Higher education in Asian countries and the role of international ...

6.2 Key Findings
242
IGOs‟ participation in the development and promotion of higher education is a recent
phenomenon. This new change can be attributed to two main events: an increased socio-
economic importance of higher education and an enhanced role of IGOs in international politics.
The increased demand of higher education, at national and international levels, is putting further
pressure on IGOs to play an effective role through enhanced interaction with states and other
IGOs. In order to respond the changing need of the society today many IGOs have higher
education in their agenda and these international bodies are engaged in its development in
different way.
OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank are active in the processes of policy reforms and capacity
building measures pertaining to education sector along with other sectors. As far as higher
education is concerned, though these organizations have the same objective, “the development of
higher education”, the three organizations follow different models. Likewise the goals vary from
organization to organization and are often intangible; thus the development of adequate measures
of organizational effectiveness has been very difficult (Marcus and Cafagna 1965). At the same
time these organizations have many commonalities in their initiatives: supporting policy reforms,
consensus building among the stakeholders; providing assistance for capacity development and
supporting quality initiatives. As without information development is impossible (Brosius and
Garner 1997), so the IGOs under study give great importance to sharing experiences,
dissemination of information through publications, reports and other documents, maintaining
data repositories etc. IGOs‟ objectives and level of engagement in common actions point towards
uniformity in their goals and convergence in their attitude as a result these international bodies
are influencing international systems (Jacobson 1984). In the following section the findings of
this study have been presented in the detail for each organization.
6.2.1 United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO)
In Asia, UNESCO is contributing to the higher education development process through field
offices, networks and official relations with other IGOs. UNESCO has produced many
conventions and declarations which act as not only international legal documents in the support
and promotion of higher education but also helpful in the creation of new laws and brining policy
reforms in education sector. Many of the Asian countries have ratified, approved or accepted