Due to the democratic and climate crises resulting in broad societal challenges, the interest in citizenship education has risen in the past two decades as a field within educational practice, policy and research. Framed by globalization processes, new educational concepts such as Global Citizenship Education and relevant actors that shape and implement them have emerged. Especially third sector organizations (TSOs) such as NGOs and foundations play an increasingly active role both in practice and policy making of citizenship education in order to fill the implementation gap of left by state actors (Riberiro et al 2016). Across Europe and beyond, a recent trend towards forming transnational networks that connect a multitude of these organizations can be observed. Even though they are increasing their presence, little is yet known about their interpretations of citizenship education and its highly contested central concepts as well as influential role in policy making (Tracchi 2019; Tarozzi 2020). However, research suggests a gap between the high expectations of transnational networks’ potentials for solving structural issues in education as well as their limited impact and ambiguous legitimacy (Bienzle et al. 2007). This study sets out to examine the interactions and relationships of five transnational networks that operate in citizenship education in Europe and beyond with a differentiated analytical focus on power. We employ qualitative content analysis integrated with discourse analytical elements to structure and interpret data from documents and semi-structured expert interviews. The preliminary results reveal the network’s potential to exert relational, structural, and especially discursive power within the European multilevel governance system of citizenship education. The results further suggest that these specific networks vary in their degree of formalization and focused citizenship education approaches while forming discourse coalitions that use common storylines to strengthen their voice and increase their power as collective actors in education policy-making. These storylines develop in context of evolving policies and funding programs of intergovernmental organizations regarding citizenship education and are entangled with different discourses such as digitalization.

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