1. Between agenda-setting and "firefighting:" International organizations as policy entrepreneurs during COVID-19

• In Event: In the Wake of the Pandemic: How International Organizations are Responding to Crisis and Changing Global Governance in Education

Proposal

The school closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a plethora of new, re-emphasized or re-signified ideas, promoted by prominent international organizations that claim to endorse evidence-based policy responses and advocate for transforming the crisis into an opportunity to build "better" and more resilient education systems. Based on extensive document analysis and interview data, we explore the role of the World Bank, UNESCO and the OECD in the global education agenda during COVID. We found that the pandemic created a window of opportunity for these organizations to reassert their role of policy entrepreneurs (Herweg et al., 2018; Kingdon, 2010;) but also put them under significant strain to act as ‘firefighters,’ finding solutions for an unprecedented crisis. In response, these organizations enhanced their collaboration in data collection while embracing less rigorous ways to produce evidence.
Despite the flimsy nature of some of the evidence showcased, these organizations generally deployed two strategies. On the one hand, framing COVID-associated problems in a way that promoted existing projects or organizational goals. On the other, reorganizing programs and bolstering previously smaller initiatives, particularly in education technology. Once the crisis started subsiding, the emphasis on particular recommendations, despite inconclusive evidence, created some rifts in their collaboration.
Our findings expand the critique on the evidence-based rhetoric of international organizations (Cowen, 2019; Verger et al., 2019; Edwards et al, 2020; Papanastasiou, 2021) and show that agenda-setting is shaped by path dependency and constrained by a public action paradox (Sending, 2019; Stone, 2019), through which imperatives to protect reputation foster solutions that do not necessarily address rationally identified problems but sustain conditions for the continuation of preferred agendas.

References
Cowen, N. (2019). For whom does “what works” work? The political economy of evidence-based education. Educational Research and Evaluation, 25(1–2), 81–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/13803611.2019.1617991
Edwards, D. B., Morrison, J., & Hall, S. (2020). The suspect statistics of best practices: A triple critique of knowledge production and mobilisation in the global education policy field. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 18(2), 125–148. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2019.1689489
Herweg, N., Zahariadis, N., & Zohlnhöfer, R. (2018). The Multiple Streams Framework: Foundations, Refinements, and Empirical Applications. In C. M. Weible & P. A. Sabatier (Eds.), Theories of the Policy Process (4th ed., pp. 17–53). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429494284-2
Kingdon, J. (2010). Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, Update Edition, with an Epilogue on Health Care (2 edition). Pearson.
Papanastasiou, N. (2021). ‘Best practice as a governing practice: Producing best practice in a European Commission working group.’ Journal of Education Policy, 36(3), 327–348.
Sending, O. J. (2019). Knowledge Networks, Scientific Communities, and Evidence-Informed Policy. In D. Stone & K. Moloney (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Global Policy and Transnational Administration (pp. 382–400). Oxford University Press.
Stone, D. (2019). Transnational policy entrepreneurs and the cultivation of influence: Individuals, organizations and their networks. Globalizations, 16(7), 1128–1144.
Verger, A., Fontdevila, C., Rogan, R., & Gurney, T. (2019). Manufacturing an illusory consensus? A bibliometric analysis of the international debate on education privatisation. International Journal of Educational Development, 64, 81–95.

Authors

• Tatiana Feitosa de Britto, OISE/University of Toronto

• Claudia Milena Diaz-Rios, OISE University of Toronto