Is this the Future We Want? Understanding the Legitimacy of International Education Agendas. The Example of Equity in Education

Abstract

This thesis is an exploration of questions pertaining to the legitimacy of International Education Agendas (IEAs) with two main contributions. Firstly, I provide a conceptually sound and empirically viable approach to assess IEAs’ legitimacy. And secondly, I investigate what can be learnt about the legitimacy of IEAs when this approach is put into practice. I thereby focus on a sociological understanding of legitimacy which is fundamentally concerned with how global governance arrangements are perceived by an identified audience. To define IEAs I introduce the distinction between the formal core of an IEA, such as UN resolutions, and the formal interpretive frames, such as global monitoring reports and thematic indicators frameworks. Specifically, my research questions focus on the legitimacy beliefs held by academics towards equity in education, as an ideational feature of the current IEA, the Education 2030 – SDG 4 agenda. I argue in my thesis that academics can be considered an audience of particular relevance to IEAs, and likewise, equity in education arguably constitutes a critical ideational feature of SDG 4. Furthermore, the present thesis recognizes the importance of ideational competition in global governance dynamics and identifies IEAs as one of the loci where this ideational competition happens. In response to gaps in the existing literature, a heuristic conceptual framework for the analysis of legitimacy beliefs towards IEAs is introduced. Building on this conceptual framework, a blended reading research design is employed to investigate the congruence between, on the one hand, academics’ perceptions of the conceptualization of equity in education embedded in IEA, and, on the other hand, those conceptualizations that are found in the scholarship on equity in education. Eventually, three specific dimensions of textual data were considered, namely, representation, structure, and knowledge, in order to allow for a comprehensive understanding of the scholarship on equity in education. Findings point to the divergence between conceptualizations of equity in education that emerge from the formal interpretive frames of the present IEA, and those that are embedded in the initial wording of the UN resolution, as well as the most prominent conceptualizations of equity in education in the scholarship. The conceptualization that emerge from the formal interpretative frames of the SDG 4 agenda is identified as principally concerned with an achievement gap perspective, whereas a substantial portion of the most recent active scholars have engaged with critical pedagogy and social justice perspectives on equity in education. Empirically, there exists a lack of congruence between equity in education as conceptualized in the SDG 4 agenda and the structure of the scholarship on the issue. A situation that did not exist under the previous international education agenda. This in turn indicates that there exist grounds for academics to withhold legitimacy beliefs towards the SDG 4 agenda, potentially eroding its authority and putting its success at risk. Furthermore, the methodological design that was employed in the present study demonstrates the potential to combine scope and depth by integrating computational approaches with qualitative analyses in positivistic approaches to studying global governance in education.