Setting a global agenda of education: Cooperation and tension within the global education policy field

Abstract

This paper explores how the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) mediate normative values of education and influence education policy. Drawing on staff interviews, the paper examines the perceived pivotal function of the OECD and UNESCO as ‘global’ agenda setting. Taking the notion of a wider global education policy field as the theoretical departure point, the analysis shows that the geographical knowledges of these organisations are significantly shaped by tensions and interdependencies between different agents within the broader field. The polarities within the field reflect the organisations’ different geographical scopes and political-economic paths. Moreover, there is a balancing act whereby the OECD and UNESCO are expected to address global issues while also nurturing relations with individual member-states that bring economic and symbolic capital to the organisations. The paper highlights two sets of geographical knowledges present in the organisations’ work, namely, time-space knowledges and scalar knowledges. Thus, the global agenda of education is embedded in a complex geography ranging from individual to global level, where orders of dominance between nation-states are reinforced in the formulation and allocation of problems and solutions.