The diffusion of global discourses: the case of educating refugees

Abstract

We examine how organizational actors use global legal, humanitarian, and development discourses in their work supporting educational services for refugees to better understand how the transfer of ideas and norms emanating within global organizations affects educational programming for refugees. We ask: (1) To what extent do organizations reference global legal, humanitarian, and development documents in their work? And, (2) How do linkages with United Nations (UN) organizations (namely UNHCR, UNESCO, and UNICEF) influence organizations’ usage of global documents? We find that different organizations draw on global discourses depending on their level of embeddedness in global society and that diverse types of relationships with UN agencies—financial and normative— mediate the extent to which they reference global policy documents.

Keywords:

• World society theory
• refugees
• education
• international organizations
• civil society
• discourses
• professionalization
• diffusion

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank John W. Meyer, Patricia Bromley, and Julia Lerch for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The paper was previously presented at the 2018 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting (Philadelphia, PA), the American Educational Research Association Meeting (AERA) Annual Meeting (New York), and the Comparative and International Education Society Annual meeting (Mexico City, Mexico).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 International Covenant for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) also establishes the right to education for all children regardless of nationality, but we did not include this in our survey

2 The Urban Refugee Project was based at Teachers College, Columbia University and was led by co-PI’s S. Garnett Russell and Mary Mendenhall. For more information see http://www.tc.columbia.edu/refugeeeducation/urban-refugee-education/.

3 As part of the broader study, we also carried out in-depth interviews with more than 90 stakeholders (including government officials; personnel working for UN agencies, international and national NGOs; and principals and teachers) in three country case studies (Lebanon, Kenya, and Ecuador). However, in this article, we focus on the survey data.

4 The survey was translated into seven different languages (including Spanish, French, Urdu, Malay, Turkish, Arabic, and Farsi).

5 We did not include the New York Declaration or the Global Compact on Refugees, as our survey was conducted during 2015-2016 before the development of these global documents.

6 We categorized the organizations evenly across the three groups rather than by specific cut-offs.

7 We also tested for the interaction between different mechanisms and organizational type but did not find any statistically significant differences by organization type and mechanisms and thus do not show these results.

8 A value of 2.0 can be interpreted as a one-step increase in the strength of the financial or normative relationship (e.g., moving from low to medium or medium to high) doubles the odds the organization will be in a higher category of the dependent variable (i.e., from not likely to mention to somewhat likely to mention).

Additional information

Funding

Funding for the project was provided by the U.S. State Department Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration.