Assembling the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Education Goal in the Indo-Pacific: a comparative analysis of Bangladesh and India

The challenge

This project provides an understanding of the complexities and challenges facing the global framing and national integration of Sustainable Development Education Goal (SDG4) in the Indo-Pacific with particular focus on South Asian countries. Theoretically, it problematises the notion of education policy understood in terms of an opaque global politics often critiqued as top-down and isolated from national realities. Empirically, it takes SDG4 as an architype case of a global education policy practicable only through consensus and challenging commitment to data from 193 countries. Auditing empirical cases from UNESCO, Bangladesh and India, it unveils the many different ways in which data and innovation are gaining centrality in education policy giving rise to unique sets of complexities and demands on low- and middle-income systems of education. It also provides practical insights on how challenges that SDG 4 bring into being are addressed through experimental politics and initiatives both at global and national levels.

Project overview

This project offers an understanding of education policy in close methodological conversation with sociological perspectives that prioritise knowledge, expertise, and experimental politics over morphing anachronisms. It takes eclectic wisdom from existing policy sociology literature to renew the methodological engagement combined with spatiality and temporality as an entry point to analysing policy as a socio-cultural formation. Space and time as an analytical-methodological device has been applied in this project in terms of multiple forms (topologies) such as spatialities, temporalities, materialities, discursivities and affect, all at once, interactively. This is to illustrate education policy in terms of topological formations and their cultural significance. In so doing it develops and advances a semiotic approach to topology dubbed as topological semiotics. Data has been collected from Bangladesh and India through online and in person interviews while official documents and digital contents of relevant sorts from UNESCO have been given robust empirical consideration.

Outcomes

This project has developed a research program on education policy sociology with a global-national focus on Sustainable Development Goal 4. It has provided advanced knowledge on how education policy and governance are changing particularly in South Asian low- and middle-income settings as a result of participation in and contribution to the processes of global education policy and politics. It advances a novel methodological and theoretical take on the sociology of education policy with an innovative focus on space, time, matter, discourse and affect, their topological formation and cultural signification. This research has produced critical insights that intend to help improve SDG4-stakeholder decisions which continue to have shaping impacts on the ways learners, teachers, parents, and their communities seek to improve quality and equity in education.

Apart from three articles, a consolidative output of the project has been a monograph with a Routledge series. More specifically, the book reveals ‘experimentality’, an intriguing transformation in education policy as the laboratory and experimentation enter and alter the domain of social governance globally. It 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.