<p>Today’s conception of justice and fairness in education, articulated in the Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) as inclusion and equity, is the product of decades of intergovernmental cooperation. This paper explores how this account of justice and fairness in education has 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 a legacy of features from past instances of intergovernmental cooperation, dating as far back as the interwar period, while moving away from politically difficult understandings; progressively privileging relative over absolute justice and developing an imperfect procedural justice narrative that emphasizes issues of achievement gaps over 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 gradual dilution of substance and actionability of recommendations adopted at the Conference 1934–2015 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.</p>