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In the field of global education policy, it is common for scholars to reflect on the progress made toward internationally agreed-upon agendas, such as Education for All (EFA). However, scant research has turned the gaze back on the major multilateral institutions that commit to taking the lead in meeting these agendas in order to ask, what implications do such agendas have for these organizations? We respond in this article by investigating the way in which UNESCO used its position as the coordinator of EFA to help it regain some of the legitimacy it lost in the preceding decades. To do so, the article first elaborates a tripartite conceptualization of organizational legitimacy and then applies it to the two prongs of UNESCO’s strategy—EFA coordination and the production of the Global Monitoring Reports (GMRs) during a key period, 2000–2014, that were at the forefront of UNESCO’s efforts to rebrand and reposition itself in the context of multilateralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses multiple perspectives to frame international processes of education policy formation and then applies the framework to El Salvador's Plan 2021 between 2003 and 2005. These perspectives are policy attraction, policy negotiation, policy imposition, and policy hybridization. Research reveals that the formation of Plan 2021 was the product of both policy imposition by international actors and policy negotiation by national policy makers. This article further extrapolates three phenomena from the findings on Plan 2021-termed here percolation, reverberation, and structural legitimization- that help to explain the way in which international influence manifests in national education policy formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]