The Power Struggle Over Education in Developing Countries: The Case of the UNESCO-World Bank Co-operative Program, 1964-1989 Maren Elfert This article was published in January 2021 in the International Journal of Educational Development: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2020.102336 Abstract This paper examines the relationship between the World Bank and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) between the 1960s and the 1980s. It focuses on the Co-operative Program (CP) between the two organizations, which was established in 1964 and lasted officially until 1989. In the context of the Co-operative Program, the Education Financing Division (EFD) was established, a joint unit located in UNESCO, with the purpose of carrying out technical missions to assist governments in the identification and preparation of educational projects and the formulation of funding requests to the World Bank. Drawing on archival research and interviews with former UNESCO and World Bank officials, the paper traces the history of the Co-operative Program, which was characterized by intense power struggles exacerbated by Cold War tensions. During the 25 years of the duration of the Co-operative Program, the World Bank developed into the most influential policy shaper for education in developing countries, while the influence of UNESCO, created in the post-World War II order as the United Nations’ designated organization for education, declined. Using Bourdieu’s concept of fields and DiMaggio and Powell’s concept of isomorphism as analytical lenses, the World Bank’s expansion to a development agency will be explained by its greater autonomy as a field, endowed with more capital based on the rationalization of education and isomorphic processes of professionalization of the “field of power” of educational planning. To the detriment of UNESCO, the World Bank became the powerhouse of a global governance structure that was built with support from the United States government and furthered by the rise of economics. Keywords: World Bank; UNESCO; Co-operative Program; Education Financing Division; educational planning; structural power; Bourdieu’s concept of fields, field of power Introduction This paper examines the relationship and power struggles between the World Bank and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) from the 1960s to the 1980s. The World Bank 1 was created in 1944 as part of the post-World War II financial order conceived at the Bretton Woods conference, with the mandate of financing the reconstruction of war-devastated Europe. UNESCO was founded in 1945 as the specialized agency of the United Nations for intellectual cooperation. In the 1950s, the World Bank expanded its lending activities towards the newly independent developing countries of the South, funding infrastructure projects, such as roads, dams, railways and industrial production. In the early 1960s, when education gained prominence as a pillar of economic 1 At the time of its creation, the World Bank was known as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD). The International Development Association (IDA) was established in 1960 to offer “soft loans” to low-income countries. The IDA channelled most of the Bank’s loans for education. These two organizations comprise what today is commonly referred to as the World Bank, which is the designation I will use in this paper.