Introduction: Development practice, power and public authority

Drawing upon research across multiple countries, the papers in this special issue explore how public authority dynamics affect development and humanitarian practices and processes. Some focus on places commonly labelled as in crisis or understood to be subject to multiple overlapping crises, where responses to epidemics, persistent conflict and migrations are in progress. Others examine how public authority dynamics affect the everyday governance of development in outwardly more stable contexts. The seven empirical papers are complimented by a conceptual framework for analysing how power permeates the foundations of public authority dynamics. Viewed together, they illuminate why exclusions, coercion and violence are often used by those claiming the legitimacy to govern, and how grasping what this may mean for well-intended interventions or reform efforts remains a challenge for practitioners. However, they also point towards a pressing need for outsiders to recognise their own roles in constructing and legitimising, sometimes harmful, forms of public authority in the places they work. And they suggest the first step is to confront a reluctance to acknowledge public authority dynamics in their official depictions of programmes' progress, learnings and impacts.