Paper short abstract:

This paper reconsiders the distinction between "policy" and "critique" in development. It is widely assumed that expert involvement in policy is necessarily of the form of "advice to the prince" and that its role is critical to the formulation of plans. Once policy is made, then it can either be implemented well or poorly, and failures are often laid at the door of "poor implementation" rather than "poor planning."

Paper long abstract:

For people interested in development critique, "policy work" is either seen as intellectually second-rate or politically compromised. I argue in this paper that this is the result of seeing involvement in "policy" as a variant of "advice to the prince." Experts who are involved in development policy see their role as advising "governments" or multilateral agencies about what "should" be done in a particular case. Experts help governments figure out which programs should be adopted, how they should be planned, and what is the best way to implement them. In all cases, "policy" is about top-down, technocratic planning that is temporally prior to implementation.

What if we were to think of policy differently, as something that was not decided prior to implementation, but as unfolding in the process of doing, and of being shaped by different agents, including its recipients and bureaucratic agents down the hierarchy? A different notion of policy, I argue, opens up spaces where a critical anthropology can meet development practice, and make a difference to the object of critique. There is a space for a politically engaged anthropology to make a difference to development programs, but that space can only be created by re-envisioning "policy" itself, and the role of expert knowledge in the process.