This paper reports on a multiyear program of international collaborative research delivered with the aim of conceptualising, validating and prototyping rubrics for evaluating and reporting university activities and outcomes relevant to the UN SDGs. The paper sets foundations by building on earlier analysis of research on university engagement with…

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) Education for Sustainable Development roadmap (ESD 2030) is a policy document that reiterates the urgency of the climate crisis and affirms the central role of education in ensuring the survival of the planet. Building on nearly two decades of international policy on…

This study aims to analyze the influence of the discourse of international organizations on university social responsibility (USR), from international organizations, in the policy and management frameworks of the State University System in Colombia. Then, we reviewed institutional documents of global and regional organizations, as well as…

The declaration of the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 brought together 193 nations to commit to a common set of 17 critical, highly ambitious global goals. This paper analyses how the Technical Cooperation Group of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) develops consensus on measuring and monitoring SDG4. We empirically…

This paper examines how UNESCO's "Guidance for Generative AI in Education and Research" uses personification metaphors to describe artificial intelligence and how these linguistic choices shape public understanding of AI's educational role. Through critical discourse analysis, we identify personification metaphors that attribute human…

Education is a human right but one that remains elusive for displaced people and refugees affected by crises and emergencies. Against the background of global commitments to education, lifelong learning policies are essential to ensure self-sufficiency and autonomy for displaced people. While the field of Education in Emergencies (EiE) has…

Much attention has been given in recent years to how the OECD promotes a neoliberal, marketised vision of education. There has been less focus, however, on how the OECD also offers a neocolonial vision of education, which promotes the epistemologies of the Global North at the expense of those of the Global South. This article contributes to this…

This paper first establishes the need for comprehensive internationalization of institutions of higher education, using frameworks provided by organizations, such as the American Council of Education (ACE) and the International Association of Universities (IAU), as well as by internationalization experts, such as Knight and De Wit. It proceeds…

In the summer of 2022, UNESCO held CONFINTEA VII, a gathering of over 140 governmental delegations with the dual purpose of examining the current state of adult learning across the world and establishing a set of comprehensive goals for the next 12 years for the field of adult education. Held regularly since 1949, the International Conference on…

China's influence is increasing in global education governance through multilateral cooperation. This paper argues that global education governance 'with Chinese characteristics' reflects China's salient motivations, capacity and limitations, and features. This article articulates China's global education governance commitment and its prospects,…

Climate change is one of the most critical challenges of our time, requiring significant responses from all aspects of society, including education. The prevailing responses to climate change tend towards treating the crisis as a predominantly scientific and managerial issue that requires technological solutions or behaviour changes.…

All internal evaluation units of public sector agencies face tradeoffs arising from the tension within the "independence-accountability-learning" nexus. Most such units are not independent, unlike the World Bank unit, which was ostensibly independent from its inception half a century ago. But new archival evidence reveals that between…

This article examines how the distinction between complicated and complex education systems contributes to our understanding of global governance and how "soft power" concerned with gender is used in international development organisations' responses to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4, the global goal for education. Four global…

Although international organisations (IOs) are recognised as important actors in education, their involvement in vocational education and training (VET) remains underexamined. This article reviews the current state of research on IOs in VET, focusing on the ILO, OECD, UNESCO, and the World Bank, through an integrative literature review of 174…

After their launch by the UN in 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been seen as landmarks for global survival. Higher education has been given a key role in the implementation of the SDGs, and the current article investigates how a sample of Nordic higher education institutions have been adapting to the SDGs. Based on the…