International Organisations’ Digital Education Reform Movement

This paper examines how International Organisations (IOs) – UNESCO, the OECD, and the World Bank – have constructed, contested, and institutionalized distinct imaginaries of the future of education, driving the digital education reform movement. This inquiry proceeds by examining how IOs’ imaginaries have shaped the uneven ‘policyscape’ of the digitalisation agenda and reform proposals, creating a competing ‘actorscape’ for both established and emerging global actors in the ‘timescape’ of permacrisis. The launch of ChatGPT following COVID has accelerated the global digitalization movement, evoking competition in national defense, economy, and skills amid amplified global economic recession, as illustrated in the 2025 America’s AI Action Plan: Winning the Race. Despite the IOs’ contestations, global policy practices have led to a somewhat homogeneous digital education reform movement, posing risks of datafication and unbundling of public education systems and practices. This paper examines the distinct imaginaries of education that IOs have promoted for the digital future, how they have advanced these imaginaries, and why, focusing on intertwined futuring practices. The findings of this study suggest that while IOs’ digitalization initiatives resonate with their neoliberal global education reform movement reinforcing historical and geopolitical relations, the influences of the G20 and big-tech in global policy practices indicate contemporary techno-politics evolving the predominant human capital approach in international development and education communities into the digital capitalist governing systems of education. Consequently, despite the redistributive, apolitical, and transformative aspirations of South-South cooperation and AI revolution, I argue that the IOs’ digital education reform movement has contributed to shaping the imbalanced landscape of digital education governance. The emergent digital education governance is likely to serve digital empire, extracting data from students, teachers, and schools, and commodifying education data into digital capital for the ed-tech and AI industry.