Short Abstract

How do non-Western actors establish their legitimacy operating in African contexts? This panel examines legitimation as an ongoing practice through which development and local actors negotiate, recognise, appropriate, or contest claims to legitimacy.

Long Abstract

In the implementation of development, a road, a school, or a health programme may appear as a grand scheme of development visibility. Yet these projects are rarely self-evident public goods, for they must be explained, justified, negotiated, and made meaningful among the different actors impacted by the projects. Therefore, before they can be understood as transformative, they must first be legitimatised.

This is proving particularly significant and indeed visible in the African development space that is increasingly shaped by non-Western actors, which come with varied development modalities. While there has been considerable attention on South-South cooperation, infrastructure, philanthropy, humanitarianism and social interventions bringing different actors together, thus blurring the boundaries between cooperative and non-state actors, nonprofit organisations, business and development.

How then do actors establish legitimacy to operate when their institutional identities and authority are not self-evident? Borrowing on the concept of legitimation as an ongoing, contested practice. This panel moves beyond understanding legitimacy as a fixed condition but examines it as an ongoing sociopolitical process. We ask how legitimacy is continuously crafted and practised through relationships, narratives, material interventions and lived realities, highlighting the different prisms through which development is experienced. How do different development forms establish actors’ socio-political legitimacy and how are these claims recognised, negotiated, contested, and appropriated? This panel is interested in cases examining how non-Western actors practise legitimation in African contexts. We welcome contributions from a range of disciplines and perspectives that centre on how legitimacy is practised, contested and negotiated in practice.

Propose paper