NORRAG NEWS 51 now online! Education and Skills Post-2015 and the Global Governance of Education: Agendas and Architecture by Kenneth King

By Kenneth King, Editor of NORRAG NEWS.

A crucial missing element of the post-2015 education discussions to date relates to the global governance of education and training (GGET).

There have been countless meetings, conferences, reports and advocacy events around education post-2015 in the last three years. NORRAG alone has run over 100 blogs on the subject, 6 working papers and 4 meetings. There have been very many less meetings explicitly on GGET (see workshop report), but arguably those on post-2015 are in fact just one part of the much wider landscape or architecture of global governance.

GGET is of great interest to a good number of individual NORRAG members. But we found that many NORRAG members had never actually used the terminology of global governance of education; so we are putting a working definition at the end of this post.

The latest issue of NORRAG News (NN51) looks at the countdown to the place of education and skills on the world’s next development agenda from 2015 against the backdrop of the global governance of education and training. To give you a sense of its contents, some of the main section heads include:

• GGET meanings and understandings
• Education post-2015 as a part of the global governance of education
• National or global governance of education
• Measuring the post-2015 education landscape
• Aid’s relation with the post-2015 education agenda and landscape
• Skills and the education architecture of post-2015

>> Access NORRAG News 51 online

>> Read NORRAG’s working paper #7 on ‘Post-2015 and the global governance of education and training’ (December 2014)

A Working Definition of GGET

The global governance of education and training (GGET) is used in this issue of NN as an organising framework for discussing how state and non-state actors secure authority and presence in education. Both formal and informal mechanisms exist by which these actors exert power and influence. Formal GGET mechanisms may include, for example: goals and targets (e.g. EFA Goals); laws, rules, conventions and charters; and, agreements, compacts, partnerships, and initiatives for policy and financial cooperation. What might be termed informal GGET mechanisms also exist. These mechanisms may not have been set up for the purpose of governing or regulating, but they clearly influence stakeholders when it comes to education, and some would argue that the power which they today exert has turned them into de facto mechanisms of GGET. Such informal GGET mechanisms might cover, for example: the influence of “best practice” knowledge and approaches (e.g. rate of return to education, competency-based training, national qualifications frameworks); the influence that grants and loans for education, as well as their associated conditionalities, have in recipient countries; the influence that data and indicators from assessments and testing (e.g. PISA, TIMMS) have, as well as benchmarking and ranking approaches (e.g. SABER, world university rankings).

Kenneth King is the Editor of NORRAG News. He is an Emeritus Professor at the School of Social and Political Studies, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. Email: Kenneth.king@ed.ac.uk

NORRAG (Network for International Policies and Cooperation in Education and Training) is an internationally recognised, multi-stakeholder network which has been seeking to inform, challenge and influence international education and training policies and cooperation for almost 30 years. NORRAG has more than 4,200 registered members worldwide and is free to join. Not a member? Join free here.