The OECD and the Contours of a Global Governing Complex in Education
One of the key speakers at the first conference on education held by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Washington, D.C., in 1961 made a remarkable statement (OECD 1961: 35):
More than anything, this statement signals that education was becoming increasingly politicized in the context of the Cold War, and it became a battlefield between multiple stakeholders’ and professionals’ values and knowledge forms, as well as political visions and priorities. Today, the global order of education is characterized by various types of international organizations, edu-businesses, and powerful nation-states continuously shaping education systems across the globe, via networks, programs, and initiatives in general, and comparisons, benchmarking, and standards in particular.[T]he fight for education is too important to be left solely to the educators.
Historically, the contemporary governing complex in education has emerged from both the collaboration and struggles between various agents and stakeholders. Bürgi’s (2017: 304) recent chapter on the historical role of the OECD in education calls for more research on precisely the structural and existential interdependencies between ‘national and international bureaucracies and on the interplay between them’. Picking up the baton, this book considers the OECD a highly relevant object for an analysis of such an interplay. As an intergovernmental organization made up of its member states and with no economic ‘big stick’ to enforce adherence to its policy recommendations, the OECD exercises its power and influence as the central cog of a global governing complex (Schmelzer 2012). The OECD has been key in the development of the way global governance in education works, and today, the OECD is widely recognized as a global authority in education because of its unique role in governance by comparison and the production of educational norms and paradigms, such as educational measurement indicators (Martens and Jakobi 2010). In an era of overproduction of data and evidence, the OECD has managed to establish itself as a key supplier and interpreter of the type of evidence appreciated by politicians and decision-makers who can ascribe their narratives to numbers; the watchwords here are simplification, comparability, and decontextualization.
However, while most research recognizes the enormous importance of the OECD as a global education policy shaper, little effort has been made in gaining a better understanding of the developments and events that made it possible for the OECD to assume this dominant role. More than 70 years have passed since the foundation of its predecessor, the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC). Back then, the organization counted 18 members; today, the OECD has 36 members and numerous partnerships around the globe; for instance, 80 countries and economies participated in the 2018 round of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA ). It is high time to revisit the historical events and developments that have put education on the economic agenda and which have shaped and informed the very way education is construed and enacted across the globe today.
The Global Governing Complex and International Organizations
As demonstrated in much of the contemporary research, a key feature of the global order of education is that the selected variables, underlying assumptions, concepts, categories, logarithms, and modes of counting constituting the backbone of seemingly objective education data form a powerful governing complex (Brøgger 2019; Gorur 2017; Grek 2009; Hultqvist et al. 2018; Iriye 2002; Williamson and Piattoeva 2018). The role of international organizations in this governing complex is often characterized by soft governance, meaning that international organizations shape the policies of nation-states via the production of policy ideas, policy evaluations, and data generation (Leimgruber and Schmelzer 2017a). Drawing on the work of Hawkins et al. (2006), Niemann and Martens (2018; 269) argue that
Although soft governance is a common denominator, the international organizations each have very different dispositions and instruments at their disposal. Therefore, the interactions between international organizations and nation-states remain complex, ambiguous, and even elusive (Christensen and Ydesen 2015). As pointed out by Moisio (2014), higher education policymaking in Finland has resorted to a ‘policy spin’, where national goals are fed back into the Finnish system via the European Union after having been ‘planted’ by Finnish policymakers. Moisio’s example points to the multilayered character of global education governance. Nevertheless, it also suggests that international organizations constitute vital hubs of education governance, because they disseminate, coordinate, and evaluate policy programs, performance, and data production but, at the same time, also obscure the various processes and actors behind the scenes (e.g. via feed-in/feedback mechanisms, open methods of coordination and/or multilateral surveillance; see Brøgger 2019; Krejsler, this volume).IO soft governance implies that although international organizations are set up by states and consist of state delegates, they are able to develop their own positions, ideas, or dynamics because of intra-organizational networks and interactions that cannot be fully controlled by any principals.
In other words, the contemporary governing complex in education leaves a big role for international organizations—in collaboration with funders, partners, and stakeholders—to set the standards of what is considered good education worldwide. The implication is that the governing complex revolving around international organizations has a significant impact on the legitimation of knowledge, education curricula, and even our understanding of the very purpose of education.
History, Education, and the OECD
Beginning as the OEEC in 1948, the OECD gradually took over the leading role from other international organizations in setting new agendas for education globally, culminating thus far with the launch of PISA in 2000 (Morgan 2009). A recurrent and forceful characteristic of the OECD’s paradigm in education has been a global vision of education as a source of human capital, which is needed to address social challenges and improve the economies of nation-states (Bray and Varghese 2011; Elfert, this volume; Elvin 1961; Spring 2015; Tröhler 2011). In other words, education is viewed as an economic production factor in general, and as a tool for maximizing the outcomes of a nation’s available human resources in particular.
Although this line of thinking has a long history predating the formation of the OEEC/OECD—for instance, the liberal political philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) sees education as an investment that would increase a person’s economic value (Locke 1695/2000)—the organization’s version of it amounts to a very utilitarian paradigm of education that is deeply concerned with evaluation, accountability, and the facilitation of cross-national governance in order to achieve ‘best practice’. Historically, the pillars underpinning this economic paradigm in education have been human capital theory and concerns about educational investment optimization, effectiveness, manpower planning, and the question of how education can sustain economic success (Ydesen and Bomholt 2019). In other words, and in trying to achieve a deeper understanding of the contemporary governing complex in education, it is reasonable to speak of historical sequences containing the seeds of a merger between education, governance, and economics—in terms of quantifiable methods (indicators, metrics, numbers, and data), accountability systems (the visibility and comparability of education stakeholders’ performance), and the very purposes of education (human resource management and economic growth).
Starting from these observations, it is the purpose of this book to understand the workings, mechanisms, range, and impact of the OECD’s work in education from a historical, international, and global perspective across member and non-member states. The book thus aims to bridge the research fields of policy studies and the history of education, seeing the current scholarship on the history of international organizations in the field of education as a logical addition to the present-day perspective of policy studies. From this vantage point, it is this book’s ambition to contribute to our understanding of the contemporary global governing complex in education.
Historically Informed Policy Research on the OECD’s Role in Global Education Governance
Introducing a book about the OECD’s role in global education governance from historical perspectives calls for reflections on its approach and framework. In the social sciences, Charles Tilly (2006: 433) argues that ‘every significant political phenomenon lives in history and requires historically grounded analysis for its explanation’, and Pierre Bourdieu emphasizes that every social object must be understood as a historical one and that it is imperative to historicize the research object in question to achieve understanding (Steinmetz 2011). Much contemporary historical research on the OECD subscribes to the same arguments, insofar as it insists on considering the present and the past under a single analytical lens. For instance, Leimgruber and Schmelzer (2017b: 6) argue that ‘analyzing the OECD as a Cold War institution… helps in understanding the OECD more generally, also at present, in...