Description
The majority of IR scholarship on global governance and objects of expertise has focused on institutions on global governance as well as elite politics within the states of the Global North. Against this backdrop I highlight an overlooked force in the constitution of objects of governance - subnational projects. Arguing that subnational projects need to be taken seriously in the literature on expertise and global governance, I contest diffusionist assumptions of knowledge (from the core of global institutions to Global South peripheries) within most accounts of global governance. I deploy Bayly’s relational sociology of knowledge to highlight that objects of governance emerged through a wide range of dizzying connections and relations between diverse political and intellectual projects articulated in multiple sites including subnational projects. I demonstrate this empirically by highlighting how the project of the Indian state Kerala’s developmental sub-nationalism was instrumental in the constitution of development as a governance object. I argue that a developmentalist egalitarianism was central to the ethos of Kerala’s subnationalism resulting in a project shaped by tensions associated with the coexistence subnational pride and anxieties of national belonging. These tensions led to multiple articulations of the Kerala model across time, which in turn were instrumental in the shaping of various objects of expertise associated with governance object of development ranging from the basic needs approach (in the 70s) to the capabilities approach (in the 90s) and decentralization (in the late 90s and 2000s) and even recent migration-based human-capital export models couched in neoliberal assumptions. While Kerala’s subnational project certainly was instrumental in propounding an order which contested the hegemonic neoliberal market fundamentalist orders, it also entrenched of a world-order where development was viewed in terms of lacking abilities of actors in developing countries as opposed marginalizing alternate imaginaries which politicised international institutions and interstate relations.
