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Record W4417221539 · doi:10.1080/09614524.2025.2598596

Reinstating the political in localisation

2025· article· en· W4417221539 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueDevelopment in Practice · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicUrban Planning and Governance
Canadian institutionsUniversité du Québec à Montréal
FundersFonds de Recherche du Québec-Société et Culture
KeywordsIdeologyPoliticsTransformative learningEliteConformityNeutralityDimension (graph theory)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The political dimension of localisation has been obfuscated by technocracy. The largest aid agencies’ technical and managerial solutions to localisation do not challenge existing hierarchies. Rather, they consolidate the dominant paradigm by conditioning endogenous organisations to adopt the standards and approaches of the humanitarian sector’s elite organisations. A belief in the neutrality of technical and managerial standards depoliticises the reform, downplaying power dynamics, social conflicts and ideological considerations that are also embedded in localisation. Drawing on fifty interviews with aid professionals, this article argues that the common practice of “capacity building” is a conformity inducing mechanism that is paradoxically opposed to the political ideal of localisation. It suggests that reinstating the “political” in localisation, by decentring and disrupting its knowledge hierarchies, can yield transformative potential.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.005
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.911
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.005
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.024
GPT teacher head0.360
Teacher spread0.336 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it