Corporate Governance of Public Education: Implications for the Human Right to Education

• In Event: Counter Hegemonic Struggles

Proposal

The human right to education is enshrined in international and national human rights frameworks, and implies the duty of States to protect, respect and fulfil it. Among its principles, we have the gratuity and universality of education, as well as its democratic governance, ensuring that the public interest constitutes the underpinnings and content of legal and political frameworks, as well as educational practices. The observation of different forms of education privatization and commodification globally raises questions about the dynamics that engender these phenomena, as well as the consequences for the realization of the right to education. In particular, the growing influence of the corporate private sector in defining and implementing educational policy is noteworthy of study.

This research interrogates the capture of political power by the corporate private sector and corporate governance of public education. It seeks to further understand the relationship between corporate actors and public power, their direct action in the sphere of the state, their increasing legitimacy in determining the direction and content of policy, the correlations of forces and interests that orchestrate education privatization processes and the consequences that this new “power architecture”, to quote Dowbor (2018), brings to ensuring the right to education and the exercise of democracy.

Its starting point is the observation that the corporate private sector has been increasingly occupying state spaces and processes, consolidating corporate governance in public education. The research analyses and discusses the implications of corporate governance of public education in the realization of the human right to education, and more specifically, the materialization of corporate governance in global and regional instances of governance, including education.

The study offers a conceptual contribution on corporate governance of public education, considering the capture of political power by corporations and the transformation of their financial power into organized political power, shaping a new power architecture, as presented by Dowbor. It highlights the rise of corporate power in instances of public policy at the global level, particularly within the UN, the World Economic Forum and ad hoc Commissions. This scaling up of corporate power is leveraged, among other things, by the operationalization of the concepts of “multistakeholder partnership” and “global corporate citizenship”, presented by Klaus Schwab in 1971 and 2008 respectively. For Schwab, corporations are at the same time subjects of rights, “citizens of the world”, as well as guarantors of rights, supplanting the role of the State in guaranteeing rights. This understanding is repeated in the position of other social actors (such as the Global Citizenship Commission) and States (such as the USA).

Furthermore, the study points to a tension in the interpretation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For example, when the World Economic Forum shifts the understanding of people from “subjects of rights” to “stakeholders” and also displaces the role of States as guarantors of rights. To that end it affirms: “The final “owner” of international governance is identified in the first words of the United Nations Charter of 1945: “We, the peoples”. Although the Charter was signed by States, it clearly positions the individual, not the State, as the main stakeholder in international cooperation. The fundamental objective of the international system is to help promote the physical and material security of people” (WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM, 2010, p. 23). It’s worth noting that, in that same year, the Supreme Court of the United States, in the Citzen United case, takes a decision that grants corporations the same rights as individuals, thus characterizing corporations as persons. The dispute between “we the peoples” and “we the corporations” is thus accentuated.

Finally, the study points to a problem that is at the heart of corporate governance of public policies, which is the growing loss of alterity between the public and private spheres. This phenomenon has been named in a variety of ways by different authors: increasing indistinction of frontiers between the public and the private (BALL, 2008); the “blurring of boundaries” (STEURER, 2013); growing hybridization of social actors, making the boundary between public and private increasingly “fuzzy” (GRAAFF, 2012).

Author

• Camilla Croso, Open Society Foundations