Governance and the Evolving Global Education Order

Abstract

It is now broadly accepted that education and schooling are being (re)articulated by forces and actors that are well beyond the control of national states. One dominant force is corporate where concerns for market reach and profit-accumulation are changing both the content and processes of education. Exemplary in this regard is the role of Multinational Corporations (MNCs) such as McKinsey & Company, Laureate Education Inc., Pearson plc., Cambridge International or the RAND Corporation (Verger et al., 2016). Other forces are supranational and driven by the political philosophy of “international cooperation” (Karns & Mingst, 2010). Here, familiar and legitimate bodies and organizations reflect political and cultural desires and commitments and are well placed to reshape institutions of learning far beyond the culturally mediated boundaries of the nation and local community. These include regional bodies such as the European Union, the Arab League, the Organization of American States or the African Union, and intergovernmental organizations such as UNESCO, the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) or the Council of Europe. Yet another force is manifest in a growing voluntary or philanthropic sector. Here, new donors (e.g., Open Society Foundation, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) have significantly shaped long-held development priorities in ways that reflect the idiosyncratic views and interests of key elite actors (Verger et al., 2016). Closely related to philanthropy is “an embryonic transnational civil society” (McGrew, 1992, 2010)—a form of society consisting of a plethora of nongovernmental organizations, advocacy networks, think tanks, and communities of learning—which also seeks to regulate, or intervene in, global and local educational affairs. Rather than this evolving global education governance complex signaling an “end of the state,” we are witnessing the arrival of a new, more activist, state. Clearly, the old Westphalian conception of territorially sovereign statehood—the entitlement of states to rule within their own territorial space without external interference including the domain of education—is being displaced and transformed, but is by no means over, especially in the fields of education (Lingard, 2019) and culture (Appadurai, 2006). Locked into thickening and overlapping webs of transnational governance in education, states now assert their sovereignty as a tool of negotiation where power is bartered, shared, and divided amongst a range of global, regional and local actors, processes and institutions. Schooling, learning and the organization of education are thus in transition and on the move. Within this evolving new topography of governance and education, we can sense a new agenda of research that extends beyond the many methodological and theoretical “isms” that currently frame scholarship (Dale & Robertson, 2009). One specific area of interest has been the rise and implications of new governance methods and systems. This has included both historical and contemporary analyses of the application of “big data” to education as well as new developments regarding measurement, performance and surveillance systems (e.g., Ball, 2017; Lawn, 2013; Lindblad et al., 2018). How are these new regimes of visibility (re)shaping notions of education and the educated person in national, regional and global terms? Another area of scholarly concern has been the analysis of new educational “spaces” that are emerging or have emerged as a result of new international and transnational governance methods and systems (e.g., Carney,