Present Futures in Global Education Governance. A Critical Discourse Analysis of UNESCO’s Futures of Education Initiative

Abstract in English

This thesis examines the role of present futures in global education policy discourse by analysing how they shape and are used to legitimise programmatic ideas for education. The thesis acknowledges present futures as action-guiding factors and arguments inspired by the sociology of expectations and sociological fictionalism.

UNESCO’s initiative Futures of Education: Learning to Become serves as the empirical entry point into the global education governing arena. This study comprises material published from the initiative’s launch in 2019 up to the initiative’s final report, published in 2021. The report was compiled by the International Commission on the Futures of Education, which UNESCO invited to revise educational futures in exchange with experts and the public. Moreover, the Faure report (1972) and the Delors report (1996), which are similar flagship reports commissioned by UNESCO, are considered for an appropriate contextualisation of the subject matter. The analysis draws on the discourse historical approach (DHA) and therefore integrates thoroughly sociopolitical and historical context for the analysis.

This thesis shows how futures were imagined and portrayed as elusive and disruptive in the Futures of Education initiative and how that meant that education needed to be flexible, adaptable, and plural. However, to understand the present futures and programmatic ideas this thesis unearthed, it is essential to consider the peculiarity of the global education governing arena and UNESCO’s history of struggle to stay relevant. After all, the initiative also functioned as an opportunity or strategy to (re)produce and legitimise the role of UNESCO as a humanistic actor and brand in the global education governing arena while maintaining to be relevant to diverse stakeholders and ideologies.