ABSTRACT
Several scholars have argued that development experts often get local socioeconomic dynamics wrong while other scholars stress that the insights, knowledge, and perspectives of local stakeholders can make significant contributions to our understanding of development. These challenges invite us to ask: What is “development expertise”? What counts as legitimate expert knowledge and who can legitimately claim to be experts? This chapter offers a normative account of development expertise. Although extending expertise beyond the traditional development experts to include local stakeholders, this normative account aims to delimit legitimate forms of expertise based on Collins and Evans’s (2002, 2008) taxonomy of expert knowledge. This normative view is labeled third wave development expertise.
