Paper short abstract:

A cadre of development professionals - legal and institutional reformers - publicly deny that development experts know what they are doing. I argue that their political power resides in allowing for a form of professional transference, allowing other development experts to purge their dissonances.

Paper long abstract:

An emerging body of literature explores how development experts' own cynicism or disenchantment with their expertise might in fact sustain or constitute that expertise. For authors such as David Kennedy and Severine Autesserre, the function of expertise is not to produce authority; it is to produce a private domain in which experts can contain their disenchantment, allowing for purer expressions of public authority. By contrast, I argue that contemporary development expertise has scaled up this insight, creating a cadre of professionals - legal and institutional reformers - whose public role it is to deny that development experts know what they are doing. Using the language of context, politics, and social complexity, they deny the conditions of possibility for governing development knowledge, using what I call "expert ignorance". In this paper, I explore the functional role of this professional cadre. Drawing on nine years' experience as a legal and institutional reformer, I detail the form and structure of expert ignorance, and its specific relationship with other development experts. I argue that its political power resides in allowing for a form of professional transference: development experts with claims to scientific knowledge, such as development economists, can purify their position by depositing their anxieties and dissonances - in the face of the limits of their knowledge - with ignorant experts.