Sustainable Development Goals are the agenda for global development and change enacted by the United Nations which consists of 17 goals and 169 targets, which should be achieved by 2030. It is expected that the achievement of the goals, while being the issue of the whole international community-at-large, mostly rests within the hands of national policies in the respective fields. With that regard, it is interesting to look at what, if any, impact does this exercise of international governance by common goal-setting has on national policies [Kanie, N. and Biermann, F., 2017]. The problem of transforming these goals into national policies is widely discussed in the literature [Unterhalter, 2019; Krupar & Taneja, 2020, King, 2017]; however, very little systematic analysis on actual undertakings of the states has been done to date.

Education has a prominent place in the SDG framework – including a specific Goal 4 (SDG4) and education-related targets in most other goals. Education, despite the “holistic and interlinked” nature of the Goals, has been described both as a “force for sustainable development” and one of the most important Goals to be achieved [i.e. Boeren, E., 2019]. It also presents a particular field for SDG-related policy analysis due to its place within the framework as well as it is an area of “low” international consensus on the scope of international obligation. This applies, particularly, to “right to education”, which spills over to the SDG4 – therefore, the ways and means of achieving the standard of “quality education” and agreed targets will differ between states [Haas, P. M., and Casey S., 2017, Beatty and Pritchett 2012].

When discussing the national contributions and national attitudes to SDG achievement in any area, the scientific discussion usually centers around Voluntary National Reviews (VNRs), a reporting instrument of the SDG framework, which each country submits to UN every five years [Sebestyén et al., 2020, Forestier and Kim, 2020, Sarwar and Nicolai, 2018, Smith, 2021]. VNRs should highlight the state of achievement of SDGs in the country. However, the information within VNRs cannot be equated to the national policy [Allen, C., Metternicht, G., & Wiedmann, T., 2021]. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze national policies to establish the existence or lack of such a link. These national undertakings can be compared not only to the SDG target at large but also to the national reporting in the VNRs – thus showing the attitude of states to SDGs in a specific field as well as to the quality and honesty of its reporting.

Russia presents a peculiar case for such national-international comparative study– its national policy in most fields, including education, has been dominated by several iterations of strategic documents and policies (so-called “national projects” or “national programs”), with the latest set enacted in 2018 and updated in 2021, which represent a national case of governance by goal-setting [i.e. Mau, 2019], which provide a comparable set of targets with SDGs.

This paper presents a survey of national strategic documents and relevant policy initiatives in the field of education, comparing their stated outcomes with the education-related targets and indicators in the SDG framework as well as with the policies reported within VNR published in 2020. The chosen sample includes all national strategic planning and goal-setting documents related to education in force in 2015 and enacted until the end of 2021. The relevancy of this research lies in mapping the policy cohesion between SDGs in education and national policy while juxtaposing it with national reporting. More broadly, this research proposes a framework to look at the broader issues of influence of international education policy on national ones.

The main methodology used in this research project is both computer-assisted text analysis and policy text analysis of Russian strategic and goal-setting instruments in the field of education in force in 2015 and enacted from 2015 to 2021. First, a timeline of all national strategic documents and programs in the field of education in the country is being created from the analysis of legislative and policy documents. These documents are then analyzed through computer-assisted text analysis and comparison of the national goals with SDG targets and sub-indicators. This process allows establishing the links between those policies and SDGs – both explicitly, where the relevant keywords or direct link to SDG framework is presented, or implicitly – where the actual stated final goal of the policy aligns with the overall Goal or its targets of sub-indicators. Finally, these policies are being cross-referenced with their appearance in VNR, with the goal of determining whether this policy is being used to report on the SDGs achievement, in case this policy has been enacted before the year of the submission of the VNR (2020). Therefore, each education policy initiative or legislative change will be coded in accordance with (1) existence of the textual linkage to the SDG4 or education-related components of other SDGs, (2) actual contribution of that policy to the achievement of SDGs, and (3) the use of policy initiative within VNR (if enacted prior to VNR publication). It is expected that several possible clusters of states could be identified through this exercise – those that take into account SDGs in their education policy formulation, those that do not, but actually enact policies that contribute to SDG achievement, using them in their reporting and those who did not align their national education policies with SDG4, and use those policies in the international reporting, presenting them as contributing to SDGs achievement, while they do not, in fact, contribute to them.

The expected outcomes of this research are to present an analysis of the influence of SDGs in the field of education in national education policies enacted or changed after SDGs adoption on a national case. This national analysis can potentially uncover the overall attitude and adherence of sampled states to SDG4 as an overarching international education policy framework and usage of actual national policies in national reporting on SDG4 achievement. Proposed policy mapping and comparison can show whether states develop their national education policies taking SDGs into account and/or basing their policy reforms and strategic planning on them. Alternatively, it can also show that states can paint a picture of adherence with the SDGs by reporting reforms and strategic goals which have neither direct nor indirect link to SDGs and were not enacted with SDGs in mind or go against the SDG framework as a whole. These results can question the overall SDG achievement in the field of education. The aim of the current stage of the research project is to present the first case study of national educational reforms and their connection (implicit or explicit) to SDGs, with analyses for other countries based on the (revised) methodology will be an area of further research and comparison.

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