Shifting Sands: Interpreting ‘Developmental’ Leadership in the Pacific Islands

Abstract

The capacity for leadership, including political leadership, to improve development outcomes has attracted recent interest within development studies and associated donor agencies. This new approach is a welcome critique of the broadly institutionalist outlook of the good governance agenda; however, there is a mismatch between the desire to ‘bring the agency back in’ and the commitment of the Developmental Leadership Programme's (DLP's) to positivism, and, despite claims to the contrary, structuralism. Instead, I argue that interpretivism, with its emphasis on the meanings and beliefs of human actors, can augment this approach by providing a fundamentally different view of the agency question that sits at the heart of the DLP's research programme. To illustrate this point, I draw from my own research into the life stories of politicians from the Pacific Islands. In contrast to the dead weight of multiple variables and formal laws, I find that political life is embedded within the distinctively human realm of interpersonal action and that while leaders implicitly believe in their own agency, they also commonly experience a sense of powerlessness that stems in no small part from the inherent contingency and uncertainty of all policy-making.

Keywords:

• developmental leadership
• interpretivism
• Pacific Islands
• framing
• storylines
• mobilising metaphors

Acknowledgements

I thank John Boswell, Patrick Vakaoti, Peter Larmour, Terence Wood, Sinclair Dinnen and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Any errors are of course my own.

Notes on contributor

Jack Corbett, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, ACT 0200, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]

Notes

¹In the time between when this article was first written and published, Adrian Leftwich, who more than anybody has influenced the research agenda on leaders, elites and coalitions in development studies, sadly passed away. A lovely tribute to the man and his work by Steve Hogg, Adrian's collaborator on all things DLP, can be viewed here: http://www.dlprog.org/contents/about-us/adrian-leftwich.php.

²See http://www.dlprog.org/contents/partners.php (accessed 11 September 2012).

³See http://www.plp.org.fj/ (accessed 27 August 2012).

⁴Positivism (including logical-positivism, neo-positivism or post-positivism) is a broad and contested term employed in this article to describe scholars working to establish and test predictive models and formal laws about observable social phenomena. Two caveats: first, I acknowledge that there are major debates within this tradition but it can nevertheless be meaningfully distinguished from interpretivism on ontological and epistemological grounds; and second, while Leftwich and the DLP do not explicitly self-identify as positivists, I maintain that their work demonstrably internalises the positivist paradigm as illustrated by their preference for quantitative data and their desire to establish correlation and covariance between leadership and other variables.

⁵A fantastic paper titled ‘Policy perspectives and practices in Global South cities: A Study of Nairobi, Kenya’ by J. Hamhaber, J. Kedogo and M. Macharia at the 7th Annual Interpretive Policy Analysis Conference in Tilburg, 5–7 July 2012, provided the inspiration for this table.

⁶Critical realists, for example, might share my emphasis on contested meanings while still holding to the belief that some narratives come closer to describing objective or material facts than others. That is, they see the relationship between structure and agency as dialectical with each having independent causal power – although they tend to see structure as having relatively more power than agency (see Marsh, 2009).