How the elite capture critique is used to legitimise top-down control of development resources

‘Elite capture’ largely refers to local elites usurping the benefits of community development and decentralisation programs in the Global South. Development interventions can be understood in terms of political and normative struggles that determine resource flows and socially constructed notions of development. As Bourdieu predicts, development actors’ disposition toward elite capture frequently aligns with their position in these struggles: development researchers and practitioners identify elite capture as a central problem with bottom-up development approaches and use the elite capture critique to legitimise top-down control of project resources, while the participants of development projects see many of these alleged instances of elite capture as unproblematic. We employ Bourdieu’s notions of reflexivity and symbolic power to investigate the history and use of competing conceptualisations of elite capture. We examine the narrow framing of the elite capture critique, and we evaluate the critique’s relevance to the roles and capacities of local elites in West African villages. Finally, we understand elite capture in terms of the larger context of powerful actors throughout the aid chain capturing development resources. Our findings suggest that the elite capture critique is a form of symbolic power that legitimises arbitrary power relations between international development institutions and rural communities in the Global South.