Education global governance and global movements in the new interregnum

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Global Governance and the Neoliberal Capitalist Order

Proposal

The author and a small team are currently engaged in a 25th Anniversary review of the Global Campaign for Education (GCE), the civil society movement that was founded in the build up to the World Education Forum in Dakar in 1999 to present a strong and united civil society voice. The campaigning work of the GCE coalesced, in first decade-and-a-half, around the Education For All Agenda (EFA), which, while global, firmly placed the clear demand for the right to education and access to quality education for all – urgent priorities of the Global South – on the global development agenda. This “strong and united civil society” voice carried over into the SDGs 2030 agenda and Education Goal 4 reflects the influence of the GCE and an array of like-minded partners including UNESCO and Education International. However, what is now clearly apparent, at this over half-way point to reaching the targets for 2030, is that global geopolitics is shifting and realigning to the point that the world is hardly recognisable from what it was 25 years ago, even if GCE may have held its course and remained true to its mission. In this sense the 25th anniversary review of the GCE needs to look forwards as much as it looks backwards.

Through an review of the relevant literature, both internal and external to GCE, and numerous lengthy interviews with academics, educators, activists and peer organisations and partners of the GCE, the GCE review will offer a reflection on the directions in which global geopolitics is shifting and realigning, the apparent decline and decay of the West’s promise, the emergence of a multi-polar world and what this may mean for education social movements, the right to quality education and education global governance. The GCE is not the only network and membership organisation that will need to reassess its past assumptions, reconsider which path it is on, and work out how and where to orient itself for the future as it enters new terrains.
This paper takes the GCE review as its point of entry and departure to explore these questions at greater depth, it will draw heavily from the breadth of the discussions in the interviews planned for the GCE review, which are already providing keen insights at the time of this submission. The paper will argue that we are in a new Gramscian interregnum, one in which the neoliberal world order has shaped the world since the end of WWII is breaking down and in which the new multi-polar world has yet to be born and take shape. Given the huge nature of this topic, the paper will only attempt to lay out the bones for the debate the education field needs to take on; it does so along the following lines.

The global education governance debate
This debate has developed along two trajectories. First, the quest for a global learning goal, first laid out by Filmer, Hasan & Pritchett in 2006, developed through the learning metrics task force by Brookings (Winthrop and others, 2013 & 2014) but most fully developed in Gates Foundation, Girin Beharry’s “Pathways to progress” (2021), which calls for a singular focus on numeracy and literacy and a repurposing the global education architecture to achieve it. The first discussion thus intersects the second, which is most fully taken on by Burnett (2010, 2020, 2024), that critiques the fitness-for-purpose of education global governance for achieving global education targets, both those agreed on by the “global education community” and those that are preferred by Washington Consensus organisations. The paper questions the future of this discussion given the crisis of US hegemony and the emerging multi-polar world.

US hegemony and the emerging multi-polar world
Since the term BRICS was coined by Goldman Sach’s Jim O’Neill for the emerging markets in 2001, and after it formally founded in Yekaterinburg, Russia, in 2009, O’Neill has done all he can to distance himself from it. The BRICS nations now have a combined GDP great than the G7 (in PPT terms). They will meet in Kazan in October 2024 to finalise a system for settling trade transactions in their own currencies rather than the US dollar, laying the economic foundations for a genuinely multi-polar world order. Drawing on texts by Robertson and others (2016, 2022, 2023), Novelli (2024), Jandrić et al (2024), Ayoub & Stoeckl (2024), Giudici et al (2024) and discussions and independent podcasts in the last two years by John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, Scott Ritter and The Duran, the paper will explore how this process has been accelerated very recently by developments within the three key geographic arenas of conflict – Ukraine, Gaza/Palestine, and China – and along three vectors of ideological and organisational conflict, the culture wars and human rights, the climate movement and the clampdowns on independent media, freedom of expression and the right to protest across the collective West.

Implications for education movements and organisations
Building on and extending the interviews undertaken for the GCE review, the paper will explore how social education movements and organisations have navigated the pressures for contestation and capture they confront in this interregnum during the past two decades and lay out the factors that need to be taken into account as these structures orient toward the future.

Limitations to this overview
The paper will need to briefly outline three elemental discussions that form part of the larger picture that needs to be drawn to be seen and understand. These, which it will have no time or space to develop, present limitations for any conclusions that can be drawn: 1) the contemporary global political economy, 2) the health of democracy within the neoliberal state, 3) the directions of financing for national education systems and their social movement and civil society structures, organisations and constituents.

Finally, after Babic (2020) and returning to Novelli (2024) and the paper returns to the Gramsci’s idea of the interregnum to reflect on its usefulness as a tool for understanding our era and the futures for comparative and international education.

Author

• Hugh McLean, NORRAG