UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank: A Global Governance Perspective

This chapter will provide a foundation for the following chapters by introducing the epistemic and ontological underpinnings of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank and giving an overview of the educational approach and activities of these three international organizations (IOs) from a global governance perspective. While all three IOs represent pillars of the post-World War II global education governance architecture, their ideological orientations and modes of operation are very different yet intrinsically connected with key developments and trajectories formed in the interwar period. As we have already pointed out in Chap. 1, our focus on UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank as key actors of the global governance structure is certainly limiting. It is not our intention to give the impression that the global governance structure of education is composed only of these three IOs. There are many other influential stakeholders that require attention, such as other IOs, supranational and regional organizations, as well as non-state actors. However, the approach taken in this book is based on the assumption that these three IOs have played instrumental roles in the building of a global education governance structure, and bringing them into one analytical lens will enhance the understanding of power dynamics in global education more broadly.

It is the overall argument of this chapter, and to some extent also of the entire book, that, although UNESCO was created as the international agency in charge of education after World War II, the OECD and the World Bank challenged UNESCO’s authority as the United Nations’ designated agency for education since the early 1960s (Ydesen & Grek, 2020). Both the World Bank and the OECD – initially its precursor, the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) – got involved in education in the late 1950s when education was increasingly tied to the economy and became a pillar of American foreign policy. The rise of the OECD and the World Bank to hegemonic policy shapers in education is related to the role of the United States in strengthening the power of these organizations, while withdrawing support from UNESCO (Elfert, 2020, 2021; Elfert & Ydesen, 2020). The United States withdrew from UNESCO in 1984, and after returning in 2002 suspended the payment of membership dues again since 2011, and is currently not a member of UNESCO.^{Footnote 1} This has added to budgetary pressure and has forced the organization to seek partnerships with the private sector and accept “tied money” that significantly restricts its room for manoeuvre.

Another factor that enabled the OECD and the World Bank to challenge UNESCO’s educational mandate is its complex governance structure. With almost universal membership, it is much more difficult to find common ground among its diverse members than in the case of the OECD that has a much smaller and more homogenous membership and represents a “Club of the Rich” (Schmelzer, 2014) of like-minded countries. At the same time, the intellectual, immaterial tradition of UNESCO stands in stark contrast to the OECD and the World Bank that have built, as we will argue, much of their power on instrumental rationality and “representational technologies”. While UNESCO’s ontology can be traced back to the pre-World War II internationalist movement, both the OECD’s and the World Bank’s ideology is rooted in free-market capitalism and derives from the intellectual and political climate of the Cold War. The OECD’s focus on classical economics, productivity and manpower politics reflects the logic of the Cold War rivalry between two economic and political systems, liberal capitalism in the West and communism in the East (Spring, 2015). The World Bank used its financial power to contain communist influence in “Third World” countries, and the Bank’s loans and grants “rewarded like-minded regimes for preserving their free market economies” (Steiner-Khamsi, 2006, p. 25), while UNESCO served to a much greater extent as platform for East-West diplomacy.

It is further important to consider in what way the forms of governance employed by the OECD and the World Bank allowed them to expand their influence to the detriment of UNESCO. In relation to the OECD, authors such as Rubenson (2008) and Henry et al. (2001) have identified the organization’s “mechanisms of persuasion” (p. 2) in educational governance, a form of governance that has often been described as “soft governance” or “soft power” (Sellar & Lingard, 2013; Bieber & Martens, 2011). Among the soft governance mechanisms associated with the OECD are data gathering and idea production, instrument development, policy evaluation, enrolment and participation in OECD-led programmes, and the creation of a culture of multilateral surveillance among member and participating states (Martens & Jakobi, 2010). As argued by Elfert (2021), the World Bank’s epistemic power prevailed over UNESCO’s as it was more aligned with the dominant political economy. Scholars have pointed to the World Bank’s coercive mode of governance based on its funding power and its close ties to powerful fields such as business and finance that constitute the structural power of American hegemony (Elfert, 2021; Zapp, 2017). The World Bank shifted from a mere funder of education in the 1960s to an influential “architect of global education policy” (Klees, 2012, p. 62) and producer of knowledge (Jones, 2004; Zapp, 2017). By tying educational funding for developing countries to conditions and policy directions, most infamously with its structural adjustment programmes, the World Bank has become both “juge et partie” (judge and party) in education policy-making (Elfert, 2021, citing Sack, 1988). While the OECD and the World Bank functioned as agents of the “economics of education”, UNESCO never endorsed the economistic and instrumental approach to education and stayed quite consistent in its humanistic-idealistic worldview (Elfert, 2018; Jones & Coleman, 2005; Rubenson, 2006). Against this background, we will conceptualize UNESCO as the “idealist”, the OECD as the “master of persuasion”, and the World Bank as the “master of coercion”.

In the opening sections of the chapter, we will tease out some key precursors and antecedents of the epistemic and ontological components that fed into the formation of UNESCO, the OECD, and the World Bank and which hold explanatory power in terms of understanding the nature of the educational work undertaken by the three organisations. We will then outline the background and historical context of each of these IOs’ creation and role in education and give a short overview of their main areas of activity and ideological orientation. In the last section of the chapter, we will critically reflect on the role these IOs have played in the global governance of education by discussing them in relation to each other.

On an overall level, the key interwar building blocks for constructing the post-WWII global governance architecture in education can be summarized as the establishment of an international and comparative outlook, the formation of international networks and organisations, and the development of and confidence in a scientific toolbox encompassing statistics, psychometrics and applied psychology (Porter, 1995; Ydesen & Andreasen, 2020). But perhaps more fundamentally the post-WWII global governance architecture can be argued to hinge on the rise of bureaucracies and a technocratic worldview which is intimately linked with the emergence of modern nation-states in the decennia after the Enlightenment. Tröhler and Maricic (2021) even argue that this development cannot be understood without considering religious ideas about “faith and ideas of salvation” (p. 150). Their argument finds resonance in Fuchs’s (2007) analysis of historical networks in education contending that,

the transnational philanthropic and religious networks of the nineteenth century were replaced by professional actors and experts whose profession was education. The rather private transnational activities turned into formalized international relations that included governments and international agreements. (p. 208)

Part of this new orientation of mastering society included a will to comparison and inspiration from other nations. In this sense, we saw the birth of comparative education as a field (Bu, 1997; Schriewer, 2012). One of the earliest examples was Friedrich August Hecht’s 1795 book De Re Scholastica Anglia Cum Germanica Comparata. Reflecting on the history of comparative education in 1931 and epitomizing a shift towards a more quantitative and generalisable mode of comparability, Scottish educational psychologist, Robert R. Rusk (1879–1972), director of the Scottish Council for Research in Education, referring to standardized tests of the International Examination Inquiry (see below), noted,

For some time past, there has been a discussion in America as to what was meant with comparative education. In the past it meant that a man went round among various countries and gave his opinion. Now that has been discredited so that our investigation and the adaptation of these tests might be made the beginning of a new comparative education on scientific lines. I should therefore merely like to intimate that we here might perhaps form the basis of a new science of comparative education. (cited in Lawn, 2008, p. 26)

The quote signals the transition of the comparative gaze of state-crafting into a belief and confidence that international comparative investigations could be developed into a scientific and objective approach that would allow education to be designed using appropriate datasets. This ambition to make education the object of scientific inquiry and as such improve its role in state-crafting processes was broader than merely comparative education. As argued by Tröhler and Maricic (2021), the social sciences as such should “discover psychological laws, identify the problems of the social world and contribute to ordered progress through an efficiently administered school that converted the pupil into a ‘learning child’ as an empowered future bearer of progress” (p. 139). To no small extent this idea involved the transformation of pedagogy into applied psychology, psychometrics and statistics (Danziger, 1998).

As an international trend, concerns were growing about segments of the population that did not benefit from education and which did not contribute to society in ways that were deemed meaningful. Social engineering was the order of the day as for instance reflected in the British Fabian Society and the People Commissions in the Nordic countries in the interwar years which were deeply dedicated to the cultivation of the societal talent pool. These concerns were fuelled by the rise of eugenic ideas which permeated the leading scientific circles at the time, and which even reached into the founding of UNESCO with Julian Huxley (1887–1975) – a known eugenicist – as its first Director-General (Weindling, 2012).

These were defining components that floated from the interwar to the postwar era. In many ways these ideational building blocks conflated into the notion of human capital, education as an economic production factor, as well as a belief in modernization and development that became so indicative of the post-war global educational architecture. Within the overall paradigm of modernization, there were notable differences between the IOs. A picture can be drawn of an idealist paradigm – represented by UNESCO’s rights-based approach and “scientific humanism” – versus an economic development paradigm – represented by the OECD’s and the World Bank’s reliance on human capital theory. But both of these paradigms were characterized by a strong belief in education as a vehicle of progress. In the next section we will briefly outline some selected organisational steppingstones of the interwar years that epitomized some of these ideational building blocks and laid out important tracks for how the post-war global educational architecture came to operate.

A key organisation of the interwar period is the League of Nations (LN), founded in 1919, which came to serve as the center and main agent for the establishment of new educational networks in the interwar years. More specifically, the batons carried by the two LN bodies, the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (CICI) established in 1922, and the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation (IICI) created in 1926, were picked up in the early formations of UNESCO (Robertson, 2022). In the words of Julian Huxley, the first Director-General of UNESCO, at the General Conference of UNESCO in November 1946, “behind this decision [to establish UNESCO], there lay 15 years of activity of the International Institute of International Cooperation in Paris” (cited in Omolewa, 2007, p. 216).

In relation to education, the New Education Fellowship was founded in 1921 by leading progressive educationalists with a cosmopolitan outlook. Changing its name to World Education Fellowship in 1966, it became a UNESCO-associated non-governmental organization. Similarly, the International Bureau of Education (IBE) – an offshoot of the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute – was created in 1925 to provide intellectual leadership and to promote international cooperation in education. The IBE was integrated into UNESCO in 1969. UNESCO’s philosophy and many of its educational programmes trace back to these inter-war internationalist movements that promoted international understanding through the cooperation of intellectuals (Krill de Capello, 1970; Renoliet, 1999).

Another important development rooted in the interwar period is the emergence of the figure of the international civil servant. In their analysis of the League of Nations, Gram-Skjoldager and Ikonomou (2020) demonstrate how,

the principles of independence from member states and international representation (i.e. a broad geographical dispersion in personnel) articulated in the Standards of Conduct were adopted and emulated by other post-war international and regional organizations such as the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC)… . (p. 227)

While the establishment of an international bureaucracy was necessary for the credibility and authority commanded by IOs, it also meant a delicate balance for the international bureaucracy between being accepted as legitimate by member states and being autonomous from the same, i.e., a tension between whether international bureaucrats are expected to represent the interests of the nation-state from which they originate or whether they are supposed to serve the field and the cause for which they work; i.e. ideally be the embodiments of disinterested internationalism and pure scientific interest. This tension connects with the question of mandate – and mode of governance – of IOs which very much relies on their function vis-à-vis member states which often constitutes their very raison d’être. For instance, and as pointed out by the Welsh League of Nations Director, Gwylum Davies, in his account on “Intellectual Cooperation between the Two Wars”, prepared for the founding of UNESCO, “national education lies outside and will always lie outside the competence of any official committee of the League” (Davies, 1943, p. 12). Another layer of tension in the establishment and reproduction of an international bureaucracy is the question of who gets to take up which positions, which positions guarantee the most influence and which areas stand out as particularly important for various national interests. As it was already visible in the League of Nations, the human make-up of international organizations tends to reflect and reproduce power hierarchies (Gram-Skjoldager & Ikonomou, 2020).

As argued above, the launch of scientific approaches as a means to the development of education became very pronounced in the post-WWII scenario. Networks of scientists and researchers in the interwar years constitute an important factor in this development. A key network in this respect was the International Examinations Inquiry (IEI) funded by the Carnegie Foundation and operational between 1931–1938. The IEI comprised USA, Scotland, England, France, Germany and Switzerland, and it later grew to include Norway, Sweden and Finland (Lawn, 2008). The aim of the IEI project was to determine the most effective way of examining students for entry into secondary education. It produced publications on examinations and intelligence and was dedicated to the development of international standards and statistical tools for testing and comparison. As argued by Lawn (2008), the IEI

appears to model or at least foreshadow a spate of post Second World War international studies and the establishing of common epistemic communities, in which loosely integrated professional, academic and policy actors form a network, and it establishes a model of work recommended for the post-war United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). (p. 9)

The IEI constituted a motley crew of pioneering participants reflecting the different strands of education research at the time – the study of intelligence, comparative education, and child-centred pedagogy associated with the progressive education movement. One of the leading actors of the IEI was Isaac Kandel (1881–1965), Professor at Columbia University and a pioneer of comparative education, who became a major educational advisor to UNESCO in its early years (Kandel, 1955). Others included

…the founders and popularisers of the study of intelligence (Spearman, Thomson, Drever, Thorndike, Nunn, Ballard), the first generation of comparativists in education (Monroe, Kandel, Sadler and Ulich), and key members of a world progressive education movement (Ziliacus, Bovet, McClelland and Boyd). (Lawn, 2008, p. 11)

But the IEI was also an arena for the development of key instruments and approaches enacted in the OECD and World Bank in the post-war global educational architecture. As argued by Lawn (2008), “through the alchemy of their procedures, with a language of reliability and an emerging discourse of objective and universal standards, they [i.e. the members of the IEI] are beginning to establish their authority over the older cultural connoisseurship and qualitative judgment of the earlier internationalists” (p. 15). But we also see the contours of the extrapolation of nationalisms in the IEI, that is the use of international networks and organisations to promote national agendas and/or national models of development. Lawn highlights how “within the internal correspondence between the key New York actors (Monroe, Keppel and Thorndike), there is a clear sense of mission to modernise examining practices in other countries (in the new American way) and to ‘offer’ a distinctive and valuable research practice which could be used by European countries” (Lawn, 2008, p. 20). In this sense, the IEI is an early example of an international forum where leading actors in the fields of comparative education and assessment formed an alliance promoting an approach to education where numbers and ideals about modernization, objectivity and generalization stand central. Simultaneously, this approach was strongly promoted by the American members of the IEI with a distinct cultural export agenda seeking to proliferate the American way to European counterparts. As we shall see, the course of these interwar dynamics would become even more pronounced in the post-war global educational architecture.

UNESCO was founded as a specialized agency of the United Nations in 1945. Tracing back to the League of Nations, UNESCO emerged from the conviction that cooperation limited to the political and economic realm was not sufficient to secure peace in the world, but that states and people around the globe needed to collaborate in the fields of education, science, culture and communication in order to achieve an “intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind”, as stated in UNESCO’s constitution. This represented a new approach and a new experiment of international cooperation, which prompted some of the earlier writers about UNESCO to define its function as “symbolic”: “The Organization has met the condition of being a symbol to the peoples of the world of ‘what is now desirable and what may become an actuality in the future’. As such it has a standing in its own right” (Sathyamurthy, 1964, p. 51/52). This view is consistent with that of constructivist scholars of international relations, who have defined UNESCO as an example of an organization that exists primarily “for reasons of legitimacy and normative fit rather than efficient output” (Barnett & Finnemore, 1999, p. 703).

UNESCO, which is based in Paris, is predominantly an intellectual organization that generates normative documents and human rights frameworks for its member states, such as the Convention against Discrimination in Education, adopted in 1960. Its key mandate and raison d’être is international understanding, and UNESCO’s ontology is underpinned by an idealistic worldview, which contrasts with the focus of the OECD and World Bank on education as means to an end, namely productivity and economic growth. UNESCO’s ontology as the “conscience of humanity” (d’Orville, 2015, p. 100) derives from a cosmopolitan and universalist outlook, which emphasizes what unites people rather than what divides them, captured by Laves and Thomson (1957) as the principle of “unity in diversity”. Another pillar of UNESCO’s Weltanschauung is the unshakable belief in education for the purpose of developing every human being’s full potential and in the capacity of human beings to change their world for the better. Here, the pre-WWII ideals of progressive educationalists can be clearly traced. However, UNESCO’s history is characterized precisely by tensions deriving from its role as an organization with a strong normative mandate, which is often at odds with the dominant managerial principles of effectiveness and accountability. More than the OECD and the World Bank, which have somewhat greater autonomy because their constituents form a much more homogenous group (in the case of the OECD) or because the role of the organization is much more unambiguous (as in the case of the World Bank), UNESCO had to navigate several fields of tensions, starting even before UNESCO was founded, when two competing proposals regarding the role of the new organization had been put forth, one by the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education (CAME), based on a proposal by the American government, the other by the French government.

While the CAME draft proposed an intergovernmental organization engaging in work of a technical and functional kind, the French proposal represented a vision for an organization based on the collaboration among intellectuals, following the model of the League of Nations’ IICI (Krill de Capello, 1970). This ambiguity between a broad intellectual and a limited technical mandate for the organization has never been resolved (Elfert, 2018; Jones, 1988). When in the context of decolonization development became an important domain for multilateral organizations, UNESCO had to demonstrate its functionality as an operational IO, in order to compete with the other agencies that gained influence in the multilateral arena. Consequently, many donors have treated UNESCO as a development agency, to be evaluated on the basis of measurable results, which is very problematic for a normative organization like UNESCO (Elfert, 2018). Another example of the tension between the technical-intellectual binary are the reforms “aimed at improving the efficiency of the work of the Executive Board” (UNESCO, 1992), the first in 1954 and the second in 1993. These changes entailed that the Executive Board was no longer composed of autonomous experts who were appointed by governments, with the result that technocrats instead of intellectuals assume the seats in the Executive Board and the committees, which has diluted the organization’s intellectual capacity (Hüfner, 2015; Elfert, 2018).

Many hopes were pinned on the founding of UNESCO, but from the outset there were indications pointing to the gap between its potentialities and what the circumstances would actually allow the organization to become. This is what William Benton, vice-chairman of the American delegation to the founding conference, held in London in 1945, likely meant when he claimed that UNESCO was the “most underrated organization in history” (Preston et al., 1989, p. 33). The organization’s unifying ambitions were based on the hope that humanity would evolve toward a world community (Sluga, 2010) – UNESCO’s first Director-General Julian Huxley proposed “the advance of world civilization” (p. 412) as one of UNESCO’s central mandates.^{Footnote 2} This unifying worldview has greatly influenced the organization to the present day, but has always been highly contested. Huxley’s cosmopolitanism was controversial as nationalism was still going strong, and the United Nations and UNESCO were by no means a project that would undermine nationalist aspirations (Mazower, 2008). An indication of the reluctance of the Great Powers to give up national sovereignty in favour of multilateral structures was the decision taken by the United States and several Western countries in 1944 to channel funds for post-war reconstruction bilaterally rather than through UNESCO, which meant that UNESCO’s budget would remain very limited, a factor that has impaired the organization even before it was established (Jones, 1988).

Early on, UNESCO’s potentialities were also seriously hampered by competition with other emerging international agencies, initially the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), later the World Bank and the OECD. These IOs contributed to constructing UNESCO’s high-flown educational programs, from “fundamental education” (1946–1958) to the Experimental World Literacy Program (EWLP) (1965–1976), as failures as they were not successful in showing economic returns (Elfert, 2018). The EWLP was already “a kind of consolation measure” (Jones & Coleman, 2005, p. 203), which was adapted to the parameters of available UNDP funding, as by the mid-1960s it was clear that UNESCO had to give up its eternal dream of a global literacy campaign. While such a campaign found strong support among the newly independent countries that came out of colonial rule, the United States was critical of it and favoured a focus on the expansion of formal school education and technical education (Jones & Coleman, 2005; Dorn & Ghodsee, 2012). Both the “fundamental education” programme and the EWLP illustrate that UNESCO was continuously forced to downsize its ambitious educational visions.

On the one hand the Cold War period was difficult for UNESCO as the organization was constantly under suspicion of falling under communist influence (Interview with Alexandra Draxler, 2019)^{Footnote 3} and suffered from Cold War tensions between its member states, which resulted in what some have referred to as the politicization of UNESCO (Dorn & Ghodsee, 2012). In the United States especially, conservative hostility against the organization was high (Hart, 2016). On the other hand, the Cold War gave meaning to UNESCO, as it was one of the few diplomatic spaces where the East and the West could meet. As Mark Bray^{Footnote 4} put it, “That’s where UNESCO had the edge on the World Bank. The Soviet Union was not a World Bank member, and so UNESCO was a universal organisation and Russian was… one of the six… UN languages” (Interview, 2019). Of the three IOs discussed in this chapter, UNESCO played the most important role in keeping diplomatic relationships with institutions and personalities of the Soviet sphere of influence, although also “the OECD sought to be a place where Cold War tensions could be defused with East-West cooperation on issues such as trade, tourism and technology” (Hynes & Trzeciak-Duval, 2015, p. 30).^{Footnote 5} Several of UNESCO’s initiatives, such as its Associated Schools programme, spanned East-West boundaries. UNESCO’s inter-governmental conferences, such as MINEDEUROPE, the Conference of Ministers of Education of UNESCO’s European Member States, and the International Conferences on Adult Education (CONFINTEA), brought together countries from both sides of the Iron Curtain (Barrows, 2017; Elfert, 2013a). Another notable institution was UNESCO’s European Centre for Higher Education (CEPES), founded in Bucharest in 1972, which served as a space of dialogue for policy-makers and researchers from Eastern and Western European countries (Barrows, 2017).

It could therefore be argued that the end of the Cold War diminished UNESCO’s authority as the global organization for education. While during the 1970s and 1980s, UNESCO’s educational activities to a large extent revolved around literacy and lifelong education, since 1990, UNESCO’s agenda has been dominated by the Education for All (EFA) initiative with its focus on universal primary education, against UNESCO’s comprehensive lifelong learning approach (Power, 2015). The shift in educational priorities that EFA entailed, constituted another concession that the organization made due to the pressure exerted in particular by the World Bank. Chabbott (1998) explained the dominance of the World Bank over the EFA process with the coercive effect of “the dependence of other donor agencies and the developing countries themselves on the financial and intellectual resources of the World Bank” (p. 212).

Since 2011, UNESCO has been in a precarious situation due to the loss of the American membership dues. To compensate for this loss, UNESCO had to accept voluntary project-bound contributions, which jeopardized the autonomy of the organization as the donor countries determine its programme (Hüfner, 2015). The lack of funding pushes the organization into cooperation with the private sector, as illustrated by the Global Education Coalition launched by UNESCO as a response to the Covid crisis (Shultz & Viczko, 2021). The admission of corporations such as Microsoft into the group of UNESCO partners, putting them at the same level as NGOs, risks to put UNESCO in the position of a service provider (Seitz & Martens, 2017). Although UNESCO still has a coordinating role in the framing and implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4), the UNESCO-driven SDG-4-related 2030 Framework for Action (UNESCO et al., 2016) is being challenged by parallel agendas, such as the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and its expansion to developing countries and the World Bank’s “learning agenda” based on the measurement of learning outcomes. New global governance bodies are taking over the role that was traditionally assigned to UNESCO, not only the OECD and the World Bank, but also multistakeholder groups such as the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), the G7 and the G20 (Matovich & Srivastava, 2023; Wulff, 2019).

The OECD was established in 1961 in Paris. It grew out of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), which was created in 1948 to channel American investments and know-how to European countries in the context of the Marshall Plan. Many scholars have pointed out that the OECD must be understood as an organization shaped by the bipolar world order of the Cold War, characterized by the rivalry between United States and the Soviet Union, representing two different political systems and ideologies (Leimgruber & Schmelzer, 2017; Bürgi, 2017a, b; Ydesen, 2020). The launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite, in 1957, which came as a shock to the United States, is often referred to as the moment after which “the Cold War became thoroughly educationalized” (Tröhler, 2014, p. 3) as the US government and scientific institutions started to invest in education, in particular science education, in order to secure scientific and technological superiority over the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, the OEEC and later the OECD served as platforms for the spread of the scientific and managerial turn of education and the pursuit of American economic policies for “productivity” and economic growth – a period characterized by a faith in social engineering and a trust in numbers (Porter, 1995). The organization furthered the rationalization and standardization of education with the help of “representational technologies” and planning tools, such as statistics (Tröhler, 2014). In 1958, the same year when the National Defense Education Act was launched in the United States as a reaction to Sputnik, the US government initiated the establishment of the Office for Scientific and Technical Personnel (OSTP) in the OEEC, with the aim of increasing the supply of a scientifically and technically trained labour force (King, 2006; Papadopoulos, 1994, p. 23). Planning was at the core of the mandate of the OSTP, which “has been advocating planned investment in human resources and contending that in no country should education be allowed to develop in a haphazard manner unrelated to its wider economic and social repercussions” (OECD, 1965a, p. 8).

While the promise of technology and productivity was embraced in the United States, Europeans were much more apprehensive towards these ideas as they feared they would lead to unemployment and exploitation (Bürgi, 2020; Elfert, 2018). An example of how the OEEC served the spread of the American management culture to Europe was the European Productivity Agency (EPA), which represented one of the key operational bodies within the OEEC and accounted for 40% of its budget (Boel, 2003). The EPA, which promoted the spread of American business management schools and methods across Europe (Gemelli, 1996; King, 2006), has been considered an important precursor of the OECD in terms of its “enculturation” function (Bürgi, 2020). As stated by Boel (2003), “the politics of productivity thus also served the strategical purpose of fortifying a ‘free world’ united by common ideals—those embodied by the American way of life—and weakening its enemies” (p. 22). The OEEC/OECD was also instrumental in what scholars have called the “economization of education” (Spring, 2015). As formulated by the President of the OECD Development Centre, Robert Buron, in 1965, a key achievement of the OEEC/OECD was “the establishment of a sort of common economic language” (OECD, 1965b, p. 10) among its member states. A Study Group on the Economics of Education, set up in 1960, was greatly influenced by human capital theory and American rate of return studies (Schultz, 1963; Becker, 1964), which showed a strong relationship between investment in education and economic growth (Lyons, 1964/1965). Denison’s seminal OECD study (Denison, 1962; OECD, 1964) contended that, apart from factors such as capital and labour, there had to be a third factor instrumental for economic growth, a “residual factor”, which was attributed to investments in human beings, such as in education and health.

The OECD Conference on “Economic Growth and Investment in Education”, held in Washington in 1961, building on a previous conference on “Economic Aspects of Educational Development in Europe”, held a year prior at the Rockefeller Foundation conference center in Bellagio, Italy, led to two major operational projects based on the theory of the relationship between education and the economy: the Mediterranean Regional Project (MRP), an educational planning project carried out by the OECD in its poorer European member states, and the Educational Investment and Planning Programme (EIP), which was concerned with educational planning and growth studies in economically more advanced OECD member countries (Bürgi, 2017a, b; Lyons, 1964/1965). The MRP, which ran from 1962–1965, represented an experiment in manpower planning, which was in line with the highly technocratic social engineering approach characteristic for the time. It entailed the calculation of a country’s “manpower” needs and the drawing up of plans for the allocation of resources to meet those needs, based on available statistics and economic and demographic data. The methodology employed by the MRP, which attracted the attention of economists of education, was later transferred to some Latin American countries, with financial support from the Ford Foundation. We will come back to the early years of educational planning in the next chapter. From a historical perspective, the MRP represented an important episode in the life of the OECD in so far as it reflected the scientific, social engineering mindset of the early Cold War era, which has persisted in the OECD to this day.

When the EPA was dissolved, many of its programmes were transitioned into the OECD and taken up by various units such as the Committee for Scientific and Technical Personnel (CSTP), the Manpower and Social Affairs Committee, and the Development Assistance Committee (Bürgi, 2017a). In 1968, with funding from the Ford Foundation and Royal Dutch Shell, the OECD set up a Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), which grew out of the CSTP. In light of the student unrest and sense of crisis that prevailed in the late 1960s, CERI marked a shift in the work of the OECD towards innovation, taking a research and policy orientation and expanding the disciplinary basis of its activities from economists to sociologists (Bürgi, 2017b). In the 1970s, very much under the influence of Sweden’s progressive education policies during that period, CERI engaged with the concept of recurrent education, which represented the Centre’s interest in the role of education for social equality (Rubenson, 1994). However, the recurrent education experiment was short-lived as, in the context of neoliberal policies, the OECD became more focused on a results- and output-oriented approach (Eide, 1990, p. 34). The OECD’s 1989 report Education and the Economy in a Changing Society marked a renewed focus on the economy, in that “education was no longer promoted as a common good but as an instrument in global competition” (Rubenson, 2008, p. 253). Additionally, the OECD had to respond to member states’ concerns about growing youth unemployment, a defining feature of the economic situation during the 1980s (Eide, 1990; Papadopoulos, 1994; Li & Auld, 2020).

The output orientation of the OECD became very apparent when the organization started its “Indicators of Education System” (INES) programme, which aimed at building a system for comparative education statistics within the OECD. The indicators were published every year in the Education at a Glance report, which was launched in 1992 (Lundgren, 2011). The United States was a driving force behind this initiative. Since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983 triggered anxiety among the American public about the shortcomings of the American school system, the United States became very interested in comparable education statistics in the context of the rising discourse of the “knowledge society” (Lundgren, 2011). Henry et al. (2001) reveal how President Reagan’s administration drove the OECD to launch a programme aimed at improving the international indicators of education to make transnational comparisons more reliable and valid. Based on the INES indicators, the OECD produced its “country reports”, reviews of member states’ school systems and education policies, which generally appeared to be infused by at least two principles, first, a shift from inputs and procedures to learning outcomes; and second, the need to instil an evaluation culture based on accountability, transparency and the appraisal of education stakeholders against well-defined performance and quality benchmarks (Verger et al., 2019). As Gorur (2015) has argued, the INES programme and Education at a Glance illustrate how the OECD has made “the world of education calculable and comparable” (p. 581).

In the 1960s and part of the 1970s – and in keeping with the dominant economic Keynesian paradigm at the time – the frame of reference among OECD specialists was the state. Key questions they grappled with were related to how states could optimise “manpower” investments to improve economic growth and how mathematical models could be developed to forecast these needs (Lyons, 1964/1965). In the 1970s, the OECD began to reorient its centre of gravity from the state to the individual and took a more sociologically-oriented approach as exemplified in the recurrent education agenda (Rubenson, 2008). In line with the rise of new public management around 1980, Lundgren (2011) contends that, as a general characteristic of this decade, “education became the arena for consultants with ambitions to increase efficiency and restructure management” (p. 21). These changes indicate a shift towards a more market-oriented approach to education (Kallo, 2021), which went along with the shift from inputs, processes and contextual approaches to educational outputs and standards.

In 1998, the OECD founded the Centre for Co-operation with Non-Members, which constituted the culmination of a new focus within the OECD on non-member states and “economies in transition”, that began after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the period which, according to Martens (2007), marked the emergence of a “comparative turn” in the OECD. Education was positioned as an economic production factor tasked with providing human capital to sustain national economic competitiveness in an emerging knowledge economy (Li & Auld, 2020). The OECD positioned itself as an organization with the right tools and solutions for ‘new economies’ to adopt the Western path of development and prosperity. Education constituted a central building block of that agenda, and participation in international large-scale assessment programmes (ILSAs) such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) was presented as the key tool of education quality assurance and a guarantee of being on the right track in the global competition race (Rasmussen & Ydesen, 2020).

Throughout its history, the OECD had a strong policy orientation. In contrast to its main competitor in the domain of ILSAs, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), which has a much longer history than the OECD in administering ILSAs such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), the OECD does not limit itself to conducting the surveys and providing the data, but engages in policy recommendations and interpretations and policy-oriented “packaging” and marketing of the data. In particular PISA is accompanied by a range of products such as a video series that features “high performers in education”, media-friendly rankings and by-products such as “PISA 4U” and “PISA for Schools”, which, from a global governance perspective, “help further the ability of the OECD and partner organisations to speak directly to schools without the intervention of government” (Lewis, 2017, p. 531), supporting the finding that “the OECD is increasingly operating as a global education policy actor in its own right” (p. 532). The branding and marketing skills of the OECD are a big part of what many scholars consider its hegemonic influence on education policies. The organization demonstrates a strong perception of the dominant policy discourses and responsiveness to the issues that member states are preoccupied with. It is therefore fair to say that to some extent the OECD shifted from an organization that was pursuing data for the sake of policy to an organization that pursues data as a “self-serving instrument” (Li, 2021).

The OECD Vision Statement released in 2011 on the organization’s 50th anniversary seems to indicate a new chapter in the expansion of the OECD’s ambitions in education. The Learning Framework 2030 aims to develop and improve the practical applicability of the OECD’s competence framework. As argued by Li and Auld (2020), the OECD has taken “a humanitarian turn”, which consists of a blend between economic competitiveness and social inclusion, “expanding the scope of PISA metrics to incorporate non-cognitive skills, such as social and emotional skills, creativity, and well-being” (Li, 2021, p. 53; see also Rappleye et al., 2020). The “social inclusion” turn is not new to the OECD, which, in particular in the 1970s after the creation of CERI, engaged with considerations of equality of opportunity with its concept of “recurrent education”. Even though the scope of the OECD’s policies in education undergoes shifts, the cultivation of talent and human capital as a vehicle for providing the appropriate competences and skills to the labour market remains a vital purpose of education in the OECD discourse.

The OECD is an IO that has so far succeeded in constantly re-inventing itself and persuading others that its role is necessary and beneficial. This adaptive and persuasive part of its identity goes back to the times of the OEEC when the organization’s original mandate – the administration and coordination of the Marshall Plan in Europe – became obsolete, and in order to survive, the organization needed to find a new role for itself. Significantly, the name of the successor organization, OECD, does not include the word “European” anymore, as it expanded across the Atlantic to include the United States and Canada, and took on the word “development”, which is a significant marker of the OECD’s legitimacy, promising the right stage of development for its member states and non-member states if they follow its recommendations. In that respect the organization lives off its “promissory legitimacy” (Beckert, 2020, p. 318). The paradigms of productivity, human capital and economic growth that characterized the educational vision of the OECD were endowed with this “promissory legitimacy” that explains the OECD’s hegemonic role as shaper of education policy. In that respect, as formulated by Rubenson (2008), “the OECD has achieved hegemony over educational discourse through its capacity to manufacture the ‘common sense’ of society” (p. 242). Ron Gass (2013), a pioneer of the OECD, put it as follows: “Although the OECD has legally binding codes and conventions, it operates mostly according to the ‘soft power’ of peer pressure and persuasion” (para. 3). PISA is the prime contemporary example of how peer pressure and persuasion is achieved through OECD’s governance by “competitive comparison” and “vertical ordering of things and people according to their relative positions on ranking scales” (Sorenson & Robertson, 2020, p. 21). In this regard the OECD still permeates the logic of the Cold War. As one of our interviewees put it, “the OECD … has set itself up as the one organization that wants to show in the competition of systems that we are always the best” (Klaus Hüfner,^{Footnote 6} cited in Elfert & Ydesen, 2020, p. 89). With its ability to perceive the dominant discourses and market the “common sense” of society, while being at the same time an elite club of rich countries, its use of “soft power” on the basis of “representational technologies” (in particular the PISA study) and the spread of the gospel of innovation and social development, the OECD represents the global governance organization par excellence.

The World Bank was created as the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) as part of the post-WWII financial order conceived at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 with the purpose of funding post-war reconstruction. When the reconstruction mandate lost pertinence, the Bank shifted its attention towards the financing of infrastructure development projects in developing countries. The late 1950s and 1960s were the high time of the decolonization movement and education became an urgent issue for newly independent African and Asian countries. In the context of the human capital and Cold War Sputnik era, the World Bank emerged as a “chosen instrument” (Oliver, 1989, p. 1) of the American foreign policy interests, which included education as a way of drawing countries into the American sphere of influence. The World Bank granted its first educational loan to Tunisia in 1962. In the early years, the Bank’s educational loans were strictly related to human capital and productivity considerations – similar to the case of the OECD, education had to be conducive to economic development. The Bank’s lending activities in the 1960s and 1970s thus focused on vocational, technical and secondary education, which was considered important for training workers and skilled personnel for the economy. An example of this approach was the Bank’s focus on “diversified” curricula between the 1960s and the 1980s, based on the Bank’s conviction that practical training such as woodshop for boys and cooking for girls, was more relevant for economic development than academic subjects (Heyneman, 2003). Infrastructure projects, such as school buildings, constituted another area of educational lending (Jones, 1992).

As the World Bank had no expertise in education, it established, in 1964, a Co-operative Program with UNESCO, which lasted officially until 1989. A unit of professionals, the Education Financing Division (EFD), was formed, which was located in UNESCO Headquarters in Paris and staffed by UNESCO, in cooperation with the World Bank. The financing of the division, which carried out the technical preparations of the Bank’s educational loans, was divided between 75% by the World Bank and 25% by UNESCO. As will be discussed in detail in Chap. 4, the relationship between the Bank and UNESCO was an uneasy marriage. Although both organizations formally belong to the United Nations system, the World Bank joined the UN only reluctantly and was always concerned about its independence as a financial organization that relies on its close ties to Wall Street. As shown by Elfert (2021), in the 25 years of the existence of the Co-operative Program between UNESCO and the World Bank, the Bank built its own resources and expertise and overtook UNESCO as the main policy shaper for education in low-income countries.

Under the presidency of Robert McNamara (1968–1981) the World Bank broadened its scope to a development agency that claimed an intellectual and policy authority in advising countries on their education systems. The Bank expanded educational lending with a focus on the poorest countries and also increased lending for basic and primary education (Kapur et al., 1997). The 1974 Education Sector Working Paper reflected this new self-identity of the World Bank and therefore caused considerable tension between the World Bank and UNESCO (Elfert, 2021). The 1980 Bell report, which was the outcome of a commissioned panel of experts chaired by the Executive Vice President of the Ford Foundation, David E. Bell, recommended a diversification of the Bank’s methodology, which so far had been too narrowly focused on manpower planning. The Bank’s subsequent shift to the rate of return approach allowed for an expansion of investment in primary education, secondary and general higher education, as well as education research. This development paved the way for a further extension of the Bank’s educational activities into the realm of UNESCO’s responsibilities (Elfert, 2021).

Based on the rate of return approach, much of the Bank’s lending in the 1980s followed a “short policy menu” (Heyneman, 2003), prescribing investments in primary education, education sectors opening up towards privatization and placing increasing costs for education on students and parents at a time when countries were burdened by the debt crisis (Mundy & Verger, 2015). In this situation, in which countries were particularly vulnerable, the World Bank had expanded its role to that of both “juge et partie” (judge and party) (Elfert, 2021, drawing on Sack, 1988). The double role of the World Bank as funder and policy adviser was particularly problematic during the era of the structural adjustment programmes – the 1980s and 1990s –, when countries were forced to accept conditions (“conditionalities”) tied to loans, which imposed the reduction of public sector spending and market-oriented principles for education. These policy measures, which were promoted particularly in Africa and Latin America, had detrimental effects on education in low-income countries, where the improvement of education was particularly important for economic development. As argued by Carnoy (1995), structural adjustment policies “were associated with increased poverty, increased inequality of income and wealth and slow (or negative) economic growth” (p. 657).

In the early 1980s, the educational investments of the World Bank, which had traditionally focused on technical and secondary education, moved towards primary education. In the aftermath of the Bell report and the epistemological shift towards the rate of return approach, the Bank, in 1981, hired the economist George Psacharopoulos as head of the Education Department’s Research Unit, whose research suggested that primary education yielded the highest rates of return compared to other levels of education (Jones, 1992; Psacharopoulos, 1981). The World Bank’s influential report Education Policies for Sub-Saharan Africa: Adjustment, Revitalization, and Expansion asserted that “renewal of progress toward universal primary education is the new investment that will bring the highest economic and social returns in many countries” (The World Bank, 1987, p. 132). This new priority was very consequential, as the focus on the expansion of primary education came to dominate the global Education for All (EFA) initiative, which was launched in 1990 at the World Conference on Education for All (WCEFA) in Jomtien, Thailand. Initially spearheaded by UNICEF, all major international organizations, NGOs and aid agencies were involved in this global agenda, which was meant to expand basic education in developing countries. Although UNESCO, which coordinated EFA, favoured a broader approach to basic education, including adult literacy, the World Bank prevailed with its priority on the expansion of universal primary education (Power, 2015).

In 2000, a follow-up conference was held to take stock of (lacking) progress of the EFA initiative, the World Education Forum in Dakar. While UNESCO continued to be in charge of the overall coordination of EFA, the World Bank took the leading role in the Fast-Track Initiative (FTI), a multilateral fund set up to finance universal primary education on the basis of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) that the countries needed to produce as a condition for funds. The PRSPs, as well as the national EFA strategies, which fell under the responsibility of UNESCO, brought about a much stronger emphasis on accountability than had been the case in the first decade of EFA. The PRSPs, which had to be “agreed” by donors and then implemented by national governments, consituted the vehicle by which countries were subjected to the logic of the market. As Paul Cammack (2006) put it, the PRSPs represented “a case, perhaps, of poor countries being clubbed into convergence” (p. 6; see also Cammack, 2002). From the FTI emerged the Global Partnership of Education (GPE), established around 2010 as a response to the growing criticism of the dominance of the World Bank and donor countries in the FTI. While the World Bank still hosts the GPE, it represents a “‘transnational public-private partnership’ … of donor and developing country governments, multilateral organizations, civil society, private companies and foundations” (Menashy, 2016, p. 98). Although the GPE investments still focus on schooling, Mundy and Verger (2015) have pointed out that since the financial crisis in 2008, Bank education lending has shifted from African countries towards large emerging economies, such as Brazil and India, who are more interested in secondary and tertiary levels of education than in basic education.

In the past two decades, the World Bank has focused on the measurement of learning outcomes as a way to ensure the quality of education systems, reflected in the Bank’s Systems Approach for Better Educational Results (SABER), defined on the Bank’s website as an “initiative to produce comparative data and knowledge on education policies and institutions, with the aim of helping countries systematically strengthen their education systems and the ultimate goal of promoting Learning for All” (The World Bank, 2021a). Not only has the Bank funded the participation of countries in learning outcome surveys and International Large Scale Assessments (ILSAs), it has also signed a partnership agreement with the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) to strengthen capacities of low-income countries to measure learning outcomes (Fontdevila, 2021; The World Bank/UIS, 2019; Mundy, 2019). New indicators such as the Learning Poverty Target (The World Bank, 2019) and initiatives such as the Human Capital Project, “a global effort to accelerate more and better investments in people for greater equity and economic growth” (The World Bank, 2021b), serve the World Bank’s pursuit of “measuring the unmeasurable” (Unterhalter, 2017) and mastering the social world under a scientific guise, underpinned by its highly technocratic management approach and tools, which will be further discussed below. In light of its track record of policy measures based on scientific claims that have turned out to be controversial, such as the doxa of the “diversified curricula”, the structural adjustment programmes, the promotion of school fees and the narrow focus on primary education, the Bank’s policy prescriptions have to be taken with a grain of salt.

Since it started granting educational loans in the 1960s, the World Bank has developed into the most influential policy shaper of education in low-income countries. Especially since the McNamara years, the Bank has sought to expand its role from a bank to a development agency. This development was enabled by the Bank’s role as “juge et partie” of education policies, as it tied educational loans to conditions, of which the structural adjustment programmes are the prime example, and which made it a coercive actor of global governance of education. With regard to the future of the World Bank’s influence on education, the Bank’s dominance might be weakened by geopolitical factors, such as the decline of the United States as the global hegemonic power, the changing dynamics among Bank members and “the questionable value” of “the rigidity and linearity of Bank prescriptions for educational systems… [for] the rapidly transforming emerging economies” (Mundy & Verger, 2015, p. 17).

The three IOs discussed in this book represent the formation of somewhat contrasting agendas of the reconstruction of education after the Second World War. UNESCO represents the logic of internationalism in terms of the promotion of international understanding, global peace and universal values through the development of international structures. The idealist ontology of the organization is anchored in the iconic sentence of its constitution: “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.” UNESCO’s cosmopolitan view of international cooperation derives from inter-war movements of intellectual cooperation as embodied in the ICIC of the League of Nations; its ideology goes back to the Enlightenment tradition of idealism and belief in progress and modernity (Renoliet, 1999). The World Bank and the OECD, on the other hand, represent a line of thinking on international relations that relies on the logic of globalization in terms of the global marketplace and the free flow of capital, and the pursuit of competition as a driver of the world order.^{Footnote 7} Both the OECD and the World Bank were to a large extent useful tools of the expansion of American hegemony – the OECD helped to expand American influence in Europe, and the World Bank was the “chosen instrument” of American free-market foreign policy in developing countries. UNESCO, on the other hand, turned out to be a difficult partner for the United States, although the country was instrumental in creating the organization. With the influx of newly independent “Third World” countries in the late 1950s and 1960s,^{Footnote 8} UNESCO, which represents the most democratic among the three organizations, as it is “the UN organization institutionally most directly responsive to the majority of its members” (Samoff, 1996, p. 267), became unattractive for the United States as a foreign policy instrument. Ultimately the United States has greatly contributed to weakening UNESCO’s influence in the international realm (Elfert & Ydesen, 2020).

While the idealistic-humanistic ideology dominated the thinking about education in the first decade after WWII, in the 1950s a counter-agenda emerged with “the marriage of two social sciences, economics and education” (UNESCO, 2003, p. 4), from which the concept of “human capital” derived, which is still the dominant paradigm underpinning education policies worldwide. This tension between the humanistic and economistic approach to education runs like a thread through the relationship of the three IOs and global governance of education to this day. The ontological difference between the World Bank and UNESCO can be illustrated by their approach to literacy. Universal literacy has always been a priority for UNESCO, and in the early 1960s UNESCO submitted a proposal for the realization of a universal literacy campaign to the UN General Assembly. However, the proposal lacked support, especially by the United States, forcing UNESCO to downscale its plans, which resulted in the Experimental World Literacy Programme (Elfert, 2021; Mundy, 1999). Also, the World Bank was strongly opposed to the idea of a universal literacy campaign – the difference in the approach to literacy between UNESCO and the World Bank is well formulated by Ricardo Diez Hochleitner, the first head of education at the World Bank, who was seconded in 1963 from UNESCO. He stated in an office memorandum to a superior at the World Bank that “literacy is not an end in itself [UNESCO’s position] but an instrument of adult education to fit adults to assume responsibilities and to play an active role in economic and social development [the Bank’s position]” (cited in Elfert, 2021, p. 7; square brackets added). While UNESCO promoted education as a right and public good with an intrinsic value, the Bank considered education primarily as a means to an end, namely as an investment in productivity and economic growth. The OECD’s position is similar to the Bank’s although there are periods in the OECD’s history when the OECD held a kind of middle ground between these two positions. The OECD’s engagement with recurrent education, which will be discussed in Chap. 6, is a case in point.

Both the OECD and the World Bank pursue grand measurement projects, but we would argue that the OECD is more interested in measurement for the sake of “competitive comparison”, while the World Bank is guided by the rationalistic logic of effectiveness. During the period of the Co-operative Programme between the Bank and UNESCO, even UNESCO staff acknowledged that UNESCO could learn from the World Bank in terms of its “structure” and effectiveness that is illustrated by the highly bureaucratized cycle of its educational loans (Elfert, 2021). Management tools such as the Planning-Programming-Budgeting System (PPBS), brought into the World Bank by Robert McNamara, allowed for professionalization and bureaucratization of the Bank’s operations. PPBS was a corporate management tool that had been developed by the RAND Corporation for military purposes, as an “efficient machinery with which to exercise management authority” (McNamara, 1968, p. 94), which “shifted the focus on decision-making from inputs to outputs” (Breul, 2010, cited by Natsios, 2010, p. 15). These representational technologies were used to “expand the dominance of rational organizations” (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, p. 150) over education for development and claim bureaucratic expertise. They represent the “coercive isomorphism” (p. 150) of the Bank, which is one of the features that allowed it to expand its role as a key actor of the global governance of education. The managerial approach to educational planning left its imprint on UNESCO during the period of the Co-operative Program between the Bank and UNESCO. Due to isomorphic processes, results-based management and technocratic management procedures have pervaded UNESCO, which are to some extent at odds with the organization’s humanistic ideology (Benavot, 2011; Elfert, 2018; Elfert, 2021) and may constitute a hindrance to the realization of “progressive educational transformations externally” (Benavot, 2011, p. 558).

While all three organizations are guided by a scientific worldview, the World Bank and the OECD are much more than UNESCO characterized by a culture of social engineering, based on material technologies and a comparative outlook, represented by indicators, ILSAs, statistical tools, and the development of standards (Lawn, 2008; Ydesen & Andreasen, 2020). The strong increase in PISA participation would not have been possible without the World Bank’s grants and loans that provided strong incentives for countries, and in some cases, coerced them to participate in ILSAs. Although UNESCO also pursued these technologies as they were part of its mandate, UNESCO with its emphasis on normative instruments and universal values has a much more immaterial outlook, as stated in its constitution. UNESCO also lacked the resources and structural conditions to compete with the OECD and the World Bank over these technologies. As we will discuss in Chap. 5, UNESCO’s function as provider of education statistics was highly contested, among others by the OECD and the World Bank. Some of the representational technologies that dominate the education discourse today even started in UNESCO, but were then moved elsewhere, such as the ILSAs, which originated in the 1950s in the UNESCO Institute for Education (UIE) (De Landsheere, 1997; Elfert, 2013a). One of the key founders of the UIE, John Thompson, repeatedly wrote about “immaterialism”, which can best be interpreted as the “immeasurable” (Weindling, 2010, p. 192; Elfert, 2013b) that should, in his view, underpin the UIE’s work. The controversy between the material and the immaterial/spiritual were typical for the intellectual climate of the post-WWII years, but continued to preoccupy UNESCO also in later years. For example, the Delors report, one of UNESCO’s education flagship reports, refers to “the tension between the spiritual and the material” (Delors et al., 1996, p. 18). In that spirit, UNESCO was always more interested in intellectual and humanistic values that are ultimately unquantifiable, in contrast to the OECD and the World Bank.

In our analysis of these three IOs from a global governance perspective, it will be important not only to examine how these organizations have interacted with each other, but also how they have constructed their power and networks with other actors. As Samoff (1992) has argued, education is governed by a “financial-intellectual complex” that has significantly shaped the thinking about education and development. While this “financial-intellectual complex” is part and parcel of the World Bank’s power as a global governor of education, UNESCO has been weakened by the economic field that was brought into it by external pressures (Elfert, 2018, 2021). Two reforms of its Executive Board resulted in the replacement of individual autonomous experts by technocrats, which eroded UNESCO’s intellectual capacity. The lack of operational budget and the significant loss of funding after the United States withdrew from the organization, first in 1984, then again – after the United States rejoined the organization in 2002 – in 2011, after the General Conference adopted Palestine as a full member, forced UNESCO to accept “tied money” and seek partnerships with the private sector, which led to the weakening of the organization by heteronomous influences, defined by Bourdieu (1996) as “the loss of autonomy through subjection to external forces” (p. 57).

The UNESCO-OECD-World Bank triangle represents a particular historical period, which has been referred to as “educational multilateralism” (Mundy, 1999). Given the increasing involvement of non-state actors, such as think tanks, philanthropic foundations and corporations, it could be argued that we are entering a new stage in the governance dynamic from multilateralism to multistakeholderism (Gleckman, 2018). These developments will likely impact the role of the OECD, the World Bank and UNESCO in the system of global governance of education. We will come back to this issue in the last chapter of the book – at this point it is fair to speculate that UNESCO, as is the case for the UN more broadly, will be further eroded by the growing influence of public-private partnerships and corporate actors. UNESCO’s role also continues to be challenged by other IOs, in particular UNICEF. The World Bank may lose ground as a consequence of geopolitical shifts, such as the rise of China and the BRICS countries, and economic and financial turmoil (Güven, 2017; Mundy & Verger, 2015). With regard to the OECD, there are indications that countries are getting tired of PISA and the high time of the PISA-era might be coming to an end, but the future of the OECD seems more uncertain, as the organization has a remarkable ability to re-invent itself. Its current emphasis on non-cognitive outcomes, such as global competences, soft skills and well-being, and education in the digital age, may indicate a shift towards finding a new role for itself in a post-human and post-work society.