Conference Agenda
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 19th Aug 2026, 21:30:04 EET
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23 SES 14 A: Multilayered governance of education
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23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education
Paper The Weakening Publicness of Public Education and Growing Intervention of Non-State Actors in Education Governance in Denmark, France, and Portugal 1: UIDEF, IE-ULisboa, Portugal; 2: The Danish School of Education, AARHUS UNIVERSITY; 3: Université de Strasbourg Presenting Author:This presentation explores how the publicness of public education is increasingly being scrutinized and undermined by the growing interventions of non-state actors in education governance. By non-state actors, we refer to a diverse range of entities, including long-established international organizations such as the OECD and UNESCO, supranational organizations like the European Union, as well as new actors such as edu-businesses, NGOs, think tanks, and philanthropic foundations (Edwards et al., 2021). Our focus is on what coordinates these actors: a shared aim to influence both public policy and private decision-making in ways that promote adherence to their preferred educational topologies (Grimaldi & Ball, 2021). Our central argument is twofold. First, we start from the observation that the ongoing succession of crises (financial, environmental, health, populism, armed conflicts, and war) has increased the complexity of policymaking (Kushnir, 2021), prompting renewed debates about the role of education in addressing emerging challenges. In public policy discourse, these crises are often framed as opportunities to initiate or justify education reforms (Cone & Brøgger, 2020), as these crises intersect with a range of persistent issues already present within education systems: the teaching profession, cyberbullying, school violence, school dropouts, segregation, and discrimination. Education seems to be perceived through its ‘pathologies’ - like a patient in need of a cure - rather than as a common good that can promote the well-being of future generations (Lingard, 2023). In this context, the intervention of non-state actors becomes welcomed as a means of addressing the crisis facing education systems. Second, while these actors encompass a wide range of organizational types and operate on multiple scales, their intervention in education governance has been analyzed both as a consequence of, and a contributing factor to, the growing centrality of a globalized education policy discourses (Rizvi et al., 2022; Robertson et al., 2012; Hultqvist et al., 2018). Building on this perspective, we will examine the effects of their interventions on public schools in Denmark, France, and Portugal in interconnected dimensions typically advocated by non-state actors (Lubienski et al., 2022): 1) the use of international large-scale assessments, and 2) the triad of accountability, datafication, and digitalization in education. Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources Used The presentation draws on literature that examines transnational reforms and the intervention of non-state actors in three European countries, Denmark, France, and Portugal, by highlighting both the similarities and the differences in their historical commitments to the democratisation of schooling. These countries were chosen as exemplary cases of visions for democratizing comprehensive school in contexts with different challenges: in Denmark schooling was integral part of developing the Nordic welfare state in a context long-dominated by social democrat policies; in France school was regarded as a guarantee of nation-making because of its ‘laïcité’(secularism) ideal; in Portugal school became an element integral to the democratization of a society struggling to reform after half a century under an authoritarian regime. From considerably different societal contexts, each of these European countries in their own way saw school as playing a central role in the democratizing project of the 1970s and 1980s; and in all three countries there followed a close association of public education with democracy, citizenship, welfare, and equal opportunities. However, in a consolidation period of democracy throughout Europe post-1989, this project no longer appears legitimate or capable of ensuring the common good; it seems ineffective at transmitting commitment to democracy, sustaining a vibrant public democratic space and reducing inequalities. Taking these contexts into account, the analysis focused on the effects of non-state actors’ interventions in education, examining two main dimensions. First, it centred on the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), selected due to its status as one of the most influential international large-scale assessments (Waldow & Steiner-Khamsi, 2019) and because, since the early 2000s, Denmark, France, and Portugal have converged in their use of transnational standards, particularly PISA. Second, the analysis focused on the triad of accountability, datafication, and digitalisation, showing how non-state actors’ participation in education has gained prominence at the national level in these three countries through distinct, though sometimes overlapping, forms of provision and supply: equipment, evidence, or solutions. Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or Findings The presentation will show how, across Denmark, France, and Portugal, non-state actors are increasingly either invited by public authorities or position themselves in the public arena as key contributors to school improvement and social inclusion, offering “knowledge that works” or ready-to-use edtech solutions to address perceived educational ‘pathologies’. It will further demonstrate how these actors mobilised PISA to support the adoption of national policies in the three countries, shaping public debate and diluting both the public interest and the capacity of the public sphere to self-restructure around educational issues. In this process, publicness has increasingly been redefined as a demand for transparency and scrutiny, a shift that has been reinforced by the growing involvement of other non-state actors at the national level. Moreover, under the triad of accountability, datafication, and digitalisation, non-state actors’ interventions are increasingly oriented towards supporting, designing, or producing large-scale data and evidence - particularly through digital tools - that feed into and frame public debate. While these interventions are often valued within the public sphere, they are frequently conceived at the margins of, or even outside, the education system. As a result, they tend to weaken democratic decision-making (Grek, 2023). We will reflect on a paradox: although the involvement of non-state actors in education governance is intensifying, it simultaneously appears to undermine the notion of publicness in schooling by reducing the participation of school-based actors, marginalising teachers, students, and local communities in decision-making processes, while amplifying the influence of non-state actors themselves. References Cone, L., & Brøgger, K. (2020). Soft privatisation: mapping an emerging field of European education governance. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 18(4), 374–390. « Edwards, D. B., Caravaca, A., & Moschetti, M. C. (2021). Network governance and new philanthropy in Latin America and the Caribbean: Reconfiguration of the State. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 42(8), 18- Grek, S. (2023). The New Production of Expert Knowledge: Education, Quantification and Utopia. Palgrave Macmillan. Grimaldi, E., & Ball, S. J. (2021). Paradoxes of freedom. An archaeological analysis of educational online platform interfaces. Critical Studies in Education, 62(1), 114-129. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2020.1861043 Kushnir, I. (2021). The role of the European Education Area in European Union integration in times of crises, European Review, 30(3), 301–321. Lingard, B. (2023). Ever-morphing relations between the global, supranational and the national in schooling policy: A reflection on some European cases. In J.B. Krejsler, & L. Moos (Eds.), School Policy Reform in Europe: Exploring transnational alignments, national particularities and contestations (pp. 263-279). Springer. Lubienski, C., Yemini, M., & Maxwell, C. (Eds.) (2022). The Rise of External Actors in Education: Shifting Boundaries Globally and Locally. Policy Press Scholarship Online. Rizvi, F., Lingard, B., & Rinne, R. (2022). Reimagining globalization and education: an Introduction. In F. Rizvi, B. Lingard, & R. Rinne (Eds.), Reimagining globalization and education (pp. 1-10). Routledge. Robertson, S., Mundy, K., & Verger, A. (Eds.). (2012). Public private partnerships in education: New actors and modes of governance in a globalizing world. Edward Elgar Publishing. Viseu, S., Carvalho, L. M., Krejsler, J & Normand, R. (2025). The weakening publicness and democracy in public education and the growing intervention of non-state actors in education governance: the case of Denmark, France and Portugal. Swiss Journal of Educational Research, 47(2), pp. 164–174 Waldow, F., & Steiner-Khamsi, G. (Eds.). (2019). Understanding PISA’s attractiveness: Critical analyses in comparative policy studies. Bloomsbury Publishing. 23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education
Paper From Modernity to the Decolonial Project: Navigating Tensions in the Search for Cognitive Justice in Global Governance of Education Tampere University, Finland Presenting Author:This presentation emerged from a self-reflexive conversation of the co-authors in a collaborative writing project for a book chapter about decolonial directions in global governance of education. Major intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), such as UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Bank, currently dominate the production, gathering and distribution of education knowledge across the globe (Baek & Steiner-Khamsi, 2025; Zapp, 2017). They represent the education problem in the ‘Global South’ narrowly as a ‘learning crisis’, with insufficient attention to context and the colonial legacy, including understanding colonialism, decoloniality and the decolonial project. Colonial thinking continues to affect not only Indigenous peoples of colonised countries, but the legacy persists in the countries that instigated the colonisation process, generating a worldview that systematically privileges those who are White, wealthy, cis-male, heterosexual, and able-bodied. Our collaborative Foucauldian analysis and decolonial writing project reveals the shift, from seeing a world made of things to seeing a world that is open and made up primarily of relationships, as implicit in moving from unitary ways of thinking to more heterogenous systems of understanding the world. The relational intra-active worldview with connectedness of all entities, challenges the five layers of modernity, namely, capitalism, racism, liberalism, positivism and Christianity. Our questions include: What tensions arise in shifting from modernity to a decolonial and relational understanding of knowing and being? How can self-reflexivity as genealogy help us move from binary thinking, through nuance to relationality? We assume that how we understand and access knowledge, informs the way we act as researchers, practitioners and citizens. Different discourses create different lived effects in terms of how we construct or understand ourselves and each other in everything we say and do. We analyse how privileged onto-epistemologies can be contested in current shifting conditions. We address power relations in global education governance policy and the contestation of dominant policy discourses. We offer the on-going process of response-ability (Bozalek & Zembylas, 2023) as one possibility towards cognitive justice in education. This practical and ethical reframing of research knowing and acting cultivates attentiveness, rendering one another capable and open to encounters that redistribute epistemic authority and policy agency. The transition about what is real and possible constitutes a primary challenge in navigating decolonial futures. We offer a provocation to prompt debate and invite conference participants to join us on this journey to reconsider the nature of knowledge, data and evidence as we put self-reflexivity as genealogy to work. Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources Used The theoretical lenses that guide our writing activity, include self-reflexivity as genealogy (Pillow, 2015), a post-structuralist Foucauldian discourse analysis, the decolonial project and other relational approaches. We deploy reflexivity as genealogy to navigate tensions and arrive at a new place of mutual understanding within our differences. We question our own attitudes, values, assumptions, prejudices and habitual actions, to strive to understand our multiple and complex roles in relation to others. As decolonial researchers we are conscious of our self-identity and life experiences in relation to our understandings. By revealing our discursive and textual framings, we open new possibilities of thinking. We acknowledge the sometimes irreducible, but necessary tensions of doing reflexivity and find places of discomfort from which to (re)think. We use Bacchi’s Foucauldian approach (Bacchi, 2000; Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016) to analyse the way the IGOs represent the problem of education in the Global South. Bacchi offers a series of questions to reveal policy assumptions, silences and implications of specific discourses and how any human condition, need, ideal, tension or disagreement can be called into policy and be named as a ‘problem’. Our post-structural perspective illuminates how specific discourses bring into play a wide range of professional and ‘expert’ knowledges that have a significant role in power relations. By treating discourse as constitutive rather than descriptive, we show how the IGO ‘learning crisis’ discourse produces specific subjects and policy. Through our analysis, possibilities to challenge the ‘certainties’ of conventional policy approaches emerge. We clarify the distinctions between colonialism, colonial thinking and the decolonial project. Despite the diversity among Indigenous groups throughout the world, these ancestral relational holistic world views emphasize the way in which all things are related, interconnected and interdependent (Denscombe, 2025). Within indigenous communities, knowledge is communal and always deeply embedded in the context. Unlike the dominant paradigm, in which knowledge is a commodity that can be decontextualised, transported and owned by individuals. The kind of schools produced by IGOs through their ‘learning crisis’ discourse, offer a dualist worldview of binaries, in which the external world is a place to be discovered outside of oneself. In contrast, from a relational perspective, the ‘external’ world is not an outside place but an act of participation. From a relational perspective, we all constitute the world, making us responsible for the world we create with others (Escobar et al., 2024). Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or Findings Our analysis reveals that the ‘learning crisis’ discourse of IGOs reinforces a narrow, measurement-driven vision of schooling with pervasive implications for power relations in global South education. This IGO discourse reveals a world made of things, with fixed hierarchical categories, standards and measurement that inadvertently exacerbates inequality and generates asymmetrical power relations. In contrast, relational approaches can disrupt this dominant discourse as it reveals an interconnected and interdependent world that we co-create with others to the best of our ability. Our self-reflexive process constitutes our findings. Differences in our understandings as co-authors emerged as we engaged with relationality or pluriversality. Self-reflexivity as genealogy helped us to think differently and question our own attitudes and research lenses. As we took personal accountability for our situatedness in systems of power and privilege and revealed our discursive and textual framings, tensions or misunderstandings arose. We spoke, did further analysis, read more, wrote and rewrote. We welcomed sometimes irreducible, but necessary tensions of doing reflexivity as inevitable in navigating decolonial possibilities in global governance of education. We flagged these tensions that offered places of discomfort from which to (re)think. We offer our story as an invitation to reconsider what we think about reality, about the contemporary modes of being human, about the relation between being, knowing, and doing (with no separation among them). This transformation is challenging as it is not just about moving between descriptions of values and goals. It is about our understanding of what is real and possible. Our findings offer possibilities for redistributing epistemic authority and policy agency to reclaim trust and public purpose in education research in the urgent context of the poli-crisis. References Bacchi, C. (2000). Policy as discourse: What does it mean? Where does it get us?. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 21(1), 45–57. DOI:10.1080/01596300050005493 Bacchi, C. & Goodwin, S. (2016). Poststructural policy analysis: A guide to practice. Springer Baek, C, & Steiner-Khamsi, G. (2025). The rise of knowledge brokers in global education governance. Edward Elgar. Bozalek, V., & Zembylas, M. (2023). Privileged Irresponsibility, Responsibility and Response-Ability in Contemporary Times: Higher Education, Coloniality and Ecological Damage. Palgrave Macmillan. Denscombe, M. (2025). Decolonial research methodology: an assessment of the challenge to established practice. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 28(2), 231-240, DOI: 10.1080/13645579.2024.2357558 Edwards, B. D. (2025). The global education policy field: theorization and problematization. Comparative Education, 61(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2025.2453786 Elfert, M., & Ydesen, C. (2023). Global governance of education: The historical and contemporary entanglements of UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank. Springer. Escobar, A., Osterweil, M., & Sharma, K. (2024). Relationality: An emergent politics of life beyond the human. Bloomsbury. Foucault, M. (1991). Politics and the study of discourse. In G. Burchell, & D. M. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault Effect: studies in governability (pp. 53–72). Chicago: University of Chicogo Press Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the coloniality of being. Cultural Studies, 21(2-3), 240-270, DOI: 10.1080/09502380601162548 Pillow, W. (2015). Reflexivity as Interpretation and Genealogy in Research. Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies, 15(6), 419–434. DOI: 10.1177/1532708615615605. UNESCO. (2021). Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education. UNESCO Publishing. UNESCO. (2013). The global learning crisis: Why every child deserves a quality education. UNESCO Publishing. World Bank, UNESCO and UNICEF. (2021). The state of the global education crisis: A path to recovery. World Bank, UNESCO and UNICEF Publishing. World Bank. (2019). The education crisis: Being in school is not the same as learning. World Bank. Available at https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/immersive-story/2019/01/22/pass-or-fail-how-can-the-world-do-its-homework.print World Bank. (2018). World Development Report 2018: Learning to realize education’s promise. World Bank. doi:10.1596/978-1-4648-1096-1 Zapp, M. (2017). The world bank and education: governing (through) knowledge. International Journal of Educational Development. 53, 1-11. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijedudev.2016.11.007 | ||