitimacy. The international political economy perspective, with its focus on politicaleconomic and geopolitical structures, is also very important to explain the “politics of convergence” we have observed in this book. The standardizing and isomorphic effect unfolded by supposedly universal ideas, global agendas, tools and governing processes is at odds with the rhetoric of country ownership and represents the postcolonial dynamics of the global governance of education, in which IOs that have emerged from the post-World War II world order, such as the World Bank and the OECD, set the agendas. In that respect, our findings resonate with the perspective taken by World Culture Theory. While universal cultural imaginaries such as universal schooling that IOs have promoted, derive from a rational modern state model, we now see a shifting role of the state and the rise of a difficult to define blurred transnational system of multistakeholder governance. Many developments described in this book such as the promotion of “education for all”, the growth of PISA and the influence of the OECD as well as the World Bank are related to processes of globalization. However, the driving force of globalization seems to be

11 Albert Tuijnman was Principal Administrator in the Education and Training Division at the OECD from 1992 to 1998. He was the main OECD contact for IALS and led one of the networks that conducted the INES project. He was the lead author of the first three Education at a Glance reports, published since 1992.

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Conclusion

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changing. Globalization has commonly been theorized as related to the logic of capitalism (Cox, 2002) and the “categorical imperative of global competitiveness” (p. 93), which underpins PISA and the discourse of the “knowledge-economy” (World Bank, 2003). More recent imaginaries promoted by IOs seem to justify globalization in terms of the need to find global solutions to “the increasing acceleration of social events and processes” (Jessop, 2003, p. 1) and perpetual crises, such as climate change, pandemics, military confrontations, and a noticeable shift towards a discourse of “resilience” can be observed (Bryan, 2022).

8.5

Conclusion

In chapter one we wrote about the promissory visions that IOs put forward as a source of legitimacy. We have discussed many of these promissory visions in this book, such as productivity and economic growth, lifelong learning, and “Education for All”. As we have briefly discussed in the opening chapter of this book, it is fair to say that the results of the promissory project of the global governance of education are sobering. That raises the question whether this system is capable of delivering on its promises. As we have shown in this book, organizations develop a behaviour oriented towards survival and expansion, to the extent that the mandate with which the organization has been created takes a back seat. The system of global governance becomes a battleground of organizational competition. In this dynamic, IOs are “always seeking a new shiny ‘silver ball’ – their main focus is on their own organizational needs and drivers” (Mundy, 2019, para. 6). As Mundy has argued in relation to the “new global metrics”, they “may all be great inventions for moving a single agency forward – and they certainly give an organization a reputational boost and the patina of strategic focus. But as far as I can see, none of these new metrics is built on the kind of consensus and the underlying accountabilities that are likely to generate lasting global change” (para. 12). Global instruments such as PISA have gained hegemonic influence, despite having been widely criticized for a flawed methodology (Zhao, 2020; Komatsu & Rappleye, 2017). Several of our interviewees have also criticized the lack of the instrument’s innovative potential: “. . .the pressure is to not change that [the tests], so you don’t do any development, because you need the results from this year’s study to be comparable to the study from 3 years ago. So doing much innovation is discouraged. So, in some ways, the tests are not as fresh as they might be” (Interview with Stan Jones, 2018).12 Albert Tujnman made a similar point: “The only thing it has been successful in is that PISA has become kind of a household name. . .That is hegemony, okay, a hegemonic position, but it hasn’t translated in any success

12 Stan Jones is a statistical expert who was involved in the development of the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) and other large-scale assessment surveys.

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whatsoever in policy because nothing has changed. . . . because the measurement instrument is so poor. . . it has stifled meaningful research. So, instead of being a success it is actually a disaster” (Interview, 2019). It is therefore unrealistic to expect any real innovation or “transformation” from IOs. The agendas they pursue may seem innovative, but are mostly suited to keep them relevant, adapting to current trends and shifts in the political economy. Reacting to the mounting criticism of PISA and “PISA fatigue” (Sorensen et al., 2021), the OECD is taking a “humanitarian turn” (Li & Auld, 2020). Its Learning Framework 2030 represents a more flexible form of measurement and a shift towards non-cognitive skills. In the same manner, the Learning Compass 2030 – soon to be followed by the Teaching Compass 2030 – promises to provide a more holistic approach to education – in OECD terminology understood as the ecosystem approach – placing student agency at its core and underpinning a broad understanding of societal wellbeing (OECD, 2019). Against the backdrop of financial crisis, the focus on economic growth, productivity and competitiveness that underpinned PISA is shifting towards a focus on “happiness” (Kim, 2022), “well-being” and “resilience”. Another field of expansion for the OECD is the change of the labour market due to increasing automation, which requires constant upskilling and “21st century skills” that set humans aside from robots (Schleicher, 2022). As discussed earlier, many of these initiatives are being carried forward with money provided by philanthropic foundations, think tanks and business partners: “We anticipate [the OECD agenda] will be heavily influenced by the integration of new technologies (AI etc.) into existing governing frameworks, and by the growing influence of technology companies and edu-businesses in education governance” (Li & Auld, 2020, p. 507). In the context of SDG 4, we are seeing “assessment for all” as a central vision, which is tied to the production of global metrics, forming a “transnational metrological field” (Grek, 2020, p. 161), and the construction of numbers “as the new doxa of transnational governance” that “legitimates a whole series of informal and ad hoc arrangements, all accepted and all approved in the name of an education crisis” (p. 161). Stuck in the dogma of results-based management, the World Bank is likely to continue down the path of the measurement and assessment agenda, “a frenetic metrics machine” (Mundy, 2019, para. 6), promoting ever more targets and benchmarks, such as the “Learning Poverty” target, involving a Learning Assessment Platform, aligned with initiatives such as the Human Capital Project (World Bank, 2019). In this context IOs are working together to some extent, prompting recent scholarship on the global governance of education to observe a shift towards “partnership” (Menashy, 2019) and “a climate of increased collaboration” (Menashy, 2016, p. 99), enabled by SDG 4 as the overarching global agenda in education, and especially the indicator framework established for the monitoring of SDG 4 (Fontdevila, 2023; Grek, 2020). However, against the background of our historical analysis, we interpret the collaboration of the World Bank with UNESCO and UNESCO-affiliated institutions such as the UIS more as a kind of co-opting as the organization formally coordinates the SDG 4 that serves as the global frame for the OECD and the World Bank to pursue their agendas.

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The endless cycle of development agendas and global targets, of which SDG 4 is the latest iteration, give IOs legitimacy, no matter how unrealistic they are. We already know that “SDG 4 is unlikely to be achieved by 2030” (UIS, 2021, p. 13). As asked by one of our interviewees, what is the point of setting “unrealistic and unrealisable goals”? (Interview with William Thorn, 2021). Another of our informants raised the question, “what’s the point of monitoring everything, what will be the consequences of that in terms of diluting focus away from the most important goals?” (Personal communication with Nick Burnett, 2019). The “assessment for all” agenda allows for the constant turning of the global governance wheel that reaches into ever more spaces and forms new “cognitive assemblages” (Srnicek, 2013, p. 14). The last bastion that is currently being taken by global governance is the classroom, under the guise of personalised learning (Lewis & Lingard, 2023). Buzzwords such as “global citizenship” only serve to obfuscate the deep inequalities that globalization has brought about. New promissory visions such as the “Fourth industrial revolution” and transhumanism will likely only exacerbate these inequalities. Many other questions arise from our analysis. Would we be in a better place today if there had been less mission creep among the IOs and UNESCO’s role had not been continuously eroded? The competition between the three IOs had an isomorphic effect that has blurred the differences between them – they are all governed by similar technocratic practices and epistemic underpinnings, such as results-based management. Another question that arises is, where does it leave these global organizations when the nature of globalization changes? If two of the IOs discussed in this book were instruments of American hegemony, what is their future going to be in a world in which other countries such as China are emerging as dominant powers, and which is governed by transnational corporate-digital power structures? Global governance of education creates the illusion of a “global consensus” (Cox, 2002), but closer scrutiny is needed to reveal whose interests the “consensus” truly represents. As global agendas such as SDG 4 are granted universal global authority, powerful actors aim to define them. We would therefore argue that we need to keep up a critical research agenda on the struggles over who gets to move into global governance spaces, what agendas are being promoted and who do they serve, and who holds “the power to produce and to impose the legitimate vision of the world” (Bourdieu, 1989, p. 20). We also need to pay close attention to voices and initiatives that resist the hegemonic, expansionist and self-serving characteristics of the current system of global governance of education, not least in a world that seems to be undergoing a fundamental social, economic and geopolitical reconstruction.

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Index of Names

A Alexander, T.J., 122, 126, 129 Argyropoulos, D., 82, 87

B Bahr, K., 89, 171, 174, 180 Ballantine, D.S., 80, 82, 83, 88, 182, 183 Barber, M., 187 Baron, J., 132 Becker, G.S., 34, 37, 57 Becker, H., 174 Bélanger, P., 155 Bell, D.E., 39, 85 Bellamy, C., 94 Bengtsson, J., 145, 148, 150, 152, 176 Benton, W., 30, 178 Benveniste, G., 61, 62, 64–66, 78, 180 Bertrand, P., 55 Betancur Mejia, G., 60 Bourgeois, M., 80 Bowles, F., 146, 147 Bowman, M.-J., 85 Bray, M., 32, 62, 64, 71, 114 Burnett, N., 2, 77, 175, 198, 215 Buron, R., 34, 55

C Caillods, F., 64–66 Carceles Breis, G., 114, 125 Champion Ward, F., 53, 85, 89

Conable, B., 88 Coombs, P.H., 15, 51, 52, 57, 59, 61, 62, 64–67, 69, 70, 89, 144, 146, 180, 181, 188

D Daniel, J., 94, 96, 97 Dave, R., 151 Davies, G., 28 De Grauwe, A., 99, 207 De Silva, A., 55 Deleon, A., 159, 160 Demuth, R.H., 64, 80, 81, 83 Diez Hochleitner, R., 9, 42, 60, 61, 66, 80, 173, 181 Draxler, A., 31, 65, 209

E Egelund, N., 177 Eide, K., 7, 35, 63, 117, 118, 120, 121, 145, 147, 148, 152, 153, 175, 176 Ekholm, M., 132, 133, 187 Elley, W.B., 185 Emmerij, L., 63, 69, 85, 159

F Faure, E., 114, 145, 150 Fredriksen, B., 3, 86, 174, 175 Friis, H., 176

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Elfert, C. Ydesen, Global Governance of Education, Educational Governance Research 24, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40411-5

221

222

Index of Names

G Gass, R., 37, 55, 57, 62, 63, 69–71, 129, 146–148, 151, 154, 161, 163, 181, 182, 209 Gordon, K., 59 Grant, J., 90 Grant Lewis, S., 176 Guadalupe, C., 126, 157

L Lakin, M., 92 Lapointe, A., 155 Lengrand, P., 149, 150, 159 Lethem, F., 84, 85 Lievesley, D., 125 Lockheed, M., 91, 94, 95, 157, 201 Lyons, R., 34, 35, 58, 181

H Habte, A., 85, 171 Haddad, W., 90–92, 175 Hallak, J., 89, 90, 92, 94, 95, 173–175, 185, 186, 198 Hanushek, E.A., 128, 187 Harbison, F.H., 58 Harris, M., 146, 147 Harrison, J.M., 148, 149 Heller, W.W., 53, 144 Heneveld, W., 101 Heyneman, S.P., 38, 39, 85, 96, 101, 112, 113, 118, 121, 122, 124–126, 171, 184 Hüfner, K., 37, 200 Hultin, M., 172, 181–184, 188, 196 Husén, T., 113, 144, 146, 159, 173, 183, 210 Huxley, J., 26, 27, 31, 178

M Maddison, A., 184 Maheu, R., 9, 80–84, 180 Matsuura, K., 94 Mayor, F., 88, 90, 91, 171 M’Bow, A.-M., 84, 87, 88, 90 McNamara, R., 39, 41, 43, 67, 83, 182, 194 Moller, W., 174 Moser, C., 128 Murray, S., 125, 155

I Illich, I., 159

J Jallade, J.-P., 183 Jallade, L., 61, 87, 101, 174, 176 Janne, H., 151 Jiménez, M., 149 Johanson, R.K., 84 Johnson, L.B., 51–53, 65, 67 Jones, S., 213 Jullien de Paris, M.-A., 110

K Kandel, I.L., 28 Kennedy, J.F., 51, 57, 61, 66, 81 Keppel, F., 29, 69, 111 King, A., 55, 147–149 Kissinger, H., 67 Konvitz, J., 169, 177, 178, 196 Krill de Capello, H.-H., 27, 30, 56 Kristensen, T., 55, 144, 176

O Orivel, F., 128

P Palme, O., 150 Parnes, H.S., 58 Peppler Barry, U., 93, 94 Phillips, H.M., 54, 62, 63, 174 Piaget, J., 178 Poignant, R., 65 Postlethwaite, N.T., 113, 185, 186 Power, C., 91, 92 Prebisch, R., 62 Psacharopoulos, G., 39, 90, 94, 184 Puryear, J.M., 122, 123

R Ramirez, F.O., 5, 6, 121 Ramos, G., 169 Reagan, R., 35, 153, 154 Rehn, G., 145, 163 Reimer, E., 159 Ripman, H.B., 78, 79 Rockefeller, N., 14, 34, 51, 57, 59, 66, 67, 209 Roosevelt, F.D., 51 Ross, K., 186 Rusk, D., 57, 59

Index of Names S Sack, R., 25, 39, 88, 100, 154, 171, 203 Schleicher, A., 4, 156, 172, 177, 184–187, 189, 196, 210–212, 214 Schmidt, L.-H., 132 Schuller, T., 133, 158 Schultz, T., 34, 57, 59 Schwartz, A., 89 Skodvin, O.-J., 133 Skovsgaard, J., 130, 132, 133, 153, 179, 187 Spaulding, S., 182

T Ter Weele, A., 86, 88, 100, 102 Tham, W., 183 Thompson, J., 43 Thorn, W., 199, 201, 202, 209, 210, 212, 215

223 Thorndike, W., 28, 29, 210 Torres Bodet, J., 178 Tuijnman, A., 123, 125, 126, 128, 148, 151, 153–158, 162, 179, 186, 211, 212

V Vaizey, J.E., 57 Vejleskov, H., 176

W Wanner, R., 107, 119, 124 Weiler, H., 66 Williams, G., 58, 59 Williams, P., 83, 197 Wolfensohn, J.D., 131 Woods, G.D., 79–83

Subject Index

A Accountability, 10, 30, 35, 40, 95, 96, 99, 127, 153, 205, 213 Adult education, 32, 42, 92, 101, 103, 154–157, 159, 160 Africa/African, 3, 4, 38–40, 42, 56, 94, 103, 157, 175 Alliance for Progress, 52, 59, 61, 62, 70, 81 Argentina, 58 Asia/Asian, 38, 56 Asia Society, 209 Assemblage, 6, 10, 215 Assessment, 2, 29, 33, 36, 40, 60, 93, 121, 128, 129, 133, 135, 155–157, 159, 161, 177, 185, 186, 194–196, 200–206, 213–215 Australia/Australian, 7, 109, 152, 186

B Belgium, 129 Bellagio (meetings, doctrine), 53, 57 Bell Report, 39, 85, 86 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 208, 209 Board on International Comparative Studies in Education (BICSE), 121–123, 125 Boundary work, 2, 15, 16, 143, 161, 170, 172, 175, 177, 178, 181, 197, 203, 204 Brazil, 40 Bretton Woods conference, 1, 38 BRICS countries, 44 Bureaucracy (bureaucratic), 9, 25, 27, 28, 43, 82, 100, 101, 153, 159, 170, 180, 194, 206, 211, 212

C Canada/Canadian: Statistics Canada, 125, 127, 155, 158 Capitalism (Capitalist), 11, 12, 24, 52, 87, 101, 144, 193, 194, 198, 213 Carnegie Foundation, 28 Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), 35, 37, 65, 67, 70, 86, 117, 120–122, 126, 129, 131–133, 145–149, 153–155, 157, 158, 161, 162, 175, 177, 181, 182, 185–187, 194, 196, 199, 203, 209 CEPES (UNESCO’s European Centre for Higher Education), 32 Chile, 61 China, 7, 44, 199, 200, 215 Cold War, 2, 12, 15, 24, 31–34, 37, 38, 51–71, 114, 120, 125, 134, 157, 193, 194, 198 Committee for Scientific and Technical Personnel (CSTP), 34, 35, 56, 67, 68, 116, 117, 147, 149, 176 Communism (communist), 12, 24, 31, 51, 52, 81, 120, 152, 194 Comparative education (comparison), 26 CONFINTEA (International Conference on Adult Education), 32, 149, 160 Constructivism (constructivist), 8, 9, 11, 29 Co-operative Program (World Bank-UNESCO) (CP), 38, 43, 64, 77–89, 102, 103, 171, 173, 175, 183, 194, 195, 202, 204 Corporations (corporate; corporatization), 3, 4, 16, 32, 43, 44, 82, 87, 92, 203, 208, 209, 211

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Elfert, C. Ydesen, Global Governance of Education, Educational Governance Research 24, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40411-5

225

226 Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), 13, 32 Council of Europe, 56, 145, 146, 148, 150, 175, 197 Cuba, 52 Covid-19, 3, 32, 208

D Danish (Ministry, delegation), 55, 130, 132, 153, 179, 187 Danish Pedagogical Institute, 186 Data (datafication), 10, 11, 14, 24, 34, 36, 40, 60, 69, 79, 93, 96, 110–118, 121–131, 133–135, 153–158, 162, 177, 184–186, 195, 201, 204, 206 Deakin University, 186 Debt crisis (debt), 39 Decolonisation, 30, 38, 64, 78, 180 Delors Report, 44, 156, 160, 161, 163, 196 Denmark, 129, 176, 177, 187 Department for International Development (DFID) (UK), 93–95, 98, 99 DeSeCo (Definition and Selection of Key Competencies curriculum framework), 130 Developing countries (low-income countries), 2–4, 7, 8, 15, 25, 32, 33, 38–42, 51, 52, 54, 56, 58, 59, 64, 66, 68, 70, 77, 79, 81, 84, 87, 90, 91, 93, 97, 100, 101, 103, 123, 150, 152, 157, 161, 181, 194, 197, 198, 201, 203, 207 Development, 1–4, 7, 10, 12, 13, 15, 23–30, 34, 36–39, 41–44, 51–63, 65, 66, 68–71, 77–103, 109–125, 127–132, 134, 135, 143, 145, 147–150, 154, 158, 160–162, 169, 170, 172, 175–177, 180–182, 184–188, 193–207, 209, 212, 213, 215 Digitalization (digital), 4, 14, 44, 208 Ditchley Park seminar, 146

E East-West relations (East-West diplomacy), 24 Economics of education (economistic), 25, 34, 37, 42, 53, 57, 63, 66, 69, 78, 81, 114, 128, 143, 145, 161, 194, 198, 202, 204 Economy, 11, 24, 34–36, 38, 40, 41, 51, 59, 67, 70, 79, 98, 101, 111, 115, 116, 118, 128, 157, 161, 177, 182, 194, 195, 207 Educational Investment and Planning Programme (EIP), 34, 173, 181

Subject Index Educationalization, 3, 9 Educational planning, 3, 14, 15, 34, 43, 51–71, 79–81, 87, 99, 101, 102, 114, 116, 117, 119, 143–145, 148, 149, 172, 173, 180, 181, 194, 203, 204, 206, 210 Educational Testing Service (ETS), 127, 155, 156, 158 Education at a Glance (EAG), 35, 128, 129, 134, 157, 185, 186 Education Financing Division (EFD), 38, 79, 82, 83, 86–90, 101, 102, 171, 174, 176, 180, 194 Education for All (EFA), 3, 4, 9, 13, 15, 32, 39, 40, 77, 89–103, 122, 160, 161, 175, 185, 195–197, 205–207, 212, 213 Éducation permanente, 143, 145, 146, 149–152, 158, 161, 163, 196, 211 EFA Global Monitoring Report, 95, 175 England, 28, 119 Enlightenment, 25, 41, 54, 151 Europe/European, 1, 23, 27, 29, 32–34, 37, 42, 51–57, 59, 62, 70, 78, 116, 120, 132, 143, 145, 146, 150, 155, 158, 160, 163, 171, 181–183, 188, 197, 198 European Productivity Agency (EPA), 34, 53 European Union (EU)/European Commission, 12, 92, 95, 103, 129, 131, 160, 163, 169, 187, 195, 197 Eurostat, 127, 129, 131 Evidence-based policy research, 131, 132 Experimental World Literacy Program (EWLP), 31, 81

F Fabian Society, 26 Fast-Track Initiative (FTI), 40, 95–99, 102, 103, 195, 207 Faure Report, 114, 149, 151, 152, 159 Financial crisis, 40, 160, 214 Finland, 28 Ford Foundation, 34, 35, 39, 52, 54, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64–67, 70, 81, 85, 116, 122, 146, 147, 161, 180, 181, 188, 194 Fourth industrial revolution, 215 France, 28, 51, 65, 66, 117, 119, 120, 125, 129, 145, 148, 153, 156, 196 Fundamental education, 31, 197

G G7/G8/G20, 33, 97–99, 102 Germany, 28, 93, 100

Subject Index Global Alliance to Monitor Learning (GAML), 206, 207 Global citizenship, 215 Global Education Coalition, 32, 208 Global Education Cooperation Mechanism (GCM), 112, 131, 200, 207 Globalization, 1, 5, 41, 163, 193, 194, 196, 208, 212, 213, 215 Global Partnership for Education (GPE), 6, 12, 33, 40, 207, 208

H Harvard University, 209 Hegemony (hegemonic), 4, 10, 12, 16, 24, 25, 36, 37, 41, 42, 101, 134, 161, 163, 194, 199, 213, 215 Heritage Foundation, 87 Higher education, 3, 39, 67, 85, 90, 122, 148, 150, 151, 161, 182, 184, 200, 210 Homogenization (homogenizing), 5, 6, 13, 77, 103, 163, 195, 199, 204–207, 212 Human capital (human capital theory), 9, 26, 34, 36–38, 42, 51, 53, 57, 78, 82, 87, 101, 111, 118, 123, 130, 184, 203, 207 See also Rate of return approach Human Capital Index (HCI), 201, 204 Humanism (humanistic), 42–44, 54, 63, 78, 102, 152, 160, 195, 202, 205

I Idealism (idealist/ic), 25, 26, 29, 41, 42, 103, 143 India, 40 Indicators, 7, 10, 14, 35, 40, 43, 62, 65, 69, 109–113, 116–124, 126–131, 134, 135, 143, 152–158, 161–163, 172, 183–186, 195, 196, 199, 204, 206, 207, 209, 212, 214 Indicators of Education Systems (INES) programme, 35, 120, 128, 129, 131, 154–157, 179, 185 International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), 125, 127, 128, 155–158, 177, 213 International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), 12, 36, 112, 113, 119, 125, 126, 129, 135, 146, 157, 162, 173, 177, 185, 186, 195 International Bureau of Education (IBE), 27, 89, 175, 178, 186 International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (CICI), 27

227 International Development Goals (IDGs), 98, 205 International Examinations Inquiry (IEI), 28, 29 International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP), 8, 52, 53, 62, 64–67, 70, 79, 89, 90, 102, 144, 146, 151, 161, 162, 172–176, 179–183, 185, 186, 188, 194, 196, 203, 212 International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation (IICI), 27, 30 Internationalism (internationalists), 24, 27–29, 41, 66, 123, 193 International Labour Organization (ILO), 61, 62, 151, 159 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 97, 98 International organizations (IOs) legitimacy, 3, 4, 6, 9, 63, 110, 201, 205, 211, 215 power, 3, 16, 28, 110 promise-making (and promissory), 2, 3, 213 International relations, 5, 8, 11, 26, 29, 41, 59 International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED), 116, 118, 119, 122, 123, 127, 134, 163, 195 International Working Group on Education (IWGE), 89–93, 102, 174, 176 Investment in education, 10, 34, 53, 57, 143, 144 Isomorphism (isomorphic), 9, 14, 43, 102, 204–207, 212, 215

J Japan, 120

K Kennedy administration, 51, 52, 57, 61, 66, 81, 180 See also Kennedy, J.F. Kennedy, J.F., 51, 81 Keynesian, 35, 52, 120 Knowledge society, 3, 35, 161

L Large-scale assessment programmes (ILSAs), 36, 40, 43, 129, 133, 186, 195 Latin America (Latin American countries) Latin American Institute for Social and Economic Planning, 61, 62 Santiago conference, 61, 62 United Nations Commission for Latin America (CEPAL), 60

228 League of Nations (LN), 27–30, 41 Liberal, 6–8, 24 Lifelong learning (lifelong education), 4, 6, 9, 15, 32, 112, 131, 143–163, 195, 196, 199, 207, 211, 213 See also Éducation permanente; Recurrent education Literacy, 31, 32, 40, 42, 81, 91, 92, 101, 103, 114, 127, 128, 133, 154, 155, 163, 177, 197, 207 Literacy Assessment and Monitoring Programme (LAMP), 133 Literacy Used in Daily Activities (LSUDA), 155

M MacBride Commission, 87 Manpower planning, 34, 39, 57–60, 63, 78, 119, 171, 184, 206 Marshall Plan (European Recovery Program), 1, 33, 37, 53, 59, 70, 198 Marxist, 125 Materialism (materialist), 10, 11, 212 McKinsey, 187 Measurement (measurable), 10, 30, 33, 40, 42, 103, 110, 112, 125, 127, 133, 143–163, 185, 195, 196, 200, 202, 204, 207, 208, 214 Mediterranean Regional Project (MRP), 34, 53–55, 57–63, 70, 174, 181, 201 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), 10, 96–98, 101, 102, 130, 195, 201, 205, 207 Modernization (modernist), 1, 3, 26, 29, 51, 54, 70, 125, 194 Monitoring Learning Achievement (MLA) programme, 154 Multilateralism, 16, 44, 207 Multistakeholderism, 16, 44, 207, 208

N National Defense Education Act, 33, 53, 67, 115 Nationalism, 31, 199 Neoliberalism (neoliberal), 4, 8, 9, 35, 68, 152, 153, 157–161, 163, 194, 208 Nepal, 4, 103 Netherlands, 93, 156 Networks, 1, 5, 6, 8, 12, 25, 27–29, 44, 53, 90, 130, 155, 169–172, 176, 178, 179, 182, 184, 187, 188, 194, 196, 202, 204, 207–210

Subject Index New Education Fellowship (World Education Fellowship), 27 New institutionalism, 8 New International Economic Order (NIEO), 87 New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), 87 Non-state actors, 5, 13, 23, 44, 200, 210 Norway, 28, 177

O Office for Scientific and Technical Personnel (OSTP), 33, 68 Oil crisis, 118 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Centre for Co-operation with Non-Members, 36 Conference on “Economic Growth and Investment in Education”, 34, 143 Development Assistance Committee (DAC), 35, 56, 63, 98, 99, 162, 176, 201, 205 Development Centre, 34, 55, 56, 58, 63, 85, 208 1961 Policy Conference on Economic Growth and Investment in Education, Washington D.C., 57 Study Group of Economics, 57 Organisation for European Economic Development (OEEC), 1, 23, 27, 33, 34, 37, 53–55, 57–59, 69, 70, 116 Organization of American States (OAS), 61, 62

P Palestine, 44, 200 Pearson, 187 Pearson Report (Partners in Development), 83, 98 Pedagogy (pedagogical), 26, 28, 111, 151 People Commissions, 26 Peru, 58, 62 Peuple et Culture, 149 Philanthropic foundations (philanthropy/ philanthropic), 4, 6, 44, 53, 58, 66, 81, 187, 207–210, 214 Planning-Programming-Budgeting System (PPBS), 43, 67, 82 Policy and Sector Analysis Division (PSA), 89, 171 Policy borrowing, 7 Political economy, 11, 24, 152, 212, 214 Politicization, 31, 198

Subject Index Politics of convergence, 3, 4, 6, 11, 103, 212 Porticus Foundation, 209 Poverty, 39, 40, 204, 208, 214 Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP), 40, 98, 100 Primary education (primary schools), 3, 32, 39–41, 61, 85, 90–92, 98, 99, 101, 103, 175, 186, 195 Privatization (private; privatized), 3, 24, 25, 32, 39, 40, 44, 100, 120, 207–211 Productivity, 3, 10, 24, 30, 33, 34, 37, 38, 42, 52, 54, 57, 70, 78, 81, 82, 101, 194, 198, 213, 214 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) PISA for Development (PISA-D), 4, 199 PISA for Schools, 36, 199, 209 PISA4U, 199 Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), 156–158, 199 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), 36, 157 Prosopography, 170, 188 Psychology (psychological), 25, 26, 209 Public-private partnerships, 12, 40, 44, 207

Q Qatar, 200, 208

R RAND Corporation, 43, 67, 82 Rasch model, 186 Rate of return approach, 39, 85, 171 See also Human capital Rationalization (rationalized, rationality, rationalistic), 9, 24, 33, 43, 51, 67, 69, 102, 160, 206 Reading Literacy Study (RLS), 185 Realism (realist), 5, 8, 11 Recurrent education, 35, 37, 42, 143, 145, 149–155, 157–161, 179, 196, 199, 211 Reduction of poverty (poverty reduction), 3, 10, 94 Résistance, 149, 150 Results-based management, 43, 204, 214, 215 Rockefeller (family; Foundation, etc.), 14, 34, 51, 57, 59, 66, 67, 89, 209, 210

229 S Scandinavian (Nordic), 133 School effectiveness/school effectiveness movement, 119, 127 Schooling (universal schooling), 3, 9, 40, 92, 103, 130, 161, 195, 196, 207, 212 Science (scientific), 11, 25, 26, 28, 29, 33, 34, 41–43, 51, 54, 55, 57–59, 66, 69, 70, 81, 88, 101, 102, 109, 115, 116, 123, 129, 132, 147–149, 153, 170, 182, 185, 186, 206, 209, 210 Scientific humanism, 26 Scotland, 28 Secondary education, 28, 38, 39, 53, 79, 85, 151 Second World War (World War II), 3, 7, 41, 51 Shanghai, 199, 200 Social and emotional learning (SEL), 209 Social engineering, 3, 11, 26, 33, 34, 43, 51, 52, 59, 134 Social network analysis, 170, 172, 173, 196 Soft power, 7, 24, 37, 38 Soviet Union (Soviet; Russian), 13, 32, 33, 52, 61, 68, 70, 84, 87, 117, 120, 193 Sputnik, 33, 38, 52, 53, 57, 59, 114, 115, 118, 199 State, the (statecraft), 7, 11, 26, 35, 51, 110, 128, 208, 209, 211, 212 Statistical Office of the European Communities (SOEC), 119, 121, 135 Statistics (statistical), 10, 14, 15, 25, 26, 28, 33–35, 43, 68, 69, 79, 96, 103, 109–131, 133–135, 143, 153, 155–158, 183, 184, 195, 200, 203, 206, 209, 212 Structural Adjustment Programmes/policies, 6, 25, 39, 41, 194 Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4), 3, 4, 14, 33, 112, 131, 134, 135, 160, 198, 200–207, 209, 214, 215 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 3, 10, 14, 130, 131, 160, 195, 202, 204, 205, 209 Sweden, Swedish, 28, 35, 113, 116, 132, 145, 150–152, 154–156, 163, 172, 173, 176, 177, 179, 181, 182, 187, 196, 199 Switzerland, 28, 126, 130 Systems analysis, 65, 67, 68, 116–118, 153 Systems Approach for Better Educational Results (SABER), 40, 112, 131, 135, 201

230 T Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), 36 Technical Advisory Group, 135 Technical Cooperation Group (TCG), 206, 207 Technocracy (technocratic, technocrats), 25, 30, 34, 41, 43, 44, 67, 101, 134, 179, 204, 215 Technology (technologies), 1, 5, 6, 10–12, 14, 24, 32, 33, 38, 43, 58, 65, 69, 70, 88, 103, 109, 110, 115, 148, 182, 187, 194, 195, 208, 212, 214 Templeton Foundation, 209 Third World, 24, 42, 81, 87, 145 Transformative (transforming), 3, 4, 41, 70, 161, 200, 204, 211 Transhumanism, 215 Transnational, 1, 5, 9, 11, 12, 14, 25, 26, 35, 40, 70, 111, 170, 171, 179, 184, 207, 208, 212, 214, 215 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), 36, 157, 186 21st century skills, 3, 214

U UNESCO Institute for Education (UIE), 43, 113, 151, 155, 157, 158, 160, 163, 173 UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL), 3, 200 UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), 40, 96, 102, 123–126, 133–135, 157, 200, 201, 203, 204, 206, 207, 214, 215 United Kingdom (UK), 64, 69, 93, 124, 125, 128, 175, 179, 194 United Nations (UN), 1, 12, 13, 16, 23, 28, 29, 31, 32, 38, 42, 44, 54, 56, 60–62, 77, 79–81, 83–85, 90, 92, 98, 102, 103, 119, 125, 144, 169, 182, 194, 197, 200, 202, 204, 205, 208 United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF), 3, 12, 13, 40, 44, 89–92, 94, 95, 97, 102, 122, 131, 185, 186, 201 United Nations Development Decade, 52, 79, 81, 98, 200 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 13, 31, 80, 89, 91, 92, 94, 185 United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), 79 United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), 59, 61, 62

Subject Index United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 1–3, 5–9, 12–16, 23–33, 38–44, 51–56, 60–65, 67–71, 77–103, 109, 110, 112–114, 116–119, 121–127, 131, 133–135, 143–146, 148–151, 153–163, 169–173, 175, 176, 178, 180–188, 193–205, 207–209, 211, 212, 214, 215 United Nations Global Compact, 208 United States (American; USA) A Nation at Risk, 35, 120, 153, 185 foreign policy, 24, 38, 42, 81, 115, 117, 124 hegemony, 25, 41, 215 National Research Council, 121 rejoining UNESCO, 24, 101, 200 withdrawal from UNESCO, 124, 154, 163, 198, 199 US Agency for International Development (USAID), 52, 61, 81, 93

V Vietnam War, 67 Vocational education, 38, 79, 122

W Williamsburg conference (International Conference on the World Crisis in Education, Williamsburg, Virginia, 1967), 53, 65, 68 World Bank International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), 38, 83, 88, 182 International Development Association (IDA), 63, 78, 83, 88 World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA) in Jomtien, Thailand, 40, 91, 122, 185, 195 World Culture Theory, 5, 6 World Education Forum (WEF) in Dakar, 40, 94–96 World Economic Forum (WEF)/Davos, 208 World War II (Second World War), 1, 2, 23, 24, 30, 42, 51–53, 58, 195 interwar, 23, 25–28, 51 post-war, 1, 2, 12, 23, 25, 26, 28, 38, 43, 53, 101, 112, 134, 143–146, 149, 193, 212