There is imagined development. And there is development in practice. And they rarely overlap. One thing is the kind of development imagined in the mind of policy and decision makers, informed by debates and predictions based on models that, no matter how deep they can sound, remain based on either theoretical findings or evidence gathered in situations that are judged “similar” and thus worth upscaling. A different story is how development happens in reality. Local politicians, community leaders, development workers have to face the issue of operationalising ideas, decisions and models that have been conceived at a centralised level.
The accent on “local development” can help mitigating, but not necessarily solving, the issue. There is no “one size fits all” solution that can be applied, unchanged, everywhere without being tailored to the needs of a local case. In this respect, it can be said that the success of a policy depends not only on its theoretical foundations but also on the capacity of the measures to allow some flexibility in its implementation, on the ability of middle actors to understand the nuances of the local context and on the understanding of local development workers, civil servants and in general local implementers of how instructions can be adjusted to take into account a given context. In this situation, the everyday knowledge and social practices of local community become crucial.
With this panel, we invite empirical-based papers on the tensions, negotiations and adaptations of development policies (in any form) to a local context. Rather than putting emphasis on a geographical region, or field of intervention, we are interested in identifying the gap between development conceived at a centralised (national, regional, city or village level) and the way it happens in practice in different regions of the globe especially in the global South.
