The influence of international consultants in the global south depends on their ability to define what counts as relevant information and to control its interpretation.  This epistemic authority may initially rest on connections, resumes, and technical skills, but to maintain interpretive control consultants must also forestall critiques or alternative interpretations by local experts.  As Choy (2011) writes, “international and mobile [expertise] . . . is posed against the knowledge of those who stay put . . . expertise must not only circulate but land as well” (87-88); cf. Koch, 2020).  “Policy peddlers and gurus” such as Michael Barber (Peck & Theodore, 2010, p. 170; Cook & Ward, 2012, p. 140; Prince, 2014, Larner & Laurie, 2010; Peck & Theodore, 2012, p. 22) play key roles in this work through embodied performances of information to ministers, secretaries and staff of government  policy units. The PowerPoint presentation is one of the political technologies they use to do this.  Drawing on evidence from a study of the interactions of global consultants with the education ministry of a South Asian country, we examine how presentations structured around the software MS PowerPoint shape relations between consultants and state agencies, suture policy networks together at certain points, and silence local experts who might challenge the consultants or offer alternative interpretations and proposals.  In this paper we build on theories of embodied policy mobilities (Larner & Laurie, 2010; Ball, 2016; Pow, 2019) and research on PowerPoint presentations (e.g., Bourgoin & Muneisa, 2016; Yates & Orlikowski, 2007; Kaplan, 2011; Knight et al., 2018; Stark & Paravel, 2008; Tufte, 2006) to show how the language, race, information asymmetries and policy aesthetics of PowerPoint performances structure the reception of European presentations and selling performances of projects and policies. 

 Unlike much of the research on policy networking, our focus is not the Western organizations or European actors (e.g., Clegg, 2010; Verger et al., 2018; Verger & Novelli, 2011; Steiner-Khamsi, 2018; Rappleye & Un, 2018; Junemann & Ball, 2015; Ball & Junemann, 2016), but on the perception of these actors by their “country-level (government and non-state actor)” interlocutors (Mundy & Menashy, 2014, p. 407; Ocampo & Neu, 2008).  Such groups play critical roles in determining how international initiatives are accommodated or deflected, as the fates of such initiatives depend in part on the “receptivity or enthusiasm for change on the part of individual state actors” (Ball, 2016, p. 559). Part of our argument, however, is that state actors are not unitary or monolithic entities, but consist of different groups and “contradictory ensemble[s] of practices and processes” (Aretxaga, 2003, pp. 395, 396). Presentations by European actors play to at least two audiences:  the high-ranking political officials who make decisions about accepting proposals or engaging external consultants, and what we call the reflexive audience of highly-trained workers in knowledge-intensive government policy units for whom the show consists of both the presentations by policy gurus and reactions of government leaders to those presentations.  These workers, offer internal critiques, rarely articulated in public, that allow a “more careful parsing of indigenous and extra-local sources of influences and expertise” in global policy (Bok & Coe, 2017, p. 530), and in the process problematize assumptions about the “epistemic homophily” or “discursive coherence” of transnational policy networks (Ball, 2016, pp. 553, 554).  Our work is based on semi-structured interviews of current and former employees of state-level policy units in a South Asian country.

To examine these issues we use semi-structured interviews with 12 current and recent members of the staffs a number of centers, institutes, and other units within the education ministry of a large province of in a South Asian country. All are working (or have worked) with education policy initiatives of major international organizations. Participants have been recruited through personal contacts and targeted network or “snowball” sampling (Noy, 2008). The research is on-going, and at this point 12 interviews have been conducted. Some interviews have been conducted in English, some in national language. We use semi-structured interviews (Seidman, 2007, p. 18; Czarniawska, 2004, p. 55) to the “sensemaking” of the staff members regarding their encounters and relations with international organizations, that is, “the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing” (Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld, 2005, p. 409). We position these interviewees as “consultants” (Briggs, 1986, pp. 21-22): they are providing us with their situated analyses of processes. We combine insights gained from these interviews with literature on PowerPoint presentations from other contexts (e.g., Barber, 2013, 2015) including materials assembled using a form of “netnography” (Kozinets, et al. 2014), which has led us to PowerPoint slides that closely resemble the slides and presentations our consultants refer to in the interviews, and to YouTube videos containing portions of consultant presentations, commentaries by consultants and presenters on PowerPoint technique, reports by consultants and others in which PowerPoint slides play a primary role, and so on. Analysis will use the ‘analytic induction’ or ‘extended case method’ approach (Mitchell, 1983 and Small, 2009 treat these as largely synonymous, but we also mean to invoke Burawoy’s sense of extending existing theory): the goal being to extend existing theory and develop new theoretical insights into performative policy mobilization and policy aesthetics. To that end we look at presentations at points of policy suture as forms of “aesthetic governmentality” (Ghertner, 2015) extending education policy from Europe to South Asia. We index the interview transcripts (Adair & Pastori, 2011) and treat each interviewee as a case, comparing cases and situating interviewees’ accounts in the broader institutional matrix of national education policy work.

The paper contributes to our understanding of Europeanisation and the politics of globalisation by showing how not only European influence is extended globally not only through the mobilization of policy frames and practices, but through specifically European modes of presentation and visual aesthetics. As our interviewees see it, to sell a particular project to the government, external non-state actors depend on presentations and visually convincing performances: They use presentations for their survival. “The presentations [from non-state actors] are always colorful. Our political leaders get impressed by colorful presentation [Interviewee 2].” The substance of the presentations can at points seem secondary. Interviewee 2 recounted that Michael Barber had been queried about some of the data in his slides and admitted that he just presented “whatever his team gave him ... He himself does not know [whether] data provided to him by his team is correct or wrong.” The “presentation is prepared by his team and his team prepares him thoroughly for the presentation.” Expertise is racialized as well: “If McKinsey ... open[s an] office here, it’s compulsory to have one or two white persons;” English is the language used “to impress.” Presenters are able to mobilize a “remarkable amount of detail and structure when they present their ideas... highlighting exactly what needs to be highlighted. ... They are so good at identifying gaps or at least pretending that they know how to address them” [Interviewee 5]. Policy workers such as our interviewees are sometimes required to use the PowerPoint formats, themes, and color schemes of IOs such as McKinsey to make their own presentations. By looking at these processes from the perspectives of such workers we can learn both about the globalisation of European policy networks, and about the internal tensions and complexities of these networks in government offices.

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