Abstract. Today’s conception of justice and fairness in education, put forth by Sustainable Development Goal 4 as inclusion and equity, is the product of decades of intergovernmental cooperation. This paper explores how these accounts of justice and fairness in education have been shaped and integrated into the set of global education values put forth by the United Nations. It uses archives from one of the longest-lasting instances of intergovernmental cooperation in education, the International Conference on Public Education (1934-2008), to develop a lexical and semantic analysis of 75 years of international recommendations. It shows how the SDG 4 agenda inherited several features introduced as far back as the interwar period while also moving away from politically difficult understandings; progressively privileging relative over absolute justice and developing an imperfect procedural justice narrative to focus on achievement gap issues and leave aside dimensions such as pedagogy and lived experiences. Furthermore, it is shown that this historical trajectory cannot be detached from the institutional changes that the International Bureau of Education (IBE) had to face to ensure its survival. The progressive loss of substance and actionability of international recommendations parallels the bid for heightened political legitimacy at the expense of scientific authority, and eventually led to the sidelining of the IBE despite its foundational contributions to fostering justice and fairness in education.