Abstract:

In the context of globalization and knowledge-based economy being shaped, the need for overcoming national boundaries and closer cooperation in education became evident. Education is one of the key factors of a stable social and economic development at a national, as well as at international level. Though globalization of education has a number of advantages, it puts new challenges, which demand coordinated actions from the national states in the XXI century.
Here the multilateral international institutions (MIOs) with their networking, cooperative and dissemination capacities, apparatus experience and staff expertise play the key role in putting in place and pursuing consistent educational policies, tuned in accordance with the member-states’ traditions and interests.
The main governance instruments practiced now by key MIOs (EU, OECD, G8, UN, WTO, etc.) combine both political (developing guidelines and translating them into regional and national policies) and analytical and research tools (developing indicators and benchmarks, monitoring and evaluation). MIOs use research tools for:
- Getting valid and reliable data on member- and non-member states’ education systems, developing educational indicators;
- Realizing a system of multilateral monitoring: assessing member- and non-member states’ compliance with decisions made through approved guidelines and benchmarks.
As it was stated in the Communication from the European Commission in July 2008, there should be given a special attention to reinforcing the analytical tools in global governance. Still, though in recent decades a proliferation of studies on governing global education was performed, the concrete research instruments used by the institutions and their scientific grounds were poorly discussed. Available analysis of research tools used by key multilateral global actors does not go far beyond overall analysis of those key instruments stated in official MIOs’ documents. Real analytic research practice is almost never discussed. There is a need for deeper understanding of multilateral governance in education from a point of view of concrete practical methodologies of research, development of indicators, data collection, monitoring of decisions made and evaluating of policy results, as far as their analytical groundings.
Responding to the above-mentioned questions, and trying to answer the current critique accusing global governance instruments of being excessively procedural and educational research of being vague and impotent, the main research aims of the paper include:
• To study and analyze actual research methodologies, instruments and techniques, which multilateral international institutions use in governing global education;
• To discover how this research toolkit is enhancing the efficiency of global education governance, and thus contributes to improving the quality of education worldwide.
Results of the research could be interesting not only from an academic point of view, but also from a perspective of a practitioner in education governance. Decision makers require proved analytical research means to compare performance of education systems, to design appropriate policy measures, to better assess their effectiveness, and to monitor the evolution.
*** In collaboration with the Centro de Investigação e Estudos de Sociologia (CIES ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon, Portugal) the research project is currently being submitted for Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowships programme.

Keywords:

multilateral international institutions, methodology of sociology, globalization of.