‘Social investment’ as political economy of education: Recent changes in early childhood education in New Zealand

The newly coined policy of social investment is an economic argument for targeting state investment to the most needy. I use Foucault’s notion of biopolitics in a discursive analysis of recent New Zealand policy documents pertaining to a discrete group of ‘vulnerable children’. I further argue that the Foucauldian metaphor of state institutions as war-like gives knowledge/power to investment as efficient government