“The Local Consultant Will Not Be Credible”: How Epistemic Injustice Is Experienced and Practised in Development Aid

ABSTRACT

This paper uses the concept of epistemic injustice to shed light on the discriminatory treatment of experts in and by development aid. While the literature on epistemic justice is largely based on philosophical reasoning, I provide an empirical case study which substantiates theoretical claims with findings from social science research. Drawing on expert interviews conducted in South Africa and Tanzania, I reveal how epistemic injustice is experienced, practiced and institutionalised in a field which claims to work towards global justice. Focusing on aid-related advisory processes, the paper highlights how epistemic authority therein is tied to identity-based prejudice. The systematic credibility deficit policy experts from aid-receiving countries suffer is closely interrelated with the credibility excess so-called ‘international’ experts profit from. Their privilege is backed by an imaginary that maintains the idea of Northern epistemic superiority and sustained by prevailing employment and procurement practices of donor organisations. The paper suggests that the concurrence of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice prevents experts from the Global South from taking the lead in interpreting their own societies’ realities. This, I argue, is not only detrimental to the countries whose knowers are marginalised but also a root cause of persisting global inequality.

KEYWORDS:

• Epistemic injustice
• credibility excess
• imaginary
• development experts

Acknowledgments

This article draws on empirical material generated by the project “(Scientific) Experts in Developing Democracies” funded by the German Research Council (DFG; project reference number WE 972/30-1) and carried out at Bielefeld University, Germany, in cooperation with the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. The project was led by Peter Weingart to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. Special thanks go to my colleague Kathrin Böhling for her instructive comments on earlier drafts of this paper as well as to two anonymous peer reviewers for their constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Dübgen (2012) analysed writings of the Malian politician and intellectual Aminata Traoré as well as the Senegalese sociologists Cheikh Tidiane Diop and Emmanuel Seyni Ndione.

2. Fricker gives two examples of situations in which credibility excess may be disadvantageous for the speakers: an overburdened GP for whom the credibility excess he receives from his patients brings an unwanted ethical burden insofar as he is unable to provide them with the specialist expertise they require and seek from him; and a professor who does not receive honest critical feedback from her junior colleague due to the inflated credibility he assigns to her, which prevents her from improving her work (Fricker 2007, 18–19). While in both cases, credibility excess has negative effects for the speakers, they are not deprived of proper respect as epistemic agents, hence do not suffer testimonial injustice in Fricker’s understanding. She then continues with a third example: a person in a privileged position who is constantly subject to credibility excess, with the result that his epistemic character is malformed over time. Being epistemically wronged over the long term by cumulative instances does constitute a special form of testimonial injustice for Fricker. However, for her, it would not be right ‘to characterize any of the individual moments of credibility excess that such a person receives as in itself an instance of testimonial injustice, since none of them wrongs him sufficiently in itself’ (Fricker 2007, 21).

3. The project ‘(Scientific) Experts in Developing Democracies’ was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and carried out at Bielefeld University from 2011 to 2016 (DFG reference number WE 972/30-1).

4. Drawing on sociology of science, democracy theory and development studies literature, the original analysis focussed on structural factors that enable young democratic governments to retain their agenda-setting autonomy while relying on aid-related expert advice. The results of this analysis were published in Koch and Weingart (2016).

5. The statement was translated by the author, the original interview was conducted in German.

6. The statement was translated by the author, the original interview was conducted in German.

7. To give just one illustrative example: The UNDP country office in Tanzania in July 2019 advertised a procurement notice for the mid-term evaluation of the so-called Legislative Support Project II. The terms of reference state: ‘The outcome evaluation will be undertaken by two (2) external evaluators comprising of an Evaluation Team Leader and an Evaluator. The Evaluation Team Leader will be hired as an international consultant, while the Evaluator will be hired as a national consultant’ (UNDP Country Office 2019). See also Koch and Weingart 2016, 128 ff.

8. In that, my paper differs from Code (2008) who was criticised by Kristie Dotson for the absence of Tanzanian voices in her study (Dotson 2008).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Council [Grant Number WE 972/30-1].

Notes on contributors

Susanne Koch

Susanne Koch is a post-doc researcher and lecturer at the Chair of Forest and Environmental Policy, Technical University of Munich, Germany. Holding a PhD in sociology, her current research focuses on the (re-) production of knowledge inequality and epistemic injustice in science and science-related fields. Adopting an interdisciplinary research perspective, she draws on sociology of science, feminist theory, post-colonial scholarship and critical philosophy to understand persistent patterns of asymmetric epistemic authority and its effects, particularly in forest and environmental governance.