Between Experts and Locals: Towards an inclusive framework for a development agenda

Abstract

In this thesis I argue that we need to ask three fundamental questions when setting a development agenda.First, what kinds of goals should a development agenda include; secondly, who should be involved in setting a development agenda; and, thirdly, how should they go about doing so? In the first part of the thesis I argue that development goals are best conceptualized in terms of capabilities and functionings. Conceptualizing development goals in terms of capabilities and functionings implies a focus on what people can do or be with their means and resources. The reason for this is that a focus on the means to development ignores the fact that people are subject to various factors that influence the extent to which they are able to successfully convert resources, goods and freedoms into actual opportunities or realized doings and beings (i.e. capabilities and functionings). The second question that I investigate in this thesis concerns who should select the relevant development goals for a development agenda? I argue that local stakeholders should be granted two kinds of authority in the context of development, namely political authority and expert authority. On the one hand, I ground this claim to political authority in republican theory and argue that it should be understood as the claim that local stakeholders should not be subject to domination, defined as the arbitrary exercise of power, in the political process of setting a development agenda, neither from national policy-makers, external stakeholders, nor fellow citizens. On the other hand, before a development agenda becomes a matter of policy-making it is a socioscientific issue. At the socioscientific level, it is a question of who can claim expert authority on matters of development. I argue that we should adopt a third wave view of development expertise, which recognizes that members of the general public who possess relevant tacit, embodied, or explicit knowledge should be granted expert authority on par with traditional development scholars. Finally, in the third part of the thesis, I ask by which method we should select normatively relevant capabilities and functionings. I argue that we should adopt a multi-stage method, which aims to engage critically with local stakeholders in a three-stage procedure. While the purpose of the first stage is to enrich the normative and descriptive theory through empirical and deliberative exercises, the second stage offers this refined theory as an input to a democratic procedure with the aim of enhancing the informational bases of the participants. Lastly, in the third stage, local stakeholders engage in a critical deliberation facilitated by mediators who can help the various stakeholders to understand each other and express their arguments in an intelligible way, with the ideal outcome of an informed and widely endorsed list of capabilities and functionings.