The day development dies

There is a certain kind of thinking prevailing among Western thinkers which sacrifices rich narratives for theory. Theory becomes a prison, limiting knowledge production to references to (largely Western) scholarship. However, theory is not inaccessible: theory is coherent, theory is liberating, theory is narrative, it is everyday. This post-colonist auto-ethnographic orality uses personal experiences as a theoretical tool for explaining that in development thinking the ‘experts’ are morally and ideologically distant from local people, knowledge, and places, and hence they are illegitimate representatives who should never be consulted in the first place.