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The author reveals an intriguing transformation in education policy as the laboratory and experimentation enter and alter the domain of social governance globally. He examines the global framing of the UN Sustainable Development Goal for Education (SDG 4) and its national implementation in two South Asian countries, Bangladesh and India.

The book demonstrates how global organisations such as the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, together with national governments, have designed the implementation of SDG 4 in the image of the laboratory. The author traces the preparatory history of these policy laboratories through a combined genealogy of the laboratory and experimentation. This historical excavation is conceptually captured in the notion of experimentality, where policy tasks, strategies and routines are enacted experimentally through data, indicators, statistics and innovation. Methodologically, the book pioneers a topological semiotic approach to policy sociology, focusing empirically on how time, space, materials, discourses and affect are assembled in the production, performance and signification of policy values.

This book will appeal to researchers as well as graduate students of global development, education policy and South Asian studies. It is of interest to academics who are keen to understand how lab-based experimental politics are rewiring relationships between established and emerging forms of authority, power and influence.