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no. 24_october 2026

On Education

editorial: knowing, governing, and measuring: the epistemic power of international organisations

Issue 24 looks into the way international organisations have historically shaped and continue to shape knowledge systems and practices in educational settings all over the world. It explores how global players such as UNESCO or OECD have contributed, in different historical and political contexts, to the introduction, consolidation and perpetuation of Western knowledge systems and practices as well as the definition of what is deemed ‘valuable knowledge’ throughout the globe. We ask how specific practices, such as standardised educational evaluation, scientific expertise, ‘modern’ technological infrastructure, and global frameworks have promoted and continue to reproduce specific Western-centric epistemic regimes under the guise of universality, neutrality and progress—while simultaneously ignoring, suppressing or fetishising local knowledges and practices, especially in the Global South.

Alexander W. Wiseman

scientized policy and epistemic authority in global education

Scientization operates as a mechanism of global education governance through which international organizations construct epistemic authority and shape educational policy legitimacy. This authority is institutionalized through standardized indicators, international assessments, and evidence-based frameworks that define credible educational knowledge and reform. International organizations have long navigated ideological disagreement and geopolitical competition, yet challenges to the liberal international order have not displaced their role in defining legitimate educational knowledge and reform. Through epistemic gatekeeping more than direct coercion, these organizations reinforce shared policy expectations and encourage cross-national isomorphism. These processes privilege quantifiable evidence, marginalize context-specific knowledge, and constrain educational policy alternatives.

Maren Elfert

international organisations, scientism and the governance of education

International organisations established within the post–World War II multilateral order have played a central role in establishing a worldview grounded in rationality and science, with profound and enduring consequences for education. Notwithstanding the idealistic underpinnings of the post-war era, the undue elevation of scientific methods and their uncritical extension to other social domains – a phenomenon conceptualised here as “scientism” – was a central feature of this epistemic shift. Drawing on critical and feminist scholarship, this article examines scientism as a central feature of postwar educational governance, arguing that claims to scientific objectivity and neutrality helped legitimise ideologically driven conceptions of modernity, rationality and economic growth. It further identifies military thinking as an important but underexplored influence on education governance. Through historical examples of postwar educational planning informed by military principles, the article traces how modes of thought originating in military research and planning entered the field of education, undermining its potential as an emancipatory project.

Jenny Ozga

governing education: international organisations, populism and the pandemic

This paper looks at the work of International Organisations (IOs) in governing education, focusing on the work that they do in the preparation and promotion of data-based knowledge that supports the global adoption of standardised practices of assessment, regulation and learning. These governing practices reflect the contemporary interdependency and interaction of governing and knowledge. As governing has changed to become less nationally bounded, and more networked and transnational, so too has knowledge changed. Epistemic governance has emerged as a governing form that is linked directly to the recent growth of knowledge technologies, especially those that enable rapid movement and transfer of information, as well as its presentation as an objective and reliable guide to best practice. Epistemic governance also promotes the growth of knowledge brokering, by agencies such as IOs, that is needed to translate complex evidence into policy advice. This paper considers the knowledge work of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), looking at how its advice has changed over time, and at the recent governing strategy of combining data-based work with persuasive strategies of incorporation of national actors into the project of global modernisation and economisation of education. Finally, the paper asks if, following the COVID-19 pandemic, evidence of growing inequalities, along with a decline of trust in expertise and the related rise of right-wing populism threatens the position of IOs as knowledge brokers par excellence.

Joakim Landahl

recruiting countries to standardized surveys: the case of the IEA civics study

This article examines how the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) recruited and retained countries for its Civic Education Study, conducted from the late 1960s to 1975. Drawing on correspondence, minutes, memoranda, test drafts, and other archival materials, it shows that international assessments depend not only on technical expertise but also on the willingness of countries to accept common standards. The Civics Study posed particular challenges because civic education was closely tied to national cultures, political systems, and conceptions of citizenship. Several countries withdrew from the project, while others criticized its test items and methods. The article argues that these conflicts illuminate the practical work involved in constructing international comparability. The study thus reveals how commensuration depended on continuous negotiation over what could—and could not—be meaningfully compared across countries.

Ana Werkstetter Caravaca

measuring for whom? a decolonial perspective on the OECD’s global comparative regime in education

This article critically examines the OECD’s global comparative regime in education through a decolonial lens, interrogating the epistemic and political consequences of its expanding governance reach into Latin America. Notably, though education—and the production of educational data—was never part of the OECD’s mandate, it has become one of the OECD’s most visible areas of activity since the launch of PISA in the 2000s. The OECD Directorate for Education and Skills has developed governance mechanisms with a focus on the knowledge, experience, and perspectives of the core regions of the world-system. These are often at odds with those living under different conditions in the periphery of the modern/colonial world system, the Global South. Drawing on Viola’s (2020) institutional and epistemic closure, the analysis highlights how the OECD’s ‘Paris Consensus on Education’ reproduces a developmentalist, Northern lens that positions Latin American member states as perpetually ‘catching up’ within a linear, Eurocentric temporality. Through examination of the OECD’s internal stratification between historical and peripheral members, the article demonstrates that membership expansion does not democratise the OECD’s epistemic foundations but instead reproduces internal stratification. Engaging with Southern theory and decolonial critique, the article challenges the presumed universality of the OECD’s measurement regime by asking: measuring for whom? This article argues that the OECD’s posturing as a neutral, technocratic epistemic authority obscures deeper colonial continuities and that the OECD’s governance mechanisms systematically preclude onto-epistemic plurality, rendering invisible alternative educational paradigms oriented towards collective well-being, cultural affirmation, and transformative social change rather than economic utility and neoliberal subjectification.

Leon Tikly

the continental education strategy for africa 2026 to 2035: a decolonial critique

This article offers a decolonial critique of the Continental Education Strategy for Africa 2026 to 2035 (CESA 26-35), adopted by the African Union in 2025. It reads the strategy as a policy discourse and situates the African Union as a regional actor embedded in the wider architecture of global education governance. On this reading, CESA 26-35 reproduces colonial epistemic hierarchies even as it presents itself as an African-led framework aligned with Agenda 2063. The strategy is anchored in a human capital approach. It privileges foundational, STEAM and labour market skills, confines African languages to the early grades and ties its monitoring to the indicators of Sustainable Development Goal 4. African epistemologies and intellectual traditions are almost entirely absent from its text. The article argues that these limitations are systemic rather than rhetorical. They arise from the conditions under which the strategy was produced and from Africa’s position within global epistemic and political-economic orders, and they cannot be resolved by policy adjustment alone. The article advances a systemic approach to epistemic justice, understood as a set of conditions for epistemic plurality rather than a substitute set of policy prescriptions, and identifies the existing struggles on which such an approach could build.

Iveta Silova and Sandra Nabulega

educating for extraction: digital literacy, international organisations, and planetary defuturing

This article examines how digital literacy, as increasingly mediated through international development agendas, operates as a developmental technology that draws schooling into extractive digital economies. Drawing on critical development studies, decolonial scholarship, and the concept of planetary defuturing, the article examines how three differently positioned international organisations—UNESCO, the World Bank, and the OECD—frame and advance digital literacy through distinct yet convergent agendas around technological adaptation, economic participation, and ‘future readiness’. Situating these organisations within a wider assemblage of states, corporations, philanthropic actors, and technological infrastructures, we trace how digital literacy connects schooling to data-intensive, energy-dependent infrastructures that carry profound social and ecological costs while constraining alternative educational futures. Rather than a neutral skills agenda, digital literacy can draw schooling more deeply into extractive digital economies while translating structural problems into demands that learners adapt, reskill, and remain ‘future ready’. We conceptualise this buffering role as a form of planetary defuturing and consider how refusing such a role might reopen questions of what technologies are needed, on whose terms, for whose purposes, and toward what futures.

Christian Ydesen

the struggle for legitimacy and the road to an attractive 2030 global education scenario

This essay examines how international organisations (IOs) such as UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank sustain their epistemic authority in a global education landscape marked by polycrisis and multipolarity. Treating IOs as neither innocent nor all-powerful, it argues that their legitimacy is produced through epistemic infrastructures of metrics, indicators and platforms, moral vocabularies of equity, well-being and human flourishing, and political alliances forged in multistakeholder arrangements. Drawing on recent scholarship on governance by numbers, the SDGs and the affective and technological turns in education policy, it shows how crisis has become a governing medium through which mandates are recalibrated and promissory visions renewed, often leaving technocratic structures intact. The essay then sketches three post-2030 trajectories, managerial consolidation, fragmented pluralism and deliberative regeneration, and argues that an attractive scenario requires a legitimacy settlement capable of organising plurality, disagreement and interdependence across local and global scales.

Walter Fritsch

symbiotic legitimacy: how stakeholder consultations at UNESCO serve both the organisation and the participants

This article examines how broad stakeholder consultations generate and sustain legitimacy in global education governance, focusing on UNESCO’s 2019–2021 Futures of Education initiative. While large-scale participatory setups risk engaging stakeholders in a tokenistic fashion, the article argues that such consultations can provide legitimacy for all actors involved. Drawing on interviews with stakeholders, it contrasts UNESCO’s official framing with participants’ perspectives. The findings reveal a mutually beneficial arrangement where participants engage with UNESCO not necessarily to influence consultation outcomes, but to leverage the organization’s global authority to legitimize and promote their own work locally. In turn, UNESCO draws on participants’ diversity and reputation to reinforce its organizational identity and claims to inclusivity. The article conceptualizes this dynamic as symbiotic legitimation, sustained by an implicit covenant of mutual affirmation. Rather than challenging existing power hierarchies, these consultative spaces may thus ultimately reaffirm existing structures of authority and influence.

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