Examining liberal rationality in development cooperation: are we prepared to address our own blind spots?

By Dr Nina Volles

Every so often, a piece of writing lands not just in our inboxes, but in our gut. It disrupts. It clarifies. And it refuses to be shelved as “an interesting read”. Anne Menzel’s paper, Situating liberal rationality: unacknowledged commitments in progressive knowledge production and policymaking, is one of those. Published as SCRIPTS Working Paper No. 23, it challenges the foundational assumptions of how we think, work, and justify what we do in international cooperation—particularly those of us who operate under the banner of being evidence-based, participatory, and progressive.

Menzel, a political scientist and ethnographer based at the University of Hamburg, has worked in post-conflict settings including Sierra Leone and Kenya. Her critique is not external. She speaks from inside the system—having navigated donor frameworks, academic standards, and policy constraints herself. This gives her argument both sharpness and credibility.

At the heart of the paper is a deceptively simple claim: that what is often framed as rational, objective policymaking is never truly neutral. It reflects a particular set of ideological commitments—typically liberal, technocratic, and steeped in historical power asymmetries. These commitments shape what counts as knowledge, whose voices are legitimised, and which solutions are deemed acceptable. The language of rationality, Menzel suggests, often masks deeper patterns of exclusion and control.

“Liberal rationality is a standpoint—if an unacknowledged one,” she writes.

For those of us engaged in education reform, green skills development, or institutional strategy, these are not abstract critiques. They reflect our daily tensions: between adaptability and accountability, between donor expectations and institutional ownership, between project logic and lived experience.

A field example: gender and energy

Earlier this year, we participated in a regional project aimed at enhancing gender responsiveness in energy access programming. As the project advanced, it became evident that the participatory strategy we implemented—deliberately structured to prioritise country-led engagement—was revealing needs that beyond the initial concept. Local actors articulated concerns, suggested alternative approaches, and sought more enduring engagement than anticipated. Bilingual delivery became required concurrently, and the scope of work broadened due to significant interest from an additional national team. We changed in real time by revising materials, conducting more briefings, and modifying facilitation methods to respect the process.

Approximately two-thirds into the project, we presented a concise and well-supported request for an extension of days and modest travel expenses, justified by clearly documented changes in scope, language requirements, and country engagement. The feedback was varied. The quality of our work and our responsiveness to country teams were clearly recognised. The extension was denied not just on procedural reasons but also because it was deemed improper to reassess the budget at that juncture, despite the completion of the job and the clarity of the rationale.

This experience exemplified Anne Menzel's description of a rationality that appears neutral and rule-based, yet is fundamentally designed to safeguard a specific order—one that values predictability over learning and control over responsiveness. The participatory method that was promoted ultimately produced requirements that the institution was either unable or unwilling to acknowledge. There was no failure in communication. It was an elucidation of the true limits of flexibility.

Bridging critique and practice

What distinguishes Menzel’s paper is not simply its theoretical contribution. It is the way she weaves together the genealogy of social science in colonial policymaking with contemporary peacebuilding interventions. She does not just point to knowledge hierarchies—she shows how they are reproduced through specific professional routines: what gets written into a report, what is considered a “valid” data source, and how donor-funded institutions classify what is policy-relevant.

This is not only a critique of donors. It is also about us—the intermediaries, facilitators, evaluators, and researchers who navigate these constraints and, at times, reproduce them. We may advocate for participatory processes, yet rely on frameworks that render local knowledge secondary. We may aim for inclusion, but fall back on deliverables that favour abstraction over experience.

And here is the challenge: this is not something we can solve through more capacity-building or improved templates. It requires a fundamental rethinking of the architecture of development cooperation. What are we really committed to? Whose questions are we answering? And are we prepared to shift from “fixing the system” to questioning the system’s very foundations?

Where we go from here

At Paeradigms, we have been grappling with these questions in a variety of contexts—from our work on sustainability strategies for public technical schools in Senegal, to our contributions to green skills curricula and organisational learning in North Africa. In many of these spaces, we have seen that what matters most—long-term trust, relational knowledge, and locally anchored solutions—is precisely what tends to get lost under pressure to perform, deliver, and report.

We are not interested in romanticising the local or rejecting all forms of structure. But we are increasingly convinced that if we are serious about transformation, we have to slow down and think carefully about the paradigms we are working within—not just the tools we are using.

This includes our role as knowledge producers. Menzel’s call is not to abandon research, but to re-situate it. Knowledge, she reminds us, is not innocent. It carries power. And if we do not interrogate that power—its origins, its language, its exclusions—we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies we claim to challenge.

An invitation to reflect

We do not have final answers. But we are committed to asking better questions—and doing so publicly, with humility. Menzel’s work gives us one such opportunity. And we invite others in our network—fellow practitioners, researchers, funders, and institutional leaders—to join us in reflecting on the questions her work raises.

📄 Read the full paper: Situating liberal rationality: unacknowledged commitments in progressive knowledge production and policymaking (SCRIPTS Working Paper No. 23) 

We would love to hear your thoughts. Where have you encountered similar tensions? What helped you navigate them? Where do you see opportunities to shift the frame, even slightly?

Let us keep this conversation active—not in theory, but in how we negotiate projects, write terms of reference, make funding decisions, and define what counts as progress.

We are listening.