Examining the universe of education intergovernmental organizations

• In Event: Data for accountability in education: Global trends in school reform

Proposal

International Organizations (IOs) are important actors in education policy. They provide international education policy data, develop normative guidelines that become globally applied and provide financial support for education projects across the world. At the same time, national education systems are under pressure to respond to challenges posed by globalization processes. They are in need of maintaining national economic competitiveness in world markets, keeping pace in a constantly growing, knowledge-based economy that sees education as the key to growth and preparing their graduates for global competition in labor markets. In this respect, IOs are often seen as a highly valued source for initiating and shaping national education reform processes. They provide guidance for education reforms, inspiration for best practices and comparative data. In particular, governance-by-numbers or “soft governance by hard fact” (Niemann and Martens, 2018) have become prominent tools of global governance to exert influence on national governments. Unsurprisingly, the investigation of OECD’s PISA (Programme in International Student Assessment) has piqued the interest of many political scientists that turned their attention to the education sector as it created attention worldwide and thus applies far beyond the membership of the IO. The paper explores how the universe of IO active in education has developed over time since WW2. Based on the Yearbook of International Organizations (YIO) as well as the Correlates of War (COW) data set, all currently active IOs were scanned as to whether they refer to education as a field of activity. A total of N=30 organizations was identified which forms the universe of active education IOs (Niemann and Martens 2021). Using approaches of IO institutional design (Debre and Dijlkstra, 2021) specific features, common characteristics and comparative analyses with other fields are applied to these 30 IOs reaching from the global to the regional, from cultural to economic aspects are explored in this paper.

Author

• Kerstin Martens, University of Bremen