Browsing by Subject "Maailmanpankki"

In my thesis, I scrutinized the World Bank, OECD and UNICEF's aims to achieve legitimacy in Brazilian education policy by using knowledge-related governance strategies. In theoretizing the concept of legitimacy, I've employed perspectives from soft governance and knowledge governance. Thus, I was empirically interested in the question of which strategies international organizations (IOs) use to construe knowledge and 'truth' about Brazilian education, as well as how they rationalize and constitute meanings and essentiality of knowledge. My analytical angles to investigate knowledge governance are different strategies of quantification and comparison, so-called 'best practices', depolitization and acting as a spokesperson. The research is stemming from Foucauldian governance studies and is inspired by the triangle of knowledge, truth and power. I used discourse analytical analysis method with an understanding of discourse as a historical and cultural concept that displays, produces and re-produces different power relations. My method of analysis lies in between theory- and data-driven; on one hand, I used comprehension of knowledge governance and legitimacy in reading the data, on the other hand, the final theoretical perspective came to be as it is only after initial analysis. The data consisted of both interviews with the IOs and documents produced by the IOs. According to my study, there are seven different strategies of knowledge and truth governance. Those are capacity building, evidence-based policymaking, national sovereignty, public and local advocacy, external evaluator, global competition and numeric truth. The essential and intriguing part in those strategies is the positioning of oneself in relation to Brazil: knowledge is often produced either together, involving local actors, or clearly from outside, by performing as a neutral and distant expert. However, from perspective of governance studies, these positions are all different strategies of governance, which constitute the truth that serves also – or foremost? – IOs' own agendas. Therefore, I conclude the research in a discussion on how knowledge production could, at least in theory, become more democratic.