This paper explores whether and to what extent the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic has created a window of opportunity for adult learning to raise in relevance among EU policy priorities.

Two years into the pandemic, many concur that it has opened multiple EU crises, including an “education crisis”, which has affected all ranges of learning environments, from compulsory to adult education (Käpplinger & Lichte, 2020), including non-formal and informal learning at the workplace (OECD, 2021). As a disruptive event, the pandemic has pushed national and international policy-makers to provide unprecedented policy responses to mitigate its negative effects. This includes major adaptations of the EU governance with the suspension of the Growth and Stability Pact and of the European Semester, both influencing national spending priorities and reforms in relevant policy domains including education. Moreover, the pandemic has also questioned the role of adult learning for individuals and society insofar as the health crisis rapidly translated into an economic and social crisis.

Recent EU education research has examined member state policy responses to the pandemic (Zancajo, Verger, Bolea, 2022) and the policy discourse at the EU level (Symeonidis et al., 2021). It has also assessed changes in education governance and suggested that EU initiatives during the pandemic are an attempt to restore EU influence on national education systems (Grek and Landri, 2021). Hence, the pandemic might have changed conditions – i.e. the problem definition and the institutional arena - for agenda-setting mechanisms that are to account for in order to grasp changes in policy priorities ensued by the pandemic. Our goal is to contribute to the growing literature on the effects of the pandemic on EU policy-making by identifying:

1) the extent to which the pandemic has affected the relevance given to adult learning in EU policy priorities and what are ‘contours’ that adult learning has been attributed during the crisis

2) the actors and governance structures that have contributed to shaping the role of adult learning in EU policy priorities under Covid-19

We draw on the Multiple Stream Framework (MSF) (Kingdon, 2014) and two complementary perspectives on actors (Goyal et al., 2021) and policy discourses (Winkel & Leipold, 2016) to understand changes in the EU agenda-setting mechanisms influencing adult learning priorities.

MSF conceptualises the government, and the EU by extension, as an organization, which life runs through three separate streams - the problem, the political, and the policy streams. Their coupling at critical junctures produces greatest agenda changes (Kingdon, 2014). For each stream, Goyal et al (2021) identify relevant actors allowing to understand streams interactions and, possibly, coupling. Winkel and Leipold (2016) combine the MSF with Policy Discourse Analysis and understand streams as discourse patterns where problems, policy, and political agents’ beliefs are discursively created.

The combination of these accounts implies that the problem stream, which provides legitimacy public issues and calls for policy intervention, is dominated by epistemic communities. These are the interface between science and policy and shape the narratives of the problem (Goyal et al, 2021). Further, the political stream, affecting issues on the agenda and subsequent decisions, is dominated by advocacy coalitions (i.e. actors with specific beliefs concerning a policy issue). Finally, the policy stream, representing policy solutions available, is dominated by instrument constituencies (i.e. actors, like policy entrepreneurs, having the power to advance acceptable interpretations and convincing policy solutions). Policy entrepreneurs can help coupling the three independent streams – by opening a policy window - and bring about change in the policy agenda (Ackrill et al., 2013). At EU level, due to the lack of centralised authority, policy entrepreneurs play a central role (Zahariadis, 2008).

Based on the MSF and the two complementary analytical approaches, we will perform policy discourse analysis on a series of public documents and actors’ interviews. Empirically, to fit the problem stream of European adult learning, we will give particular attention to the role of the OECD – an international actor that has become a central ‘knowledge producer’ in the field with the OECD Skills Strategy and the launch of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competences (PIAAC). In line with the MSF, we expect the OCED to act as problem broker, using knowledge, values, and emotions to disseminate specific framing of the problems, thanks to its willingness, persistence, and access to policy makers (Knaggård, 2015). For the policy stream, we will analyse the role of the European Commission, not as a monolithic institution, but as the sum of diverse actors using different discourses embedded in heterogenous policy environments. We will pay attention to the role of policy entrepreneur that the European Commission might have played in this policy field as it did in others (Vesan et al., 2021). Finally, in the political stream, we consider European governmental and non-governmental stakeholders (at different level), thus accounting for the plurality of political actors at the EU level. Once these actors have been identified, we will perform policy discourse analysis and examine how people and policy stakeholders speak about and make sense of issues at stake (Winkel and Leipold, 2016). For epistemic communities, and in particular of the OECD Education and Labour and Social Affairs Departments, we will analyse documents produced in various forms and venues (reports, policy briefs, etc), and interviews. We will also analyse European Commission documents as well as interviews with staff from different DGs in order to contribute to the analysis of the policy streams. Documents (e.g. reports, opinion and position papers) as well as interviews with nongovernmental and governmental (EU) stakeholders will allow to flesh out the political conditions that might have favoured the opening up of a window of opportunity. The timeframe for the selection of the documentations and the interview guide starts with the declaration of the pandemic by WHO.

This is a work in progress and we are still collecting data on the three different streams, their actors’ discourses and the conditions that favoured or hampered the opening of the window of opportunity for changes in European priorities for adult learning. However, we believe our contribution will shed light on agenda-setting mechanisms in a transversal and understudied policy domain, which is often understood as a corollary of employment and social policies. The identification of actors for each stream, and their policy discourses, will allow seizing current policy directions, underlying tensions and the implications for future developments.

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