‘Not the destination but the journey’: Competing decision-making structures in the lead-up to SDG4

• In Event: Highlighted Session: The ‘practice turn’ in global governance: Analysing the changing role of international organizations in education policy-making

Proposal

Far from being a master-planned process guided by a neat roadmap, the negotiation of the SDGs retained an open-ended quality well into the very end of the process in 2015. The making of SDGs was indeed a multi-layered process, anchored to a wide variety of fora and engaging a range of transnational and domestic actors. In the education realm such dynamics were particularly apparent given that, since the turn of the century, the global education agenda had been informed by two separate sets of goals –the Education for All (EFA) goals and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Each of these sets of goals were associated with a specific decision-making architecture and with different communities of practice, led by different IOs. More specifically, while the EFA goals were perceived as the remit of UNESCO, the education agendas of the World Bank and UNICEF were much more aligned to the MDGs.

Crafting a new education agenda meant, in practice, combining the decision-making procedures specific to a UNESCO-led EFA architecture with the negotiation processes set in motion within UN circles as a continuation of the MDGs. This entailed the need to find common ground between different (and sometimes conflicting) expectations regarding the legitimate loci of power, and regarding the acceptable ways of negotiating consensus – that is, the profile and number of those invited to key forums, the nature and formalization of interventions, or the sources of authoritative knowledge.

Drawing on a corpus of 52 interviews with key negotiators of the SDG4 agenda, and informed by an open systems perspective (cf. Seabrooke and Sending, 2015), this paper analyses some of the key issues around which such tensions crystallized. It aims thus towards gaining insight into the process through which a range of IOs and development partners reached a consensus on the very structure of the negotiation process, i.e., the venues, working modalities and negotiation practices deemed legitimate for goal-setting purposes. The negotiation of the SDG4 architecture is thus approached as a fruitful opportunity to advance our understanding of inter-organizational relationships – an understudied aspect in the study of IOs (Kranke, 2017; Bierman & Koops, 2016). It offers also an opportunity to understand the micro-sociological foundations of IO collaboration, in line with the practice approach informing this panel.

The paper finds that much of the inter-organizational animosity encountered during the post-2015 process has its origins in the mismatch between the bureaucratic culture of the UN sphere, and the more horizontal deliberation routines that characterize UNESCO and the EFA architecture. Such divergences, in turn, mirror different understandings of what qualifies as a democratic debate. Complementarily, the paper identifies a number of practices creatively developed by IO negotiators in order to reach consensus – namely, (1) role-blurring (the characterization of certain venues as both consultation mechanisms and negotiation chambers); (2) turning to informality (relying on personal connections and backroom deals to prevent organizational clashes); and (3) temporal nesting (signalling a provisional hierarchy of negotiation spaces and postponing pronouncements as to the real locus of decision-making).

Author

• Clara Fontdevila, University of Glasgow