Unterhalter, ES; (2015) Global inequalities, multipolarity, and supranational organizations engagements with gender and education. Journal of Supranational Policies of Education , 3 pp. 10-28.

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Abstract

This paper seeks to identify the emergence of a multi-polar space regarding international development in the last ten years that stands between agendas associated with human rights and basic needs, security, the environmental agenda, and responses to the 2008 financial crisis. In this environment, gender and education, notably issues associated with girls’ access to school, have come to occupy a particular resonant space, signalling both an end to all development ills, and the dissolution of differences between, for example, the state and the private sector, equality oriented NGOs and those linked with profit. The paper discusses how in this process supra-national organisations concerned with education deploy a number of key terms –empowerment , effectiveness and evidence – and how the ambiguities associated with these allow policies concerned with gender and education to signal both a social justice project and processes which sanction or sanitise relations of commodification, exploitation or continued inequalities. The analysis comprises three threads of discussion. In setting the scene I first present a montage of some features of global inequalities associated with gender and education and some of the slippery dimensions of multi-polarity. I then consider some of the ways in which multi-polarity has been deployed in discussions of international relations and radical democracy , and use some of the metaphoric aspects of this notion to characterise the present moment in international development policy. Through this I attempt to theorise approaches to gender, education and international development that I term dispersal. In the third section I outline some of the relationships of supra-national organisations with national and local institutions working on gender and education, and show , using the example of the Department for International Development (DFID) Girls’ Education Challenge (GEC) programme how features of dispersal are evident in policy declarations, programme descriptions and framing discourses. The conclusion draws out the implications of this analysis for some of the key global policy declarations being negated in 2015, such as the Sustainable development Goals (SDGs).

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