ABSTRACT
Scientific and technical knowledge and practice play a key role in international development interventions. Expertise, thus, is a key element of the geographical and historical relations between the colonial and postcolonial cores and peripheries (Vessuri, this volume; Ferguson 1990, 2006, Escobar 1995, Watts 2003), and it has accordingly been the object of a great deal of attention in critical development studies and related fields (Mitchell 2002, Goldman 2005, Li 2007, Mosse 2011). For example, scholars have examined the ‘downstream’ effects of expert knowledge on populations' subjectivities (Agrawal 2005, Li 2007, Birkenholtz 2008), and how dominant narratives within colonial ventures have contributed to the stabilization and selections of some ways of knowing over others (Fairhead and Leach 1996, Bassett and Bi Zuéli 2000, Davis 2007).
