When after the Struggles the Experts Come: Sociology of a “Worldwide Parliamentary Development Community of Practice”

In “The Democracy makers”, N. Guilhot (2005) shows how during the cold war, the US foreign policy gave birth to a large number of NGOs working at “democratization”: supporting political parties, training activists for struggles, and promoting human rights all over the world. Since the 90’s, new perspectives have emerged, such as a focus on parliaments: strengthening secretariats, supporting oversight mechanisms, training members of parliaments, etc. A “worldwide parliamentary development community of practice” now gathers experts from NGOs and international organizations (such as the United Nations Development Program and the World Bank), as well as scientists. Contrary to Guilhot’s “democracy makers”, who were seen by governments mainly as political activists, “Parliamentary development” seems to follow different institutionalization and legitimization processes.

This presentation will explore how these experts embody the “community of practice”, with a focus on division of labor. We will see how these “knowledge workers”, coming frequently from parliaments of “developed” countries (both members and staff), build their expertise mainly from the understanding of informal mechanisms inside parliaments. With the UNDP example, we will show how the transformations of funding, as well as the practices for managing human resources and expertise in the UN system (rosters, contracts, etc.) lead to an international market of expertise and provides both constraints and support to the institutionalization of a professional group, who is trying to globalize knowledge on political systems.

This work is part of an ongoing PhD research in political science, undertaken as a “global investigation in social sciences” (Siméant, 2015), and is based on field researches (interviews, observations, archives) among international actors in Egypt and Tunisia, at UNDP headquarters, and currently in the UNDP team for Parliamentary development in Tunisia. The main case study of this research is the parliamentary strengthening policy implemented in Tunisia after the “revolution” in 2011.