Conference Agenda

Global Governance in Education has been put forward as an important factor in shaping national educational policies(Grek & Ydesen, 2021; Sellar & Lingard, 2014). The origins of this global converge of educational policy can be traced to the recuperation of Europe after the Second World War and to the American-led idea of the importance of bringing about economic development in order to defend the interests of Western Capitalist Democracies (Elfert & Ydesen, 2020; Jones, 2006). This new scheme of development was accompanied by the optimistic notion of planning, that is, the capacity to re-configurate a rationality oriented society on the basis of scientific objective methods. Gradually, the lack of adequate educational services was accepted as an important factor hindering development and the term Human Capital emerged to justify the key role of education in guaranteeing social modernisation and stability across the world. (Delgado Gómez-Escalonilla, 2020; Dorn & Ghodsee, 2012; Elfert, 2021; Lindo-Fuentes & Ching, 2012).

All these elements contributed to the emerging transnational governance space, in which a dense net of international organisations, private enterprises, philanthropic organisations, think tanks, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), individual experts, and national governments participated in an optimistic exercise of social engineering(Meyer & Benavot, 2013). research has pointed out that this process had a clear impact on national policies and some of the mechanisms of influence of international organisations have been highlighted. Nevertheless, in order to understand the processes which have led to this educational converge there is a need to explore how national idiosyncrasies affect the recontextualizing of global policies and how knowledge exchange processes impact national decision making (Ydesen, 2025).

In this process of educational convergence, a network of professionals with recognized expertise and competence had emerged (Sorensen et al., 2021). They acquired a clear authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within the domain of education. The emergence of this epistemic community was tightly connected to the discourse of development consolidated after the Second World War (Delgado Gómez-Escalonilla, 2015; Ossenbach & Boom, 2011). This class of experts had different agendas and sometimes different interpretations of the world. But they shared the belief that the western rationale was the guarantee for better life for humanity and that careful planning could ensure economic and social development (Lindo-Fuentes & Ching, 2012). Research on knowledge brokerage in relation to global governance of education has been studied mainly in the framework of international organisations such as the OECD or the World Bank (Baek & Steiner-Khamsi, 2024). In the case of our research, we would like to complement this vision with a study of how these processes played out on the national level. We use the case of a Spanish high ranking official to explore the forging of a knowledge/policy broker on the national level. For our research we chose Joaquin Tena Artigas (1915–2017) who held key positions in the Spanish National Agency for Cooperation with the UNESCO established in 1953 and was nominated the Director of Primary Education in the Ministry of Education from 1956 until 1968. He also, held positions or collaborated with other IOs such as the OECD, the Ibero-American Education Office (OEI) established in 1947 as an international agency and transformed in 1957 into an intergovernmental body and the IBE. His dual position as a high ranking official and collaborator with IO makes him a perfect match for our research. We believe his trajectory offers a privileged entry point for examining how global discourses on education were configured, negotiated, and projected in the Spanish context, while also illuminating the political dimension of expert knowledge.

In 1960, the OECD launched a programme aimed at the development of the educational systems of the traditionally educationally lagging countries of Southern Europe: Portugal, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey, with Spain joining several months later. The author of this proposal has examined in previous scholarly venues the conceptual premises underlying the project and its decisive contribution to the emergence of what has come to be known as the Global Architecture of Education.

On this occasion, the objective is to move beyond the theoretical plane and to undertake an analysis and evaluation of the Project’s concrete outcomes. The study seeks to explore the actual results of this extensive and demanding planning effort and to assess the extent to which its objectives were achieved. The ultimate aim is to evaluate whether the Project effectively shaped the policy agendas of the participating countries or whether, instead, these countries engaged in processes of external and instrumental adaptation in order to pursue their own agendas with international support. This line of inquiry necessarily engages with the examination of the complex and ambivalent power relations between the centre and the peripheries, a question that remains central to an international understanding of education.