Paper short abstract:

What role national development experts (NDEs), with deeper cultural knowledge and working in their country of origins, can play in facilitating sustainable change? Critical exploration of this group can deepen our understanding for building networks for promoting sustainable change.

Paper long abstract:

National development experts (NDEs)* are an important actor in national level development but are often invisible in aid scholarship, as very little is known about their roles, agency, motivations and interests in mediating, brokering, negotiating, interpreting and operationalising external development frameworks. A growing body of literature, labelled as 'new actors in development' focuses on a range of development actors including celebrities, philanthropic institutions, diaspora groups etc., but the NDEs who can provide insightful insiders perspective on development policies and practices within development landscape do not get any mention. In the era of Sustainable Development Goals, new alliances and enterprises are deemed to be of significant importance for promoting sustainable change. In this context, we raise the question how can we map and situate the roles of NDEs along with their agency, interests, and motivations for their engagement in development. We highlight a gap in existing literature and seek to fill this gap by expanding our understanding of NDEs in development based on qualitative data and personal experiences from Bangladesh and Ghana. This paper examines the role of NDEs as an important actor of development at the national levels and manifests the need for further research on this group that has a broader relevance for holistic and more comprehensive ethnographies of aid.

*Provisionally defined as people whose main income is derived from working as self-employed consultants or from being employed by government, non-governmental and external agencies specifically to formulate, implement and assess development policies, programmes and projects in their country of residence.