This research report focuses on the International Conference on Public Education, led by the IBE and UNESCO between 1970 and 1989. Firstly, with a social history lens, a review of literature on the historicization of modes of global governance in education was conducted, then to be combined with an empirical approach to IBE’s archives. This approach thus makes it possible to restore the historical and constitutive elements of the establishment of a mode of global governance in education. Secondly, this research project aims to propose a replicable thought process to constitute a database listing the diversity of profiles participating to the Conferences. This report restitutes the initial results obtained from the analytical database, to illustrate trends over the period, but also to refine our understanding of how principles of a mode of governance impact (or not) States’cooperation on educational subjects. To a larger extent, this report is a contribution to the historicization of global governance in education from a social history perspective and rooted in the transnational turn.