During the last few years strategies of economic political austerity have grown strong in Europe. This has emerged mainly in response to the European debt crisis, which was interlinked with the worldwide economic recession. The debt problems of countries in the Eurozone was met with neo-liberal measures for recovery: reduce public spending, tighten financial controls – and keep the political reaction to these measures under control. The EU has become increasingly dominated by economic institutions and policies, controlled by the strongest member states. More recently the movement towards austerity has also been influenced by national political reactions to the refugee crisis, questioning the established policy of free movement across European borders. These developments have had impact on policies for adult education and lifelong learning, both at the EU level and in the individual European countries. The EU has tried since the late 1990ties to develop and promote policies for adult education and training integrated in a broader framework of lifelong and life-wide learning. Recently changes can be observed which include (1) playing down the Lisbon strategy for ‘knowledge based society’; (2) weakening commitment to the strategy of lifelong learning and (3) more focus on adult education for employability. While the mechanisms are complex there is no doubt that these changes can be related to the politics of austerity. Changes are also visible at the level of individual European countries. In Denmark, a country with a strong tradition of adult education, political attention has recently been focused almost exclusively on primary, secondary and higher education. There are very few policy initiatives in adult education and they mainly give priority to vocationally oriented adult education at the expense of liberal adult education as offered e.g. by the folk high schools. At the same time, the public financing of adult education has been reduced (Holm, 2014, Larson, 2011). The declining importance of adult education in Danish education policy also became evident in the media’s response to the first round of PIAAC in 2013, where the debate swiftly turned to primary education as the mean to better the Danish ranking (Cort & Larson, 2015). In the paper we will discuss these developments. Apart from Denmark we will look closer at one other country probably, Portugal. Methods and sources will be document analysis and interviews with key policy actors.
