Will Brehm 1:30
Gita Steiner-Khamsi, welcome back to FreshEd.

Gita Steiner-Khamsi 1:35
Hello, hi, good to see you again.

Will Brehm 1:39
So you were at the UN in late September for the Global Partnership for Education’s Multiply Possibility high level event, which I think was co-hosted by Italy and Nigeria. Can you sort of set the scene for us for those who have never really been to some of these global sort of summits that take place around the UN at that time? What does this type of event actually look like from inside the room?

Gita Steiner-Khamsi 2:05
Let me start by saying how it looks from outside. It was actually really difficult to get there because there were so many rallies. And interestingly, it was just one rally. There were so many rallies from different nationalities, because right now we have so many governments that are controversial, so many wars going on. And there were multiple rallies. I almost got there too late. I had to run at the end to get there to the high level event. So entering the building was also a story of its own.
But once I got there, it was a huge room in the ECOSOC building with hundreds of people sitting there. In the front are the ones that are pledging money, that make financial promises, but also representatives from recipient governments and NGOs. And then in the back is us. We were sitting there and depending on how much the pledge was, we were clapping like mad and we were just very happy. It was an uplifting experience, I must say.

Will Brehm 3:10
And so were you an observer technically at the event?

Gita Steiner-Khamsi 3:13
No, I went there as a professor and as someone who is affiliated sort of with the Global Partnership for Education because of the KICS initiative. I’m like a research lead in one of the GPE funded projects, which is a very good project. It’s called Knowledge and Innovation Exchange. So I’m not sure whether that was for me the entry ticket, but I managed to get in there and I’m really happy I got there because it was an interesting experience.

Will Brehm 3:39
It sort of sounds — in an email exchange, you sort of said it seemed like Eurovision a little bit.

Gita Steiner-Khamsi 3:46
Yes, because country after country, not only do they make pledges, but they start their statement with saying how important education is. It’s a human right. It’s good for girls. It is for happiness. Education is great to end wars, to end the climate crisis. So as someone who is in education, I felt fantastic. I thought every day could be a pledging day, a replenishing event, because it really shows how important education is.

And the chairperson who started the replenishing meeting started to ask, is education in the house? And everyone said, yes, yes, yes. And then she asked, is money in the house? And then also people said, yes, money is also in the house. So money for education is a good thing. So it was a very uplifting experience.

Will Brehm 4:40
So what is this campaign trying to do? I mean, obviously, they’re trying to raise money. How much money? Why? What’s happening at this moment that this type of event is needed?

Gita Steiner-Khamsi 4:50
It is actually a ritual. It’s every couple of years when the organization has a new strategic plan. Education Cannot Wait is like another organization. They have their replenishing meeting in November 5th, I believe, in Geneva. It’s important to remember that GPE meant to have this replenishing meeting in June, but they postponed it because of the war, because they were afraid that not much money would come in. So the war is still going on. So it is under very dire circumstances that this took place. And even more so, people were happy that pledges were made that were significant, because I think many of us thought it would be much less. So the feeling was positive. It was an affirmation that the countries do support GPE’s work.

Will Brehm 5:45
How much money was pledged in the end?

Gita Steiner-Khamsi 5:47
I looked at the website today. They say 2.1 billion. But if you add all these mechanisms, it will add up to much more, because there will be multiplier funds and some commitments were just for one year and not three years. So I think 2.1 billion and more.

Will Brehm 6:09
And more, right? And potentially could go higher. And who’s actually pledging? When we say someone is pledging, who is doing that?

Gita Steiner-Khamsi 6:17
It’s actually the sovereign states, the donor countries, and also GPE is a multi-stakeholder organization. So they also have a representative from the philanthropies and another one from the private sector. So they all make promises, financial promises, basically for the next three years, or some of them only for one year. And so they were given the floor, one after the other. And depending on the amount they were giving and how they explained it, the applause was louder or not so loud.

Will Brehm 6:53
And do any of them stick out in your mind as being memorable?

Gita Steiner-Khamsi 6:57
Oh, absolutely. Canada was unexpected, that they would give $300 million. Then there was frenetic ovation and applause for the Arab Coordination Group. They pledged $800 million, of which $400 million comes from the OPEC International Development Fund. Then there was also applause for the philanthropies. They were represented by the Roger Federer Foundation. But of course, the representative of the philanthropies is the Aga Khan Foundation, Andrew Cunningham. He has a seat on the board. So there was applause for them.

I personally also liked very much Denmark, because Denmark, she started in a very sober manner. And I thought, what does this have to do with GPE? She said, Denmark was doing really well economically. And then she was going on that they have the policy that 0.7% of their GNI, gross national income, is allocated to international cooperation. And then she said, because of that, I’m happy to report that we can increase our funding for GPE. And this is how it’s supposed to be. Every country is supposed to give. They agreed at some point to give 0.7% of their national income, which is very little, actually, if you think of it, for international cooperation. But it’s one of the few countries. It’s a small country, but it does keep that promise — since I looked it up — since 1978. And it gives that amount. Because of that, it’s a small country, but it’s always among the top five donors of GPE.

And that’s an interesting case because so many other countries have, in recent years, reduced their aid budget. And I think this year, also, GPE and other international organizations had to reduce their budgets, their expectations. It was much higher than what GPE wanted to raise. So compared to the fears that everyone had, it’s better, but it’s still less than what they were hoping for, maybe, last year around this time.

Will Brehm 9:13
It’s such an interesting context. So like, you walking through all these protests to get into the building, going into the building where everyone’s cheering, and it’s kind of like a game show or a celebrity show, and all this money’s being pledged. But at the same time, the larger context of the aid industry is that it’s actually seeing a reduction in funding over the last few years. I mean, there’s a lot of competing emotions and feelings, I would imagine, happening all at once.

Gita Steiner-Khamsi 9:41
A lot of money these days is going to defense. That’s why they did not want to have the replenishing meeting in the middle of a war. And a lot of money is actually also going to climate change. So these are the two things that are nowadays on the table.
And what always worries me is when delegates or politicians or representatives of governments say what they give the money for. So some of them said for Africa, for girls’ education, for climate change, for education in conflict-affected countries. And I’m wondering, what does that mean once GPE decides on priorities? Do they have to listen to all this long list of wishes and priorities that the donors have?

That’s an interesting one. Like if this two plus billion dollars is all earmarked for pet projects that these different countries and donors want to work on. But it made me think that we don’t study enough the politics and economics of the donors. We study a lot — or I did in my group — the politics of policy borrowing and the economic reasons. The strings attached to the money that countries receive. But there used to be this branch within development studies on donor priorities. And there’s this one article I still read in my classes, even though it’s from 2002, by Alesina and Dollar. It’s called, Who Gives Aid to Whom and Why? That question is very, very important.

And I think the reason why many countries force, I would say, international organizations to prioritize girls’ education — even though I personally believe that this should be de-emphasized by now. We should be moving on to students with disabilities, ethnic minorities, other groups. Girls’ education is always a priority, I think, for one single reason nowadays. I mean, I’m not debating that it was important and still is important. I don’t want to be misunderstood. But it is overemphasized because there’s something where you can have political consensus at home in the donor country.
Or another area where I personally think there’s an over-commitment to give money for countries in conflict and fragile states. The reason is because every donor country is afraid of having immigrants from these countries. So the politics of why these priorities are given — it’s not a matter of target countries, which is well-studied, to which countries the international cooperation money flows, or aid flows. That’s the target countries is well-studied, but not so much the thematic priorities of aid.

And for me, my eyes were wide open when they said, for girls, climate, and conflict-affected countries. These are exactly the three fears that everyone has at home in the donor countries. Girls’ education — not a fear, but something that they hear from their mothers and sisters and wives, how important that is. But also, climate and migration are universal topics that also affect donor countries. That’s why it’s such a thematic priority.

Will Brehm 13:13
Were there any other thematic priorities that came up that sort of surprised you?

Gita Steiner-Khamsi 13:16
No, Africa did not surprise me because they have a large number of lower and lower-mid-income countries. And I think money should go to Africa, but also South Asia. And Australia — I said it was interesting, the point of Australia, because they said that so many GPE countries are in that part of the world, but of course, they counted all the small states in the Pacific.

Will Brehm 13:43
Absolutely, absolutely. Now, before we sort of turn to thinking more, maybe theoretically, around what you witnessed and have been looking at in terms of some of these pledges and this notion of the future, I just want to sort of maybe get an understanding of — are these pledges mandatory? Is there a mechanism that makes the donors who pledge the money actually give it?

Gita Steiner-Khamsi 14:09
I don’t know. I’m not sure. I would think so. I mean, I know that Sweden, for example, at the meeting said they cannot commit. They will, for sure, contribute to GPE, but they had their election just last week, so they don’t know how the new government will think and allocate funds. Or Kuwait reiterated how important GPE is and how important education is, but they did not give any number. So I do think that the sovereign states, maybe they do take it seriously, but I’m not sure how it is reinforced. I don’t think they drop their pledges once they make that public.

Will Brehm 14:52
Let’s sort of shift to thinking a bit more broadly and maybe theoretically, right? There’s this growing body of work in our field on the future as sort of a tool of governance. And so maybe to start, for listeners who might not be too familiar with these debates, what does it mean to say that orienting towards the future reorders things in the present? How do we start thinking about the future as a governance tool?

Gita Steiner-Khamsi 15:15
It has become a very popular tool. The World Bank, OECD, international organizations use that. The idea is to come to an agreement how the future is supposed to look like. Once you have that future in mind, you can reorder your activities to get there. So this whole benchmark thinking, this target setting, it is not new. It is actually since 2002, and actually Education Fast Track Initiative, or GPE, was the pioneer in that, in having these target setting goals and having best practices that goes with it, or at that time was called indicative framework, like the kind of indicators that were monitored to see whether progress in that direction is really happening, where the countries are on track. That’s the language they would use.
And once that was done, a whole data infrastructure was put in place, or what we call data for accountability, to track progress towards those goals. So it’s supposed to guide activities in the present towards one predefined future.
What that also means is very often it is accompanied with best practices. For example, the 20% benchmark of domestic financing. It used to be a hard requirement when Karen Mundy was chief technical officer of GPE. This domestic finance requirement was taken very seriously, and I’m actually 100% for it — that governments who receive grants from GPE are supposed to commit 20% of their national budget for education. That’s a great requirement to make. At that time, it was also a hard requirement that 60% of the education budget should be allocated for primary education. That one day dropped, for good reasons, because now the movement is towards secondary school and pre-primary.

So once you have that target set in the future, the temporal ordering happens by knowing what you want to achieve. You have the best practices that international organizations have, and there’s an abundance of them, a whole portfolio of best practices. And what happens is that countries start redefining the local needs and problem definition in line with practices and the portfolio of best practices that exist, for which funding is made available. So instead of having first a problem and then a solution, you have the solution and you have the target and then you reframe and redefine your local problem in line with that solution.

Will Brehm 18:10
And so did you hear a lot of talk at this event around best buys and best practices?

Gita Steiner-Khamsi 18:13
Not at all. No, it’s not that location. It’s not the venue to do that, but it is done in other places.
But there is also another reason why the pledges are important, or why this pledge is future oriented. It’s for the next three years, but actually it is part of the whole international agenda — Sustainable Development Goals 4.0 in our case. Having these international agreements and this future orientation helps to some extent to depoliticize international cooperation, because it commits governments to stay with their commitment or their plan to give money on the donor side. And it also commits governments at the recipient end to stay with the plans that they develop and not change their priorities if there is a change in government. And there is change in government. That’s natural. So it’s a commitment to depoliticize education or international cooperation. So that’s for sure one point.

The other thing that we say in policy studies is that governments usually have five tools of how they regulate or govern. One is by laws and regulation and decree. Another one is by financial incentives. And I’m talking now governments in general, not in the context of international cooperation — to incentivize by giving, and in the US this is very popular, giving grants and then grants for specific things that the government believes in. The third one is contracts, contractual arrangements with institutions. We have that problem now with Columbia University and the whole higher education, because we get a little bit of state funding, but these contracts are bound to conditions. A fourth tool of government is information. We had that during COVID, information campaigns, trying to persuade the population of something. And the last one is the newest — well, newest like the last 20 years, I’d say — the phenomenon of standards-based regulation. And we have that in curriculum studies. We have a set curriculum and then we have, especially in schools, performance-based evaluations and accountability.

So these five tools of government all apply also for international organizations, except for law and regulation. An international organization does not have the authority to regulate by means of sanctions. And these sanctions, even if they have them, like all these sanctions are not very effective. But all the others are effective, especially this contractual arrangement where you have an agreement what is supposed to be achieved as a benchmark or a target. International organizations also do information. And they also have standards-based regulation to some extent in the form of best practices. And they also have incentives they give — especially the international financial institutions, they give big loans and big grants. So all these other types of tools of governance also exist for international organizations, except laws.

Will Brehm 21:39
So in a sense, then, thinking about the SDGs, as you mentioned, and how they’re sort of coming to an end in 2030, and there’s a lot of question about what comes next. But of course, the SDGs weren’t the first sort of set of global goals that were trying to create global standards that push people in certain countries in certain directions. We had the Education for All movement, I think the deadline was 2000. Then we had the MDGs, the Millennium Development Goals, which were supposed to be complete by 2015. And then the SDGs trying to finish by 2030. And every single one of them, most likely the goals were never met. You could look at it on a surface level and say they failed to many extents. But they probably also played — in how you’re thinking about governance and regulation — a really important part in compelling actors to behave in certain ways. So they were, in a sense, successful. Is that kind of how you see these big goals?

Gita Steiner-Khamsi 22:38
I do see them. And I think one thing that is maybe not talked about or not explained enough is that there’s an internal logic between those three big international agreements that we had so far. 1990, Education for All. Then Millennium Development Goals in 2000. And in 2015, Sustainable Development Goals.

I would like to see it as part of educational expansion. And I explained that in the 2025 book on timing education policy transfer. We had unprecedented growth in education. In many countries already in the 19th century, early 20th century, but then in many countries that were subject to colonization and oppression only starting in the 60s. And that educational expansion happened in two directions.

One is the prolongation of educational attainment or of compulsory education, from very few years of primary school to primary school completion, to lower secondary, to upper secondary, to pre-primary. And that one I would call vertical expansion. Talking about vertical expansion, educational attainment increased over time from 3.3 years of schooling to something like nine years of schooling, world average. This is an amazing success story for education. And international organizations starting in 1990 supported that goal, especially in low and lower middle income countries. In 1990, it was improving access to education and especially primary education. In 2000, it was primary school completion, universal completion of primary school. In 2015, it was expansion into free lower secondary education and pre-primary. So I would expect in 2030, there will be universal secondary completion, especially universal lower secondary completion. So there is an internal logic to vertical education expansion that international organizations have really supported.

And they have supported that by setting priorities. For instance, to say, when you move from access to primary school to primary school completion, you have to improve the quality of education. Otherwise, you have children that come to school but then drop out, especially if the opportunity costs are high. So there is a logic to this sequence of international agreements.

The same applies for what I call horizontal educational expansion. It started off that international organizations with EFA only emphasized girls’ education in EFA, in Education for All 1990. In the Millennium Development Goals, also it was girls’ education and students with special needs because of the Salamanca Agreement that was in 1994. And now there’s a revolution going on. In 2015, the SDGs emphasized gender, but also geographic location and disability. So it’s an expansion of the social groups that are being prioritized for inclusion, because the cost of education is higher if you also include students with special needs, if you include remote rural areas.

So this is a commitment or pressure put by an international organization because they are, as Martha Finnemore would say, teachers of norms, teachers of liberal values. That’s what international organizations are. That’s how they define themselves, to bring liberal values, the right to education. Even the World Bank that is criticized, they also believe in this right to education for everyone. UNESCO, of course, has it inscribed in their constitution. For different reasons, the OECD and the World Bank — you can say for economic reasons — it is good for a society to have universal education for a variety of reasons, not just including health, climate, everything, to have an educated population.
So that sequence is really important to understand because it might give us an idea of what comes next.

Will Brehm 27:19
And what do you think does come next?

Gita Steiner-Khamsi 27:22
I think in 2030, I wish ethnic and linguistic minorities would come next, but I’m skeptical. I mean, I can tell you why, because it’s the sovereign states that sign off on these international agreements. And it is counter to the idea of the nation state to empower ethnic and linguistic minorities in many countries, unless they have an identity as a multilingual, multi-ethnic country. But not many countries have that. But actually, that’s where the need really is.

So because I’m affiliated also with UNESCO as a UNESCO chair, I always look at the UNESCO website. And it seems that UNESCO is changing their language on that inclusion clause. It used to be geographic location, gender, and disability. Now they talk about indigenous groups. That’s a new term that they use. So it’s interesting how that category is being expanded. But I doubt that they ever would say — because UNESCO has the secretariat in that Sherpa group — I doubt that the governments would ever sign off on promoting minority languages in one of the international agreements, even though it’s very much needed. So what happens in many countries is that they are delegated to a non-formal second class education system.

I rather think — and I’m not sure I’m happy about that, because I think already too much money goes into countries that are affected by conflict — and conflict-affected countries, for all the reasons because donor countries do not want to have immigration. They want them to stay where they are. They want them to stay in the camps and integrated in other countries, but not in their own country. For all these reasons, they want money to go there. And I think it’s problematic.
Education Cannot Wait has its own pledge. I think it distracts from development projects. And there’s a huge lobby, including in our own camp, comparative and international education, that does education in emergencies, that does humanitarian aid. We have a whole professionalization process going on with INEE, with Geneva Global Hub for Education, with Education Cannot Wait. UNICEF was established as an emergency fund. Now, again, it has reinvented itself as an emergency organization. So there’s a lot of double funding going on. And even within GPE, we have projects that focus on conflict and conflict-affected states. I anticipate that more money will go there because they have a strong lobby, but I’m not sure this would be a good decision.

Will Brehm 30:16
Another thing that sort of, when you look across time at all these different global agendas and global goals in education, we also see the rise of more stakeholders, right? And I think GPE is kind of like a really good example of this, that they’re a multi-stakeholder initiative that is more than just sovereign states at the table thinking about education policy. And you’re now naming Education Cannot Wait and the INEE. There’s just countless. And a lot of this is NGOs. You and Iveta Silova wrote about the NGOs. And so I do wonder in the post-2030 agenda, where does multi-stakeholder initiatives kind of go? Obviously there needs to be a little bit more coordination, it sounds like.

Gita Steiner-Khamsi 31:02
So the reason why this multi-stakeholder approach is, in my opinion, the new normal in international organizations is because also at country level, network governance — that’s the term Stephen Ball is using — but polycentric governance, that’s a term that we use more in policy studies, or Paul Kearney is using, is the new normal, where public-private partnership exists. And the private sector is not anymore a backstage advisor. It’s like a front stage advisor sitting at the table and having an impact on school.

Will Brehm 31:35
And so finally to end, what are some big questions you are sort of asking yourself as you watch the post-2030 agenda sort of unfold in front of your eyes, as you were a researcher invited to sit in the audience at this big event at the UN in late September? What are some of the big questions you’re asking, and you hope our field sort of begins to ask going forward?

Gita Steiner-Khamsi 32:03
We have a big, actually, northeastern conference of CIES at Teachers College, and my colleagues Mary Mendenhall and Garnet Russell are organizing that. And I convened a group of past presidents. I couldn’t convene all of them because we have so many of them on the East Coast. But I invited Karen Mundy, Sangeeta Kamath, Gilbert Valverde, and Steve Klees, and I myself — we are on that panel to discuss the future of the post-2030 agenda.

One of the things that worries me — or it does not worry me, but it’s food for thought — is that countries that are right now experiencing democratic backsliding, they are not committed to a future. They don’t want to think of the next 15 years. We can see that when they talk about climate change, when they talk about deregulation of financial markets, deregulation or non-regulation of AI. They do not care about the future. What does that mean for international agreements? What does that mean for the post-2030 agenda? Maybe the next international agenda is not for the next 10 or 15 years. Until now, there were either 10 years or 15 years. Maybe it’s just for five years. And maybe that’s not a bad thing. But it does generate even more pressure on data for accountability and collecting indicators. We moved from 189 indicators in 1989 that the World Bank had for education and social sector to 2,500 indicators for education alone. So this just shows how this future orientation and monitoring and target setting, what impact this has on collecting data, and the establishment of data infrastructures and professions and what have you.

Will Brehm 34:09
Wow. Well, that idea, like a lot of particular kind of right-wing movements not having a future orientation — it reminds me of the new book that Naomi Klein, I think, is publishing just in late September, called End Times Fascism. And that’s her point, basically, is that this is the first time when sort of fascist thinking didn’t have a future sort of utopia. All the other fascisms historically have always sort of had this future horizon, whereas today it doesn’t. And that’s sort of this really scary point. But what she and her co-author sort of argue is that one way to develop a future is actually the social movements, the protest movements. And so maybe it is about coming in and talking about those protest movements that you walk through to get to the UN. Maybe that’s where the story is.

Gita Steiner-Khamsi 34:57
So there is one book that I can recommend. It’s by Michel Moraes, César Silva and Gomide. It’s about policymaking and democratic backsliding. It’s a really excellent collection of chapters on that topic, how the governance changes in this kind of environment, and not just governance of national governments, but also of international organizations.

Will Brehm 35:21
Well, Gita Steiner-Khamsi, thank you so much, as always, for joining FreshEd.

Gita Steiner-Khamsi 35:25
It is so wonderful that you invited me. Thank you so much.

Designing a Global Compact on Education

Who Gives Foreign Aid to Whom and Why?

International Aid to Education: Power Dynamics in an Era of Partnership

International Organizations as Teachers of Norms: The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization and Science Policy

Governing by Numbers: The PISA ‘Effect’ in Europe

Educating for the Future? Mapping the Emerging Lines of Precision Education Governance

Networks, New Governance and Education

Public Policy in Democratic Backsliding: How Illiberal Populists Engage with the Policy Process

The Rise of End Times Fascism

Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com