To successfully navigate everyday leadership, we need a way of understanding and seeing it in action – this is where the real politics of development happens but often remains hidden. Drawing on DLP research, this synthesis paper reveals the day-to-day leadership practices from a variety of Indo-Pacific contexts.
We unpack the inner workings of everyday leadership using navigational waypoints (materials, relationships and ideas) and ask who can make change happen, why and how. Through the synthesis, we examine what this means for how we define and conceive ‘leadership’ in development, how we study, experience and see it – and how communities, governments and other external actors can navigate its complexity without undermining its productive potential.
To this end, we provide a set of guiding questions aimed to uncover the often hidden aspects of everyday leadership that can be used alongside other programmatic design, planning and monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) tools.
This paper is the culmination of several collaborative research projects of the Developmental Leadership Program (2019 – 2023).
