Imagining a transformed UNESCO with learning at its core (original) (raw)
Related papers
Bringing communication up to agency: UNESCO reforms its visibility
Public Relations Inquiry, 2014
This article is the first to discuss the recent and significant reforms of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) communications. I analyse the major measures such as bringing together communication and political workers in one sector, assembling all communicators and web services in one division and introducing monthly media reports. I examine issues such as opening the brand, clearance of press releases, use of languages, professionalisation, press agentry and the need to adopt a more conversational and multiple-voice approach. UNESCO’s communications reform has advanced only halfway in two respects. First, changes have not resulted in a comprehensive communication strategy. Despite refurbishing its web site and introducing various social media, the organisation is still using the one-sided model of public information. It is lacking the new media agents who can engage UNESCO’s diverse constituency in online sharing and networking. Second, the restructuring has partly empowered the communicators and made them more professional. The reform, however, is not accomplished. The functionalist, old bureaucratic notion that communication is an organisational ‘silo’, and that changes should affect only those who are appointed to communicate, is redundant. For a full success, not only the communications of the organisation, but also the organisation that communicates needs to change.
UNESCO played a pivotal role in shaping postwar educational transformations, contributing to the reconstruction of war-ravaged school systems and fostering new visions of education and learning. Notably, the organization assumed a critical role in the decolonization process, supporting the establishment of independent national education systems and promoting access to education for all peoples. In recognition of the 80 th anniversary of UNESCO's founding, the Roma Tre University is pleased to announce a call for papers for an international webinar series, scheduled to unfold across three distinct dates in the Spring of 2025: March 26, April 16, and May 14. The working languages of the webinar series will be English, French, and Italian, and contributions will be published in open access with Roma Tre University Press. This series is designed to provide a platform for presenters to showcase their ongoing research projects, discuss their chosen methodologies, highlight the types of sources being utilized, and share anticipated outcomes. The focus is on presenting works in progress and fostering collaborative and transdisciplinary discussions on emerging research. In addition to the webinar series, a final conference will be held on November 18, 2025, at Roma Tre University. This conference will provide a platform for broader discussion and reflection on the research project's findings. Proceedings from the conference will be published with an international publisher, to be determined. This initiative invites scholars, researchers, and practitioners to submit papers that explore UNESCO's key role in postwar educational transformations, with a particular, though not exclusive, focus on the issue of decolonization.
Unesco: From Inherent Contradictions to Open Crisis
Comparative Education Review, 1986
how built-in organizational contradictions can degenerate into a crisis that threatens the organization's survival. In the case of Unesco, we have a situation that is fundamentally contradictory but nevertheless stable over a long period and then suddenly degenerates into crisis. The process was actually years in the making, and its ingredients are many and of different natures. The organization still operates with its original constitution, although there has been more than a threefold increase in its membership and, therefore, its expectations of the organization. Its largest contributor, the United States, took relatively little notice of its programs and operations and appeared to be practicing a long-term policy of benign neglict toward the organization. The current director-general, a fervent advocate of the interests of the Third World, has combined a certain neglect of the interests of the organization's largest contributors with mismanagement of its financial, personnel, and programmatic operations. Unesco is structured to function in a classic double bind. Politically, it houses countries with very different, and often antagonistic, aims and ambitions. Its member-countries (161 until the withdrawal of the United States) represent the full spectrum of political, cultural, and economic practices. Structurally, there is a legal working majority that has practically no material responsibility for the organization's financial foundations. This structural contradiction works to the advantage of the poorer members, and it is to their advantage that it be maintained.
From intergovernmental to global: UNESCO’s response to globalization
Whilst there is an ever-growing literature on the economic and political aspects of ‘globalization,’ at present there are few studies analyzing how intergovernmental organizations have reacted to this phenomenon. This article aims to fill this gap by analyzing the response to globalization of UNESCO, one of the least studied organizations of the UN constellation. Addressing the global orientation of some of the current programs, this article shows how a recent re-evaluation of scientific humanism—the main philosophical framework contributing to the creation of UNESCO—has influenced both UNESCO’s self-understanding and its understanding of globalization. Scientific humanism is a philosophical utopia that couples the advance of scientific knowledge with the diffusion of a common philosophical framework and promotes a universal system of education in order to establish a global community. Based on the philosophical appeal of a culture of peace based on science, humanism and human rights, UNESCO’s representation of globalization represents an intriguing example of how our global future may be conceived and, to some extent, realized.
Educational multilateralism in a changing world order: Unesco and the limits of the possible
International Journal of Educational Development, 1999
This paper provides a critical re-valuation of Unesco's work in education over the last five decades, updating this story to include the most recent decade of crisis and reform within the organization and within the United Nations more broadly. Drawing on interviews within Unesco, a wide range of Unesco documentation and secondary sources, the paper addresses two main questions. First, what can Unesco's 52 years of experience in the field of education tell us about the possibilities and limits of multilateral cooperation in education? Second, how (and how successfully) has Unesco adapted to changes in world order over the last two decades?
This research note shares insights which resulted from a larger study into the ways in which the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) – during 2010–2014 – used its position as coordinator of the post-Dakar Framework for Action (initiated at the World Education Forum held in 2000 and designed to reinvigorate the Education for All initiative) to help it regain some of the legitimacy it had lost in the preceding decades. The research study focused on the role of both the UNESCO Education for All Follow-up Unit and the production of the Global Monitoring Report (GMR) during the 2000s because they were at the heart of UNESCO's efforts to repair its image and renew its impact in one area of global governance, specifically in the global education policy field. The study's findings were based on an analysis of documents, archives and interviews (n=17) with key actors inside and outside UNESCO, including representatives of UNESCO's peer institutions. Résumé ((The French translation of the final edited abstract will be added here later))