The production of global metrics by International Organisations (IOs) has not only penetrated the transnational social and policy fields; it has also become an integral mode of the ways IOs interconnect. Through their collaborative practices of quantification and commensuration, IOs are both constituting new realities and being reconstituted themselves. Thus, the dominance of global measurement regimes has profound implications for the ways IOs interact, and for the environments these new interrelationships come to generate.   How is one to make sense of this emerging reality? This paper will examine the case of the collaboration of several actors in the production of SDG4 through a close examination of the UNESCO Institute of Statistics (UIS) Technical Cooperation Group, in order to offer some insights into the labour of the joint production of SDG4. Through the specific case presented, but also deriving empirical findings from the larger project this paper builds on (ERC funded grant, 'International Organisations and the Rise of a Global Metrological Field' ), the paper will show how the fields of education and sustainable development came much closer together; this was the direct result of large quantification exercises like the construction of the MDGs and, more recently, SDG4. Through an examination of the structure and governance of this group, as well as the analysis of documentation of the group’s first four meetings, the paper will examine the interdependencies of transnational actors in the making of indicators. We will focus particularly on the interplay of International Organisations, and more specifically on the collaboration of UIS with the World Bank, OECD and the European Commission. Document analysis has shown a high degree of convergence of these IOs’ not only statistical production infrastructures, but also an emergent discursive proximity. To conclude, through an analysis of the discursive and numerical reconstruction of both education and sustainable development policy arenas, the paper will discuss the performative effects of quantification, suggesting that numbers have reshaped education and development as almost a single policy field; in addition, and perhaps more crucially, they have shaken the foundations and structures of decades long education governance relations between the major IOs in the Global South.

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