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This chapter will examine the interplay among actors who took part in the process of consensus building towards a post-2015 education agenda via different channels of global governance, including both formal and informal channels.

Most of the forums and entities established as part of the global governance structure are composed of representatives from UN or UNESCO member states, civil society organizations (CSOs) and UN agencies. However, each of these categories has diverse constituent groups; representing these groups is not as straightforward a task as the governance structure seems to assume. Therefore, based on interviews and qualitative text analysis, this chapter will introduce major groups of actors and their major issues of concern, decision-making structure, mode of communication and relationship with other actors. Then, based on an understanding of the characteristics of the various channels and actors, it will present the structural issues that arose during the analysis of post-2015 discourse and the educational issues that emerged as the shared concerns of the ‘education community’. While most of the analysis to untangle the nature of discourse relies on qualitative analysis of texts and interviews, the end of this chapter will also demonstrate the trends of discourse in quantitative terms.

What was the post-2015 discourse for the so-called education community, which in itself has an ambiguous and virtual existence? The keywords post-2015 and post-EFA provide us with an opportunity to untangle how shared norms and codes of conduct were shaped at the global scale.

The United Nations (UN) actively incorporated new media as a tool for consultation and agenda setting during the Millennium Development Goal (MDG)–Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) transition. As global actors shifted their attention to the sustainable development goals, the UN and its partners scaled up their digital engagement with civil society, multinational agencies, and country-level stakeholders to inform the post-2015 agenda. This chapter explored how the UN integrated Twitter into the post-2015 consultation and how the UN Women and the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative used Twitter to construct and diffuse girls’ education policy discourse during the MDG–SDG transition.

This chapter highlights the characteristics of Asia through the analysis of policy-related documents by five donor countries, namely Japan, South Korea, China, India and Thailand. It will also examine the roles played by regional bodies such as the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) and ASPBAE (the Asia South Pacific Association for Basic and Adult Education) as the horizontal channels influencing aid policies in respective countries. Together with the analysis of the national and organizational policies, the regional process of building consensus on the post-2015 agenda is examined, with a particular focus on the Asia-Pacific Regional Education Conference (APREC) held in August 2014.

The analysis reveals that the region has two faces: one is imaginary and the other is functional. There is a common trend across Asian donors to refer to their historical ties with regions and countries to which they provide assistance and their traditional notions of education and development. They highlight Asian features in contrast to conventional aid principles and approaches based on the Western value system, either apparently or in a muted manner. In this sense, the imagined community of Asia with common cultural roots is perceived by the policymakers across the board.

At the same time, administratively, the importance of the region as a stage between the national and global levels is recognized increasingly in the multilateral global governance structure. With this broadened participatory structure, as discussed in the chapter ‘Post-EFA Global Discourse: The Process of Shaping the Shared View of the ‘Education Community’’, the expected function of the region to transmit the norms and requests from the global level and to collect and summarize national voices has increased.

This chapter will situate the global paradigm shift toward Post-Education-For-All (Post-EFA) not only in the policy trends in the field of international education development, but also in the academic context of international relations and comparative education.

The chapter highlights three dimensions which characterize the paradigm shift; namely, discourse on norms, diversifying actors, and the changed mode of communication and participation in the global consultation processes. The existing formal structure of the EFA global governance is based on multilateralism which recognizes sovereign nation-states, representing national interests, as the participants. However, such an assumption is eroding, given that there is a growing number of state and nonstate actors who influence decision-making not only through conventional formal channels, but also informally. Urging the revision of theories of multilateralism, the chapter introduces the attention given to nontraditional donors and horizontal networks of civil society actors in this volume.

The introduction also shows that that the widening basis of participation in the global consultation processes on post-EFA and advanced communication technology have changed the ways in which discourse is formulated. While the amount and the speed of exchanging information have been enhanced and different types of actors have been encouraged to take part, it also obliges scholars to adopt innovative methods of analyzing discourse formation.

The chapter also demonstrates the importance of the focus on the Asia-Pacific region, which is composed of diverse actors who often underscore Asian cultural roots in contrast to Western hegemony. By focusing on the discourse, actors, and the structure through which the consensus views on the post-EFA agenda were built, the volume attempts to untangle the nature of the post-EFA paradigm shift, at the global, Asia-Pacific regional, and national levels.

This chapter aims to investigate and interpret China’s educational aid by analyzing its history, philosophies, and practices in Africa. The study is based on review and analysis of governmental documents, reports, academic papers, and news by Chinese and foreign scholars on China’s aid, particularly educational aid to Africa. The analysis unveils three transformations of China’s aid “from pro-ideology to de-ideology,” “from single area to multiple areas,” and “from pragmatic economy driven to sustainable and humane economy focused” in Africa. Meanwhile, it indicates a continuity of the philosophy of solidarity, morality, and reciprocity in China’s South-South cooperation with African educational development.

The analysis also shows China’s educational aid does not match well with the framework of the Western donors. China, under the FOCAC framework, is devoted to higher education cooperation, human resources training program, scholarship, and Chinese language education with African partners. With the growth of its economic and political influence, China will play multiple roles as the biggest developing country and as an active promoter and provider for South-South cooperation in the negotiation and construction of the post-2015 agenda. Nevertheless, we assume China will keep a pragmatic higher education cooperation with its developing country partners to inclusively link it with business, technology transfer, and people-to-people exchange.

This study delivers a comprehensive review and analysis of paradigm shift, philosophy, mechanism, and practice of China’s educational aid to Africa to fill up the literature gap in this field. It also timely presents China’s stance toward discussion on the post-2015 agenda.

This purpose of this paper is to provide the context in which this special issue is published. This special issue highlights the matters related to the Asian countries which provide assistance to developing countries for their advancement of education. There are an increasing number of donor countries which are formerly recipients of development assistance. Their emergence as donors is changing the landscape of international educational development. Being outside of the self-regulating community of traditional donors, they bring different logics and motivations to this field that often go beyond the frame of meaning making among traditional donors. Asia-Pacific region is unique in the sense that it has both traditional and new types of donors. The former group includes Japan and the USA, while the latter has Korea, China, India, and many others.

As the introduction to the collection of articles which introduce characteristics of diverse donors (traditional and nontraditional) in the Asia-Pacific region, this paper discusses first, changing the normative framework toward the target year of achieving Education for All goals, which is 2015; second, the background for the nontraditional donors to increase their presence and the changed landscape of international educational development; and third, commonalities and differences among Asian donors in terms of their philosophies, structures, and histories.

This paper maps out the locations of each Asian donors discussed in the respective country cases to follow and highlights some Asian characteristics.

The findings would hint at the presence of principles and logics of educational cooperation which cannot be fully grasped by applying widely diffused western notions of educational development.

As the sole Asian country in the DAC donor community until South Korea joined in 2010, Japan has been struggling with the pressure to align with the norms and modalities of the community, while having a different history of aid from Western donors and desiring to be unique. This chapter untangles the domestic and international factors that have affected policy making and implementation of the Japanese Overseas Development Assistance (ODA), particularly in education, at different times in its history. The philosophical foundations of Japanese aid policies are examined in the changing political, economic, and social contexts from the 1950s up to the present.

As the Education for All paradigm took the stage, Japanese education ODA has shifted from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s to primary education from technical and vocational education and training (TVET) and higher education. However, in the post-2015 process, the policies have swung back to give equal emphasis to TVET and higher education as to basic education, reflecting the global trend to make the agenda more comprehensive. While the convergence with the global trend is clear in Japanese ODA, the hesitant desire to be unique always forces Japanese ODA officials and scholars to discuss and try to demonstrate the “Japanese model” of development and aid.

The chapter also points out that the increased presence of other Asian donors in recent years has made Japanese ODA policies driven more by national interests than by global humanitarianism, which is clearly seen in the Development Cooperation Charter adopted in 2014.

This chapter investigates the origins of cross-sectoral collaboration by exploring when and why policy networks form within the Turkish health sector – a least likely case for network formation. The analysis presented here draws on information collected from a number of official documents, semi-structured interviews with professional experts, and two multi-stakeholder meetings. Timewise, networks entered the policy jargon during the introduction of the Health Transformation Program in 2003. Yet, the years between 2011 and 2015 were ground-breaking in producing concrete cross-sectoral collaborative instruments of policy making. The findings of the analysis reveal that policy networks form as a result of central government’s choice to devolve responsibility and expand the policy space with new issues and actors. Moreover, policy networks emerge not only during the times of policy change which has a reactionary, abrupt, and nature but also during the times of policy stability and legitimacy. These contextual factors are crucial in maintaining an atmosphere of trust among stakeholders, particularly between state and non-state actors. The refugee crisis and spreading securitization discourse in the post-2015 period explain the shifting policy and political agenda leading to public sector retrenchment from cross-sectoral projects within the field of health. This chapter intends to contribute to the literature of comparative public policy by examining the link between policy networks and policy change in addition to adding to the debates on network governance by exploring the processes of network formation. Finally, this chapter contributes to Turkish studies by examining the process of network formation within the Turkish health sector.

The Indian pharmaceutical industry accounts for 8% of global production and exports medicines to over 200 countries. Multinational enterprises (MNEs) enter the Indian market either directly through the establishment of subsidiaries or indirectly through licensing arrangements. However, evidence on MNE’s contribution toward development in India in terms of capability enhancement and linkages or through other spillover effects is limited. The purpose of this research was to generate evidence on (a) contribution of MNEs in the pharmaceutical market in India, (b) nature and impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in the Indian pharmaceutical sector, (c) contribution of MNEs in R&D and innovation in India, and (d) MNE’s contribution toward introducing new chemical entities (NCEs) and new biological entities (NBEs) in India through a mixed method research design. We conducted an in-depth quantitative analysis on multiple data sets and qualitative interviews of various stakeholders to generate a holistic understanding on the aforementioned research objectives. Our findings suggest that from the perspective of capability enhancement and linkages, the contribution of pharmaceutical MNEs in India is limited. We observed that majority of FDI investments are brownfield against desired greenfield investments. In addition, MNEs are investing far less of profit before tax (PBT) compared with Indian firms on research and development. However, MNEs are contributing significantly toward access to certain pharmaceutical segments like vaccines, hormones, and parenterals, which require sophisticated production facilities, advanced technology, and intellectual capital. Further, MNEs role in innovation and introduction of new medicines (new molecular entity [NME] and NBE New Chemical and Biological Entities (NCEs and NBEs)) in India is significant. We propose that creating a conducive policy environment and predictable regulatory environment can facilitate capability enhancement and linkages through MNEs. Some of the potential policy instruments include appropriate implementation of FDI policy and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) policy to balance trade and public health.