Adult Learning in Times of Urgency: Moving Beyond Rhetoric

More than twenty years after the OECD’s Beyond Rhetoric report (2003), adult learning continues to be characterised by persistent inequalities in participation, fragmented governance, and an enduring economic bias. This paper argues that the limits of lifelong learning are not primarily technical, linked to insufficient targets, inadequate monitoring, or weak incentives, but conceptual and political: adult learning is still governed through a nagerial scripts of efficiency and urgency that translate structural problems into individual obligations. Building on the long-standing tension between UNESCO’s humanistic tradition and the economistic orientation consolidated through OECD and World Bank agendas, the paper examines how international organisations construct adult learning through indicators, participation measures, and benchmark logics. Drawing on OECD analyses (2003–2025), European policy trajectories, CEDEFOP’s evolving monitoring frameworks, and UNESCO’s GRALE series (2009–2022) and its rights-based reframing under SDG 4, it shows how participation has increasingly become a quantifiable object of governance, often reducing learning to attendance and obscuring agency, duration, collaboration, and territorial diversity. Moving beyond rhetoric requires a politics of implementation grounded in social rights, systemic governance, and learning infrastructures rooted in trusted local spaces, capable of sustaining meaningful participation beyond compliance-based training.