Education for All” on An International Stage - gwu.edu.docVIP

“Education for All” and the Global Governors Karen Mundy, University of Toronto, Draft – November 5, 2007 Introduction Although first established as an international norm in the UN Declaration on Human Rights and UNESCO’s constitution more than six decades ago, international efforts to support a universal right to education have had a volatile and uneven history. A range of multilateral and bilateral, of governmental and non-governmental, actors have rallied to its cause over the last century, but never in so widespread and substantive a manner as during the past half-decade. Today it would be difficult to find any meeting of world leaders in which the universal right to education is not trumpeted as an international goal. Education for all (EFA)” is promised by international financial institutions, advocated by transnational human rights networks, and discussed at meetings of world business leaders. It is also an expanding arena for international development cooperation, where it is the focus of widespread experimentation with pooled approaches to aid delivery, new kinds of donor-recipient relationships and unexpectedly high volumes of aid spending. It would not be too much to say that EFA has moved from being a widely accepted but unimplemented international norm, to one that is more often subject to processes of transnational accountability, and (as a result) more consistently acted upon. However, the EFA case is also more nuanced than this. International actors engaged in EFA – its “governors” in the sense employed in this book, include rich industrialized and developing country governments; international organizations such as the World Bank, UNESCO, and UNICEF; non-governmental organizations; and an array of transnational actor networks. These different governors were recruited into supporting international “education for all” efforts for different reasons. They in turn mobilize competing ideological frames, are guided by strikingly different political logi