Preface

This volume emerged from a desire to enhance the quality and frequency of dialogue between scholars and practitioners of legal pluralism. Too often, it seemed to our group within the World Bank legal department that scholars of legal pluralism were operating at a level several steps removed from the concrete challenges faced by practitioners in the field, whereas practitioners, for their part, too often encountered or reported on vexing instances of legal pluralism in particular contexts but failed to connect their work to, or engage substantively with, the broader literature on this issue. The reasons for this divide are in part a product of familiar differences pertaining to each group's respective training, professional identity, and career incentives and an abiding sense that the others' knowledge is only of tangential relevance to their immediate concerns. Even so, it's hard to argue that this separation generates optimal outcomes for either party or for newcomers to the field of legal pluralism seeking to discern how theory, research, and policy inform (or might inform) one another. The first motive behind this volume, then, was a pragmatic one: Namely, a conviction that both scholarship and practice are enhanced by regular, open, constructive interaction. The second and related motive was our conviction that scholars and practitioners could have a distinctively fruitful exchange, one transcending the diversity of views that one expects to encounter in more traditional professional gatherings. In our experience, “diversity” in such settings is still largely diversity of a particular kind (e.g., people coming at an issue from a range of well-known theoretical perspectives), with the corresponding debates largely centered on finer points of disagreement. These “family fights”, so to speak, may be no less heated, but they are the debates one expects and to which one is trained to respond; they take place within a familiar intellectual space, with the rules and roles of participants, for the most part, well rehearsed and well understood.