The article analyses how citizenship is conceptualised in policy documents of four key international organisations. The basic assumption is that public policy has not turned away from adult learning for active citizenship, but that there are rather new ways in which international governmental organisations conceptualise and in some cases seek to…

Compares developments in lifelong learning in the 1990s, especially its emergence on government policy agendas, with its origins in the 1960s-1970s. Shows that the lifelong learning rhetoric about educational opportunities has become a justification for reducing public resources, creating new inequities. (Contains 43 references.) (SK)