Resumen de Governança global via promeses. Negociant i supervisant els objectius d'aprenentatge en temps dels ods
This dissertation aims to examine processes of global goal-setting in education through a case study of the negotiation of Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4). Goal- and target-setting have a long history in the field of education – while the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the six Education For All (EFA) goals feature among the most well-known episodes, the practice of goal-setting in education dates back at least as far as the 1960s. The adoption of SDG4 adds thus to a well-established tradition within the education-for-development realm. While much of the public comment and scholarship on global goals has tended to focus on the relative impact (or the lack thereof) of such normative instruments, this thesis takes a step back and focuses instead on the very process through which such goals came into being.
The thesis explores such questions by concentrating on the role of international organizations– a comparatively under-discussed theme in the early accounts of the making of the SDGs. The main goal of the thesis is thus to examine the negotiation and monitoring of SDG4 by bringing to the center of the analysis the interests and routines of the international organizations partaking in these endeavor, as well as the institutional architecture in which inter-organizational interactions took place. To this purpose, the research draws on a combination of data-sources (namely, semi-structured interviews, documentary analysis and non-participant observation) and relies on analytical strategy informed by a case-centric variant of process tracing.
The first line of inquiry addressed by the thesis concerns the process through which the normative statements and targets encapsulated in SDG4 were agreed upon. The study finds that this negotiation was shaped by two persistent sources of tension, relative to the very architecture of the debate and the content of the new agenda. In relation to the former, the thesis finds that the coexistence of two workstreams (one led by the UN, the other by EFA) often proved a source of friction, as a result of the disparities between the bureaucratic culture of the UN sphere and the deliberation routines that characterize the EFA architecture – a divergence that, in turn, reflects different understandings of what qualifies as a democratic debate. In relation to the latter, the research finds that attempts to institutionalize the learning-outcomes norm as the centerpiece of the SDG4 were actively resisted by certain strategically-located constituencies.
The second line of inquiry addressed by the research concerns the impact of the new education goal on the organizations involved in the production of SDG4 indicators. The thesis shows that, despite the consensus on the indispensability of global learning data, the production of such data represents a challenging endeavor. This is so as the growing centrality of assessment data is perceived by a range of data producers and data collectors as an opportunity to consolidate and expand their areas of influence – a process that inevitably creates issues of rivalry and overlap. Second, the collective nature of the measurement process has laid bare the fact that multiple (and contradictory) expectations are placed on global monitoring efforts, and has rendered visible a tension between the principles of in-built comparability and country ownership.
Overall, the negotiation patterns identified by the research suggest that, while the formulation of the SDGs was a deliberative and participatory process, these qualities should not be equated to an absence of conflict or or to the suppression of power-laden dynamics. Thus, even when the negotiations relied on horizontal decision-making structures, different actors were unequally equipped to take advantage of them; also, consensus-building exercises frequently relied on ambiguity – rather than entailing a genuine process of ideational convergence or rapprochement.
