Prospects for Increased Student Participation Within the International Education Polity: the Emergence of the Global Student Forum

With the collapse of the two competing international student organizations, the International Union of Students (IUS) and the International Student Conference (ISC), in the second half of the twentieth century, students were left without a representative voice on the global stage for decades. This vacuum in global student representation coincided with a period of increased globalization in higher education, defined by Altbach as a “broad economic, technological, and scientific trends that directly affect higher education” and the effects of which are “beyond the control of any one actor or set of actors”. Today, the system of global higher education policy-making is increasingly non-hierarchical, involving negotiation and mediation from a range of stakeholders, as opposed to unilateral decisions by single authority. Key players in global higher education polity include intergovernmental organizations that hold regular education policy-making fora and processes between Member States, such as the United Nations and its subsidiary agencies, international financing institutions and multilateral funds focused on education, and a diverse, vibrant global education civil society sector composed of non-governmental organizations and trade unions who are often formally recognized and represented in the former two entities. The Global Student Forum entered the global higher education polity in 2020. This study analyzes the emergence of the GSF and how, and to what extent, a democratic, representative, global student entity can influence the decentralized higher education policy-making framework and processes at the global level. To do so, the existing systems of representation and the nature of student intermediation in key global education stakeholders are assessed. This analysis utilizes the framework proposed by Klemenčič and Palomares and the understanding that formalized routes of engagement strengthen the “legitimate power” of student organizing and enables a “higher propensity for students to influence policy processes”. Drawing on a wider range of documents issued by relevant student unions and international education sector organizations and harnessing the findings of a series of expert interviews conducted throughout 2021 and 2022, this piece describes the process that led to the foundation of the Global Student Forum, to then expose its internal structures and functioning. The global decision-making environment on educational policy and students’ role in it are then introduced, leading to a threefold analysis of intergovernmental organizations, education financing institutions, and international organized civil society. This study has been published as part of the The Bloomsbury Handbook of Student Politics and Representation in Higher Education (ed. Klemenčič, 2024), a collective project of inquiry on student politics and its impact on higher education globally, that saw the active involvement of student leaders and young researchers, with knowledge production seen as a form of leadership practice. Authors of the relative chapter were Sebastian Berger, Giuseppe Lipari, Georgia Potton and Carmen Romero.