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

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

International organizations (IOs) have long been recognized as key players in the global governance of education and in global education policy making. Not only is the role of IOs routinely recognized in studies of domestic policy making but, a prolific literature has emerged describing the role, governance mechanisms and influence of these IOs, enquiring on their evolution, and interrogating their agendas (Ydesen, 2020; Niemann & Martens, 2021; Resnik, 2006).

One of the risks of this latter stream of the literature is its tendency towards reification - that is, the reliance on an excessively abstract and fixed understanding of IOs as policy actors. To be sure, these risks are not exclusive to the education realm – rather, they constitute cross-cutting trends within the global social policy literature. As noted by Béland and Orenstein (2013), the characterization of IOs offered by this field of studies has tended to be exceedingly simplistic. Specifically, three main problems - or epistemological ‘isms’ - are frequently associated with such an actor-centric understanding of IOs’ role in policy-making, namely:

(1) Substantialism: the tendency to overlook the key role played by IOs’ interactions with other IOs and their environment in the very constitution of their organizational identities, policy agendas, etc; conceptualization of IOs as self-contained and sharply-bounded spheres of action with a fixed set of attributes (cf. Adler-Nissen, 2013).

(2) Essentialism: the tendency the approach IOs as constituted by a set of fixed attributes. Neglect of the micro-sociological foundations of international social life, including routines, intra-organizational pluralism and conflict, irreflexive practices, and the role of habit and practical knowledge (cf. McCourt, 2016).

(3) Organizational nominalism: a mode of inquiry that (implicitly) assumes that agents operating in a given organization have limited agency as their action is (almost) entirely governed by a shared identity relative to their affiliation, or by principles based on clearly pre-defined interests (Henriksen & Seabrooke, 2016).

These tendencies can certainly be observed in the education field. Hence, case studies of the most prominent education IOs have tended to present each one of these entities driven by a specific mission and a set of ideological premises which colour the totality of their activity. For instance, much of this literature seems to be informed by a dichotomic understanding that opposes utilitarian perspectives (primarily concerned with the economic returns of education) to human-rights oriented perspectives (concerned with education as a social right, and a means to self-fulfilment and social cohesion - cf. Nagel et al., 2010). The World Bank is thus routinely portrayed as a carrier of neoclassical economic thinking (see contributions to Klees, 2012) whereas UNESCO is associated to a human-rights approach to education (Hüfner, 2011). While these characterizations of education IOs make sense from a historical perspective, they obscure the complexity and internal diversity of organizations, which have diverse centres of power and exhibit an evolving rather than a static agenda. In fact, and as Niemann and Martens (2021) show, in many education IOs, both utilitarian and liberal approaches to education coexist – noting for instance that both the World Bank and the OECD have progressively embraced a more holistic understanding of education.

Yet fine-grained accounts on the pluralistic and changing nature of education IOs continue to be scant – with much scholarship approaching them as unitary and self-contained entities with a fixed set of policy ideas or preferences. This reified approach to IOs does a disservice to the study of global policy-making, in that it obscures the contested and dynamics character the policy ideas put forward by IOs, as well as the constitutive character of the interactions between IOs and other entities.

In light of these limitations, a number of scholars loosely affiliated to a constructivist perspective have called for the need to advance towards a more situated understanding of IOs and to bring a relational sensibility to the study of IOs – recognizing that IO’s features are permanently negotiated through their interaction with their environment, including other IOs, and that IO’s boundaries are more porous than frequently assumed (Sending et al., 2015). Many of these concerns and analytical commitments have crystallized in the so-called “practice turn” within IR scholarship (Adler & Pouliot, 2011). Despite its theoretical pluralism, practice theory can be characterized by its empirical focus on observable instances of human activity (i.e. practices) as basic units of analysis. Also, and in contrast to textualist or rationalist traditions, practice theory draws attention to practical knowledge and habit as key forces shaping international life - including the inner workings of IOs (Pouliot & Mérand, 2013; Bueger & Gadinger, 2018). The practice turn hence favours greater empirical attention to the mundane unfolding of transnational spaces and to the routines, practices and practical knowledge of those inhabiting it.

This panel is motivated by the premise that, in the field of education, the incorporation of such perspectives holds great promise - in the sense that it can allow for a more fine-grained understanding of the subtle and complex ways in which IOs shape education policy-making. This panel aims precisely at bringing this lens to the study of IOs in education policy-making. To do so, it combines a series of empirically-rich papers that bring to the fore:

(1) The constitutive role of IO interaction, through the study of contemporary and historical episodes of IO collaboration - namely, the UNESCO-World Bank Co-operative Programme and the implementation of EFA (Paper 1) and the negotiation of SDG4 (Paper 2).

(2) The pluralistic, collective and contested character of IOs’ ideational labour, through a case study of the (convoluted process of) construction of the school-autonomy-with-accountability (SAWA) policy model in the context of the OECD (Paper 3), and the collaboration of the WB and UNESCO in the production of education statistics (Paper 4).

In so doing, the panel aims at capturing and making sense of the fluid and contested nature of IO’s agendas, and the different forms of technical and symbolic interdependence that shape their action – hence stimulating a productive discussion on the changing role of IOs in contemporary education policy-making.

Sub Unit

• Globalization & Education SIG

Chair

• Clara Fontdevila, University of Glasgow

Individual Presentations

• The struggle between UNESCO and the World Bank over education for development - Maren Elfert, King's College London

• ‘Not the destination but the journey’: Competing decision-making structures in the lead-up to SDG4 - Clara Fontdevila, University of Glasgow

• Data chasing policy: The OECD and the construction of 'school autonomy with accountability' as a global policy model - Antoni Verger planells, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; Clara Fontdevila, University of Glasgow

• Revolving doors: Social Network Analysis of the OECD, UNESCO, and World Bank Education Nexuses - Christian Ydesen, Aalborg University

Discussant

• D. Brent Edwards, University of Hawaii