This paper examines the relationship between UNESCO and the World Bank between 1964 and 1986 in the field of educational planning in the context of the rise of global governance in education for development during the Cold War. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) represented the main authority for education at the time, but its position was challenged by other organizations that emerged from the post-war U.S. dominated international order, such as the OECD and the World Bank. The 1960s was the high time of educational and manpower planning, fueled by human capital theory and a scientific approach to education. During those years UNESCO and the World Bank worked very closely together, in particular in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1964, in the context of the UNESCO-World Bank Co-operative Agreement, the Education Financing Division (EFD) was established, a joint unit staffed by UNESCO and the World Bank. The EFD carried out technical missions for World Bank-funded educational projects that were prepared by UNESCO. The division was a “product of pragmatism” (Jones, 1992, p. 71) – the World Bank quickly needed to move on staffing its education program as in the 1960s, demands for educational loans were rapidly increasing. In the years to come the World Bank relied less and less on UNESCO and built its own resources and expertise in education, sought to be perceived as “not just a lending agency” (World Bank, 1964) and “to play [an] intellectual role” (Rose, 2003, p. 67). The World Bank has arguably developed into the most influential policy shaper in education in developing countries (Mundy & Verger, 2015; Klees, Samoff, & Stromquist, 2012), while the influence of UNESCO has declined (Burnett, 2010; Elfert, 2018).

The guiding question of this paper is: What was the historical foundation of the World Bank overtaking UNESCO as the dominant international organization for education in developing countries? Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital and symbolic power (Bourdieu, 1977; 1989; 1993) and the concept of “epistemic communities” (Haas, 1992), I will address this question by focusing on the differences in ideology and “the shared set of normative and principled beliefs” (p. 3) between UNESCO and the World Bank. These two organizations represented somewhat different “fields”. UNESCO had many educators and philosophers among its staff and employed a humanistic and human rights approach to education, while the World Bank staff was composed mostly of economists situated in a more scientific and econometric education approach. There was a lot of tension between these two groups, and “educators did not voluntarily surrender the field of education to the economists” (Elfert, forthcoming; Elfert, 2018). An example of the ideological tensions between the two organizations was their disagreement on the approach to literacy. The World Bank financed education for “productive purposes” (Interview with former World Bank officer) and disagreed with UNESCO’s support to a “universal literacy movement” (World Bank, 1963). However, they also shared common beliefs. Both pursued educational and manpower planning, which was constructed by a new group of experts as scientific and endowed with capital (Benveniste, 1977).

The UNESCO-World Bank Co-operative agreement lost momentum throughout the 1970s and officially ended in 1989 (World Bank, 1989). Over the period of the existence of the EFD, the historical sources show a clear development of the World Bank gaining greater capital and “power to produce…the legitimate vision of the world” (Bourdieu, 1989, p. 20), while UNESCO lost out in the struggle over global governance of education.

This sociological-historical study draws on the triangulation of data obtained from different sources: Analysis of secondary literature, historical-interpretive analyses of primary sources and archival materials, as well as 10 semi-structured open-ended interviews with former UNESCO and World Bank officials and EFD staffers. The interviews will be analyzed according to the research question and the conceptual framework.

This study aims at contributing to our understanding of the emergence of the particular system of thought and governance that dominates education for development today and examine the historical context in which the World Bank rose to its dominant position in education in developing countries, while UNESCO’s influence has declined. Although the United States was influential in the creation of UNESCO, it had to compromise with other countries that claimed influence in UNESCO, initially in particular France (Elfert, 2018). In the process of decolonization in the late 1950s and 1960s, developing countries, which joined UNESCO in large numbers, challenged the influence of the U.S. and Western countries and used their numerical power to claim their rights and interests. In the context of the Cold War, UNESCO was increasingly seen as a politicized organization that, given its universal membership, could not be easily integrated into the capitalist U.S. dominated world order. The World Bank with its focus on “connecting capital markets to development” (title of a World Bank 70th Anniversary publication) emerged as the organization that was particularly suitable to legitimize and spread paradigms of modernization and growth that represented “the legitimate vision of the world” (Bourdieu, 1989, p. 20). The paper aims to shed light on the ideological and geopolitical struggles over the field of education for development and the shifts in global governance in education that are ongoing.

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