By design, the success or failure of the Education 2030 - SDG 4 agenda can not be attributed to a single institution but rather should be attributed to the global education community, as a collective of actors who strive to reach common goals. This a feature of the prevailing notion of ‘partnership’ that has emerged with the Millennium Development Goals and continued into the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Hulme, 2016). A direct consequence of this new form of global governance is that its normative legitimacy is difficult to assess as it has theoretically become a function of the normative legitimacy attributed to the various actors involved (Montjourides, 2023). Where inquiries into normative legitimacy would typically have an institution as the unit of analysis (e.g., Edwards, Jr. et al., 2018; Schmidt, 2012) it is now necessary to disentangle the many features and actors to maybe hope to produce a valid assessment of the overall legitimacy of international education agendas (IEAs). Investigations of IEAs’ legitimacy have typically focused on either a single actor such as UNESCO (Edwards, Jr. et al., 2018; Elfert & Ydesen, 2023), or a single thematic feature as with the example of as teachers, equity or global citizenship (Montjourides, 2023; Rose & Sayed, 2024). Nevertheless, the Education 2030 – SDG 4 agenda is embedded in a set of principles, processes and rules that tie together institutions and actors to the notion of throughput legitimacy (Schmidt, 2012). Building on this, the paper articulates an assessment of the agenda’s normative legitimacy by reviewing the various processes that preceded and followed the adoption of the Education 2030 – SDG 4 agenda. Using a blended approach weaving text-as-data methods (Grimmer et al. 2022) and qualitative discourse analysis on UN documents produced between 2012 and 2024 the paper demonstrates how delegated authority and the dilution of normative legitimacy, associated with poor accountability and the lack of review mechanisms, opened possibilities for stakeholders with heightened international agency to appropriate various parts of the processes that participate to the definition of global education values. The paper argues that this dilution of legitimacy weakens the overall authority of the Education 2030 - SDG 4 agenda and consequently undermines educational progress and the formation of global education values for and by all.

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