Educationalisation, Fictional Expectations, and Regional Mediation: Understanding SDG4 in Latin America

• In Event: Who rules? Actors, movements, and struggles behind education governance in Latin America (Part 2)

Proposal

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) embody a key trend in global governance: the educationalisation of social problems, whereby social, economic, and political challenges are reframed as issues that education systems can solve (Tröhler, 2014). SDG4, which envisions inclusive, equitable, and quality education for all by 2030, epitomises this dynamic. It casts education as the primary lever for achieving wide-ranging social transformations, while at the same time projecting fictional expectations that are unlikely to be fully realised in practice (Sorensen, 2024). However, it is precisely this fictitious character that grants SDG4 its mobilising capacity: rather than a strictly achievable roadmap, it functions as a motivating projection that provides governments, international organisations, and civil society with a shared vocabulary for aspirations, benchmarks for policy-making, and a rationale for investment (Smith, Ehren & Grek, 2024).
Since its adoption, the gap between SDG4’s universal goals and tangible outcomes has grown increasingly visible (Edwards, Niaz Asadullah & Webb, 2024). Latin America offers a particularly telling case. The region has registered notable progress in expanding access to schooling, yet persistent challenges remain in terms of equity, quality, and inclusion (CEPAL, 2024). These tensions illustrate both the strengths and the limits of the global agenda: SDG4 provides a symbolic horizon that sustains political momentum, but its distance from national realities generates contradictions, unmet expectations, and even disillusionment.
This paper sets out to analyse the circulation of SDG4 across policy levels in Latin America, with a specific focus on how the global agenda is mediated, translated, and contested within the region. To do so, it draws on primary sources, including interviews with national, regional, and international experts directly engaged in the monitoring of SDG4, as well as on secondary sources, such as national reports and UNESCO’s regional reviews of education policies. The methodology allows for triangulating discourses at different scales, highlighting not only official reporting but also the perceptions and interpretations of key actors.
The analysis shows that the regional scale is crucial in understanding how SDG4 takes shape in Latin America. Regional offices and organisations –such as UNESCO’s regional bureau, ECLAC, and SECC/CICA– operate as a buffer between global frameworks and national education systems. In some instances, this buffer enables genuine recontextualisation: universal targets are reinterpreted considering historical trajectories and local priorities. In other cases, however, regional institutions act primarily as conduits for the global agenda. This ambivalence illustrates the importance of regional mediation: it shapes both the implementation of SDG4 and the narratives through which success and failure are defined.

Author

• Felicitas M Acosta, Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento & NORRAG