Locally led development
On 26 November, CICED and iiINTERest invite you to a debate meeting on one of today’s significant themes among development organizations, namely ‘locally led development’. As a warm-up to the debate, CICED NYT looks at where CICED stands in relation to the theme and how we – at least in our own perception – practice ‘locally led development’.
The first article revolved around the somewhat random roots of why CICED has worked with and for “locally led development” since 1992, even though it was called something else back then.
In this article, we focus on whose knowledge counts the most. And what the consequences can be when ‘we-know-best’ arrogance breaks out in full force. We end with clarifying what we mean by ‘locally led development’.
* * * * * * *
Knowledge is power – also in community-led development
Can you be an expert in something you know little or nothing about? The question itself sounds a bit silly when you look at the word’s meaning.
According to the Danish dictionary, an expert is “a person with extensive knowledge of a particular (professional) field”.
In the first article on community-led development, I touched on whose knowledge counts the most in development cooperation between partners in the Global North and Global South. The answer was – and unfortunately often still is – that we in the global industrialized North are convinced that we know best. A self-confidence that, in the prevailing jargon of the development world, is also reflected in the titles of professionals in a development project. A distinction is made between international experts and local specialists.
According to the Danish dictionary, a specialist is a “person with extensive knowledge of a particular (professional) field”. In other words, it is precisely the same as an expert.
We must turn to the English language, the lingua franca of the development industry, for an explanation. The Cambridge Dictionary and the American Merriam-Webster indicate a hierarchy of knowledge between the two positions. The latter, in particular, spells it out:
An expert has a special skill or knowledge that represents mastery of a particular subject.
A specialist is specialized in a particular profession, practice, or field of study. Mastery is left out.
Let’s take a step into the use of artificial intelligence and recall that answers to questions are based on existing data and ask, for example, the platform Perplexity about the difference between an expert and a specialist. It states: An expert has extensive knowledge, experience and skills in a broad subject area or topic. Conversely, a specialist focuses on a more specific subfield or niche within a field.
In other words, when job descriptions in international development cooperation distinguish between ‘international expert’ and ‘local specialist’, it is clearly marked that the outsider, typically from the West/the global industrialized north, is by definition more competent, more knowledgeable than his/her local colleagues.
When arrogance takes over
In several professional fields, this may actually be the case. However, if the ‘mastery of a particular field’ is not followed through with appropriate humility towards one’s excellence and respect for local knowledge, it can result in useless or even destructive efforts.
In Mongolia in the second half of the 1990s, the Asian Development Bank believed something drastic needed to be done with Mongolian schools. The quality of math and physics education, in particular, needed to be improved. In rural areas, schools should merge to save on management and administration costs. Class ratios would go up.
A core part of the plan was that 1300 teachers would resign voluntarily with three years’ full pay. The Mongolian government had to borrow the money for this scheme from the Asian Development Bank.
With Mongolian colleagues, I warned the international experts from the bank that figures from the rest of Asia could not be used to assess class ratios in Mongolia. As an argument for more pupils per teacher in Mongolian schools, they referred to figures from Bangladesh, among others. In 1997, the population density in Bangladesh was 825 perkm2– in Mongolia it was 1.5 perkm2.
Secondly, we warned that most teachers who would accept redundancy with three years’ full pay would be mainly math and physics teachers. In other words, those who would be responsible for improving the quality of teaching in these two subjects. Everywhere in the former socialist countries, it could be seen that people with a background in math and natural sciences were quickest to seize the new opportunities under capitalism and political liberal democracy.
All warnings were dismissed. ‘Complex schools’ were created with two to several schools under the same administration. One thousand three hundred teachers, mainly math and physics teachers, accepted three years’ salary and disappeared from the schools.
After two to three years, the schools had to be divided into independent units again. With up to 100 kilometers from the central school (soum center school) to the village school (bagh school), a frozen landscape for 5-6 months, and no internet or telephone connection, the complex idea didn’t work. The quality of mathematics and physics teaching dropped. Teaching had to be taken over by teachers without the necessary qualifications. Most 1,300 teachers laid off had to be lured back into the schools. And Mongolia had to repay the money borrowed for this foolish idea for many years.
In the early 2000s, I was privileged to coordinate Danish technical assistance to Nepal’s education sector. I witnessed a group of ‘international experts’, most of whom had never set foot in the country before, spend a day and a half in the field, actually only a few hours in conversation with a district education officer, and then spend a Saturday in their five-star hotel in Kathmandu drafting 17 pages of recommendations to the Nepalese government.
A few years ago, I was asked if I would like to be an “international expert” on developing teacher education in Mongolia. The request came from a good old acquaintance, a consultancy firm in England, with whom I had previously worked on Danida assignments. With my long-standing collaboration with good colleagues in Mongolia behind me, I said yes. However, the commitment only lasted until the job description landed in my inbox.
I was given three months to review all curricula and teaching materials for teacher training programs in Mongolia and all curricula and materials applicable to Mongolian schools, grades 1-10. Next, I had to formulate a recommendation for reforming Mongolia’s teacher education programs. I neither speak nor read Mongolian. But as an international expert, I could handle the task, was the attitude.
I asked what people would think about a task in the opposite direction. Could you imagine someone from Mongolia with qualifications like mine, who didn’t speak or read English, doing a similar job for the UK Department for Education? I haven’t heard from them since.
Fortunately, there are many examples of international experts listening to and genuinely incorporating local knowledge and experience. I will provide examples of this in the following article.
A parenthesis
As I write this article, news from Altinget/Development lands in my inbox. Here, you can read that the Danish government will increase the number of sector advisors placed in countries in the Global South to 75 in the 2025 Finance Act. This is an increase of 13 people compared to 2024 and a fourfold increase since 2016.
Sector advisors will primarily promote framework conditions for private sector cooperation between companies in Denmark and the countries where the sector advisor is stationed. The focus is often on green solutions, where Danish expertise should be in demand.
The article in Altinget refers to an evaluation of the Danish cooperation with authorities. In the evaluation summary, among other observations, it is stated that the broad and long-term effect of the Danish support appears relatively modest, and that the support has not always been sufficiently based on thorough country analyses and well enough adapted to the specific context.
According to Altinget, Anne Mette Kjær, chairperson of the Development Policy Council and professor at Aarhus University, calls for “It (the work of sector advisors, etc.) must be based on demand from the countries themselves, so that aid is targeted to the specific needs (my translation)”.
It is hoped that mastering locally-led development will be required for many new sector advisors, aka international experts.
Mechanical transfer of knowledge
The ‘expert’ concept in development cooperation also contains an age-old assumption about how knowledge and skills are developed, and thus also how to build capacity and competencies.
In short and somewhat caricatured form, the assumption is that you take an expert and give him/her the task of transferring his/her knowledge to someone you think needs to know something of what the expert knows. This is typically done as a workshop or seminar, or the expert writes a manual or guide. And voila, the task is solved. Knowledge is transferred, and if the recipients of the expert’s knowledge have yet to understand or apply everything they have heard and read, well, that’s their fault.
The 2003 UNDP report Capacity Development – New Solutions to Old Problems takes a critical look at this practice:
“Technical cooperation has long been predicated on this kind of transfer, with the adviser analysing the knowledge gap and prescribing solutions that might enable counterparts to improve their performance. The underlying premise is that poorer countries can simply adopt a template that has been refined over time in the richer countries. No need to reinvent the wheel.
To be sure, most people have acknowledged that this is at least partly wrong— that there have been inevitable misalignments and poor fits, and that there is a need for some local adaptations. What has not been appreciated, however, is just how catastrophically wrong the entire approach has been. The process really needs to be turned inside out, with the first priority being encouragement for recipients to initiate the process. This starts from a deep understanding of local knowledge and practice—
assessing the capabilities and potential of individuals, institutions and the society as a whole, and working out ways to build on these incrementally. The process is also likely to be, in the broadest sense, a political one—appreciating the different interests involved and anticipating how conflicts might be resolved”.(UNDP report p. 13 – link to report here)
From a CICED perspective, we are back to our opening rant to all international collaborations: We are not here to tell you what to do. You are the experts. Hopefully, we know something, and hopefully, we have some experience and ideas that you can use.
What is this locally-led development?
The criticism of the we-know-best attitude has, as mentioned, been known for decades and has been directed at development (cooperation) work in general. However, it is within the humanitarian field and climate adaptation work that community-led development has really taken off in the last decade or so.
Based on materials from our umbrella organization CISU , and reading documents on the subject from several other organizations, I venture this definition:
Community-led development describes a process where local actors-including individuals, communities, organizations, businesses and governments-determine their own priorities, develop solutions and lead the implementation of those solutions. The basic principle is to transfer decision-making power, resources and ownership to local stakeholders.
Some essential characteristics of community-led development include:
- Local stakeholders have a say in the formulation of development priorities and challenges.
- Local stakeholders create projects/programs and solutions.
- Local entities oversee implementation and have control over resources.
- Local partners are accountable for results and promote learning.
The big push towards practising community-led development came in 2014 with the adoption of The Core Humanitarian Standards that target humanitarian work. This was followed by several other international commemorations supporting community-led development and Shift the Power , which are too extensive to go into here. For interested readers, I recommend looking at, for example, partos.nl. Partos is a platform for knowledge and competence development for over 100 Dutch development organizations, similar to CISU.
Now, we’ve been presented with the background to all this talk about locally-led development. And we’ve come up with a definition that most people agree on. And then the rest should be straightforward! Unfortunately, it’s not.
There are serious dilemmas, obstacles, and concerns – some technical, financial, and some political. For example: Who are the locals? Whose power, whose local knowledge is valid? The following article addresses these challenges while examining how CICED has concretely worked with locally-led development.
