ABSTRACT
The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is the lead United Nations (UN) agency in the field of education. As its website proudly proclaims, UNESCO is: “the only UN body with a mandate in higher education.”1 However, UNESCO’s work in higher education has always operated at the margins of its education program (Daniels 2003, 22). Higher education has long been overshadowed by the organization’s focus on popular access to basic education, especially over the past decade, when UNESCO has made achieving “education for all” the central pillar of its educational activities (Mundy 1999). Nonetheless, a strong argument can be made about the need for a UN presence in higher education, particularly in the context of the globalization and internationalization of higher education. Massification of higher education, the growth of private and trans-border service provision, and new information and communications technologies are each transforming the global organization of higher education. In higher education, these processes of globalization have created new types of within-country inequality, and new regional and interstate forms of competition (Robertson and Keeling 2008; Marginson 2008). UNESCO’s mandate within the UN requires it to defend and promote the idea of equality of opportunity within an increasingly globalized higher education policy arena. Its own constitution also requires UNESCO to promote the sharing of knowledge and to defend cultural diversity. This chapter explores the effort within UNESCO to translate its mandate as the UN body in the field of higher education into an effective program of action. Based primarily on document review, this chapter also draws on private communication with 10 higher education experts either involved in UNESCO initiatives or on staff. The chapter is structured as follows: a historical review of UNESCO activities, suggesting how these activities have been shaped by the changes in the organization and in the wider UN environment; UNESCO activities in higher education over the past decade, assessing in
particular UNESCO’s response to the rapid globalization of higher education and its efforts to define a unique role for itself in the international higher education policy agenda; exploring the challenges posed to UNESCO’s work in higher education by current UN and UNESCO; and concluding with some preliminary thoughts on the key opportunities for UNESCO in the governance of higher education as a policy arena.
