Drawing on archival research and interviews, this paper traces the historical continuities between the educational planning fervour of the post-World War II era and the contemporary rise of global metrology. In the 1960s international organisations such as the OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank promoted educational planning based on input-output oriented manpower forecasting methods. Milestones of that period were the establishment of the UNESCO-World Bank Cooperative Agreement in 1964, OECD’s Mediterranean Regional Project, and the creation of the International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) in 1963, which was to some extent a consequence of the turf struggles between the OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank over the field of educational planning (Elfert, 2021). These organizations and initiatives based their legitimacy on processes of normative isomorphism driven by professionalization and “representational technologies”, such as statistics and management tools, creating “new points of intervention within a sociotechnical assemblage” (Srnicek, 2013, p. 25). The Cold War constituted the breeding ground of comparative research and the rise of metrology, promoted as a governance tool by a nexus of international organizations, philanthropic foundations, universities, and think tanks close to and supported by the U.S. government. These intersections and entanglements are reflected in the career of Philip Coombs, who held influential positions in the Ford Foundation and the U.S. government before being appointed, in 1963, as the first director of the IIEP. This paper will shed light on the instrumental role of the U.S. government in creating a system of global governance of education in the context of the Cold War environment, which was consequential for the rise of the global metrological field.

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