Competitors Without a Cause? World Bank and UNESCO in Education Policy

IOs do not only enhance, manage and structure cooperation among actors in a given policy field, they also compete for funding, recognition, and influence. In education policy we can observe a continuous expansion and diversification of IOs since the turn of the millennium. With the rise of the “knowledge society”, education has been increasingly seen as a field with resources which need to be revealed. Even IOs that were originally not concerned with education issues started to cover this area and compile data, analyze policies and provide recommendations. In fact, these dynamic diversification processes of IOs have led to increased competition, even among IOs within the UN System. This becomes apparent if we look at UNESCO, the UNIO originally concerned with education, and how it is being challenged by the initiatives of other IOs. The World Bank, for example, links its mission of poverty alleviation with matters of education by launching education projects that are mainly aimed at fostering economic development. This puts the Bank at odds with UNESCO’s program and goals. We argue that the competition is no deliberate choice made by IOs but rather that IO bureaucracies perceive themselves to be pressured to expand their activities to other policy fields in order to accomplish and address their original mission. The incorporation of education was seen as essential for the Bank to enable recipient countries to develop economically. In this regard, contestation and competition are not necessarily pathological but follow a logic of bureaucratic dynamics within individual IOs. One effect is that a policy, in our case education, is evaluated from different (intra-) organizational perspectives with different bureaucratic rationales and worldviews. UNESCO mainly sees education as a means for self-development and individual emancipation while the Bank rather follows a utilitarian approach and views education as a tool to boost economic growth. Both views collide within the UN System and generate an air of competition and contestation. In our paper, we first briefly trace the developments of education policy as an internationalized policy from post WW2 until today and highlight to what extent different IOs which are active in this field can be characterized either by inertia or flexibility with regards to their institutional evolution. Using an organizational ecology approach, we then explain why IOs originally not concerned with education expanded to this area. Lastly, we explore inter-organizational dynamics between the UN-related bodies working on education and analyze the dynamics of how IOs influence each other. Our contributions draw on original data from an ongoing research project and include document analysis and expert interviews with IO representatives, thus generating novel insights into international public administrations.