Is this the Future We Want? Understanding the Legitimacy of International Education Agendas. The Example of Equity in Education

• In Event: Improving Education for a More Equitable World: Critical Perspectives

Proposal

This study explores the legitimacy of global education values put forth by the United Nations (UN) and International Organizations (IOs) through international education agendas.
On the one hand, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) have been hailed as a model of transparent, participatory, and collective endeavor providing a common course of action for humanity (Benavot & Naidoo, 2018; Eck et al., 2015; Fox & Stoett, 2016; Mohammed, 2015; UNESCO, 2016c). The goals are said to reflect the general will of the people and to chart an inclusive and transformative path for human development. The SDG Agenda is broader and more comprehensive than ever (Benavot & Naidoo, 2018; Mohammed, 2015), proposes a unified agenda for education and development (Eck et al., 2015) and is based on contributions from all stakeholders (Fox & Stoett, 2016; Sachs-Israel, 2016; Unterhalter, 2019). Views that notably contrast with perspectives on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) whose process was seen as elite-driven, and guided by donors’ understanding of development rather than by a democratic perspective (Amin, 2006; Fox & Stoett, 2016; Fukuda-Parr et al., 2014; Tarabini, 2010).
But on the other hand, the SDGs are considered by some as yet another instrument that contributes to imposing a neoliberal understanding of development and education (Kumi, 2019; McCloskey, 2019; Sayed et al., 2018; Tikly, 2016; H. Weber, 2017). The new UN agenda is seen as perpetuating a market-driven understanding of development (H. Weber, 2017), to favor the integration of new actors whose agenda is unclear between philanthropy and profit (Kumi, 2019), to ignore structural issues that influence and perpetuate gender inequality (Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, 2017; Unterhalter & North, 2018a), and in education to promote a narrow and instrumental (Sayed & Moriarty, 2020), pro-growth and utilitarian (Mitter, 2016) account of educational development.
These tension also resonate with concerns recently raised about the legitimacy of IOs, oftentimes referred to as the ‘legitimacy crisis’ (Dellmuth and Tallberg 2015; Lenz and Viola 2017). This inquiry employs a sociological understanding of legitimacy, which is fundamentally concerned with how global governance arrangements are perceived by an identified audience, and uses the example of SDG 4.5 and equity in education. The principal research question addressed by this study is the extent to which the SDG 4 agenda, through the values it embeds, can be perceived as legitimate by relevant audiences. The study uses a conceptual framework adapted from studies of sociological legitimacy in International Relations (Dellmuth, Scholte, and Tallberg 2019) to investigate determinants in the formation of legitimacy beliefs and infer on the presence of these beliefs towards SDG target 4.5 which formalizes equity as a global education value.
Building on this conceptual framework, a blended reading research design was used to investigate the congruence between, on the one hand, academics’ perceptions of the conceptualization of equity in education embedded in SDG 4, and, on the other hand, those conceptualizations that are found in the scholarship on equity in education. Three specific dimensions of textual data were considered, namely, representation, structure, and knowledge, in order to allow for a comprehensive understanding of the scholarship on equity in education. Blended reading enables to combine computational approaches and qualitative discourse analysis methods to propose a structured understanding of large text corpora. The corpus of text analyzed includes more than 4800 bibliographic records pertaining to equity in education.
By using co-citation analysis and bibliometric coupling analysis this study sheds light on existing network dynamics within the scholarship on equity in education since the early 1970s. In particular, the approach enables to identify the characteristics (geography, income group, field of study, main influences) of dominant communities within the set of dialogical exchanges reconstructed from academic literature. Further, quantitative text analysis (text-scaling) is combined with in-depth review of texts to better characterize the communities (main concepts, groups, education focus) and situate the various conceptions of equity in education on a unidimensional space. This notably enables to visualize and assess the congruence between SDG 4.5 and the structure of the scholarship on equity in education.
Findings point to the divergence between conceptualizations of equity in education that emerge from the formal interpretive frames of the SDG 4 agenda, the Global Education Monitoring Reports and the monitoring framework, the initial wording of the UN resolution, as well as the most prominent conceptualizations of equity in education in the scholarship. The conceptualization that emerge from the formal interpretative frames of the SDG 4 agenda is identified as principally concerned with an achievement gap perspective, whereas a substantial portion of the most recent active scholars have engaged with critical pedagogy and social justice perspectives on equity in education. Empirically, there exists a lack of congruence between equity in education as conceptualized in the SDG 4 agenda and the structure of the scholarship on the issue. A situation that did not exist under the previous international education agenda. This in turn indicates that there exist grounds for academics to withhold legitimacy beliefs towards the SDG 4 agenda, potentially eroding its authority and putting its success at risk. Furthermore, the methodological design that was employed in the present study demonstrates the potential to combine scope and depth by integrating computational approaches with qualitative analyses in positivistic approaches to studying global governance in education.

Author

• Patrick Henri Pierre Montjourides, Unesco