History of International Organisations’ Visions and Sociomaterial Practices for the Future of Education

This paper examines how IOs’ vision and policy priorities for the future of development and education have evolved across time, focusing on three global crises: the Sputnik Crisis in 1957; the oil crises of the 1970s; and the global financial crisis in 2008-2009. It also explores IOs' historical socio-material futuring practices employed to promote their visions from their inception up to the 2010s, illustrating the entanglements of policy networks and events, results-based development aid infrastructure, and representational technologies. Through these examinations, this paper demonstrates how IOs had competed over the vision of redistributive and liberal development and education with the seemingly common global agenda - such as manpower and education planning during the 1960s, partnerships during the 1970s, Education for All during the 1990s, Millenium Development Goals during the 2000s, and Sustainable Development Goals for the 2010s. The finding of this study shows the politics of crisis time illustrated in IOs' repetitive struggles for envisioning endogenous versus aided development and skills versus lifelong education in defining the predominant visions of international development and education. Having gone through key global crises over the course of 70 years, particular stories and socio-technical imaginaries for neoliberal globalization have been reinforced through IOs’ socio-material practices. There has been a continuity in seeking rational development goals in the pursuit of modernity resulting in the current predominance of the SDGs and global aid and education data infrastructures which locate us within a monitoring movement across all three IOs. While UNESCO has been beset by international relations from the onset of the Cold War, the OECD and the World Bank have risen to the global leadership in international development and education, resourced with member states' stable funding and buoyed by their mission of economic modernization and neoliberal globalization. The repetitive silences and disadvantages followed by development initiatives illustrate the politics and power relations reinforced by international development and education despite the seemingly rationalistic story, technical infrastructures, and cooperative practices.