The Council of Europe (CoE) has exerted influence on educational practices in Europe and beyond since the end of the Second World War and had positioned itself as a significant player in education well before the European Union (EU) entered the field (Patel & Calligaro, 2017). The CoE has pioneered initiatives in higher education mobility and enabled the inclusion of over 50 signatory countries in the Bologna process (Crosier & Parveva, 2013). The organisation’s human rights and citizenship education frameworks, as well as language education standards are integral to curricula across Europe (Byram et al., 2023; Otte, 2014). CoE established institutionalised cooperation with non-formal education actors who implement the recommended practices (Williamson, 2024).

The CoE mode of soft governance allows for the proliferation of the regional and global education agenda beyond Western Europe (Sprague, 2016). The 46 full-fledged member states of the CoE, as well as neighboring states like Kazakhstan and Morocco, participate in the development of common education standards and implement them according to what they deem suitable for their own systems. Moreover, the CoE has fostered long-term collaboration with IGOs such as UNESCO, OECD (Hawlicek, 1983), and the World Bank (Steckhan, 2017), playing a notable role in shaping global education agendas and promoting them among its member states, including the Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) (Solberg, 2016).

This paper investigates the CoE’s role as a regional organisation (RO) in the global governance of education, focusing on its historical and contemporary governance of the European and global education agenda. It addresses four research questions (RQs):

1. How can the role of ROs in global governance of education be theoretically conceptualized?
2. How has the CoE exercised this role over time?
3. What factors have determined the organisation's use of specific governance tools for the execution of this role?
4. What are the implications of these findings for contemporary global governance of education?

The RQs are operationalised through two study objectives. First, the paper explores the tools of governance employed by the CoE to execute its functions as an RO in global governance of education, as well as the evolution of these tools and the factors behind this evolution (RQs 2, 3). Tools of governance can be defined both as knowledge on how to govern and the exercise of this knowledge which include coordination, decision-making, monitoring and evaluation, as well as legitimization (Simons & Voß, 2018). In that sense, governance is closely related to policymaking which in the current state-of-the-art is seen as a process that is both governed through power relations and politics, but that is also an expression of governance by the ones who make policy decisions, interprete, implement and evaluate policies (Ozga & Lingard, 2006). Therefore, both governance and policy tools will be at the centre of this study, and they will be examined through critical policy analysis (CPA).

A theoretical approach if of core importance for the methodological design and a research focus of a CPA study (Young & Diem, 2018). The second objective of the paper is to address the theoretical gap regarding the role of ROs in global education governance (RQs 1, 4).Even though global governance is often criticized for its eclecticism, some fundamental conceptual postulates for understanding the role of IGOs in global governance of education are in place (Verger, 2018). Simultaneously, ROs remain under-theorized in global governance literature despite their numerical dominance among IGOs (Martens et al., 2023). It is not clear if the CoE as an IGO follows the same principles of soft governance that are described in the more elaborate scholarship on UNESCO, OECD and the World Bank (Bieber, 2016).

The study uses a mixed-methods exploratory approach and includes qualitative and quantitative policy document analysis for blended reading (Lemke et al., 2015). To validate the text analysis conclusions and close textual gaps, semi-structured qualitative interviews with former and current CoE officials will be conducted (Cohen et al., 2017). Traditionally, the CPA approach is methodologically linked with qualitative analysis (Young & Diem, 2018), but blended reading allows for an in-depth interpretation enhanced by the identification of patterns that would not be visible to the “naked eye”. Data collection includes the review of the CoE archival materials from the early 1950s to 2019. The earliest chronological frame is defined by the organisation’s establishment and the beginning of education standardization in the region influenced by the CoE and UNESCO. The latest point of analysis precedes the significant policy shift aimed at addressing the educational crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Thematically, the analysis focuses on two policy areas that appear to reflect long-term tendencies of the CoE governance and be of relevance to international education agendas, such as higher education, as well as citizenship and human rights education. Documents were selected for their significance in policy development, i.e., those pertaining to institutionalized decisions in education, such as budgets, action plans, recommendations, and treaties. The qualitative analysis examines CoE policy language and discourse evolution. Policy tools are identified through a literature review and qualitative document analysis, extracting text units that reflect governance tool applications (Silge & Robinson, 2017). These units are categorized for quantitative content analysis, allowing for the examination of documents like budget reports and program descriptions that might be overlooked in a purely qualitative review (Jules, 2015). Such an approach farmed in a CPA manner would allow to analyse the CoE not as a moral actor or a legal entity, as it is often presented in the literature, but as a policy-making and governing institution with its own legitimization, norm-setting and power-assertion goals. To juxtapose CoE policies with global education governance trends, thematic categories are constructed (Weber, 1990). Given the CoE’s long-standing cooperation with UNESCO and OECD, the study examines key frameworks promoted by these organizations in the areas of higher education, human rights and citizenship education. Identifying shared references highlights policy convergence, while a qualitative review of these convergences explores how international norms are adapted regionally. Finally, semi-structured interviews designed based on the two previous stages of analysis validate the findings.

The study is ongoing, but some preliminary conclusions on the theoretical and empirical perspective on the ROs and CoE in global governance and the applied governance tools can be drawn. Many aspects of IGOs in global governance are applicable to ROs, like overlapping competences among international actors, the increasing involvement of non-state actors in shaping RO activities, and standardization tendencies (Langenhove, 2016). However, there are distinct characteristics regarding the role of ROs in the global governance of education. One of their key functions is promoting global norms to alleviate member states’ concerns about falling behind, but also moderating the effects of globalization on their regions by selectively adopting or adapting international norms (Cooper et al., 2007). The CoE provides a compelling example of an RO that aligns with global discourses and similuitaneously reinforces regionally relevant perspectives through its governance tools (Dale & Robertson, 2002). The CoE governance instruments have evolved significantly, heavily influenced by the activities of other IGOs in the area of education and by the broader political context. Before the emergence of OECD and the EU as education policy actors, the CoE’s primary governance mechanisms have been the provision of expertise and establishment of regional standards. Due to its budgetary and competences limitations, the organisation could not compete with more powerful international actors and by the late 1960s, its key governance instrument was policy convergence with such regionally relevant IGOs as UNESCO, EC and OECD. Since the 1990s, the political context has changed drastically. Following the demands of the post-socialist member states, who now constituted almost half of its members, the CoE positioned itself as an actor with moral authority in promoting European education standards for value-based societal transformations. Ultimately, the CoE’s reliance on "soft governance" tools has been a key factor in its survival and continued relevance.

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