Short Abstract

This panel invites submissions that explore the role that elite actors play in development. We are particularly interested in contributions that disentangle the relationship between the production of expertise and social stratification.

Description

Our panel examines the complex roles that elite non-state actors play within the knowledge infrastructures that sustain contemporary development practice in the Global South (Hurl and Vogelphol 2021; Sajjanhar 2024). The evolving relation between the state and capital as well as the restructuring of the knowledge economy to value technical expertise has led to an intensification of elite control of ‘Aidland.’ These elites, who acquire specialized degrees and professional experience in the Global North, often come from the professional managerial class in the Global South. By yoking their local accumulated forms of social and cultural capital to their transnational academic and professional networks, they are able to exchange ‘apolitical’ expertise for lucrative careers in the development sector (Lewis 2011; Harrington and Seabrooke 2020). The rise of various ‘young professional’ schemes, funded by multilateral aid agencies and corporate philanthropy, is increasingly an influential pathway that produces these contemporary development professionals.

We invite contributions from graduate students, early career and established scholars who use critical ethnographic, sociological, and historical approaches to engage with three interlinked questions: i) how do elites actors, including but not limited to ‘young professionals,’ consultants, researchers, sectoral experts, and aid managers, participate in international development? ii) what are the institutional arrangements, the socio-technical organizational practices, and the material linkages that facilitate the production of technical experts? iii) and how are epistemic hierarchies that are foundational to technical expertise linked to broader social stratifications like caste, class, and race?

This Panel has 6 pending paper proposals.
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