Data-driven policymaking and capacity building/development are two of the key contemporary concepts transnational organizations (World Bank) and consultants (Mckinsey) use to justify their reform agendas. Most contemporary literature treats both of these concepts in isolation, while very limited direct research look into ‘data and capacity’ alliances in decision-making and in the western context. This research will explore the combinations of data and capacity discourse that create and change policy realities for fostering policy change. Policy realities that are derived from the epistemic and ontological viewpoints of transnational organizations and consultants rather than local and national actors, which often results in suppressing of the local and national epistemic practices.

Data discourses portray policymaking as a process of gaining knowledge, analyzing performances of projects, and justifying actions in terms of data (Henig, 2012; Ozga, 2016). Capacity discourses are used to explain abilities of state institutions to perform core functions, identify and solve problems, achieve objectives and deal with global and local development targets (Vallejo & Wehn, 2016; Venner, 2015). Focusing on combination dimensions enables this research to provide a subtle and fine grained analysis of these popular discourses, while complementing and strengthening existing literature. This research intends to be a bridge for bringing data and capacity together and to highlight interrelations between these highly regarded development concepts. Therefore, the research question is how international funding agencies and transnational consultants have operationalized combinations of capacity and data discourses in their relations with state actors in the global South?

The proposed analytical frameworks to study data and capacity discourse are The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) and Narrative analysis. The focus of SKAD is to understand the role and power of knowledge in communicative actions of social actors. SKAD structure is based on the assumption that discourse is realized through communicative action of social actors (Keller, 2028 p.20). In this research these social actors are non-state actors, who use knowledge to constitute themes through performative actions that form rules of understanding situations. Social actors’ communicative actions to define a situation establish social relationships of knowledge that transform and constitute knowledge systems to understand human beings and world (Keller, 2011, 2013).  The second overarching theoretical lens is data narratives. Narratives are closely related to discourse. In this case, narrative analysis will be used for the analysis of stories. Discourse may take the form of storytelling both in written and oral arguments (Fischer, 2003). I am using Shanahan’s (2011) approach to policy narratives and defining it as:

a policy narrative has a setting, a plot, characters (hero, villain, and victim), and is disseminated toward a preferred policy outcome (the moral of the story) (Shanahan et al., 2011, p. 540).

Policy narratives influence policymakers' beliefs and organize their thoughts about issue acceptance and shaping opinions about frames through strategically constructing stories.

Most research to study the impact of data based management and capacity development narrative is on western countries. But countries in the global south have been adopting these policies since the start of this millennium (Verger & Skedsmo, 2021). A large province in southern Asian will be used as a new case study in this research to offer territorial diversification for data based management and capacity development research to understand how these two concepts' combination played a crucial role in providing pathways for non-state actors into the policy environment of southern countries. The Economist described this southern Asian country reform as one of the largest in the World but it is understudied in the literature. The work is based on semi-structured interviews of education officials and a corpus of materials related to education reforms.

12 interviewees are selected according to their association with the education reforms. Interviews were conducted on-site and over Zoom in a few instances due to Covid-19 disturbance. Interviews consist of semi-structured setup, which allows for flexible interviewing contingent upon interviewee working exposure and to have a conversation rather than a static telling of events. The corpus of texts to be analyzed includes media reports, loan agreements with transnational development organizations, comparative statistics, consultants' publications, data collection tools, and publications from various national and international organizations. The selected documents are all related to education reforms. Transcripts were indexed and treated as cases (Adair & Pastori, 2011), comparing interviews and situating interviewees' accounts in the institutional context of power in national education policy work. The corpus is used in two ways. First to test the research question collectively with the interviews. Secondly, text analysis will be used to compare government textual language with non-state actors’ discursive strategies in the non-state actors’ documents. Following, Moretti and Pestre (2015), comparison will include semantics, grammar, collocates, and frequent words. This helps to identify partners of how non-state actors discourse gets operationalized in the education department publications. The act of repetition in government text that build on non-state actor texts, even if two text are not same, still reproduce authorship of previous text (Cooper & Ezzamel, 2013). Each repetition establishes non-state actors as truth tellers and displaces local government actors' understandings. Non-state experts of transnational development organizations text put limits on the conclusion and applications that can be drawn from the repetition in government text, thus evolving its meaning as universal and homogenous in southern countries.

After removing stop words for text corpus, the frequent word is implementation. Data is fourth most and capacity is seventh most. In individual documents, of Capacity is also mostly used by Education Department because lack of capacity to implement non-state actors’ projects is a concern for the department. Data is mostly used by development organizations because they require data to measure progress (Newman et al., 2017). Another word ‘support’ is used by non-state actors as a supplementary word for capacity building (Brinkerhoff & Morgan, 2010). Non-state actors gravitated towards centers of power, while state actors towards sites of implementation (Rappleye & Un, 2018). The result is an uneven social-epistemic relationship, with non-state actors crafting policies from the bottom, and state actors implementing it at the bottom. As one of the interviewee mentioned “ Donors only concern is implementation … donors are not merely concerned who exactly are implementing in the government because what they knows is that government is implementing the project, with in government they are not really concern”. So, the focus is on managing and increasing the capacity of recipient countries' management and administrative capabilities through knowledge, experience, and technology, and not the development of countries' capacity to innovate independently (Phillips & Ilcan, 2004). Similarly, Non-state actors use data in text to highlight technical aspects (standardized questionnaires, codes, database architectures), to measure implementation progress of their projects, rather than what state actors prefer (Williamson & Piattoeva, 2019).

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