Abstract
Global policy agendas for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) increasingly shape higher education systems worldwide. In transitional contexts, however, these agendas are mediated by historical legacies, geopolitical pressures, and competing national priorities, resulting in uneven and context-specific patterns of policy engagement. This paper examines how Kazakhstan’s higher education policies engage with global ESD discourses through a qualitative content analysis of national and institutional policy documents. The findings indicate a pattern of partial and fragmented alignment, where ESD-related values and competencies are present but lack a coherent conceptual framework or clear integration into educational purposes. This pattern is conceptualised as a drift model of policy engagement, characterised by unanchored adaptation to external policy agendas alongside the persistence of internal path dependencies. Drawing on postcolonial perspectives and theories of policy diffusion, the analysis shows how global sustainability discourses are incorporated into policy language while remaining weakly anchored in local epistemic and institutional contexts. The paper contributes to debates on global policy borrowing and higher education governance by proposing the drift model as a way of understanding how sustainability agendas are integrated in transitional systems. It also highlights the need for more contextually grounded approaches to ESD that move beyond symbolic alignment toward more coherent and transformative integration.