The Educational Work of UNESCO: Between Idealism and Functionalism

Maren Elfert

University of British Columbia

May, 2013

Introduction: The debates that accompanied the founding of UNESCO

The years after the Second World War were a high point for multilateralism with a

humanist agenda as a new path for international cooperation. The United Nations (UN)

system was established on the basis of the assumptions that war as an instrument of

national policy was no longer acceptable and had to be prevented; that nation states are

interdependent and must collaborate with each other; and that peace must build on “the

common interests and aspirations [of a] world community” (Sathyamurthy, 1964, p. 24).

As a specialized agency of the UN, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and

Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which is based in Paris, emerged from the conviction

that cooperation limited to the political and economic realm was not sufficient to secure

peace in the world, but that states and people around the globe needed to collaborate in

the fields of education, science, culture and communications in order to achieve an

“intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind” (UNESCO, 2004, p. 7). This constituted a

new approach and a new experiment of international cooperation, which prompted some

of the earlier writers about UNESCO to define its function as “symbolic”: “The

Organization has met the condition of being a symbol to the peoples of the world of

‘what is now desirable and what may become an actuality in the future’. As such it has a

standing in its own right” (Sathyamurthy, 1964, p. 51/52; see also Laves & Thomson,

1957, p. 350). This view is consistent with that of constructivist scholars of international

relations, which would define UNESCO as an example of an organization that exists

primarily “for reasons of legitimacy and normative fit rather than efficient output”

(Barnett & Finnemore, 1999, p. 703).

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The view of UNESCO as a symbol for a better future was represented by the “scientific

humanistic evolutionary philosophy” of UNESCO’s first Director-General Julian Huxley

as laid out in his paper UNESCO: Its purpose and its philosophy (1946). However, it was

challenged by a functionalist perspective of the organization, as represented by Reinhold

Niebuhr1 (Sathyamurthy, 1964, p. 12). Whereas Huxley propagated a cosmopolitan

utopia and believed that the organization could achieve world peace by creating a “world

community” (Sluga, 2010, p. 393), Niebuhr was the proponent of a limited perspective

for UNESCO. Although he believed that the program of the organization was important,

he was suspicious of UNESCO’s “too simple universalism” (Niebuhr cited in

Sathyamurthy, 1948, p. 43) and questioned the organization’s grand intentions to secure

peace (Niebuhr, 1950). In his view, the rationalist objectivity promoted in Huxley’s

“scientific humanism” was unable to overcome “ideological corruptions” (p. 8) and the

“religious divergences” (p. 9) that divide cultures. For Niebuhr, UNESCO’s main role

was to promote the position of the “free world” against communism (Sathyamurthy, 1964,

p. 45). Jacques Maritain, the President of the French delegation to UNESCO, occupied a

middle ground between these two perspectives. He believed that agreement on

UNESCO’s “paradoxical” (UNESCO, 1948a, p. 1) task, in that “it presupposes unity of

thought among men whose conceptions are different and even opposed” (p. 1), could be

achieved through a pragmatic approach, not on the basis of “a common speculative

philosophy, but from a common practical philosophy” (p. 1; see also UNESCO, 1948b,

pp. 3; 6).2

Pavone (2007) argues that the idealist and functionalist perspectives of UNESCO

represented by Huxley and Niebuhr have never been reconciled and still remain a tension

within the organization:

The permanent confrontation between these two views [an utopian

                                                                                                               1  The Christian intellectual was a U.S. delegate to UNESCO at the 4th General Conference. 2  The idealist versus functionalist debate had started already much earlier and had marked the meetings of the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education (CAME) that preceded the founding of UNESCO and the constituent conference held in London in November 1945 at which UNESCO was established (see Jones, 1988, Chapter 1).

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ideology like scientific humanism and a pragmatic approach like

functionalism] remained unsolved because the first view appeared to be

premature and utopian whilst the second proved too limited to serve as a

rationale for the organization. As none of these two views managed to

become completely dominant, the relative models ended constituting the

upper and lower limits of the working of the organization. In fact, the real

working of UNESCO depended and still depends on the interaction

between these two interpretations (p. 81).

Another tension underlying UNESCO is that between diversity and universality. The

member states prescribe the program of the organization, and UNESCO’s

recommendations to their member states need to be “specific enough to be useful” (Jones,

1988, p. 63), but on the other hand it is necessary to bridge national interests and follow

“aspirations for universality” (p. 63) in order to carry out work on a global scale. In the

early years after the foundation of the UN and UNESCO, some certainly hoped that

international organizations would eventually lead to a system of world government

(Weiss, 2009). Huxley (1946) hoped to bridge the differences between UNESCO

member states with his idea of “scientific humanism”. He wanted UNESCO to work

towards “a unified way of life and of looking at life” (p. 62) and “to help the emergence

of a single world culture”, with the ultimate aim of “world unification” (p. 61). But after

a short period of internationalism that lasted approximately until 1950 (Sluga, 2010), the

Cold War conflict, followed by the North-South confrontation and increasing

politicization of the UN, shattered these hopes. Jones (1988, p. 63) argues that

UNESCO’s inefficiency derives to some extent from this contradiction between the

national and international aspects of its work.

One of UNESCO’s main mandates, as laid out in its constitution, is “to contribute to

peace and security” through education. Education is widely regarded as the most

important domain of UNESCO, and the largest proportion of the budget is allocated to its

education sector. In this essay, I will explore how the tensions outlined above – the

tension between the idealist and functionalist perspectives and between diversity and

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universality – play out in UNESCO’s educational work, with a focus on adult education

and lifelong learning. I will trace UNESCO’s educational program from the early years

until today, by discussing it in the context of UNESCO’s role and relationships in the UN

system. As I have placed some emphasis on the development-related activities of

UNESCO, I have neglected other areas that deserve attention, such as the educational

work in Eastern European countries during the Cold War. As much as possible, I will

follow a chronological order, but two important aspects of UNESCO’s educational

program will be discussed in two separate sections: literacy and the right to education.

Fundamental education

In the early years, UNESCO’s educational program was marked by a broad array of

activities, called by Clarence Beeby (1997), head of the education sector in 1948 and

1949, “a thing of threds and patches” (p. 258): International understanding, revision of

textbooks, international conferences on adult and higher education, a program on

technical and vocational education in partnership with the International Labour

Organization (ILO), the founding of institutes in Germany; and other activities in all

world regions.

UNESCO’s first educational flagship program was “fundamental education”. It

constituted the organization’s first attempt to enlighten the 1,000 million illiterate people

who lived in “the ‘dark zones’ of the world” (Huxley, 1946, p. 29). The initiative was

supposed to fight poverty through educational measures “in a wider program of

community education for better living” (Bowers, 1948), based on “the needs and

resources of the local community” (Records of the Third Session of the General

Conference, cited in Jones, 1988, p. 55). The term “fundamental education” was favoured

over the Anglo-Saxon “mass education” because the latter was considered too egalitarian

(UNESCO, 2000, p. 28). Also, “fundamental education” included education for adults

and children (Watras, 2010, p. 221; Jones, 1988, p. 49) and “meant an education that

would provide for the acquisition of literacy and the other essential skills, knowledge and

values needed for full participation in society” (UNESCO, 2000, p. 27).

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The fundamental education program goes back to the preparatory commission of

UNESCO that favoured a practical mandate for the organization and wished to see

“concrete projects which would symbolise its character and meaning to the world” (cited

in Jones, 1988, p. 35). Until 1950, the program consisted of experimental projects, run in

cooperation of UNESCO with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the ILO

and the World Health Organization (WHO). A fundamental education pilot project in

Haiti started with great enthusiasm in 1948, but was given up in 1953, due to continuous

problems of bureaucratic, logistical and political nature, including the resistance of local

people and authorities to the project (Watras, 2010; Jones, 1988, pp. 65-71). In 1951, it

was decided to launch a twelve-year program, involving the establishment of six training

centres in Latin America, Africa, Arab states and Asia (UNESCO, 1951a, p. 6). It was

foreseen that in a twenty-one months program, the centres would train 5,000

“fundamental education specialists” (p. 6), who on their part would set up a network of

national and local centres with the purpose of training teachers (p. 6). Apart from the

training, the regional centres would be in charge of research, production of educational

materials and support to education activities. The program was not only driven by an

imperturbable faith in education, but also in the effects of modern technology. Each

regional centre was to be “equipped with a complete production crew to turn out films

and other visual materials” or “staffed for radio work, with an experimental recording

studio included in its equipment” (p. 6). The first centre was established in 1951 in

Pátzcuaro, Mexico, with funds from UNESCO, the Government of Mexico and the

Organization of American States. This centre – the Regional Centre for Fundamental

Education in Latin America (CREFAL) – is still today a regional clearing house for adult

education.

The cost of the training centre network was estimated at more than US$20 million

(UNESCO, 1951a, p. 6). This amount would have to be obtained from extra-budgetary

sources. Initially optimism was high that these funds could be attracted (Bowers, 1948),

but it proved to be impossible (Watras, 2010, p. 227). Member states such as the United

States, India, New Zealand and France did not contribute to the project at all as they

believed it was “over-ambitious and costly” (Watras, 2010, p. 228). Eleven years after the

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inauguration of the first centre in Mexico, only one more had been opened, the Arab

States Fundamental Education Centre (ASFEC) in Egypt. In the years 1955 and 1956, the

costs for ASFEC and CREFAL amounted to $607,200 out of a fundamental education

budget of $1,017,493 and a total education budget of $3,442,351 (Jones, 1988, p. 95).

Jones (1988, pp. 81-84) describes the centres’ activities, which consisted mainly of

training educational personnel, as the most successful element of the fundamental

education initiative. However, only 600 instead of the foreseen 3500 people were trained.

According to Watras (2010), the fundamental education program failed because of its

internal contradictions in so far as the program “undercut traditional cultures even though

[it] wanted to reinforce indigenous values” (p. 237). Although it was supposed to be

driven by the people concerned, it relied on the dissemination of specialized knowledge

to developing countries, such as library systems (Watras, 2010). The plans to rely on

audiovisual materials in order to communicate with illiterate populations were doomed to

fail not only because of technical and logistical problems, but because the films that were

produced by companies used images and messages that were not meaningful to the

targetted populations and most of the time did not use their languages. Watras (2010, p.

231) gives the example of films produced in Spanish that were shown to indigenous

villagers. Jones (1988, p. 90 ff.) ascribes the main reason for the demise of the program to

the power struggles between the UN and UNESCO. The United Nations Bureau of Social

Affairs was the driving force behind a new approach of “community development” as a

new paradigm of development assistance. In the course of the multilateral negotiations on

this approach, the opinion prevailed that fundamental education was “not coincident with

community development” (UN report cited in Jones, 1988, p. 92). On top of this, the UN

Bureau of Social Affairs claimed for itself the coordinating role for development

activities in the UN system and assigned a minor role to UNESCO, limiting it to specific

technical services. At the same time, some UNESCO member states in the General

Conference criticized the fundamental education program as “colonial” and called for

greater attention to the development of school systems in developing countries.

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As a consequence, ASFEC and CREFAL were reoriented from “fundamental education

centres” to “community development centres” (Jones, 1988, p. 96). In 1957 fundamental

education was shifted within UNESCO to the Division of Out-of-School Education and

merged with adult education and work (Watras, 2010, p. 236). In 1958, the delegates of

the General Conference instructed the Director-General to replace the term “fundamental

education” by another more appropriate term (p. 237). It should be noted that the

community development approach suffered the same destiny and was short-lived. The

UN Bureau of Social Affairs’ attempt to take the lead in development assistance was

unsuccessful, and it was the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the

World Bank that came to dominate this domain (Jones, 1988, chapter 3).

The first experience of UNESCO with an operational project was a disillusioning one. It

confronted the organization for the first time with the harsh reality of insufficient funding,

which remains UNESCO’s biggest challenge until today. UNESCO’s budget limitations

trace back to the decision of the United States (U.S.) and several Western countries of

1944 to channel funds for post-war reconstruction through bilateral rather than

multilateral paths (Jones, 1988, p. 36/37). Apart from the lack of funding, it was the

unclarity with regard to the financial responsibility that had jeopardized the project.

Neither UNESCO nor the Haitian government were willing and able to invest the amount

of money which would have been necessary. So from then on the model of the

“associated project” was favoured, where the financial responsibility rested with the

member state and UNESCO supported the project through clearing house functions.

Given the “‘impracticality’ of pilot projects” (Jones, 1988, p. 71), Clarence Beeby

favoured a role for UNESCO focussing on its clearing house functions (Beeby, 1997, p.

259). The delegates of the fourth and the fifth session of the General Conference

discussed the wish of many member states to develop a more focussed and less

diversified program. This led to the “Major Projects”, one each in the fields of education,

science and culture. The Major Project for education, which ran from 1957 to 1966, was

concerned with the extension of primary education in Latin America. This was in line

with Beeby’s prioritization of compulsory schooling (Beeby, 1997, p. 259; Mundy, 1999,

p. 33).

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UNESCO’s shift to development

The election, in 1948, of Huxley’s successor, the Mexican Jaime Torres Bodet as

Director-General was highly significant as it accelerated UNESCO’s turn to development.

Bodet shared with Huxley a view of UNESCO as “conscience” of the world, but at the

same time, aware of UNESCO’s budgetary constraints, he considered it important that

the organization should quickly show “concrete results measurable in quantitative terms

within prescribed short periods of time” (Proceedings of the 4th Session of the General

Conference, cited by Jones, 1988, p. 40). Bodet was interested in enhancing UNESCO’s

technical capacity as a precondition of getting the organization more involved in the

broader UN efforts with regard to development, in particular the UN Expanded Program

of Technical Assistance (EPTA) (Jones, 1988, p. 40). As Minister of Education, Bodet

had been in charge of a mass campaign against literacy in Mexico, which had marked

him – he believed that education was at the heart of any development effort, and that

literacy was a right that needed to be provided by governments (Jones, 1988, p. 39).

Technical assistance emerged as the UN response to Truman’s “Point Four” idea,

presented during his inaugural address in January 1949. It aimed at not only providing

“those ‘unfavoured by history and geography’...with the means of progress”, but also at

making them ”capable and desirous of using them” (UNESCO, 1951b, p. 12). Technical

assistance – which corresponds to today’s “capacity-building” – differed from broader

development aid in so far as it focussed on the development of skills of the staff involved

in local or national development activities. This approach emphasized the functionalist

purpose of UNESCO. Technical assistance was embraced by Bodet as a means of adding

more resources to UNESCO’s very limited budget. However, Bodet was opposed to the

U.S. initiative to integrate technical assistance programs into the regular budget as he

believed that that would limit UNESCO’s scope. But given the support the U.S. had

among the member states and the weight of its voice as the biggest contributor to

UNESCO, the U.S. position prevailed, causing Bodet to resign when the General

Conference refused to adopt the budget he had asked for (Pavone, 2007, p. 80/81;

Valderrama, 1995, p. 88/89). This resignation was the consequence of Bodet’s notorious

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frustration with the organization’s budgetary constraints and the emphasis placed by the

U.S. and other countries on economic rather than idealist considerations (Sathyamurthy,

1964, p. 18) that had almost led to his resignation the year before, which could be averted

by the General Conference (Moorehead, 1950, 5 July).

Education for economic development

In the period of decolonization, development aid was seen by the U.S. and other Western

governments as a way to contain the spread of communism and align the developing

countries to the economic world view of the West. The late 1950s and early 1960s saw

new multilateral arrangements and a change in the UNESCO education program. In 1960,

a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly recognized the importance of

education for economic development. This was an important indication for a stronger role

of education for development, which was backed by increased financial resources. In the

same year, the UNESCO General Conference followed the General Assembly by

attributing more resources to the education sector in terms of budget and programming.

UNESCO’s extra-budgetary funds increased significantly during the early 1960s.

Through the UN Special Fund, which had been set up to strengthen the technical and

operational work of the UN, UNESCO received $10 million in 1961/62; this amount

increased to $20 million two years later (Jones, 1988, p. 110). These developments were

accompanied by the rapid increase of member states from the newly independent former

colonies. This led to the development of an increasingly competitive “development

regime” (Mundy, 1999; 2006), in which the UN institutions became rivals for influence,

resources and authority. The reliance on extra-budgetary funding weakened UNESCO’s

autonomy as it had to comply to the funding criteria of the donor agencies. Hoggart

(1978) criticized a “retreat into the technical” (p. 93), which sharpened the tension

between the intellectual and normative work of UNESCO and the operational work

linked to development aid.

René Maheu, who took office as Director-General in 1962, was critical of a “too narrow

economic view of development” (Jones, 1988, p. 5). For Maheu, the first Director-

General after Huxley who was convinced that UNESCO should be guided by a UNESCO

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philosophy and “idea”, human rights constituted the raison d’être of UNESCO, its ”guide

to action” and its “ideology”, also in the domain of development (Maheu cited in Jones,

1988, p. 104). On the one hand, Maheu wanted the technical and operational work that

was carried out with extra-budgetary funds to be better integrated into the intellectual and

normative work funded by the regular budget. On the other hand, he was seduced by the

big budgets available to UNESCO and very optimistic that the increased funding would

lead to a breakthrough in the organization’s achievements. This is why Jones (1988)

observes that “Maheu led the organisation deeper into the realm of action than ever

before” (p. 101). However, the cooperation between UNESCO and the main funding

agency at the time, the UNDP, was competitive. The UNDP emerged in 1965 from a

merger between the Expanded Program of Technical Assistance (established in 1949) and

the UN Special Fund (1958). Between 1959 and 1967 the proportion of UNDP projects

executed by UNESCO decreased. Maheu put pressure on the UNDP to reverse this trend,

and the relationship deteriorated even more when UNDP instrumentalized the first

evaluation carried out on the organization to strengthen its coordinating role. Maheu

attacked the UNDP for threatening the independence of the specialized UN agencies.

The World Bank group entered the education field in 1962 (Jones, 1988, p. 116), and in

1964 UNESCO signed the UNESCO-World Bank cooperative agreement. As a result, a

unit was established within UNESCO, which was responsible to the Bank (Jones, 1988, p.

126). World Bank funding was involved in the foundation of the International Institute of

Educational Planning (IIEP), which was created in 1963 under the auspices of UNESCO

with the mandate of supporting the newly independent countries of the South in

developing their education systems. Since the early 1980s the World Bank relied less and

less on UNESCO expertise when it came to education, which led to increasing

competition between the two organizations. With its much larger budget, the Bank got

ahead of UNESCO and became one of the main players in the field of education and

development and the largest donor of educational development aid.

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Lifelong education

According to Jones (1988, p. 125), the rivalry between UNESCO and the UNDP was one

of the reasons why René Maheu established the International Commission on the

Development of Education, chaired by Edgar Faure, as a demonstration of UNESCO’s

moral and intellectual authority in education. It was a strategic move on the part of

Maheu to provide a UNESCO response to the “world educational crisis” (Coombs, 1968),

caused by the exploding enrolment rates and educational needs both in developing and

developed countries and the urgency of adapting educational systems to these changes,

expressed by student riots around the world. The report submitted by the Commission,

Learning to be (Faure et al. 1972), the so-called Faure report, reflected debates about

lifelong education that had emerged within UNESCO already during the 1960s, mainly in

relation to adult education (Lengrand, 1970; UNESCO, 1969, p. XX, art. 32). It presented

lifelong education as the new global educational master concept. Learning, and not

education, was at the heart of “learning societies”, in which the focus was not anymore

on schooling, educational institutions and provision, but on the learning process and the

development of every individual, which was seen as a lifelong process, especially in the

light of the “scientific-technological revolution”. The report responded to the general

frustration about the inadequacies of educational policies by criticizing the “linear

expansion” of education systems, and it recommended a “move from the quantitative to

the qualitative, from imitation and reproduction to a search for innovations, from a

uniform procedure to diverse alternatives” (Faure et al., 1972, p. 173f.).

Field (2001, p. 6) sees the Faure report as a “turning point”, as it marked a shift from the

emphasis on schooling and provision of education to a broader perspective including less

traditional pillars of education such as non-formal and informal education. According to

Boshier (1998), the Faure report is “one of the outstanding adult education texts of the

20th century” (p. 5). Elsewhere, he observes the “challenge to formal education [that is]

nested in the architecture for lifelong education” (Boshier, 2004, p. 55). In his view,

Faure’s lifelong education represented “a collectivist and anarchist-utopianism vision”

(Boshier, 1998, p. 15) of education. With its claim for a learning society and its radical

influences (Lee & Friedrich, 2011), it questioned the traditional approaches to education.

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Rubenson (2006) states that the report had no strong impact on national educational

policies as “the Third World countries regarded lifelong education as a luxury of the

Developed World and the latter took no notice of the idea” (p. 71). Boshier (1998, p. 14)

notes that many countries took the report seriously, but only mentions industrialized

countries. There is certainly much more research to be done on the impact of the Faure

report. But what is striking at first glance is the disconnect between the report,

representing the intellectual side of UNESCO, and the organization’s work in

development. Although the report was meant to present a global educational system, it

was indeed not successful in reaching the developing world as it did not influence the

Education for All (EFA) initiative, which became the development agenda for the South

(Lee & Friedrich, 2011; Mundy, 2006; Torres, 2002), as will be discussed below. The

report was certainly more of a high-flown intellectual exercise and, with its strong

humanist ideology and innovative ideas, did not speak to the mainstream. However, it

marked the beginning of a new way of thinking about education and has certainly to

some extent played into the educational visions of the OECD, the Council of Europe, the

European Union and the World Bank as well as scholarly debates about education until

the present date.

The “politicization” of UNESCO

For Niebuhr, international organizations were an instrument of the “free world”, in

particular the U.S. In his view, UNESCO’s role was to “relate American power to a

weakened world and American prosperity to an impoverished world” (cited in

Sathyamurthy, 1964, p. 38). Especially until 1954, when the Soviet Union officially

joined UNESCO, there were many who feared that UNESCO was going to be “an agency

of ‘American cultural imperialism’” (Asher, 1950). The power balance changed in the

1970s when the growing rate of newly independent states changed membership patterns

in UNESCO, and the new members brought different agendas. Their calls for a more just

world order challenged the U.S. and their Western allies. That was sharpened by

UNESCO’s “one country-one vote” system, that differs from the system of the UN, in

which the influential founding countries can block decisions made by the General

Assembly through their veto power, and from other international organizations such as

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the World Bank, where the voting power is weighted depending on the dimension of the

financial contribution.

1974 was a crucial year in the history of UNESCO. René Maheu was succeeded by

Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, the first Director-General from a developing country.

UNESCO’s literacy flagship program, the Experimental World Literacy Program

(EWLP) came to a close. The developing world suffered from the global economic and

accelerating debt crisis. The developing countries organized themselves in the “Group of

77” that called for a “New International Economic Order” (NIEO), which was debated by

the General Assembly of the UN in 1974. UNESCO became the site of an ideological

confrontation between the block of the developing countries and the U.S. and some of

their allies, in particular the United Kingdom (U.K.). M’Bow was committed to

advancing the NIEO and established a committee to explore how this could be done,

which consisted mainly of proponents of the “dependency theory”, arguing that

underdevelopment in the Southern part of the world was caused by structures, regulations

and practices set up by the Western countries. This was the first political statement made

by M’Bow.3 He promoted the concept of “endogenous development”, which implied an

understanding of development driven at the national level and adapted to the specific

circumstances of each country.

Around the same time, a series of General Conference resolutions with regard to the City

of Jerusalem and Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories caused a climate of

tension among member states in UNESCO. An éclat was provoked in the General

Conference when, for voting purposes, all UNESCO member states were assigned to a

regional group. Israel was the only member state that could not be placed in a regional

group (Hoggart, 1978, pp. 75-79). This was interpreted by the U.S. as hostility against

Israel. The conflict escalated in the early 1980s over the debates within UNESCO about

the “New World Information and Communication Order” (NWICO), which derived from

the NIEO. The idea behind the NWICO was to reduce the neo-colonial dependency of the

                                                                                                               3  The main UNESCO contribution to the debates around the NIEO was the report “Moving towards change” (UNESCO, 1976).

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developing countries on the Western news agencies. As a matter of fact, the General

Conference never adopted the NWICO. However, the whole case was seriously

misrepresented by a U.S. driven media campaign, to an extent that some scholars have

called it a right-wing conspiracy against UNESCO (Preston, Herrmann & Schiller, 1989;

Astre, October 1985). At the same time, UNESCO failed to respond to increasing

Western demands for a more limited and functional program (Mundy, 1999, p. 41). The

conflict culminated in the withdrawal of the U.S., the U.K. and Singapore from UNESCO

in 1984 and 1985.

This severe crisis must be considered in the broader picture of that time, marked by

changes in the world economy. The debt crisis hit the developing world hard,

transnational production patterns emerged, and the rise of new economies went alongside

the shift from the Keynesian welfare regime and the “embedded liberalism” (Ruggie,

1982) that had dominated the post-war era until the 1970s to a neo-liberal economic order

based on market principles. During this period a new era of multilateral institutions

emerged, predominated by the rich countries, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-

operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank (Mundy, 1999, p. 40). Also, the

crisis was certainly abetted by M’Bow’s management style, which showed “the dual

effect of poor quality in the organization’s intellectual work and its failure to provide

clear and practical guidance for UNESCO’s operational work” (Jones & Coleman, 2005,

p. 66), which made UNESCO even more vulnerable to the criticism of its opponents.

The impact of this period on UNESCO was largely detrimental for the organization as it

cemented its reputation as a politicized organization. The controversy caused by the

adoption of the General Conference of Palestine as full member of UNESCO in 2011 is

the latest example. This reputation weakens UNESCO and makes it vulnerable to attacks

on its legitimacy by neo-conservative forces, especially in the U.S. (Curtis, 2013, April

20).

The 1990s: Renewed confidence

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In the years to follow, UNESCO was caught up in an inward-looking process of internal

reform, trying to recover from this severe blow to its legitimacy and to adapt its program

to a budget reduced by 30%. This changed when the election of Federico Mayor as

Director-General in 1987 brought a spirit of optimism to UNESCO. Mayor introduced a

“think big” perspective to UNESCO and stressed its profile as an intellectual leader:

“UNESCO stands not merely for a new set of adjustments but for a new way of life, a

new outlook, a new philosophy which will inspire humanity” (Mayor cited in Pavone,

2006, p. 90). This was certainly easier without the U.K. and the U.S., “two of its most

important proponents [of functionalism]” (Pavone, 2006, p. 85). But

Mayor also undertook several structural reforms including decentralization of staff and

responsibilities to field offices, scaling down of the secretariat and streamlining the

program. The initiatives launched under his leadership, Education for All (EFA) and

Culture of Peace were supposed to be driven to a large extent by the field offices. He also

increased the budgets of the Category I education institutes (IBE, IIEP and UIE4). The

decentralization pursued during his term of office led to a decline of professional

educational staff at headquarters (Jones & Coleman, 2005, p. 68). Given UNESCO’s

limited financial resources, Mayor turned away from operational activities and focussed

on “upstream co-operation with Member States, thus heralding a shift of UNESCO’s role

and priorities towards closer collaboration with national authorities regarding global

assessment, analysis, review, conception, planning, policy and strategy development in

education for all” (Mayor cited in Jones & Coleman, 2005, p. 68).

To increase its visibility in the field of education, UNESCO started to publish the World

Education Report (the first edition was published in 1991), as a response to the reports

published by other UN agencies, such as the World Development Report (World Bank)

and the World Health Report (WHO). The organization took an active role in some of the

“summits of idealism”5 (Bhola, 1998, p. 493) that were held by the UN system during the

                                                                                                               4  The International Bureau of Education in Geneva, the International Institute for Educational Planning in Paris and the UNESCO Institute for Education in Hamburg. 5 These include the World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien (1990); the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro (1992); the World Conference

  16  

1990s and which saw a much greater participation of civil society and NGOs than ever

before. UNESCO organized a series of influential conferences itself such as the Fifth

International Conference on Adult Education (CONFINTEA V), held in 1997 in

Hamburg, which was strongly influenced by the report Learning: The treasure within, the

so-called Delors report (Delors et al., 1996), published in 1996 as the outcome of the

“International Commission on Education for the Twenty-First Century” established by

Mayor and chaired by the French politician and long-term President of the European

Commission Jacques Delors. The Delors report followed the Faure report in confirming

the role of UNESCO as the advocate of a humanist vision of education. It reflected on the

role of education in the face of the tensions which characterize the world on the eve of

the new millennium, such as the tension between the universal and the individual,

tradition and modernity and the spiritual and the material (Delors et al., p. 16ff.). It

focussed on the ability of people to learn and introduced four pillars around which

education and learning should be organized.6 Some criticized the report for its Western

perspective and because of its neglect of adult education (Bhola, 1997; 1998). Others

stress the impact it had on educational debates (Lee & Friedrich, 2011). According to

Draxler (2010, p. 33), the report was translated in more than 30 languages and generated

initiatives in 50 countries. However, like its predecessor, the Faure report, it had little

impact on educational policies, especially in the developing countries. It was above all an

intellectual document, which put forward educational ideas and recommendations,

without translating them into program activity, which is why Watson (1999) saw it as a

“missed opportunity” (p. 15).

According to Mundy (1999, p. 46), the Delors report was the UNESCO response to the

economistic view of education put forward in the World Bank’s 1995 Priorities and

Strategies for Education, which adopted a human capital perspective and considered

“education [as] an investment [to economic development] in every sense just as hard as

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         on Human Rights in Vienna (1993); and the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995). 6  Learning to know; learning to do; learning to live together and learning to live with others; and learning to be.  

  17  

building bridges or roads” (Burnett & Patrinos, 1996, p. 273). The rivalry between

UNESCO and the World Bank, in which UNESCO had taken a too passive role during

the 1980s (Mundy, 1999, p. 42) was a topic addressed by Mayor, and he explicitly

claimed to reinstate UNESCO’s authority for education:

I do not accept that the World Bank and the IMF should continue to take

decisions and make recommendations on issues in education in which they are

not adequately informed...They should concentrate on economics, banking and

finance and leave education to Unesco and other agencies mandated to work in

this domain (Mayor in a speech held at the Seventh African Education

Ministers Conference in 1998, cited by Mundy, 1999, p. 47).

The 1990s were paradoxical years. After the end of the Cold War, it seemed that

capitalism had gained a complete victory, and at the same time there was hope for a

revitalisation of international cooperation. In this optimistic climate, UNESCO made an

effort to raise its profile by advocating for human rights against the spread of an

economistic view of education and by affirming its role as a global standard-setter in

education, again sharpening the tensions with its operational work. On the day to day

operational level, it was the Education for All (EFA) initiative that would come to

dominate UNESCO’s work from the 1990s onwards.

Education for All

The Education for All Conference, held in Jomtien, Thailand, in 1990, was an

unprecedented UN-wide initiative to universalise education, including UNESCO, the

United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the UNDP and the World Bank. Federico

Mayor played a major role in the planning of the EFA conference as he saw it as a

platform for raising UNESCO’s profile, jeopardized by the withdrawals of the U.S. and

the U.K. (Chabbott, 1998, p. 211). The World Declaration on Education for All presented

“basic education as the foundation of lifelong learning and human development”

(UNESCO, 1990, Article 1, point 4). 10 years later, in 2000, a second EFA conference,

the World Education Forum, was held in Dakar, in order to revitalize the unachieved

  18  

goals set in Jomtien. In Dakar, six education goals (the EFA or Dakar goals) were set to

be achieved by 2015. Despite the “balanced attention to the education of children, youth

and adults” originally foreseen in Jomtien (Bhola, 1998, p. 492), UNICEF and the World

Bank had focused on the expansion of primary education. Jomtien’s “expanded vision of

basic Education for All” (UNESCO, 1990) was narrowed in Dakar when universal

primary education won the day. Heyneman (2009) argues that this limited view of

education contributed to the failure of EFA as a political strategy and stagnated funding

commitments to education because it “has changed the rationale of education from being

the infrastructure necessary for a democracy to being little more than a charitable handout

for rural girls” (p. 8). The EFA initiative has been criticized because the reliance on goals

entailed increased linking of development aid to the achievement of numerical targets

(Goldstein, 2004). On the other hand, the establishment of global educational priorities

led to greater harmonization and coordination between the World Bank and other donor

organizations, the UN organizations and the increasing number of NGOs involved in the

“education-for-development regime” (Mundy, 2006), further aligned through the

Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of 2000.

The responsibility for the coordination of the EFA initiative was given to UNESCO.

Mayor’s successor, Koïchiro Matsuura, a bureaucratic and pragmatic Director-General

who clearly pursued the functionalist approach in UNESCO, made EFA his flagship.

However, the World Bank took a leading role in the establishment of the Fast-Track-

Initiative, a mechanism to ensure donor commitment for universal primary education in

the context of EFA for specific countries on the basis of Poverty Reduction Plans. This

was just one of the new mechanisms that emerged from the new “Global Development

Compact” (Mundy, 2006) and the concentration on monitoring progress of the

achievement of educational goals. The coordination of the EFA initiative by UNESCO

involved support for (and pressure on) countries to develop national EFA plans. The

UNESCO Institute for Statistics was founded in 1999 in order to strengthen UNESCO’s

statistical capacities, and it allowed for UNESCO to publish, from 2002 onwards, the

yearly EFA Global Monitoring Report as an instrument of monitoring the progress of

EFA. Progress in adult education is being monitored through the reporting mechanism for

  19  

the intergovernmental CONFINTEA conferences and the publication of the Global

Report on Adult Learning and Education (GRALE) by the UNESCO Institute for

Lifelong Learning (UIL) in Hamburg, which was first published in 2009, with a second

edition forthcoming in 2013.

As a consequence of the emphasis placed on EFA, many of the high-flown initiatives

started by Mayor were either abandoned or reduced in scope, such as the Education for

the Twenty-First Century program, which had yielded the Delors report. “Basic

education” was the main organising principle of EFA, not lifelong learning (Torres, 2001;

2002; 2011; King, 2011, p. 17). EFA placed (and continues to place) a strong emphasis

on formal education for children, whereas lifelong learning continued to be viewed as a

Western concept synonymous with continuing and vocational education. However,

UNESCO took on the task of integrating a more holistic vision of education into national

EFA plans. The “Task Force on UNESCO in the Twenty-First Century”, called by

Matsuura to reflect on the role of UNESCO, emphasized that “action and reflection

constitute two important and inseparable aspects” and that UNESCO should raise “the

consciousness of the Bretton Woods institutions concerning the ethical and moral aspects

of placing a more ‘human face’ on development” (cited in Jones & Coleman, 2005, p. 72).

Especially the UIL advocated for a vision of EFA that included lifelong learning and

adult education (Medel-Añonuevo, 2001; Singh, 2002).

Literacy: A core domain of UNESCO

Jones (1988) points out that the constitution of UNESCO, which broadly defines the

promotion of peace and security as UNESCO’s mandates, does not indicate the

prominent role that literacy would play in the organization’s educational program. Alfred

Zimmern laid the ground for literacy at an ad hoc meeting of the UNESCO preparatory

commission organized after the UNESCO constituent conference in London in 1945

(Jones, 1988, p. 24). The concern for literacy reflected the aspiration of many involved in

the founding and early years of UNESCO that the organization should contribute to

“equalisation” (Huxley cited in Jones, 1988, p. 33), democratize education and promote

“popular education” (UNESCO, 2004, article I, 1a). Also Huxley considered the “attack

  20  

on literacy” (Huxley, 1946, p. 29) the main precondition for development and one of

UNESCO’s most urgent tasks and promoted an approach to literacy embedded in broader

matters of education, health and citizenship. Later, René Maheu accorded priority to

literacy. In fact, it became one of UNESCO’s primary functions – until the present day –

to convince member states to invest in literacy. One of the tools used by UNESCO to

promote literacy were the literacy surveys and statistics. The first, the report World

illiteracy at mid-century, was published in 1957 and showed the magnitude of illiteracy

in the world, estimating that about 44 per cent of the total world population 15 years and

older was illiterate (Jones, 1988, p. 75). These surveys, which confronted UNESCO with

challenges with regard to the definition of literacy and the collection of data, were to

become a major feature of UNESCO’s educational work. Between 1955 and 1971,

UNESCO published the World Surveys of Education.7 “In pushing forward such surveys,

Unesco was arguing for a recognition of its centrality in UN development efforts [in

order to help] ensure an increase in status, influence and resources for the organisation”

(Jones, 1988, p. 75). In 1956, UNESCO published the report The teaching of reading and

writing, which used the concept of functional illiteracy and expanded the perspective on

literacy from the mere ability to write and read by connecting it to wider social activities.8

This approach set the tone for UNESCO’s literacy work in the years to come:

....a person is functionally literate when he has acquired the knowledge

and skills in reading and writing which enable him to engage effectively

in all those activities in which literacy is normally assumed in his

culture or group (cited in Jones, 1988, p. 76/77).

The concept of functional illiteracy gained importance at the World Congress on the

Eradication of Literacy, organized by UNESCO in Tehran in 1965, where the

Experimental World Literacy Program (EWLP), funded through UNESCO, the UNDP

                                                                                                               7  These reports were  followed by the World Education Report since 1991 and, since 2002, by the EFA Global Monitoring Report, which monitors the EFA initiative.  8  For a discussion of “functional literacy”, see Jones, 1988, pp. 143-152.

  21  

and the eleven countries concerned,9 was launched. The ELWP was regarded a major

contribution to the first UN Development Decade (1960-1969), underlying the

importance attributed to education for development. The EWLP marked a turn away from

the approach of mass literacy campaigns, which was still propagated at the Second

International Conference on Adult Education (CONFINTEA II) held in Montréal in 1960,

and in the Declaration on the Eradication of Illiteracy, adopted by the General

Conference in 1964. The concept of functional illiteracy was a smaller-scale and

“selective” (UNESCO, 2000, p. 33) approach, adapted to the social and economic

development of the community. It was also more learner-centred as it built on the

learning needs and motivations of individuals rather than on the top-down approach of

making masses of people literate at the same time. But it also reflected a vocational view

of literacy.

In principle, René Maheu’s dream was a universal literacy campaign, and in 1963

UNESCO submitted a proposal for the realization of such a campaign to the UN General

Assembly. But the General Assembly, while being in principle supportive, did not take

the appropriate steps to back up UNESCO’s initiative. The U.S. was critical of it and

favoured a focus on the expansion of formal school education and technical education.

Given the parameters of UNDP funding, Maheu took a pragmatic turn and embraced the

ELWP. But as soon as it was over, he broadened the concept again: “Unesco is an

essentially humanist organisation for which man is an integral whole, a pluri-dimensional

being for whom a limited functional approach is by no means adequate” (Maheu 1972,

cited by Jones, 1988, p. 107/108).

The ELWP was a disappointment in the sense that it turned out to be impossible to show

the direct economic and social returns of literacy. Also, the hope that the program would

generate a methodological model that could be applied to a global literacy campaign,

remained unrealized (UNESCO, 2000, p. 33). Despite its shortcomings, Jones (1988) sees

it as “Unesco’s most substantial achievement in literacy education” (p. 160) because of                                                                                                                9  Algeria, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Guinea, India, Iran, Madagascar, Mali, Sudan, the Syrian Arab Republic and the United Republic of Tanzania. Around the year 1971, nearly a quarter of a million of adults were involved in the program (UNESCO, 2000, p. 34).

  22  

its complexity, including a strong evaluation component, which added pressure to the

achievement of early and convincing results, and the development of innovative teaching

methods based on a functional approach. The ELWP involved many partners apart from

UNESCO and UNDP, such as other donors and the governments of the countries in

which the projects were carried out, all of these having different interests and

understandings.10 One of the results of the EWLP was an integrated concept of expanding

primary education and non-formal literacy education for adults. The “Plan of Action for

the Eradication of Illiteracy by the year 2000”, adopted by the General Conference in

1984, and four regional programs were conceived following this integrated approach.

In the decade of the politicization crisis of UNESCO starting in 1974, literacy was

downgraded, and formal schooling was given priority on the program level. As Limage

(2007) put it, the “early optimism for world literacy has not been regained since that time”

(p. 453).

The next big momentum for literacy came up with International Literacy Year (ILY) in

1990. The UN transferred the main responsibility for its coordination to UNESCO. Many

international meetings were held around that time, also in industrialized countries, where

functional illiteracy became an issue in the 1980s. However, the main event held during

ILY was the Education for All (EFA) Conference in Jomtien, which, as it has been shown

above, led to the prioritization of universal primary education. The United Nations

Literacy Decade (UNLD), launched by the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan for the

years 2003-2012, was another opportunity to advance the literacy agenda. UNESCO was

charged with the coordination of the UNLD, which was shaped to some extent by the U.S.

after their return to UNESCO in 2002 (Limage, 2007). Laura Bush was nominated

Honorary Ambassador for the UNLD. The White House Conference of Global Literacy,

held in 2006, started off a series of six high-level regional conferences in support of

Global Literacy, which were held between 2007 and 2008. These conferences focussed

on “good practice models” in four areas, namely mother-child literacy and

                                                                                                               10  For a comprehensive overview and discussion of the ELWP, see Jones, 1988, chapter 4, which draws on the evaluation of the ELWP carried out by Seth Spaulding (1976).

  23  

intergenerational learning, literacy for health and literacy for economic self-sufficiency

(UNESCO, 2007, August 3, p. 1). Launched with great fanfare by the UN, the UNLD

was from its very beginning understaffed and underfinanced (Limage, 2007, p. 454).

There was very little cooperation with other UN organizations in the coordination of the

decade, and the UNLD always stayed in the shadow of the United Nations Decade of

Education for Sustainable Development (DESD). This situation was even aggravated

when in 2006 the new Assistant-Director General for Education, Peter Smith (the first

American in that position since 1962), initiated a major restructuring of the UNESCO

Education Sector, which caused major turmoil in the sector. The literacy section was

dissolved, and a substantial part of UNESCO’s literacy work was transferred to UIL,

including the Literacy Initiative for Empowerment (LIFE), launched in 2006, as the

implementation framework of the UNLD, targetting those 35 countries worldwide that

face the biggest literacy challenges (UNESCO, 2007, August 3, p. 5). This was criticized

as a further dismantling of the professional capacity of UNESCO in one of its core

mandates (Limage, 2007). In 2009, the little that was left of the UNLD unit was

transferred to the new Division for Basic Learning and Skills Development, which was

given a new director. In the course of a recent trend back to centralising activities at

headquarters, LIFE has been retransferred from UIL to Paris in 2012, where it has

literally disappeared – a search of official documents on the UNESCO website resulted in

no evidence of any kind of activity under this initiative since 2012. The UNLD, and

especially LIFE, certainly had some impact at country level (see UIL, 2012), but in terms

of the big picture, the UNLD “has neither significantly raised awareness of the problem

nor galvanized action” (UNESCO, 2011c, p. 7). It is a prime example of a mismanaged

initiative, which was killed by lack of resources, excessive restructuring and frequent

staff changes. The Assistant-Director General for Education changed four times during

the duration of the decade. Other staff was let go, relocated or retired, so that there is a

glaring lack of institutional memory when it comes to the UNLD. UNESCO will submit a

report of the UNLD to the UN General Assembly in the fall of 2013, which will draw on

country reports submitted by member states.

  24  

The right to education

UNESCO played a key role in defining the right to education, which was first proclaimed

in Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and later in Articles

13 and 14 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966),

the latter being strongly inspired by the UNESCO Convention against Discrimination in

Education of 1960. The UDHR and the Covenant speak of “elementary” or “primary”

education; “secondary” and “higher” education; and “fundamental” education for those

who have been deprived of primary education. UNESCO has greatly contributed to

expanding the limited vision of the right to education based on the categorization into age

groups and institutions. In particular, through the Nairobi Recommendation on the

Development of Adult Education of 1976 and the series of International Conferences on

Adult Education (CONFINTEA), held in 1949, 1960, 1972, 1985, 1997 and 2009, it has

expanded the right to education to adult education. Although the declarations put forward

by the CONFINTEA conferences do not have the legally binding character of treaties,

they are adopted on the understanding that member states will commit to and implement

the principles laid out in them.

The World Conference on Education in Jomtien, held in 1990, reaffirmed “the right of all

people to education”, with an emphasis on the “basic learning needs” of all and set the

ambitious goal for the world community of providing “access to education for all by the

year 2000.” The Faure report of 1972 and the Delors report of 1996 propagated a

holistic and rights-based view of education and learning as a lifelong process, placing the

emphasis on the development of the individual and linking education to democracy. The

most recent standard-setting UNESCO document on adult education, the Belém

Framework for Action of 2009, which came out of CONFINTEA VI, reaffirms lifelong

learning as “a philosophy, a conceptual framework and an organising principle of all

forms of education, based on inclusive, emancipatory, humanistic and democratic values”

(UIL, 2010, p. 5).

The international treaties and declarations that define and claim the right to education are

one thing – the actual implementation of the right to education is another. In its General

  25  

Comment to Article 13 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural

Rights, published in 1999, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

laid out four conditions that constitute the right to education: Availability, accessibility,

acceptability and adaptability, the so-called “4-As” (Tomasevski, 2006), which can be

used as a framework to monitor the right to education (Friboulet et al., 2006). The “4-As”

have been taken up by UNESCO, but are often replaced or expanded by similar concepts.

The Belém Framework for Action and the Global Report on Adult Education and

Learning (GRALE) have used “participation” “inclusion” and “equity” as well as

“relevance” as indicators of quality in education. Another indicator often used is

“effectiveness”. While availability and accessibility are covered in participation, and

acceptability and adaptability in relevance, the concept of effectiveness exceeds the “4-

As” at it aims at learning outcomes. As important as it is to make an effort to measure the

right to education, it bears the risk of shifting to a purely quantitative results-based

agenda. As Andrew Natsios, former administrator of USAID, put it: “...those

development programs that are the most precisely and easily measured are the least

transformational, and those programs that are the most transformational are the least

measurable” (cited in Draxler, 2012, para. 2). The dominance of the “results-based

agenda” needs to be regarded with suspicion as it bears the risk of ultimately

undermining the right to education instead of advancing it. This is another dilemma

related to the humanist-functionalist tension in which UNESCO finds itself.

The new millennium

Irina Bokova, the first-ever female Director-General, who took office in 2009, introduced

the notion of the “new humanism” as “a genuinely people-centered development

paradigm” (UNESCO, 2011a, p. 36). This term is not a new one. In fact, it has been used

to describe UNESCO’s mandate since the beginning. In an article published in 1948 in

the UNESCO Courier, Pedro Bosch-Gimpera, at the time newly appointed head of the

Philosophy and Humanities Section, called for a “new humanism” in a world changed by

“scientific progress” and “rationalist philosophy” (1948, p. 7). One of the paths proposed

toward this “new humanism” was “to institute a universal education to enable all to share

in the benefits of civilization, bring the cultures of the east and the west into contact, and

  26  

raise to their own level backward peoples who still occupy large areas of the world’s

surface” (p. 7). In her inaugural address, Bokova used the term as a call for renewed

understanding, co-existence and equality between the people of the world, in all their

diversity (Bokova, 2009, le 23 octobre). In 2011, an entire issue of the UNESCO Courier,

entitled “Humanism, a new idea” has been devoted to this concept (UNESCO, 2011b). It

is a collection of philosophical reflections of humanism as a guiding principle for human

coexistence in a globalized world, recalling the collection of essays that UNESCO

published in 1948 (UNESCO, 1948c). On other occasions, Bokova has used the term to

refer to the Western-European tradition of humanism and enlightenment (Bokova, 2010,

October 7). While it is not entirely clear what Bokova’s concept of a “new humanism”

entails, it is evident that she uses it to demonstrate UNESCO’s intellectual tradition and

authority.

In sharp contrast to those high-flown rhetorics stands a budget reduction of 31 % (approx.

$36 million), as a consequence of the U.S. withholding their membership dues after the

General Conference adopted Palestine as full member, which brought the education

sector budget down from $115 to $79 million.11 As this budgetary situation doesn’t allow

for a big move, UNESCO takes what it gets. The Secretary-General of the UN has given

UNESCO the role of hosting the secretariat of the Global Education First Initiative

(GEFI), launched in 2012 as a five-year initiative “for the final push” (GEFI website)12

towards the achievement of the second MDG, universal primary education (UNESCO,

2013, April, para. 8). The narrow focus of this initiative does not correspond to

UNESCO’s holistic view of education. The Capacity Development for Education For All

(CapEFA) funding mechanism, sponsored by the Scandinavian countries, is the largest

source of extrabudgetary funding available to UNESCO, in the context of which the

organization engages in specific and time-bound activities.

                                                                                                               11  This information derives from an internal power point presentation by the Assistant-Director General for Education, Mr Qian Tang, at a staff meeting of the Education Sector held on 18 December 2012. 12  http://www.globaleducationfirst.org/308.htm

 

  27  

The loss of U.S. funding goes along with allegations against UNESCO of being a

politicized and ineffective organization (Curtis, 2013, April 20). In recent reports on their

development activities, Australia and the U.K. have treated UNESCO as a development

agency and given it disastrous evaluations (AusAID, 2012; DFID, 2012). The Australian

report observes that “it is difficult to define and measure results in most areas of

UNESCO’s work” (AusAID, 2012, p. 219) and therefore gives it among the poorest

ratings among the 42 agencies covered (p. xii), categorizing UNESCO among those

organizations for which “further analysis is required before decisions are made on core

funding levels” (p. xvi). In its response to the UK Multilateral Aid Review, UNESCO

addresses the challenge of “conceptual difficulties related to the assessment of

results/impact of normative work” (UNESCO, 2012, p. 3) and announces the

development of a Handbook for the Evaluation of Normative Work in cooperation with

the United Nations Evaluation Group (UNEG). The UNESCO Draft Medium-term

strategy for the years 2014-2021, the 37 C/4 (UNESCO, 2013), which is going to be

submitted to the General Conference for approval in the fall of 2013, indirectly responds

to this critique. In this document the organization, in order to regain trust and secure its

survival, commits itself to establishing a “results culture”:

Developing a results culture is fundamental to building the Organization’s

credibility and accountability vis-à-vis its Member States, partners and

investors. UNESCO will work to institutionalize a results-delivery culture

throughout its activities, by improving results-based management,

monitoring, evaluation and results reporting (p. 44).

The Director-General expresses her determination “to reduce further the relative weight

of administration compared to programs across the Organization, and to further increase

efficiency, effectiveness and value for money” (p. 7).

Apart from playing a key role in the GEFI initiative, UNESCO’s work in education will

continue to focus on “literacy, technical and vocational education and training (TVET)

and higher education” (UNESCO, 2013, p. 22). The other important goal for UNESCO is

  28  

to “position itself in the post-2015 development agenda”, which will be defined to a large

extent by the “sustainable development goals, which are yet to be defined by the UN

General Assembly” (p. 14). There are indications that UNESCO will draw on its profile

as an intellectual and standard-setting organization to fulfill its strategic objective 3 –

“shaping the future education agenda” (UNESCO, 2013, p. 20ff.). UNESCO has recently

started a “Rethinking education” initiative and is currently revisiting the Delors report

(Tawil & Cougoureux, 2013). The UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning has been

mandated to revisit and update the Nairobi Recommendation on the Development of Adult

Education of 1976.

Conclusion

Throughout UNESCO’s history, its official discourse showed a tendency to appeal to the

unity of the world by applying universal concepts such as “Education for All” and

“lifelong learning”. Huxley believed that the claim to universality could be achieved

through “scientific humanism”. Bodet stated that “without...diversity UNESCO will not

be universal and unless in fact it does seek to be universal I can see no significance in it”

(Bodet cited in UNESCO, 1950, p. 10). For Maheu, the concept of “universalité” was the

inspiration behind UNESCO, and it was strongly linked to the diversity of all cultures

(Maheu, 1973). “Universalité” was one of Maheu’s most-used terms, and for him, the

discovery of what is universal for all human beings – which was to be found in the

“domain of the spirit” (Maheu cited in Jones, 1988, p. 105) – was one of UNESCO’s core

mandates (Maheu, 1976). This claim to universality is being echoed by the current

concept of the “new humanism”. However, on the level of program planning UNESCO

proved unable to live up to the ideals of a universal mandate and program. As “the

organization could not afford its view of itself” (Jones, 1988, p. 37), UNESCO resorted to

activities for which funding was available even if they represented a limited version of

UNESCO’s educational vision. The EWLP and the new GEFI initiative are examples of

this. Mundy (2006) argues that since the mid-1990s “the education-for-development

regime” has changed considerably in that EFA brought an unprecedented consensus

between the Bretton Woods and the UN organizations on the relevance of basic education

for poverty reduction, even if they look at education from different vantage points

  29  

(Bretton Woods sees education as an investment, the UN as a right and a matter of

equity). It is important to note that this consensus has only been possible at the expense

of UNESCO’s holistic vision of education. When universal primary education became an

MDG, it was a decision against a broader vision of education and learning and ultimately

another defeat for UNESCO. The GEFI initiative, which provides a further framework

for development aid, is another example of the disconnect between development and

lifelong learning as a global educational paradigm. The tension between UNESCO’s

high-mindedness and the pragmatic turns it had to take to demonstrate results to its

donors, to member states and the other UN agencies run like a red thread through the

history of the organization.

This has many reasons, some of which have been addressed in this paper: Controversies

over its mandate, the political tensions that characterize the organization, and competition

with other UN agencies. Another aspect that would need special attention is UNESCO’s

heavy bureaucratic inward-looking apparatus (Hoggart, 1978, e. g. p. 91; Benavot, 2011)

and a high level of mismanagement, of which the UNLD is an example. To a large extent

UNESCO’s shortcomings are due to the dramatic budgetary constraints that the

organization faced from the beginning. The first program that UNESCO aspired to

implement on a global scale, the fundamental education program, failed largely because it

proved impossible to mobilize the necessary funds. This trend continued, the most recent

example being the UNLD, forcing UNESCO to turn to focussed and time-bound

activities.

UNESCO’s turn to development entailed further limitations. Because of the reliance on

development funding, which was targetted to functional operational work, UNESCO’s

development activities remained somewhat disconnected from its intellectual work,

represented by the educational reports and the standard-setting documents. This leads to a

narrow view of UNESCO on the side of its partners and donors as demonstrated by the

recent negative assessments of UNESCO as a development agency.

The authors of the Draft 37 C/4 tried hard to adapt to the narrow view of UNESCO by

committing to a “results” and “value for money” culture. To go back to Barnett &

  30  

Finnemore’s quote from the introduction to this paper, UNESCO has been reduced from

an organization that was founded “for reasons of legitimacy and normative fit” (1999, p.

703) and that was defined as “symbolic” (Sathyamurthy, 1964, p. 51), to an organization

legitimized by “value for money”. At the same time, the Director-General, in her

introduction to the 37 C/4, insists on “the humanist mandate of UNESCO” (UNESCO,

2013, p. 9), which will “continue to be guided by a rights-based and holistic approach to

education” (p. 21).

That is the story of UNESCO.

  31  

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