Towards a More Nuanced Theory of Elite Capture in Development Projects. The Importance of Context and Theories of Power
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Elite capture in development projects is problematic across a wide range of cultures, governance contexts and geographical locations. The dominant development discourse suggests that elite capture can be addressed using principles of good governance and participatory democracy. We critique the notion that this is sufficient to challenge practices of elite domination that detrimentally affect the outcome of development projects. Using a Foucauldian notion of power we suggest that power relationships are more complex than current conceptualisations of elite capture allow. We offer some definitions and suggest a common conceptual framework to unify the concept of elite capture across cultures. This conceptual framework is used to analyse data from 2 case studies in south western Zambia. We conclude that the dominant discourse ignores complex power relationships and uses a simplistic notion of political legitimacy that may enhance elite capture rather than prevent it. The concept of political legitimacy needs to be expanded to include traditional institutions that are not elected, while still applying principles of participation and accountability to the design of institutions.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it