ABSTRACT
The field of international organizations (IOs) in Latin America is rich in the number and type of organizations that comprise it. At the same time, it is both a highly networked and stratified field in which the relationships among different organizations, governments, and institutions are complex, and the functions of organizations multifarious and often overlapping (see Jaramillo and Knight 2005, for a detailed typology). To reach a fuller understanding of the complex role of IOs in Latin American higher learning, it is imperative to delve deeper into the interconnectivity and the points of convergence and divergence amongst these agencies. Rather than trying to categorize them, in this chapter we focus on the relationships of cooperation and competition among some of the IOs that have played an influential role on Latin American higher education since the end of World War II. In doing so, we highlight the discourses that the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the World Bank, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and other influential IOs in the region have displayed in their approaches toward higher education. Understanding the characteristics of the various higher education systems in Latin America is a complex task. If we constructed an evolutionary map of the university in Latin America, we would see a number of uneven layers resting on top of the first institutions established in the sixteenth century. The regional university systems, after all, are the result of a quintessentially colonial process dating back to 1530 with the creation of the oldest university in the western hemisphere-the Universidad Santo Tomas Aquino, now the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo-by the Spanish colonizers. Yet the region has also experienced colonization by other powers, including Portugal, England, France, and, more recently, by the United States and the former Soviet Union. Throughout this colonial history, Latin American universities have incorporated organizational and educational structures from other higher education systems,
while at the same time developing decidedly local identities and functions (Albornoz 1991; Levy 2005; Mollis 2006). Similarly, we must bear in mind that over the last 60 years Latin American countries went from a stage of relative prosperity to one of great economic and political turmoil. It is, then, in this highly variegated set of systems that IOs have operated since the end of World War II. The ideological affiliations and specific agendas of IOs have played an important role in how university systems have negotiated these disruptions. Over the last three decades in particular, the rise of an educational doctrine closely tied to neo-liberal economic principles, promoted and contested by different IOs, has conditioned the growth and orientation of Latin American higher education. This is the context that we will examine in the rest of this chapter.
