ABSTRACT
Policies intended to guide supervisory practices in developing countries are usually generic adaptations of Western rhetoric, neither conceptually nor contextually designed to facilitate developing world realities. Here we discuss policies aimed at supporting the practice of graduate supervision in the developing world and highlight how these documents, for socio-historical reasons, tend towards brevity; focus on procedure; limit the human factor, and leave gaps where individuals are left to interpret things in their own way. Our goal is to contribute to graduate supervision scholarship by offering an insightful description to aid supervisors’ understanding of the development and utility of such documents. This insight is presented as a way of improving, or in the case of new research supervisors, informing supervisory practices.
