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Forum for Development Studies

ISSN: 0803-9410 (Print) 1891-1765 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/sfds20

Knowledge as Relational: Reflections on


Knowledge in International Development

David Mosse

To cite this article: David Mosse (2014) Knowledge as Relational: Reflections on Knowledge
in International Development, Forum for Development Studies, 41:3, 513-523, DOI:
10.1080/08039410.2014.959379

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08039410.2014.959379

Published online: 28 Oct 2014.

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Forum for Development Studies, 2014
Vol. 41, No. 3, 513– 523, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08039410.2014.959379

DEBATE

Knowledge as Relational: Reflections on Knowledge in


International Development
David Mosse

Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS University of London, London, UK


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In this debate article I want to raise some questions about how we think about knowl-
edge in the encounters of international development, and the kinds of knowledge or
knowledge practices of the different actors involved. Göran Hyden (this issue) has
set out some broad changes in the understanding of what needs to known for develop-
ment, and the demands of a contemporary shift away from donor-driven models of
knowledge and accountability. This requires also that we re-think the function and
purposes of knowledge in development. My principal point is that knowledge has to
be understood as a relationship, rather than as simply instrumental, and that knowl-
edge-relationships can be rather unpredictable in their effects. This has implications
for how we understand development encounters, as well as the processes within
agencies and institutions, and takes us beyond the earlier ‘principal-agent’ (Hyden,
this issue) framings of development as ‘dominating knowledge’ (Hobart, 1993) or its
interfaces as ‘battlefields of knowledge’ (Long and Long, 1992), as well as counterpart
ideas of ‘local knowledge’ or participatory development alternatives.
I take the special issue title – ‘knowing development/developing knowledge’ – as
my guide for a discussion in 2 parts. I begin with ‘knowing development’, which raises
questions about ‘development’ itself as a category. Here I want to use a project example
to do 2 things. The first is to look at development conceived as problem-solving knowl-
edge and problem-solving technology, that is as an intentional process. I will illustrate
the continuing challenge of deriving relevant knowledge for local interventions, even
amidst the profusion of methodologies, especially participatory ones that Robert
Chambers (this issue) among others has promoted. Second, I will look at development
encounters in terms of a set of knowledge effects that are not explicitly intended and are
to do with changing social relationships. The distinction between development as a set
of intentions and as social effects relates to one Cowen and Shenton (1996) draw
between, on the one hand, development as imminent action, that is development as
doing, human creativity and will, and on the other, development as immanent
process, that is something that happens despite intention.
In the second part of the article, I turn to the other title phrase ‘developing knowl-
edge’. Here again I am interested in the nature of development policy knowledge; not

# 2014 Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI)


514 David Mosse

just its biases (see Chambers, this issue), but the way in which it is both embedded in
institutions and social relations (of development agencies), and how development
agencies lack reflexivity to acknowledge this fact or to learn about crucial aspects of
development practice.
For some years I was involved in an agricultural development programme in an
inaccessible part of western India, with an extremely poor and predominantly
Adivasi population categorised as ‘tribal’, where not uncommonly families were
unable to grow food crops sufficient to feed themselves for more than 4 or 5 months
of the year. They depended for survival upon seasonal labour migration to distant
urban centres where they mostly worked on construction sites under highly exploitative
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conditions (Mosse, 2005; Mosse et al., 2005).


Our project aimed to increase food security by improving farm yields. The
constraint on achieving this was understood to be a lack of knowledge. Now, this
was not (as might be imagined) a lack in knowledge among the Adivasi farmers (we
were in the 1990s era of the Farmer First paradigm, Chambers et al., 1989), but
rather the lack of knowledge of the scientists in the regional research centres about
farmers’ agricultural practices and the constraints they faced, and which led to
inappropriate official recommendations.
Our project team had concluded that a successful agricultural development
programme needed to be built on farmers’ knowledge, and among other things, set
about organising a programme of Participatory Varietal Selection (PVS) and Participa-
tory Plant Breeding (PPB) that took place on farmers’ fields and involved farmers’
choices (see Mosse, 2005). The approach of using farmers’ own fine-grained judgements
in breeding, testing and popularising new varieties appeared to be a huge success, and a
major advance on prevailing regulatory frameworks with wide application in policy; it
shifted well-established hierarchies of knowledge in development as well as allowed
impressive cost-recovery models in anticipation of expansion and replication.
However, while initially favourable, after 5 years the picture from impact studies
suggested that farmers’ views on the new improved seeds were equivocal: the seeds
only did well in particular soil, moisture and social conditions (Mosse, 2005). Canadian
ethnographer-agronomist, Kirit Patel, researched one of the project’s exemplar villages
in 2002–2003 and found that that the varieties found to be highly successful by their
project promoters just 3 or 4 years earlier, had almost entirely disappeared from
farmers’ fields, being replaced by local ones (Patel, 2007).
Central to this perhaps familiar story are claims about knowledge and ignorance –
the farmers’ or the scientists’. The first diagnosis of the development problem was that
the knowledge of the scientists on government research stations was insufficiently
‘scientific’ because it could be shown to be embedded in their own social and insti-
tutional relations and incentives, for instance, promoting high input-dependent, scien-
tist career-building cultivars. Farmers on the other hand were the true scientists or
experts. However, giving farmers the status of ‘scientists’ though PVS/PPB and
getting them to make judgements about crop performance from paired comparisons
Forum for Development Studies 515

and controlled crop-cutting experiments involved ignoring the social context of their
own knowledge; disembedding it. Once the new crop varieties were re-embedded in
the complex social relations and micro-environments – the conditions of seed
supply, networks of obligations, deficits or debts, family relations or market connec-
tions that constituted Adivasi cultivation practices – the scientifically proven yield
advantages failed to appear as livelihood benefits.
The problem was that the expert techniques and PPB models, carried meta-assump-
tions about the knowledge practices of farmers themselves. They presumed a world of
choice in which farmers would meet the demands of a harsh and variable ecology (steep
slopes, water scarcity) by changing their portfolio of varieties. They just needed more
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choices.
But especially when it came to their staple crop, maize, Adivasi farmers did not – or
could not – imagine themselves in a supermarket of maize varieties. As Patel (2007)
discovered, Advasis had a strong preference for one particular kind of grain –
khatoli maize – based among other things on nutritional reasoning. They first
worked hard to adapt environments to allow cultivation of this particular grain, for
example, by levelling increasingly fragmented field plots. Second, they exploited the
variability present within the existing katholi variety in order to adapt to different
environments (small seeds for sloping land; large ones for the flat); and third they
preserved the quality of seeds (at risk through cross-pollination) through rigorous
seed selection practices, incorporated into daily social life, hence the typical display
of cobs outside Adivasi houses and the group interactions over seed sorting.
There was an important difference here. Our project’s PPB model for maize expected
adaptation and yield increase from preserving genetic purity through the careful differ-
entiation of the identity and source of new varieties. Adivasi farmers, however, applied a
sophisticated taxonomic knowledge (based on a morphological classification and an
understanding of the interaction between biological and agro-ecological factors) to
the selection of seeds from existing varieties after each harvest.
As a story of the failure of socially disembedded knowledge to bring about the
desired change when re-situated in specific social and institutional worlds, this is
perhaps a familiar story. It would certainly have parallels in different sectors at different
scales wherever institutions or technologies fashioned by experts come to be
re-embedded in social and power relations, in the process de-railing expected out-
comes; in situations as far different as models of public sector reform failing to
enhance efficiency and transparency for example in Malawi as examined by Anders
(2010); or Poverty Reduction Strategies in Vietnam, Uganda, Pakistan or New
Zealand – countries where Craig and Porter (2006) have tracked the fate of develop-
ments ‘travelling rationalities’. Readers will fill in their own examples.
But the main point I want to make in relation to the Indian project example is that the
failure to deliver better livelihoods based on improved crop varieties may not, in fact, be
the most important outcome of the development knowledge encounter; and the displace-
ment of these varieties by existing ones may not be the most significant lesson from the
516 David Mosse

particular knowledge interface. Through participating in crop trials and forming judge-
ments about varieties, Adivasi cultivators became aware of constraints, and did new
things. For example, growing project seeds delivered with inputs separated crop
variety choices from debt relations in ways that could be liberating, and in a similar
manner to how women’s savings and credit groups (which failed in narrow financial
terms) allowed credit to be separated from various obligations to kin or moneylenders.
This was important for those too poor to meet the demanding obligations of existing
village networks, while having an impact on gender relations (see Mosse, 2005).
What was conveyed through our project impact surveys as most important to these
people, was not what we (project workers) looked for in terms of our indicators (the
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spread of new varieties or loan repayment rates) but rather changed or new social
relationships, not least relationships with project outsiders or the state, or banks; and
the patronage or protection, the resources or the advancement these offered. Develop-
ment knowledge was significant not instrumentally but relationally, and not for the
local autonomy it fostered, but for the connections that it allowed.
Participatory techniques (participatory rural appraisal (PRA), PVS, SHGs (self-help
groups)) that were innovated to elicit local knowledge and local choices for local control
were, in fact, ones that Adivasi communities valued because they were useful as a means
to better grasp intentions and needs of outsiders, to make a plan and thereby forge a new
relationship (I remember quite early on our project, a village leader appealing to the dis-
trict heath officer armed with PRA-type charts amidst an outbreak of malaria). Indeed,
development for upland Adivasi communities in western India was not only about the
delivery of specific technologies or services or assets, but a better engagement with out-
siders, perhaps enabling them to become citizens legible to the state – something they
desired rather than feared or sought to avoid (as Scott, 2009 argues for elsewhere).
Ferguson (2013) has recently suggested that a liberal pre-occupation with develop-
ment as autonomy and independence has obscured the importance for many living
precarious lives of seeking out relationships of dependence, of becoming part of a
system of patronage that offers recognition or membership (even on hierarchical
terms) in preference to ‘asocial’ welfare assistance. The Adivasi engagement with
this aid project may not have constituted Ferguson’s ‘declarations of dependence’,
but it did appear to be concerned with negotiating connection and clientship for
which new knowledge was necessary.
It is of course important not to lose sight of the wider political economy of the
knowledge processes in such development encounters, where politically weaker or
exploited communities negotiate with powerful agents of change. Certainly, Adivasis
in western India have long struggled to maintain livelihoods (and forge identities)
through relations with dominant groups with better access to resources – Rajput
rulers, Baniya moneylenders, British administrators, Christian missionaries, Gandhian
reformers, Hindu nationalists, labour contractors, non-governmental organisation
(NGOs) and international development projects. This has usually involved complicity
with external schemes and judgements, and the strategic adoption of elements of the
Forum for Development Studies 517

dominant culture (e.g. Baviskar, 1995; Hardiman, 1987). Often a new ‘detribalising’
economy in social life is necessary to contend with stigma and exclusion.
Certainly in our case, it was wider structural conditions that ensured Adivasis with a
long history of economic insecurity and exploitation, living in a region of underdeve-
loped markets, failed enterprises and experiencing loss of protective patronage trans-
formed a neo-liberal participatory development concern with ‘technology choice’,
‘local voice’, independent self-help and sustainability, into a more relevant strategy
for the acquisition of assets, and social protection, by forging alliances with the
project (not least though certain knowledge practices) as a route to wages, assets or
remunerative broker roles.
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Looking at the wider field of relations in development (still relatively rarely done) we
need not conclude that these unplanned power effects of programmes are necessarily det-
rimental; although this has pretty much been the assumption of social analysts ever since
Ferguson’s seminal Anti-politics Machine (1994). For Li (2007), as an example, devel-
opment knowledge has the particular effect of re-arranging social and institutional
relations so that they are aligned with expert designs while leaving wider structures of
power and inequality unaltered: a process she refers to as ‘rendering technical’, and
which she argues is a key governmental effect of development in rural Indonesia
where she examines World Bank Community-Driven Development in these terms.
The tracing of governmental effects in this way has been extended to various policy
regimes, including human rights, which Englund (2006) argues becomes disempowering
in Malawi by ‘rendering technical’ structural problems of power and wealth, blocking
collective action for entitlements and justice and making the poor ‘prisoners of freedom’.
Others look critically at development knowledge as being parasitic, in David
Harvey’s terms, appropriating and co-opting the pre-existing cultural and social
achievements of poor people. This is how Elyachar (2005), for example, sees the
effect of NGO microenterprise initiatives among craftsmen in Cairo; while De Vries
(2007) sees the Development industry and its knowledge practices as ‘parasitic on
the beliefs and dreams of the subjects it creates’. Development he says is a ‘desiring
machine’; the lack from its failures driving desire, articulated through imagination.
I do not think we should discount these studies, and the insights they offer, but it is not
helpful to assume that what is labelled ‘Development’ organises affairs in any particular
way with particular effects. This is the presumption that Escobar re-affirms in the second
edition of his Encountering Development (2012) saying that across asymmetries of
power/knowledge the Western idea of Development (with a big ‘D’) continues to
provide the ‘organising principle of social life’, and becomes the translator of ideas,
experiences or dreams; that upon which counterwork must be performed – obliterating
culturally variant alternatives. This idea of Development as a Western knowledge regime
arriving from the outside is decreasingly relevant or helpful. Development, like ‘human
rights’ or ‘democracy’, need not be viewed as a regime of truth ‘diffusing’ from modern
liberalism (Subramanian, 2009), or that which the West does to the rest, but instead as
part of dynamic cultural formations that emerge in different places, albeit often as
518 David Mosse

‘part of the postcolonial predicament’ (Yarrow, 2011, pp. 2–3) and often intimately
related to democracy and the need for political legitimacy. In fact, a good deal more
needs to be understood about the hybrid nature of ‘development’ knowledge, and the
way in which indigenous and modern concepts shape each other; an example being
John Peel’s (1978) exploration of how the Yoruba concept of qlaju, or ‘enlightenment’,
referring to a particular system of metaphors and ideas about knowledge in relation to
power, became progressively linked to Western education and its place in Nigerian
social policy.
Then, moving in the other direction are studies of how universal ‘rights’ discourses
become partially incorporated into a local cultural politics of identity, for example as
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‘Dalit Human Rights’ by NGOs and activists that I have worked with in south India,
and who graft this universal language onto a century-long struggle for resources and rec-
ognition by those subordinated as untouchable. The rights framework provides an
‘engaged universal’ (Tsing, 2004) for the articulation of issues of caste (Dalit difference,
dignity, development) so as to connect to global networks, while at the same time chan-
ging both the framing of problems and the articulation of demand (see Mosse, forthcom-
ing). In other cases too, universal rights or development agendas interact with historical–
cultural formations and are then globalised through advocacy chains.
The point to emphasise is that knowledge processes in development do not just
concern the desiring, designing and developing of schemes and services; ‘Development’
or its vernacular equivalents is a category into which a variety of political practices,
cultural identities and struggles – from the periphery and from the centre – come to be
translated, for an equally diverse range of purposes: access to services and claims to citi-
zenship among them. Development programmes are not part of one particular discourse of
power and not even a ‘coherent set of practices’, but, as Yarrow puts it, ‘a set of practices
that produce coherence’ (2011, p. 6), meaningful in different ways. What elements of
power are involved, who the significant actors are, what purposes are served, what auton-
omy or dependence is achieved or lost; none of this can be known in advance.
***
Having explored ‘knowing development’ I want to turn now to ‘developing knowl-
edge’ and in particular to the social production of development expertise. ‘Perhaps never
before has so much been made of the power of ideas, right theory, or good policy’; never
before such ‘expert consensus on how global poverty is to be eliminated and the poor
governed’ (Mosse, 2011a, p. 3). Earlier, I alluded to certain context-free formalistic ‘tra-
velling rationalities’ such as liberal frameworks of governance, that may be unravelled
(or at least transformed) as they are unpacked into the interests and relationships of other
social/institutional worlds, often generating unintended effects. But the point here is that
what is described as context-free or disembedded knowledge is not context free at all.
Knowledge claimed as universal (or technologies like the research station seeds
above) is actually embedded, albeit in unacknowledged ways, in the particular preju-
dices and structures of the originating policy-making institutions, and has to lose (or
hide) its context and history to become relevant as international development policy.
Forum for Development Studies 519

One thing that the universal applicability of policy models involves therefore is a
denial of history; the practice, as Pritchett and Woolcock (2004) put it, of ‘skipping
straight to Weber’, that is, transferring from place to place principles of bureaucratic
rationality, which carry with them institutional mythologies that conceal the fact that
in reality institutional solutions (for example on governance) ‘emerge from an internal
historical process of trial and error, and of political struggle’, and that part of ‘the
solution’ is to hide this fact (Pritchett and Woolcock, 2004, p. 201). Expert travelling
rationalities in this sense have undeclared baggage.
The question political historians such as Mitchell (2002) therefore ask of expert
solutions, is not why they might fail, but out of what conflicts or politically driven
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experiments are they produced, and (through careful national histories of development)
how does expert knowledge come to be disembedded from politics so as ‘to rearrange
power over people as power over ideas’ from which arises policy as a sphere of rational
intention external to and generative of events (Mitchell, 2002, p. 90).
This is not quite the same as asking what partisan interests do particular policy
regimes serve (as is often done of policies of the World Bank or global corporate
governance), or asking about the governmental effects of the global governance of
market-led development, or about internal processes of paradigm maintenance such
as the ‘group think’ and risk aversion that commit development institutions like the
World Bank to their preferred models (Mosse, 2011b). Instead, it is about decentring
policy knowledge, taking it off its pedestal by locating it within the processes that it
claims to orchestrate, and discovering the sets of particular social relations that shape it.
Working as a development consultant, I may not be alone in having the disconcerting
realisation that ‘so-called’ expert knowledge often does not precede and direct action, but
follows it, proving an authoritative framework of interpretation for higher policy; which
is often the most urgent demand (see Mosse, 2005). Professional expertise is then itself
partly a process of disembedding knowledge from the politics of projects and pro-
grammes, from the actual relationships and social encounters of development, the
various contests and diverse or conflicting views, so as to produce a universal point of
view, often captured in normative rules, principles and schemes, models and technologies,
and shaped in the experience-distant jargon and format of the structured report. Inter-
national development agencies require consultants who can generate this theoretical
clarity out of the confusion of practice – essential to negotiating relations in a project
system – but they rarely need or want explicit knowledge of programme relationships.
In this sense, policy knowledge is interstitial. Policy is not the author of programme
practice, but part of the making of relationships of development cooperation. In this vein,
Rottenburg (2009) has written an imaginative (loosely fictional) account of development
cooperation. In his book on water-sector reform in East Africa, the various actors – con-
sultants, bureaucrats, politicians – in the European donor and the African recipient
countries give their separate accounts of the project and of each other. It is
evident that they have to play a ‘technical game’ and develop a language of problems-
and-solutions divorced from the institutional–political context; but as Rottenburg puts
520 David Mosse

it, this rendering technical ‘is not an instrument of hegemony [as Li has it], but rather the
only code available for carrying out transcultural negotiations . . . under postcolonial
conditions . . . and the norm of reciprocity’ (Rottenburg, 2009, p. 142).
Rottenburg points out that typically in development cooperation encounters there is
a ‘loose coupling’ between development policy ideas – goals models and structures –
and the actual organisational practices. But donors and researchers are happy to know
little about the trading zones and translation practices, the mediators, brokers and
‘ceremonial facades’ that actually comprise loosely coupled development ventures.
The focus of Rottenburg’s aid story, by contrast, is not the objects and actors of devel-
opment but ‘what occurs between them’. Loose coupling – or disjuncture, the term
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some of us used before – facilitates the contradictions that are central to development
practice, whether this is the co-existence of incongruous principles (efficiency vs. local
ownership), incompatible knowledge/epistemologies or ideological and political
differences (Rottenburg, 2009).
The point is that expert knowledge which is part of the coordination of institutional
relations (and shaped by them) provides very little knowledge about these relations. I
learned something about this when at the World Bank in Washington, DC briefly in
2003–2004. What struck me first of all was the way in which some of the Bank’s
‘global’ policy thought was shaped by its own highly local internal institutional
relations. Policy ideas exemplified socially embedded knowledge. There is insufficient
space here to explain the point (see Mosse, 2011b), but the case concerns the way in
which non-economics social scientists (or social development experts) in the Bank
were constrained to develop concepts that would first and foremost serve to define
and defend their professional space as a vulnerable group within an economics-domi-
nated organisation. Among other things, this involved shifting from a concern with the
prevention of harm, to conceptual work that produced instrumental formulations of ‘the
social’ (or of power, or rights, or equality) in order to frame ‘social development’ objec-
tives within the Bank’s core neo-liberal policy dialogue. This was ‘social analysis’ that
had to be sold to other (especially operational) Bank staff and other donors as products
– business lines, ‘off the shelf’ packages of concepts, models, best-practice, tools and
how-to-do materials – on social capital, Community-Driven Development, empower-
ment and so on. For the most part, these are ‘corporate products’ useful for the internal
negotiation of loans and projects, without shaping operations or research, but reprodu-
cing policy rationality apart from actual practice (Mosse, 2011b).
Despite significant increase in numbers of social scientists at the Bank, from a single
anthropologist appointed in 1974 to as many as 450 in 2004, and equivalent increases in
other agencies, the capacity to explore the practices of development, for example to
explain processes of loose-coupling, has actually declined; and anthropology as a criti-
cal descriptive discipline has been significantly marginalised. The restructuring and
‘upstreaming’, and the dispersal of social science expertise, as well as the virtual dis-
appearance of ‘field experience’ in one agency leads Rosalind Eyben to quip that
Forum for Development Studies 521

interest in local patterns of power and social relations has been replaced by a fascination
with patterns on the carpeted floor of the Finance Minister’s office (2011, p. 144).
Robert Chambers (this issue) insists that we learn more about the psychology of the
powerful to understand biases in knowledge. But these biases are socially and institu-
tionally sustained, which means we might start by learning more about the social and
institutional lives of international experts and development professionals (which
anthropologists have begun to research). Eyben (2011), for instance, hypothesises
that harmonised or homogenised development thinking (and the denial of local
context) has its basis in the sociality of international communities of experts –
locally transient but internationally permanent, and well-knit (through employment
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circuits and electronic communication), highly visible in the capital cities of the devel-
oping world, occupying cultural enclaves, shared lifestyles and values – a group which
despite cosmopolitan claims, is ‘at least as restricted as any other strong ethnic identity’
(Friedman, 2004, p. 167).
Let me conclude with 3 points. First, we need better understanding of relationships
in development, and specifically to see knowledge itself as a relationship; second, we
need attention to what is going on in development encounters based on inductive rather
than deductive research frames; and third, reflexivity and self-understanding is
especially important, including awareness about what might be at stake in suppressing
the critical insight of insiders, or institutionalising social science within knowledge
systems that contribute to internal legitimising while organising attention away from
the complex relationships of practice.
We do well to find ways to develop sophisticated understanding of the various knowl-
edge processes of Aidland – as Raymond Apthorpe characterises the world of develop-
ment cooperation (Apthorpe, 2011) – its loose coupling of policy and practice and the
uncertain link between intention and outcome. Here then is a call for better understanding
within international development agencies of how they think and what their action does
(see Eyben, 2009). The need for reflexive knowledge can be presented with the aid of a
closing metaphor drawing on Drew Leders’ book The Absent Body (1990) (with thanks
to Kit Davis). Because of the way we are made (heads on top, eyes in front), we can’t actu-
ally see very much of ourselves and tend to live our lives in a condition of ecstasis – that is
slightly out of ourselves, in the world. This means that we are aware of our bodies only
when they fail to support our lack of attention.1 The world of international development
has a tendency to ecstasis, to disembodied knowledge, a lack of awareness of the social
context of its operations and of its own policy-making, except when they go wrong. As
international development of necessity becomes multi-polar, as it involves plural account-
abilities, the need for epistemological awareness increases. But as Hyden (this issue)
points out, the fragmentation of donors into more nationalistic approaches brings a new

1
I owe this phrasing of the dilemma of knowledge in development with its reference to Leder to
my colleague Kit (Christopher) Davis (personal communication).
522 David Mosse

rigidity, reductionism and control to development research, which makes the meeting of
this need considerably harder.

Notes on contributor
David Mosse (b.1959) is Professor of Social Anthropology at SOAS University of London. He
studied social anthropology at Oxford University from where he received a DPhil in 1986. He
worked for Oxfam as Representative for South India in Bangalore, as a social development
advisor and consultant for the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and
other international development agencies. He is the author of Cultivating Development: An Eth-
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nography of Aid Policy and Practice (2005), The Rule of Water: Statecraft, Ecology and Col-
lective Action in South India (2003), The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Caste and Christianity in
India (2012), and several edited volumes on development including Adventures in Aidland
(2011), The Aid Effect (2005, with D. Lewis) and Development Brokers and Translators
(2006, with D. Lewis). A current collaborative project, ‘Caste Out of Development’ examines
the continuing significance of caste in contemporary development encounters.

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