Articles
Reconsidering the Global Governance: Discourse Analysis of the Process of Formulating Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4)
2016 Volume 25 Issue 1-2 Pages 17-33
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2016 Volume 25 Issue 1-2 Pages 17-33
Based on the analysis of the discourse in the process of consensus building toward a post-2015 education agenda, this paper will examine if commonly accepted notion of “global governance” represents the reality or is in need of revision.
The paper examines the interplay among actors who took part in the discourse via different channels of global governance, including both formal and informal channels. Most of the forums and entities established as part of the global governance structure are composed of representatives from UN or UNESCO member states, civil society organizations (CSOs), and UN agencies. However, each of these categories has diverse constituent groups; representing these groups is not as straightforward a task as the governance structure seems to assume. Therefore, based on interviews and qualitative text analysis, this paper will introduce major groups of actors and their major issues of concern, decision-making structure, mode of communication, and relationship with other actors. Then, based on an understanding of the characteristics of the various channels and actors, it will present the structural issues which determined the nature of discourse and the educational issues that emerged as the shared concerns of the “education community”.
What was the post-2015 discourse for the so-called education community, which in itself has an ambiguous and virtual existence? The key words post-2015 and post-EFA provide us with an opportunity to untangle how shared norms and codes of conduct were socially constructed in the vertical and horizontal spaces of discourse at the global, regional, and national levels.
Given that the most of such processes toward constructing the norms and decision-making framework happened outside of the formal United Nations-led mechanism, the paper argues that the global governance theories based on the relationships between states and their representative “international bodies” are losing relevance to the global dynamics of consensus building.
