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Paper short abstract:

Development studies exists to question what development is – but how? I propose an empirical approach based on sequential exploratory and confirmatory narrative stakeholder interviews in co-selected fields of practice informed by critical realism, discursive institutionalism and decolonial praxis.

Paper long abstract:

Self-identified development actors, practitioners, volunteers, professionals, academics, experts… tell themselves and others many stories about their evolving relationship to development as a historical process, aspiration and field of personal engagement. This paper proposes a theoretical framework and empirical strategy for investigating such accounts informed by critical realism, discursive institutionalism and decolonial praxis. The critical realism entails theorising development studies as a transdisciplinary field for sequentially identifying (a) unequal and stratified multidimensional wellbeing outcomes, (b) agent-centred causal mechanisms to explain these outcomes, and (c) structural and cultural factors conditioning these mechanisms. The discursive institutionalism entails linking causal mechanisms to the evolution of personal, shared and often fragmented mental models of progress and regress at multiple levels (from personal to global) emerging from tangled processes of personal reflexivity, interpersonal deliberation and contestation. The decolonial praxis entails empirically grounded, reciprocal, deliberative and transparent co-production of ideas informed by reflexivity about participants’ relationship to structures and cultures of inequality and injustice. A practical test of this approach would be what it reveals not only about the diversity of thinking about development, but also the mechanisms that prompt radical shifts in ideas and actions – e.g. concerning climate change. The proposed methodological strategy would rely on sequential use of exploratory and confirmatory narrative interviews among stakeholders selected through a participatory and evolutionary process.