As one of several organisations jostling for influence in the global governance of education, UNESCO is not only aptly positioned to promote its ideal global education landscape, but also holds a vested interest in doing so. In recent years, the organisation has advanced a vision of education predicated on the idea of the commons. In this view, education serves a global common good and should thus be protected by institutional arrangements that bind peoples and communities closer together (UNESCO 2015, UNESCO 2021). In its publications, UNESCO advocates for a commoningapproach, supporting the emergence of modes of collectivity and social relations around shared values and a perceived common future. While rooted in the ideal of shared values and requiring collaborative participation, the commons remain, as Means et al. (2019) describe it, “always a divided and contested terrain”. The global governance of education is itself contested, with various organisations vying for influence and legitimacy in this space (Robertson 2022). UNESCO’s promotion of a global common good perspective on education thus occurs in a complex and competitive landscape of ideas, actors, and interests. 

This paper critically examines UNESCO’s construction of a commons approach to global education through a multivocal analysis of its 2021 report “A new social contract for education: imagining our futures together”. Through this novel form of analysis, we show how UNESCO constructs the commons by referring implicitly to a specific addressee, what we call the “global reader”, articulated as part of a global community bound by shared values, collective futures and faced with a common set of global crises. A particular subjectivity is thus implied by the text through the construction of a “we”, an undefined community which readers are expected to relate to. We question to what extent this community of global readers exists and consider its implications for a global commons approach to education.

With the migration of education policy beyond state boundaries and the increasing engagement of international organisations in education agenda setting, a “global project of education reform” (Ball Junemann and Santori 2017) has developed. Studies have explored how and under what conditions global education policy and reform travel to different domestic contexts. While promoted as a “global” endeavour, the norms and agendas of international organisations like UNESCO are ultimately distributed and implemented unevenly in local policy contexts (Mundy et al. 2016). By highlighting how policy ideas are received and interpreted by the report’s addressees, this study shifts attention from national or local policy to a more affective, individual perspective. The collaborative analysis and shared critique bring to light how the report is interpreted by its readers. Ultimately, the report is addressed to readers making up the ‘global community’- it is directed towards a “we”- intended to represent individuals and communities making up a common humanity. Hence, an inquiry into how addressees of the report take in its language and ideas is important. Our policy analysis moves beyond the study of how global education policies are received and implemented by relevant governments and policy stakeholders to underscore how they are digested and interpreted by individual readers irrespective of national, regional borders and differences.

In order to critically examine UNESCO’s construction of education and the commons, we developed and tested a multivocal qualitative analysis of the 2021 report on “A new social contract”. We draw on Lund and Suthers’ (2018) Multivocal Analysis Approach (MVA), which relies on collaboration between researchers of different theoretical and methodological traditions working in parallel on a shared research project. Through dialogue, inter-subjective meaning making and the co-construction of interpretations, the different “voices” emanating from the participating researchers are harnessed for a richer analysis and towards the production of new knowledge. Accordingly, we brought together a group of seven researchers from geographically and socially diverse backgrounds to construct a dialogical analysis of the report. As a group of international researchers, we saw ourselves as possible variations of the “global” reader and through a shared methodology, conceptualized our different perceptions of the report as a way to gain a specific epistemic advantage. This multivocal approach exposes how the idea of the “global” is taken up through a diversity of perspectives.

Our collaborative inquiry draws on and engages with scholarship advancing critical approaches to the global governance of education (Mundy et al. 2016, Robertson 2022, Vander, Doussen Toucan 2017). As suggested in the literature, while promoted as a “global” endeavour, the norms and agendas of UNESCO are ultimately distributed and implemented unevenly when met with domestic policy frames (Mundy et al 2016). Through our multivocal analysis, we investigate whether this unevenness is also apparent in how the policy is perceived and received by readers. In our view, implicit references to a “global reader” are problematic, as they assume that the report is digested in the same way by all. Accordingly, we argue that problematizing this starting point is crucial to advance whether a global commons approach to education can indeed be manifested, and if so, how this might be achieved. By exposing the “global reader” implied by UNESCO policies, this study invites a discussion on which alternative models of subjectivity and intersubjective dialogue can generate power to support the reframing of education as a global common good.

Lund, K., & Suthers, D. (2018). Multivocal analysis: Multiple perspectives in analyzing interaction. In International handbook of the learning sciences (pp. 455-464). Routledge. Mundy, K., Green, A., Lingard, B., & Verger, A. (Eds.). (2016). Handbook of global education policy. John Wiley & Sons. Robertson, S. L. (2022). Guardians of the Future: International Organisations, Anticipatory Governance and Education. Global Society, 36(2), 188-205. UNESCO 2021, International Commission on the Futures of Education, Re-imaging our futures together: a new social contract for education. VanderDussen Toukan, E. (2018). Educating citizens of ‘the global’: Mapping textual constructs of UNESCO’s global citizenship education 2012–2015. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 13(1), 51-64.’