Opening Up the Black Box of Knowledge Production in International Development: An Intervention from a Practice-Theoretical Perspective

Abstract The increased emphasis on results and evidence in international development has made practices such as planning, monitoring, reporting, and evaluation more important. These practices depend on knowledge production, involving the systematic collection and analysis of data and information. As such, development practice follows a general trend in international politics where problems of global concern are increasingly subject to various forms of knowledge production by expert institutions. However, development research rarely treats knowledge production as a study object in itself. Consequently, this research note proposes a research agenda to open up the black box of knowledge production in international development. This research agenda mobilizes a burgeoning practice-theoretical literature, which international relations scholars have increasingly turned to in order to examine the practices of knowledge production that render problems and objects of global concern knowable and governable. I argue that practice-theoretical scholarship offers a conceptual vocabulary that allows for a systematic and critical examination of knowledge production in international development. Particularly, I contend that practice theory offers the analytical tools to: (1) identify the sites where knowledge production unfolds in international development, (2) analyze the mundane and routine practices of producing and communicating knowledge, and (3) investigate the political nature of knowledge production. This research agenda not only opens up the possibility to examine knowledge production in itself but also enables the deconstruction of its power-laden and colonial underpinnings.