Following from my last post in the series: knowledge is power, and it’s not all valued equally. One of our sector’s main tensions is the value placed on technical expertise—specialised knowledge in education, advocacy, and PMEL—and lived experience, the deep insights gained through direct engagement with the contexts and challenges that our work aims to address.

This relationship has profound implications for how power is distributed within organisations and across regions. Understanding this dynamic is essential to build and sustain equitable partnerships, support local leadership, and to use this partnership approach to help us shift power.

Technical Expertise

Technical expertise often carries significant weight, with professionals with specialised skills in fields like policy analysis, advocacy, or technology assumed as the leaders for projects. Their knowledge is given value because of degrees or years of working experience. All of this makes their contributions essential to solving complex, systemic problems, and their insights are central to organisational strategies and funding decisions.

In principle there’s nothing wrong with this of course. But we need to think about where these technical experts come from, what backgrounds they represent, and the assumptions made about qualifications over other types of knowledge, especially for projects that are not in these experts’ contexts. Such experts, and for my part I am also in this category, may be external consultants or specialists brought in to advise on initiatives, or they may hold key roles within international or national organisations. Their/our influence often extends across multiple organisations and regions, especially when their expertise is linked to the ability to unlock financial resources or provide strategic direction. It is assumed that our knowledge carries weight and while that may be true, the problem is in how other forms of knowledge and expertise are automatically positioned as serving, or at least less valuable.

There’s an implicit power dynamic that overshadows local perspectives and lived experiences. Experts are often seen as neutral authorities. Their/our knowledge presumed to be objective and universally applicable. Neither of which is rarely true – all humans have their biases and there is no neutrality in our work. This dynamic can inadvertently marginalise the insights of those with lived experience—people who are intimately familiar with the local issues but may not have the same formal credentials.

Lived Experience

Lived experience is the social, cultural, political, and economic knowledge we all have about the places where we live and come from, those that we belong to. We understand the norms and values and know firsthand ‘how things are done’. Think about a group of people you belong to – based on age group, language, culture, whatever. That’s your lived experience. Imagine if someone outside their group, often with multiple university degrees, were automatically assumed to be an expert on something that you know in your bones.

Lived experience also means deep knowledge of your landscape, including technical expertise like sustainable land conservation or agricultural practices. This is the easiest example to demonstrate here since, in climate change, a lot of the invaluable technical expertise comes from those with lived experience as well.

Naturally, there’s an overlap between lived experience and technical expertise – we all have the former.

In advocacy, someone with lived experience may belong to a group fighting for their rights, as well as being a trained advocate or lawyer. They may also be a community leader or community organiser, with lived experience in that role and the leadership that comes with it.

However, think about the groups that form the political or knowledge elite where you are, and the credentials they have. Think about those who are less valued purely because of their lack of these credentials – that gives you the distinction. Think of the many jobs that ask for a Master’s degree or 5-7 years of equivalent experience (never mind that many Master’s courses take a year not 7), and those that offer no equivalent amount of work experience. This demonstrates our bias towards formal qualifications over work or lived experience.   

Technical Expertise Versus Lived Experience

Our work often prioritises formal education, certifications, and technical knowledge when hiring or seeking consultants, particularly for roles that involve decision-making or strategic planning. Lived experience, on the other hand, is frequently relegated to a secondary role, seen as anecdotal or supplementary rather than central to the work.

This imbalance can have significant consequences:

When technical expertise is valued above lived experience, local voices can be sidelined, particularly in regional and grassroots initiatives. For example, a technical expert from outside a community might design a development program based on data models without fully understanding the cultural or social context. This can lead to solutions that are misaligned with local needs or fail to gain community support.

The prioritisation of technical knowledge can reinforce existing power imbalances, such as between INGOs and smaller NGOs. Experts from privileged backgrounds often have easier access to technical education and networks, including funds for professional development, which give them disproportionate influence over decision-making, even in regions they may know little about firsthand.

When lived experience is undervalued, communities may feel disempowered. They may be treated as recipients of aid or intervention rather than as co-creators of solutions. This dynamic can undermine our fundamental work, which should be for the sustainable support of our communities according to their needs. That includes strengthening local leadership and ownership.

To address these challenges, we need to rethink how we values different forms of knowledge. Both technical expertise and lived experience have unique and complementary strengths – and an equitable approach to power dynamics requires valuing them equally.

We can start by centring the voices of those with lived experience in decision-making processes – strategies, programs, PMEL, and finances. This might involve giving community members a formal role in leadership or advisory capacities or co-creating participatory frameworks that prioritise local input when designing interventions.

Instead of viewing technical experts as the primary drivers of change, they should be seen as resources that support local leadership. This requires a shift in mindset—from “experts coming in to solve problems” to “experts coming in to support communities in solving their own problems.” In this model, technical expertise is used to amplify the work that communities are already doing rather than imposing external solutions.

It’s important to recognise that technical expertise is not monolithic. The sector should invest in diversifying the pool of experts by elevating local and regional technical professionals who understand the cultural and social nuances of their communities. Supporting education and professional development for underrepresented groups can help ensure that technical expertise is locally rooted.

One reason technical expertise is often prioritised is that it can be easily quantified and measured—through degrees, certifications, or output data. Lived experience, on the other hand, can be more difficult to evaluate. So what’s needed are more inclusive metrics that capture the value of lived experience, such as community engagement, trust-building, and long-term impact on local ecosystems.

Our work should invest in skill building for both technical skills and lived experience. This might involve offering training and resources to help community leaders develop technical skills while also providing opportunities for technical experts to engage in immersive learning experiences that deepen their understanding of local contexts and lived realities.