This paper explores how the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) mediate normative values of education and influence education policy. Drawing on staff interviews, the paper examines the perceived pivotal function of the OECD and UNESCO as 'global' agenda setting. Taking the notion of a wider global education policy field as the theoretical departure point, the analysis shows that the geographical knowledges of these organisations are significantly shaped by tensions and interdependencies between different agents within the broader field. The polarities within the field reflect the organisations' different geographical scopes and political-economic paths. Moreover, there is a balancing act whereby the OECD and UNESCO are expected to address global issues while also nurturing relations with individual member-states that bring economic and symbolic capital to the organisations. The paper highlights two sets of geographical knowledges present in the organisations' work, namely, time-space knowledges and scalar knowledges. Thus, the global agenda of education is embedded in a complex geography ranging from individual to global level, where orders of dominance between nation-states are reinforced in the formulation and allocation of problems and solutions.

'Successful adulthoods' are associated with mobile professionals, higher education and cosmopolitan lifestyles. This paper takes an interest in how this discourse is adopted or altered by young people living far away from big cities. Based on interviews in a traditional woodland community in northern Sweden, the study examines how young people in the second and final years of upper secondary school negotiate their transition from education to work. It draws on the two-dimensional concept of 'spatial capital'. It sheds light firstly on a range of local possibilities underpinned by 'position capital', such as proximity to mining districts as well as to educational institutions. These possibilities compete with 'situation capital' in the form of young people's dispositions towards mobility where they consider alternatives in other cities in Sweden and sometimes - although rarely - abroad. I argue that spatial capital is an indication of young people's habitus, where the geographical marginality of the study location influences perceptions of the future in divergent and sometimes contradictory ways. The paper also problematizes contemporary society's privileging of mobility, which should be viewed in relation to youth's perceived 'right to immobility'.