ABSTRACT
Among the major influences that have shaped global education policy, and evolving comparative and international research agendas, has been the impact of powerful agencies such as UNESCO and the World Bank. In this chapter we document how multilateral and bilateral agencies have influenced international perspectives on education, and how global agendas have emerged and been reformulated in the half century since the end of World War II. Building upon a number of issues first raised in Chapter 5, we pay particular attention here to the less developed countries of the world, and to changing relationships between the rich countries of the North and the poorer ones of the South. In this respect, we consider efforts to move away from a development assistance paradigm characterised by the terms ‘donors’ and ‘recipients’ – with their overtones of neo-colonial superiority – towards models that attempt to promote new forms of co-operation and collaborative partnerships. [The terms ‘North’ and ‘South’ first became widely accepted in both academic and development discourse as a result of the Brandt Reports in the early 1980s (Brandt 1980; 1983)]. We also demonstrate how global solutions have increasingly come to be promoted as a means of dealing with apparently common problems across different societies – regardless of their appropriateness in such varied contexts. Indeed, despite increased theoretical recognition of the importance of policy dialogue between local and global stakeholders, in practice the power and financial dominance of the funding countries and agencies means that they can, and do, still lay down conditionalities for development assistance, and they can still promote dependency by shaping what they perceive to be in the best interests of others. As we argue throughout this chapter, and the book as a whole, such global disparities necessitate new ways of pursuing the long-term relationships between local, national and global agencies if we are genuinely to improve the quality and impact of comparative and international research, consultancy and development co-operation.
