The Struggle for Legitimacy and the Road to an Attractive 2030 Global Education Scenario

This essay examines how international organisations (IOs) such as UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank sustain their epistemic authority in a global education landscape marked by polycrisis and multipolarity. Treating IOs as neither innocent nor all-powerful, it argues that their legitimacy is produced through epistemic infrastructures of metrics, indicators and platforms, moral vocabularies of equity, well-being and human flourishing, and political alliances forged in multistakeholder arrangements. Drawing on recent scholarship on governance by numbers, the SDGs and the affective and technological turns in education policy, it shows how crisis has become a governing medium through which mandates are recalibrated and promissory visions renewed, often leaving technocratic structures intact. The essay then sketches three post-2030 trajectories, managerial consolidation, fragmented pluralism and deliberative regeneration, and argues that an attractive scenario requires a legitimacy settlement capable of organising plurality, disagreement and interdependence across local and global scales.