Panel proposal to the General conference of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), Glasgow, 3 – 6 September 2014

(subject to acceptance by ECPR)

Knowledge as an instrument of government: national development policies and international expertise

Over the last decade, the increasingly pervasive call for development policies to be ‘evidence-based’ has progressively placed the production and uses of knowledge at the heart of international cooperation. While the incorporation of knowledge into development policies crystallizes underlying power relations, many of the players involved in this process minimize its political underpinnings. In the absence of elective legitimacy, international development actors ground their authority to act in national contexts in their role as custodians of technical expertise. This panel proposes to analyze the production of different types of development knowledge and the tensions inherent in its incorporation into public policies within ‘beneficiary’ countries. In this sense, we invite empirically founded contributions that explore the production and mobilization of knowledge as a constitutive dimension of the politics of international development. We propose two exploratory, non exclusive, lines of inquiry.

1) The first aims to better grasp the configuration of players involved in the production of knowledge at the various levels and domains of development cooperation (health, education, economic policy, agriculture, environment, etc.). Who produces expert knowledge about whom, based on which assumptions and empirical foundations, and according to which political agendas?

2) The second line of inquiry invites contributors to document how development players articulate technical expertise and value trade-offs in the formulation of political decisions, and to explore to what extent ‘development’ can be considered as a process of “domination through knowledge” (Max Weber). This perspective prompts a detailed inquiry into the ways in which the authoritative use of knowledge shapes debates within specific policy arenas. For instance, given the legitimating function of expertise for international players, in what ways does the mobilization of knowledge condition the relative openness or closure of decision processes? Similarly, how does the use of expert knowledge affect the selection of players involved and do those excluded question the authority of institutional development expertise in any way?

If interested, please send an abstract of your proposal (title + 150 words) to moritz.hunsmann@ehess.fr and raphaelle.parizet@gmail.com by 12 February 2014 (final deadline).