Since the inclusion of the universal right to free elementary education as part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the justice-oriented aspirations of education have been central to the global community of educational governance. Governments worldwide, despite vastly differing realities, have rationalized educational imperatives into their national frameworks, using education as a tool to accelerate socioeconomic development and help distribute its benefits equitably. In the formative years, the universal educational entitlements that were declared were translated into an international program of education for all (EFA), as advocated by UNESCO and UNICEF, but were soon outpaced by other organizations promoting an economic perspective, such as the World Bank (WB) and the OECD. (Tikly, 2017). Commitments to widen educational opportunities became bolstered by the discourse on equality of opportunity, in parallel with human capital theory, which together promised both societal transformation and the unlocking of society’s full potential (Marginson, 2016). While an idealistic-humanistic ideology dominated thinking about education in the first decade after the Second World War, the latter decades saw a rise in economist perspectives, which continue to underpin educational policies worldwide (Elfert & Ydesen, 2023; Spring, 2013). Some scholars has used the term economic imperialism (see Jabbar & Menashy 2022) to capture the extent to which economic theories such as human capital theory (HCT) and rational choice theory (RCT), and economic methods, such as a variety of econometric analysis, have come to dominate education policy.

            Since the turn of the millennia, the international program of EFA has transformed into Learning for all, which is better aligned with HCT informed perspectives of education (Tikly 2017). In the same vein, quality assurance and evaluation (QAE) practices, emphasis on comparative learning metrics and indicators, as well as evidence based policymaking, have creating the need for new kinds of data infrastructures in education (Zajda, 2020). As an extension, a technical orientation and positive attitude toward information seem to have led to a turn from philosophical definitions of social justice toward technical and numerical mediations of equity (Lingard, et al. 2014).

            In parallel to the above, scholarship on global education governance has emphasized and combined a variety of perspectives and sources of legitimacy in explaining the influence and authority of international organizations (IOs), particularly the WB (see Mundy & Verger, 2015; Spring, 2014). Recent decades have witnessed increasing scientific interest on the epistemic nature of authority, in which IOs across organizational types, sectors, research fields and geographical areas, both act as sites of knowledge production, and seek to legitimate their policies based on evidence and knowledge (Zapp, 2017, 2020).

            In this ECER presentation, I discuss the enactment of justice-oriented aspirations in education policy within a knowledge driven and economically influenced policy architecture. The presentation is based on recent analysis on WB’s education policy since the 1990s (Pynnönen & Kallo, forthcoming). The analysis draws on Nancy Fraser’s (1997, 2009) thoery on three dimensions of justice – economic, cultural and political – to investigate the WB’s approach, while analyzing the knowledge claims the WB uses to justify its approach. These knowledge claims are called ‘epistemic anchors’ inherent to WB’s approach.

The focus on epistemic anchors inherent in WB’s educational policy places the analysis within an epistemic governance framework (see Alasuutari & Qadir, 2014) and contribute to theme of politics of knowledge and knowledge-policy relations. Inspired by poststructural approaches, the analytical framework sees knowledge both as a matter of interpretations that attribute qualified and objective values and possess legitimate authority and as a nondominant instrument of power that produces “problems,” “subjects,” “objects,” and “places” (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2018). The analytical framework follows a Foucauldian perspective by seeing knowledge (and data) being shaped by discursive rules of formation (Torfing, 2005) that frame and set boundaries upon what is possible to think, write, and speak about a given social object or practice (Bacchi & Goodwin, 2018). The empirical data encompass eight WB’s policy documents (strategy papers, reports and project briefs) between 1995 and 2023. All document we chose based on their centrality in expressing the WB’s contemporary understandings of the “state” of education globally and the key policy stances and visions for education. The analysis uses methods developed for document analysis (Hull, 2012; Shankar et al. 2017), and the findings are established through a qualitative theory-guided content analysis that utilizes the theoretical framework through an abductive process of inquiry, in which the framework is gradually taken along to guide and interpret the research material (Cresswell, 2009). The analysis regards documents as part of translation processes between epistemologically founded knowledge claims and policy problematizations. The policy documents are, therefore, considered products of complex processes of negotiation and acts of persuasion between the different epistemic communities within WB and its broader institutional framework and in relation to its multiple audiences. Thus, the documents are not only considered passive “informants” and “containers” of inert data and evidence (see Prior, 2008) there merely that echo the multiple voices stored in them. Instead, they are considered epistemic “actants” (see Callon, 1984) that have the capacity to orient and induce action. While the analysis does not venture to speculate about the possible actions in themselves, it is grounded in the widely recognized idea that any artifact of culture, be it a document or a less tangible social phenomenon, such as a perspective and knowledge claim arising from disciplinary fields or ideologies, are not only descriptive but, by enacting and inaugurating reality, also performative (Blakely, 2020).

The analysis bring forward three distinct but partly overlapping epistemic periods in WB's education policy since the 1990s. 1) A methodological period dominated by human capital informed analysis (especially rate of return analysis) that together with theoretically considerations of private and social externalities as well as adaptions of economic growth theories, justified public investment in basic level educational opportunities of all. 2) A period characterized by self-proclaimed analytical expertise in a theoretical and methodological vacuum filled by a neoliberal systems-approach and calls for quality. 3) A period characterized by a move towards capacity building efforts underpinned by economic theories and ideas (equilibrium, positive externalities) and statistics (development accounting, aggregation methods and harmonization exercises) that legitimate datafication as means to clear power imbalance and inefficiencies in education and by extension provide equity. The finding show how WB’s knowledge initiatives have absorbed noneconomic aspects of justice as positive externalities of human capital and subdued the diversity of epistemic traditions of its client countries. This has been done especially by insisting on and arguing for an all-encompassing human capital approach that emphasizes and validates the relevance of global learning assessments as a prepolitical baseline for resolving development aspirations no matter the context. In addition, the analysis highlight the WB’s agility in composing different kinds of epistemic anchors, by combining, and adapting a variety of core beliefs of neoclassical economics, to justify its data driven and neoliberal approach to education. Throughout the three periods, justice-oriented aspects of cultural subordination and political representation were pushed to the margins of the WB’s educational policy. While the WB operationalize elements of dialog and participation, its knowledge initiatives and policies are unable to position and support disadvantaged and marginalized groups as legitimate epistemic agents and political actors, but primarily as informants and clients embedded in an economic system.

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