2026 OISE Presentation: Global Governance through Time

Hosted by the Office of International Studies in Education (OISE), this presentation will explore The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Knowledge-for-Policy Tools and Futurities in Higher Education (1960 to 2025).

This is a hybrid event. For Zoom information, please contact Julie Sinclair.

Speakers:

- Johanna Kallo, Professor, Department of Education, University of Turku, Finland
- Riyad Shahjahan, Professor, Department of Educational Administration, College of Education, Michigan State University, USA

Abstract:

Cooperation and Development (OECD) as a macro-epistemic actor shaping the futures of educational policy, its anticipatory artefacts remain unaddressed from temporal and higher education perspectives. These artefacts — predictive modelling in planning, indicators, and multiple foresight techniques — actively shape how problems are defined and how policy futures are imagined, enacted, or foreclosed, thereby making certain futures governable while excluding others.

We critically examine how these anticipatory artefacts, which we understand as knowledge-for-policy tools, construct and institutionalize futurities of higher education. Using a longitudinal analysis of OECD records from 1960 to 2025, we further investigate how the OECD develops these tools to shape policy goals in alignment with its future imaginaries. We argue that the OECD’s higher education imaginary artifacts mobilize the past as a resource for planning, manage the present to shape possibilities, and actively construct the future through various tools that enable envisioning alternative scenarios decades ahead. We demonstrate that a temporal lens, particularly a futurity lens, offers a critical and underutilized framework for understanding future governance in global higher education. We conclude by outlining the theoretical and practical implications of our analysis for reimagining global governance in higher education policy.