International Journal of Educational Development 31 (2011) 315–318

Short communication

UNESCO Education: Political or Technical? Reflections on recent personalexperience§

Nicholas Burnett *

Results for Development Institute, 1875 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington, DC, United States

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International Journal of Educational Development

journa l homepage: www.e lsev ier .com/ locate / i jedudev

This short paper discusses UNESCO Education’s recent past andassesses its possible future by probing three simple interrelatedquestions: (1) Does the world get the UNESCO it wants? (2) Doesthe world get the UNESCO it needs? (3) Can this change? My ownview is that, to some extent, the world does get the UNESCO wantsas the world is not clear on what it wants, that it needs a strongtechnical education UNESCO that it does not currently have, andthat there is now a climate in which change, if difficult, might bepossible for the first time in some decades.

The world is not unanimous in what it wants from UNESCO.1

There are different views among Southern countries, Northerncountries and other international organizations.

For many countries in the South, loosely organized into the G-77 and China, UNESCO represents one of several UN fora in whichtheir voices can dominate – through participation in the 58member state Executive Board (out of a total of 193 memberstates), through participation in the General Conference that setsUNESCO’s programme every two years but is also a platform forresolutions on many issues, and through participation in thenumerous global and regional education conferences that UNESCOorganizes. Over the fourteen months from November 2008 toFebruary 2010, there was an unprecedented concentration of theseglobal conferences, including the International Conference onEducation with the theme of inclusive education (Geneva,November 2008), the Education for All High Level Group (twice,in Oslo in December 2008 and in Addis Ababa in February 2010),the World Conference on Education for Sustainable Developmentat the mid-point of the Decade of Education for SustainableDevelopment (Bonn, April 2009), the World Conference on HigherEducation (Paris, July 2009) and the Sixth International Conferenceon Adult Education, known as CONFINTEA VI (Belem, December2009), not to mention the UNESCO General Conference (Paris,October 2009). Most of these global conferences were preceded byregional conferences in the six UNESCO regions, for a total of over20 in all. All these conferences, regional and global, werecharacterized by lengthy wrangling about the content of their

§ This paper is based on a presentation on March 4, 2010 in Chicago at the annual

meeting of the Comparative and International Education Society and draws also on

a guest lecture given on February 4, 2010 to the George Washington University class

Education 228 on UNESCO: Agenda for the 21st Century.

* Corresponding author.

E-mail address: nburnett@resultsfordevelopment.org.1 Throughout this paper, ‘‘UNESCO’’ refers to UNESCO’s Education Sector and

Programme. Some of the analysis may be relevant to other sectors but this paper is

confined to Education, the largest programme sector in terms of budget and staffing.

0738-0593/$ – see front matter � 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.ijedudev.2010.11.014

communiques or other public declarations, much of it having verylittle to do with education and almost never committing theparticipant states to specific future actions.2

Over two-thirds of UNESCO’s education programme activitybudget (funds not used for staff salaries) is decentralized to itscountry programmes, which are exclusively in developingcountries. As the total budget is relatively small, each programmeis also rather small, though in some cases it is supplemented withsignificant extrabudgetary funds. These country programmesinspire fierce loyalty among member states, and are very difficultto change even though there is little evaluation of their impact.Member states, and especially National Commissions, are alsomuch attached to ‘‘participation programme and fellowship’’ fundsthat are made available to them through the Commissions, fromoutside the education sector, and which can be used for manypurposes. Access to these, admittedly modest, funds gives NationalCommissions and governments a considerable interest in main-taining the education programmes, the participation programmesand the status quo.3

For me, as an advocate of the view that the world needs a strongtechnical UNESCO, these two aspects of Southern dominance of thepolitics of the organization are troubling. At the same time, itwould not be at all fair to suggest that these are the only intereststhat Southern countries have in UNESCO – indeed one of theorganization’s greatest assets is the respect in which it is held bydeveloping countries, reflected in both the ease of access of its staffto ministers and other decision-makers and the strong conveningpower it still has. Despite their excessive number, the variousUNESCO meetings are usually well attended and at fairly high level.Beyond this, many developing countries look to UNESCO for advice,as they believe, rightly, that, as a UN agency, it is more neutral andless biased than some of the other sources that exist, notably theWorld Bank which they tend to hold in some suspicion. A keyquestion, however, is whether this neutral stance is used to providethe best advice and knowledge that exist; many ministers askedme for the latest thinking on many education topics, noting that

2 For an insight into politics in the declaration from the World Conference on

Higher Education, see Alma Maldonado-Maldonado and Antoni Verger, ‘‘Politics,

UNESCO, and Higher Education: A Case Study’’, International Higher Education,

Number 58, Winter 2010.3 A further example of the politicized nature of the organization is the existence,

at Paris headquarters, of the Africa Bureau, headed by an Assistant Director-General.

This bureau has very little funds and there are anyway regional sector bureaus on

the African continent (such as that for education in Dakar) but its existence is

testimony to the large number of member states in Africa.

N. Burnett / International Journal of Educational Development 31 (2011) 315–318316

the UNESCO field staff with whom they interacted did not seem tohave this knowledge.

Northern countries have much less political power thansouthern ones at UNESCO, as elsewhere in the UN system, buttheir power can stem from three particular sources: they pay formuch of the regular budget (the United States alone contributesalmost a quarter, at 22%), they can contribute extrabudgetaryfunds for specific programmes, and the fact that the Board has atradition, though no requirement, of making decisions byconsensus, giving minority positions a relative greater strengththan they might otherwise have. Northern countries broadly fallinto three categories: those that engage in general, those thatengage only on particular issues, and those that do not engage.Those that do engage tend to do so with regard to education indeveloping countries and not necessarily with regard to educationin their own or other OECD countries. Indeed the existence of theOECD as an effective forum for discussing education issues in theNorth poses quite serious issues for UNESCO as many countriesthink that it should confine itself to issues of education in theSouth, a far cry from its original conception.4

Those Northern countries that do engage, whether generally orpartially, tend to expect a technical UNESCO, ideally one providingtechnical knowledge and expertise on education to developingcountries to parallel the aid and other financial flows that theyprovide directly through bilateral and indirectly through multilat-eral channels. According to this view, UNESCO should provide‘‘global public goods’’ in education, such things as data, analysis,research findings, the sharing of experience, and the recognition ofeducational qualifications across borders. The two major achieve-ments of the education sector in the last decade are largely due toNorthern pressure and Northern extrabudgetary funding: theestablishment of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics as a reliablesource of data and the establishment of the Education for All GlobalMonitoring Report as the key annual document for assessingprogress toward the EFA goals. Both have been welcomed by Northand South alike, demonstrating the demand for this type of dataand analysis. Less visible, but financially quite significant, arecertain country programmes with major extrabudgetary fundingfrom the North – the huge Afghanistan adult literacy programmerun by UNESCO with the Afghan government is essentiallyfinanced by Japan, for example.

All countries, both Southern and Northern, have a major interestin the employment of their nationals, on the UNESCO staff or in theirdelegation to UNESCO. Though UNESCO employs fewer than 2000staff, there is enormous competition for every vacancy, and majorefforts by member states and their delegations to influenceappointments.5 Similarly, member states, of which something like160 maintain a permanent delegation in Paris, have created astructure in which the individuals on the staff of these delegations(an average of three, perhaps) have a strong interest in maintainingstructures, like the large and unwieldy Executive Board, which inturn justify the existence of a permanent delegation. That UNESCO isthe only UN agency in Paris is in stark contrast to New York andGeneva, where member state delegations relate to many agencies atonce; only a few delegations in Paris combine bilateral representa-tion to France or OECD with that to UNESCO.

As noted, other multilateral organizations have moved quiteheavily into education over the last several decades, in part becauseof the inability of UNESCO to provide the technical knowledge andsupport that these agencies want. During the 1970s, for example, the

4 This attitude, incidentally, represents a moving in the direction proposed in the

parallel paper by Stephen Heyneman, 2011.5 During the period I was Assistant Director-General, I received more visits and

phone calls from delegations about staffing than about any other subject. I did not

keep records but I would estimate it at about 40% of the total!

World Bank financed a cooperative programme with UNESCO, bywhich UNESCO provided technical support to Bank educationprojects, with Bank staff largely focused on providing the financing.Over time, the Bank became concerned about the technical quality ofthis support and started building up its own education staff. UNICEFhas grown very rapidly and, at about 400, now has more educationstaff than any other multilateral agency. OECD work on educationhas increased over recent decades, and its geographical scope hasnow begun to increase, both to include countries that are candidatesto join OECD and also with the establishment of a major OECDprogramme of providing technical education support to non-OECDcountries on a reimbursable basis, with a large number of countriestaking this up.

There are many current examples of effective cooperationbetween UNESCO and these other agencies on specific topics, e.g.with UNICEF on analyzing data on children out of school, with theWorld Bank on quality in higher education, and with OECD onguidelines for cross-border recognition of higher educationqualifications. Moreover, senior officials of these other multilateralorganizations also consistently voice their desire for a technicallystronger UNESCO with which they could cooperate more. Whenattempts are made to make this cooperation more real in otherthan limited areas, however, there is some reluctance to do so. Aprime example is the group of five convening agencies forEducation for All; while cooperation and involvement haveincreased in recent years, especially among UNESCO, UNICEFand the World Bank if less so with UNDP and UNFPA, thiscooperation has tended to be at the global, managerial level andnot to have been paralleled in practice in the field.

If the world is not unanimous in what it wants from UNESCO, whatsort of a UNESCO Education Sector does it get? During the 2008–09biennium when I was Assistant Director-General for Education, theanswer, already hinted at earlier in this paper, included:

� A small number of high quality programmes, almost all largelyfinanced with extrabudgetary funds. Examples include UIS(technically outside Education but perhaps 75% of its work ison education), the Global Monitoring Report, the HigherEducation Quality Assurance programme, and the activities ofthe International Institute for Educational Planning.� The huge number of conferences, regional and global, already

discussed above.� More institutes than can be afforded on an institute budget of only

$17 million every two years, resulting in much work that is notrelevant and is of insufficiently high quality. There were in 2008–09eight institutes and centres in education plus UIS. These includedfive global institutes and centres (International Bureau of Educa-tion, Geneva – IBE; International Institute for Educational Planning,Paris – IIEP; International Centre for Technical and VocationalEducation and Training, Bonn – UNEVOC; International Institute forTechnology in Education, Moscow – IITE; and the UNESCO Institutefor Lifelong Learning – UIL) and three regional ones (Centre forHigher Education in Europe, Bucharest – CEPES; InternationalInstitute for Capacity Building in Africa, Addis Ababa – IICBA; andthe International Institute for Higher Education in Latin Americaand the Caribbean, Caracas – IESALC). Only three consistentlyproduce work of quality (IBE, IIEP and UIL) and the volume is verylow from IBE and UIL. Justifying all these institutes is very hard intechnical terms – their very number and the limited financingavailable inevitably results in their relative insignificance.

� An unwieldy governance structure with the biennial GeneralConference and the twice-yearly 58-member Executive Board.These meetings not only take up much actual time (4–6 weeks ayear), they require enormous efforts in terms of documentpreparation by staff, principally those in the Paris headquarters,

N. Burnett / International Journal of Educational Development 31 (2011) 315–318 317

and lead to requirements to report on programmes that havebarely started.

� A very inadequate budget for Education. Out of UNESCO’s totalregular budget of $631 million over the two years 2008–09, $108million was allocated to education, or only $54 million per year.While this is supplemented with perhaps another $30 million peryear of extrabudgetary funds, it is very far from the $2 billionannual budget of the World Health Organization, which in someways is analogous for health to UNESCO’s role in education.� A budget increasingly dominated by staff salaries. About 54% of

the total UNESCO budget of $631 million for the biennium wasfor general administration, a major reason so little is available foreducation and other sector programmes. Within the educationsector, more is spent on salaries than on activities. In the previous2008–09 biennium, for example, salaries accounted for $58million of the education regular budget, or 54%. About 60% of theeducation staff is stationed outside Paris.� Rigid human resources rules which, combined with declining

real budgets and a weak managerial culture, make it very difficultto renew the staff and to introduce new perspectives andknowledge into UNESCO’s work.� Given the share of the budget accounted for by salaries, funds

available for actual activities were necessarily limited. The eightinstitutes and centres received $17 million, leaving only $33million over two years for everything else, which translated intovery small amounts for the four regional bureaus and some 50country offices, each handling more than one country pro-gramme. Even for major countries like India, the size of thecountry programme was only a few hundred thousand dollarsand for many countries it was less than $100,000. Country offices’activities also tended to be very varied, with very many focusingon implementing small projects and too few focusing on sectoralissues and on collaboration with other agencies, such as activelyparticipating where relevant in the EFA Fast Track Initiative.� Despite these very limited funds, the Education Sector was held

accountable by the Board and the General Conference for thedelivery of 43 Expected Results, grouped into two BiennialSectoral Priorities and four Main Lines of Action. Theseestablished Education for All as the overriding priority, a correctdecision in my view, but did not allow sufficient concentrationon particular aspects of EFA or on countries most in need or, forthat matter, on other aspects of education.� The shortage of funds also meant that extrabudgetary finance

could effectively shape the programme – the three largestEducation programmes in 2008–09 were the literacy programmein Afghanistan, the global programme on HIV/AIDS andeducation (EDUCAIDS), and the country programme in Brazil,financed respectively by Japan, UNAIDS and Brazil. All threeprogrammes were important but it was clearly a distortion thatthese should be the largest programmes in the sector; there arealso major questions about whether UNESCO should implementprogrammes in a country that are funded by that country’sgovernment, as is the case in Brazil.

Faced with this situation when I became Assistant Director-General for Education, and learning quickly that major changeswould not be possible during the biennium in that the programmehad already been adopted by the General Conference in late 2007, Idecided to focus my strategic efforts on improving things for thenext biennium, 2010–11.6 My objective was to secure a realbudgetary increase for the education sector, when all sectors were

6 I stress here that this was the focus of my strategic efforts. There were other

areas on which I also focused, including particularly the attempt to create a more

professional atmosphere for the staff and to make all staff feel part of the same

sector, regardless of their geographic location.

threatened with cuts, and to focus its work on a more limitednumber of activities. Thus the programme for the currentbiennium is characterized by:

� A modest real increase in the sector’s budget, to $118 millionover two years out of a total UNESCO budget of $653 million (that$653 million representing a real decrease compared to theprevious $631 million when allowance is made for inflation).Education was the only sector to achieve such an increase.� Focusing the programme particularly on four areas which are

crucial to achieving EFA but which have been relatively neglectedby both UNESCO and other agencies: youth and adult literacy;teachers; skills including technical and vocational education;and sector-wide policy and planning. Literacy remains the mostneglected EFA goal and various earlier efforts by UNESCO,including with US support, have not resulted in a sufficientlyhigher global profile. Teachers are the key to achieving quality inschools, increasingly the central issue as enrolments continues toincrease at both primary and secondary levels. Skills andreadiness for work were identified by the majority of educationministers as one of their top priority areas on which they alsoneeded advice. A focus on sectoral policy and planning areessential if UNESCO is to play a more effective role at countrylevel and also for the achievement of the other three priorities, asall three have tended to be ignored or inadequately treated ineducation sector plans.� A massively reduced number of Expected Results, down from 43

to 14, even if this is still perhaps too many.� Focusing the programme geographically, increasing Africa’s

share by 5 percentage points to 32% of the total educationprogramme and by allocating all the real budget increase (arelatively modest $6 million) to twenty priority countries, thoseleast likely to achieve EFA without an extra effort.� Focusing country offices on the delivery of upstream policy

advice and the development of in-country capacity, rather thanthe previous habit of implementing small projects themselves.� Avoiding too many conferences. There should be some respite from

these for the next year or so, with only a major conference on earlychildhood care and education on the horizon (Moscow, September2010) plus the continuing annual EFA High Level Group.� Streamlining and better aligning the institutes and centres with

UNESCO’s overall work programme. This was not easy, as theinstitutes each have their own independent boards and becausereducing their number proved ultimately impossible. A modesteffort to close CEPES, on the ground that it was no longer needed,was thwarted by strong lobbying from Romania, though did resultin CEPES now being funded extra-budgetarily by Bucharest.Despite efforts to limit the number of institutes, India successfullyadvocated very late in the planning process the establishment ofthe Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace andSustainable Development for Asia and the Pacific, Delhi –MGIEPSD). The decision to establish this institute was an exampleof political prioritization from the South, in part a reaction to thevery legitimate argument that most of the existing institutes arelocated in the North, indeed specifically in Europe.� Reinforcing the results to be achieved through the regular budget

with those to be achieved through extrabudgetary funding, bybuilding on a UNESCO-wide initiative to establish a Comple-mentary Additional Programme.7

� Trying to clarify the reporting relationships within the sector,enhancing in particular the roles of the four regional Educationbureaus with regard to country offices in their regions.

7 It is too early to tell if this will have an effect, at either the UNESCO-wide or

Education Sector levels.

N. Burnett / International Journal of Educational Development 31 (2011) 315–318318

That these reforms were feasible, at least in terms of theprogramme and budget documents, is very encouraging. Despitethe high level of politicization, rational professional argumentscould – and did – win the day, though considerable lobbying ofdelegations was needed to get there.

Less encouraging were efforts to introduce other reforms, inpart because they take time, in part because the environment wasnot appropriate. Mention has already been made of the failure toclose CEPES or to stop the Gandhi Institute being rushed through.It would be useful to focus not only additional resources but someof the existing ones on countries most in need, but other countries’sense of ‘‘entitlement’’ made this impossible – there is a verylegitimate discussion to be held here on whether or not everycountry, or at least every developing country, should have aUNESCO education programme. Certain programmes also enjoyrelatively little support but are important to certain majorcountries and so difficult to focus into manageable shape – anexample is Education for Sustainable Development which came tobe interpreted as meaning almost all aspects of education andhence very hard to operationalize. Attempts to consider reducingits scope, say to limit it to education in relation to climate change,were strongly resisted by those member states behind theprogramme, notably Germany, Japan and Sweden. Renewingthe staff, through new blood and through retraining, was notpossible due to financial and human resource policy constraints;changing the management culture, which will be essential forUNESCO’s renewal, will also take an injection of managers withexperience in other organizations and a knowledge of modernmanagement techniques. It would have been helpful also to haveorganized some new and visible products, fulfilling UNESCO’s‘‘laboratory of ideas’’ mandate, comparable perhaps to the Delors

Report of the 1990s, but this was again difficult given financial andstaff constraints.

Many further reforms may now be possible. A start has beenmade by focusing the programme. There is a new spirit to theorganization with a new Director-General, who has clearly statedher conviction that education is UNESCO’s most important sector.There is a welcome for her in important – and different – fora, suchas the United Nations itself, among key member states like theUnited States, in the business community as was evident recentlyat the World Economic Forum in Davos, among other agencies suchas the World Bank and UNICEF, and, not least, among the staff. Ihope she will have the courage – and endurance – to take reform tothe next level, by renewing the staff, focusing the programmeseven more, and revitalizing intellectual activity and new ideas. Thismay have to involve closing down all, and certainly some, countryprogrammes. Indeed, a strong case can be made that UNESCO’sstrength should for now be concentrated on the global and regionallevels where it can fill a major gap and also further regain itsreputation. This will require not only reforming management,which is hopefully now in place, but also a broad alliance of majorcountries, Southern and Northern, to support reform and also awillingness of other agencies to agree on a new internationaldivision of labor internationally on education, with UNESCO takingon a stronger technical role in support of others with finance. TheG-20 might be a useful device to marshal this support, as it starts tomove beyond purely macroeconomic issues.

Reference

Heyneman, S.P., 2011. The future of UNESCO: Strategies for attracting newresources. International Journal of Educational Development 31, 313–314.