This chapter lays out the theoretical and conceptual framework of the study. First, it includes a literature review of the status quo in global social policy scholarship regarding the role of knowledge production and use. The chapter details which issues are made visible through these theoretical choices and which are obscured and thus problematizes our existing ways of dealing with knowledge in global social policy research. Second, the chapter brings together strands of scholarship from sociological theory (on comparison and quantification), Foucaultian studies (on the generation and effects of knowledge) and Science & Technology Studies (STS; adapting the study of laboratories and the making of facts to the realm of the social) to theorize on the book’s core theoretical concept of epistemic infrastructures.