International organisations and their role and impacts on local/national and global policymaking in the sector of education have been object of discussion in a vast number of academic studies during the past decades (e.g. McNeely 1995; Verger, Novalli, and Altinyelken 2018; Martens and Windzio 2022). However, the perspectives of the practitioners working within these international organisations are rarely analysed. In this study we analyse the role and impacts of international organisations in the differentiation between education systems through the understandings of education experts in these organisations. Empirically the paper builds on thematic semi-structured interviews with Finnish education experts working in international organisations. Our research question is: How are the international organisations impacting the reduction, construction or continuity of differentiation between the educational systems of the Global North and the Global South through development collaboration initiatives?

We develop our analysis by combining the onto-epistemic lenses of complexity thinking (e.g. Cilliers 1998) with the Luhmaniann concept of differentiation (e.g. Luhmann 1982; Baraldi, Corsi, and Esposito 2021;) and utilise the perspective of sensemaking as a tool to guide the analysis (e.g. Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld 2005; Brown, Colville, and Pye 2015). The combination of different perspectives and concepts has been done successfully in previous literature (e.g. Zahariadis 1998; Howlett et al. 2016; Santos 2022) demonstrating that different theoretical lenses can benefit from being aggregated, not only leading to a better understanding of the phenomenon under analysis, but also by contributing to advancements of each of the different theories utilised, while also innovating the ways in which theories are utilised in qualitative research. In the case of this study, this theoretical aggregation enables the development of a more holistic analysis of the dynamics of development cooperation in the education sector, contributing not only to a better understanding of these dynamics but also of how the Finnish education experts involved in them make sense of what happens around their professional environment.

The study starts with two assumptions a) that there is an imaginary, blurry divide between the so-called Global North (often described as developed countries, also donor countries) and the so-called Global South (frequently see as the underdeveloped, peripherical countries, which are the receivers of international support); and b) that the initiatives developed by international organisations impact the development of education globally, but more intensively in the Global South as it has been discussed in earlier research (e.g. Verger, Novelli, and Altinyelken 2018).

Hence, while bundles of studies, analyse the role of international organisations from distant, macro-economic perspectives. We study the sensemaking of the (Finnish) education experts working in international organizations to understand, from an internal perspective, the roles and impacts of international organisations in development cooperation, with the aim of comprehending if these organisations indeed maintain or even increase differentiations North-South or if they actually manage to reduce this differentiation and harmonise education systems, access and quality globally, as it is the aim Sustainable Development Goal 4 – Quality of education. This study contributes to complementary fields of research, namely Global Education Policies studies and Development studies.

Our findings indicate that interviewees understand the complexity and ambiguity of development cooperation and that international organisations, by keeping the leadership of development cooperation initiatives often maintain and can even increase differentiations among education systems along the divide North-South.

This study utilised a convenience sample (Etikan, Musa, and Alkassim 2015); selected in the context of a larger project that analysed (1) the roles and impacts of national experts in development cooperation in the sector of education and (2) how these experts understand to be the roles and impacts of their organisations in the development of education locally/nationally and globally. We interviewed 31 Finnish education experts working (or that until recently have worked) in international organisations (inter-governmental and non-governmental). The interviewees selection was done in two steps. First, a survey was conducted to already identified education experts potentially interested in participating in an interview. Second, through the agreed interviews a snowballing method was utilised to identify other Finnish experts involved in development cooperation in the sector of education within international organisations. This strategy was chosen because one of the criteria for the identification of expertise is the consensus among peers that one is an expert in a specific field (Chi 2006, 22–23). The sample represents a group of international experts placed in a variety of expert positions. The nationality of the interviewees is taken into account to understand their work, but the analysis is not done from a “national perspective” but rather from an organizational perspective into global development of education. The study deployed a qualitative methodological approach started with a review of earlier literature - e.g. international organisations’ reports (e.g. World bank and UNESCO) earlier academic literature on development cooperation and international organisations, and previous reports discussing the Finnish participation in international cooperation in the sector of education, which allowed us to understand how these publications discuss the roles and impacts of international organisations in education development and how Finland position itself within these international dynamics. The data obtained from the interviews was analysed qualitatively using content analysis (Schreier 2014), inductively and deductively. Thus, a set of categories were created beforehand based on readings of previous literature which seemed to be needed to retrieve the information necessary to respond to the research question (e.g. “significant organisations in development cooperation for education”, “roles of international organisations”, “experts views on their own role and influence in education development”, “problems and challenges in development cooperation initiatives”. These categories were then complemented with the information offered by the interviewees (e.g. “significant organisations in development cooperation for education: UNESCO”, “roles of international organisations: develop international awareness”.

The analysis revealed that the participants have holistic understandings of the world of development cooperation in education and that they perceive international organisations’ roles and impacts in the development of education locally, nationally and globally to be complex, ambiguous and paradoxical. On the one hand, international organisations are crucial in supporting the development of education systems in the countries of the Global South, on the other hand, these organisations’ initiatives, if not contextualised in the place of implementation and if not led by these contexts’ actors, often have unintentional and unpredictable outcomes that contribute to the maintenance and even increasing of differentiation between the education systems of the Global North (where donors usually are) and the education systems of the Global South (where development cooperation initiatives take place). While international organisations might, in all good intentions, be aiming at harmonising high-quality education globally, aspects such as the ones mentioned above lead to dynamics that directly or indirectly maintain and in some cases, increase the differentiation between education systems in both sides of the divide South-North. Furthermore, in line with earlier studies (e.g. Sultana 2019; Menashy 2017), and mentioned in the interviews, international organisations need to change the assumption that they have the valid knowledge about how education must be developed. To reduce differentiations between education systems in the Global North and the Global South, dynamics of development cooperation in education need to become co-constructed long-term partnerships where the leadership and, therefore, the power of decision is on the local/national actors and their knowledge and priorities are recognised as pivotal. This transformation requires, thus, a change in the established power dynamics and a democratic synergy of agendas (Centeno 2017) between governments of the receiving countries and international organisations, in order to grant these systems’ sustainable development.

Baraldi, C., Corsi, G., & Esposito, E. (2021). Unlocking Luhmann: A keyword introduction to systems theory. Frankfurt am Main: Bielefeld University Press. Brown, Andrew, Ian Colville, and Annie Pye. 2015. “Making Sense of Sensemaking in Organisation Studies.” Organization Studies 36 (2): 265-277. doi: 10.1177/0170840614559259. Centeno, Vera. 2017. The OECD’s Educational Agendas: Framed from Above, Fed from Below, Determined in Interaction. A Study on the Recurrent Education Agenda. Berlin: Peter Lang. Chi, Michelene T. H. 2006. “Two Approaches to the Study of Experts’ Characteristics.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, edited by K. Anders Ericsson, Neil Charness, Paul J. Feltovich, and Robert R. Hoffman, 21–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cilliers, Paul. 1998. Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems. London: Taylor & Francis. Etikan, Ilker, Sulaiman Abubakar Musa, and Rukayya Sunusi Alkassim. 2015. “Comparison of Convenience Sampling and Purposive Sampling.” American Journal of Theoretical and Applied Statistics 5 (1): 1-4. doi: 10.11648/j.ajtas.20160501.11. Howlett, Michael, Allan McConnell, and Anthony Perl. 2016. “Moving Policy Theory Forward: Connecting Multiple Stream and Advocacy Coalition Frameworks to Policy Cycle Models of Analysis.” Australian Journal of Public Administration 76 (1): 65-79. doi: 10.1111/1467-8500.12191. Luhmann, Niklas. 1981. “The World Society as a Social System.” International Journal of General Systems 8: 131-138. Martens, Kerstin, and Michael Windzio, eds. 2022. Global Pathways to Education: Cultural Spheres, Networks and International Organisations. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. McNeely, Connie. 1995. “Prescribing National Policies: The Role of International Organisations.” Comparative Education Review 39 (4): 483-507. Menashy, Francine. 2018. “Multi-stakeholder Aid to Education: Power in the Context of Partnership.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 16 (1): 13–26. doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2017.1356702. Santos, Íris. 2022. “Externalisations in the Portuguese Parliament and Print Media: A Complexity Approach to Education Policymaking Processes.” PhD Diss., Tampere University and University of Lisbon. Schreier, Margrit. 2014. “Qualitative Content Analysis.” In The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Analysis, edited by Uwe Flick, 170–183. London: Sage. Sultana, Farhana. 2019. “Decolonizing development education and the pursuit of social justice.” Human Geography 12 (3): 31- 46. Verger, Antoni., Mario Novelli, and Hülya Kosar Altinyelken, eds. 2018. Policy and International Development: New Agendas, Issues and Policies. London: Bloomsbury. Weick, Karl E., Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, and David Obstfeld. 2005. “Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking.” Organization Science 16 (4): 409-421. doi 10.1287/orsc.1050.0133. Zahariadis, Nicolaos. (1998). Comparing Three Lenses of Policy Choice. Policy Studies Journal 26 (3): 434-448.