International Organizations, Knowledge Production, and Global Education Policy
It has long been acknowledged that international organizations are influential when it comes to the reform of education policy around the world (Altbach, 1988; Berman, 1979, 1992).1 More recently, scholarship has highlighted that many of these organizations, beyond having the resources to collect data on a large scale, also use those resources to produce attractive knowledge products, to widely disseminate them, and even to deliver them directly to policymakers (DeBray et al., 2014; Verger, Edwards, & Kosar-Altinyelken, 2014). Importantly, what these observations underscore is that international organizationsâor any intermediary organization that produces knowledge about policies and practice to inform decision-makingâboth derive and generate their influence in material and ideational terms. That is, the power of international organizations comes, on one hand, from access to significant financial and organizational resources and, on the other hand, from the ability to strategically employ those resources to promote certain ideas or policies and to shape the conversation around what kinds of reform are seen as desirable within the global education policy field (Barnett & Finnemore, 2005; Jakobi, 2009).
What the above comments presuppose is the combination of a few key assumptions that should be clarified because they are fundamental to the way that a political economy perspective understands the intersection of international organizations, knowledge production, and the field of global education policy.2 That is, the opening comments and the remainder of this book depart from a number of precepts that should be stated unambiguously because they serve as the conceptual point of departure for the methodological approach and the particular findings offered here. The first assumption is that each international organization is animated by certain ideas, policies, or values more so than by others, with these ideas, related to the mission of the organization and to the preferences of those in leadership positions (Allison & Zelikow, 1999; Haas, 1990). Second, international organizations, like all organizations, scan their environments and look for ways to ensure stability (Malen & Knapp, 1997). Third, for organizations that rely to a greater or lesser extent on the ability to sell, mobilize, or produce ideas or knowledge products (e.g., research or other analytic work), stability results from the perceived relevance of those ideas (as judged by others) and the need for those knowledge products within the larger political context (Porter, 1995). This dual orientation toward organizational survival and political salience makes sense when one considers that international organizationsâwhich range from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), to philanthropic foundations, to think tanks, to corporate entities, to bilateral agencies and to multilateral institutionsâare not simply reactive features of the global education policy field but are also political actors in their own right. They are actors that operate on one or more levels from the global to the local to influence a range of ideational issues, such as which problems, policies, programs, and so on, are seen as warranting attention, with the goal being to preserve organizational longevity into the future by demonstrating the relevance of the organization to those problems, policies, programs, and so on (Altbach, 1988; Ball, 2012; Berman, 1992; Salas-Porras & Murray, 2017). These three assumptions thus highlight the interdependence among the political, organizational, and ideational factors that international organizations must manage, to the extent possible, to survive in the world of global education reform.3
The issues raised above are at the heart of the political economy perspective on the connections among international organizations, knowledge production, and the politics of global education policy. However, in operating from a political economy perspective, it is important to further draw attention to a fourth factor, namely, the variegated nature of the field of global education policy. This factor highlights the fact that the political economy perspective analyzes the dynamics highlighted above in relation to (a) the uneven topography of this field of activity as states respond differently to the pressures of globalization (Lingard & Rawolle, 2011) and to (b) the competition among actors that occurs as organizations strive for increased legitimacy and influence (Edwards, Okitsu, da Costa, & Kitamura, 2018; Mundy & Ghali, 2009). Additionally, and fundamentally, the political economy perspective is sensitive to (c) the way that the field of global education policy is overlaid on, is intertwined with, and must respond to other structural considerations that often mediate the relationship between global educational actors and opportunities at the national level through which these actors can influence educational policies and programs (Hay, 2002). These structural considerations can relate to supranational constraints (as with World Trade Organization regulations), regional bodies and accords, free trade agreements among countries, intercountry political relationships, or intra-country political dynamics. When it comes to the ways that the global education policy field interacts with larger structural considerations, the point is that, first, the relationship between international organizations and national actors is shaped by a variety of circumstances and, second, that we cannot think of this relationship between global and national actors in isolation, separate from the kinds of structural issues mentioned above.
Taking the aforementioned assumptions as a starting point, the task at hand in this book is to contribute to how we understand and investigate the role and influence of knowledge production by international organizations within the field of global education reform. This opening section has taken a first step in that direction by spelling out what it means to bring a political economy lens to this issue. However, as the title of this book indicates, the interest here is to go beyond a general focus on knowledge production to examine a particular kind of knowledge production, that is, the production of impact evaluations (discussed further below). Moreover, as will become clear, the end goal is not only to unpack the methodological, technical, political, and organizational challenges in the production of impact evaluations (as discussed in Chap. 2) but also to detail an approach to critically understanding and examining the role that impact evaluations, once produced, play within the political economy of global education reform (discussed in Chap. 3). The final two goals are to demonstrate the application of this approach in relation to a global education policy from El Salvador (Chaps. 5, 6) and to reflect on the implications of this case for ways forward, methodologically and otherwise (see Chap. 7).
Before moving on to focus on these goals, the present chapter sets the stage by addressing a number of key issues. Due to its centrality in the policy case from El Salvador, the first section characterizes the role of the World Bank within the field of global education in relation to knowledge production. The second section below defines and characterizes impact evaluations. Subsequent sections (a) discuss the purpose, argument, and contribution of this book, (b) provide background information on the policy case from El Salvador, and (c) situate this book in relation to prev...