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Analyzing three cases of school-level language policy decision-making in Nepal shows that each school had a pair of language policy arbiters, actors with disproportionate power over language policy decisions. The permissive but passive stance of Nepal’s government toward providing multilingual schooling including minoritized languages created a situation where inaction maintained the language policy status quo. This ethnography of language policy builds on theorizing of the language policy arbiter to show that agency may require coordination of two people, rather than being a slot filled by individuals. In a highly centralized education bureaucracy, there were no crucial arbiters between central policymakers and the school level. Shifting from viewing scales as fixed to being produced by scale-making practices clarifies how scale is employed politically. I argue that identifying language policy arbiters may be important not only for analysis but also for advocates interested in opening ideological and implementational spaces for multilingual education.
