Meritocracy, Inequality, and the Erosion of Social Solidarity
Beyond the structural contradictions of equal opportunity, meritocracy poses a deeper threat to the social fabric of developing nations: it can corrode the sense of shared fate and mutual obligation that holds societies together. This is the critique that the philosopher Michael Sandel has made most forcefully in the developed world context, but it applies with even greater intensity in developing countries where social solidarity is often the primary buffer against destitution.
When meritocracy becomes the dominant ideology of a society, it carries an implicit moral narrative: those who succeed have earned their success, and those who fail have earned their failure. In wealthy societies with extensive social safety nets, this narrative is damaging but survivable. In developing countries where poverty can mean genuine destitution, hunger, and preventable death, the narrative becomes actively harmful. A government that grounds its legitimacy in meritocratic achievement may find itself psychologically and politically disinclined to redistribute resources, invest in universal public services, or protect those who have not succeeded within the meritocratic system — because the system’s logic suggests those people have only themselves to blame.
In ethnically or regionally diverse developing nations — which is to say, most of them — meritocracy can also become a vehicle for group domination. If one ethnic or regional group happens to have better access to educational resources due to historical circumstance, colonial investment patterns, or geographic advantage, a meritocratic system will systematically favor members of that group in government positions. The resulting concentration of state power in the hands of a particular community inflames ethnic resentment, undermines national unity, and can contribute to the political instability and even violent conflict that has plagued countries across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Nigeria, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia all offer cautionary tales of how seemingly neutral meritocratic systems can become perceived as instruments of ethnic domination.
The Technocratic Trap: Governance Without Democratic Accountability
A further danger of meritocracy as a governing philosophy in developing countries is what might be called the technocratic trap. The logic of meritocracy, taken to its conclusion, suggests that governance should be entrusted to experts — those who know best, who have the credentials and analytical capacity to make correct decisions. This logic has a powerful appeal in contexts where governments face immense technical challenges and where political systems are often corrupted by populism, clientelism, or ethnic patronage.
But technocratic governance systematically devalues democratic participation and local knowledge. When economic policy is delegated to internationally trained economists who are insulated from political pressure, those economists may make choices that are efficient from a macroeconomic perspective but deeply damaging to the lived experience of ordinary citizens. The structural adjustment programs imposed across sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America by technocratic institutions in the 1980s and 1990s are a stark illustration of this danger. Designed by some of the most credentialed economists in the world, they produced unemployment, the gutting of public services, and social crises that set back development in many countries by decades.
There is a fundamental difference between a government that recruits competent people and a government that treats competence as a substitute for democratic legitimacy. The former is a genuine virtue; the latter is a form of elitism dressed in the language of efficiency. A developing country government whose fundamental purpose is to ensure that its people are free, equal, and prosperous must ultimately answer to those people — not to the logic of examination scores and professional credentials alone.
Toward a More Adequate Framework: Beyond Meritocracy
None of this is to argue that competence is irrelevant to governance or that developing countries should abandon all efforts to recruit capable people into public service. The argument is rather that meritocracy, as a comprehensive governing philosophy, is inadequate to the purposes of government in the developing world — and that a richer framework is needed.
Such a framework would begin by insisting on genuine equality of opportunity as a precondition of meritocratic selection rather than an afterthought. This means massive, sustained public investment in universal education, healthcare, and social services — not because these investments are the most efficient use of resources in a narrow technocratic sense, but because they are preconditions for a society in which selection on the basis of merit can actually mean something fair. Until a child in a rural village has a comparable educational foundation to a child in an elite urban school, selecting between them on the basis of examination performance is not meritocracy; it is the reproduction of advantage under a different name.
A more adequate framework would also expand its conception of merit to include the kinds of knowledge and capability that formal educational systems systematically undervalue. Community leadership, facility in indigenous languages and knowledge systems, deep understanding of local economic and social dynamics, the capacity to build trust across divided communities — these are genuine and important forms of human excellence that developing country governments urgently need. Broadening the definition of merit in government recruitment is not a concession to mediocrity; it is a recognition that the country’s most pressing governance challenges require the full range of its human resources.
Finally, such a framework would ground the purpose of government not in the reward of achievement but in the guarantee of dignity. John Rawls argued that a just society is one whose institutions are designed to be fair to the least advantaged members — not one that maximizes opportunity for those at the top. Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum developed the capabilities approach, which argues that governments should be evaluated by whether they expand the real freedoms of all their citizens to live lives they have reason to value. These frameworks do not exclude competence; they situate it within a larger moral purpose. Government exists not to reward the meritorious but to create conditions under which all human beings can flourish.
Conclusion
Meritocracy is not a lie. The impulse behind it — that people should be judged by what they can do and what they contribute rather than by who their parents are — reflects a genuine moral intuition about fairness and human dignity. For developing countries seeking to build effective, corruption-resistant institutions, the meritocratic reform of public service recruitment is a real improvement over the patronage systems it replaces.
But meritocracy as a comprehensive governing philosophy — as the primary answer to questions of justice, distribution, and the purpose of public institutions — is not adequate to the challenges facing developing nations. It mistakes equal opportunity for something that exists before it has been created. It mistakes the measurement of narrow credentialed achievement for the full breadth of human capability. It mistakes the legitimacy of expertise for the legitimacy of democratic self-governance. And perhaps most dangerously, it provides ideological cover for inequality by telling those at the bottom of deeply unequal societies that their position is the result of their own insufficient effort or ability.
The fundamental purpose of government — in the developing world as everywhere — is to ensure that its people are free, equal, and able to prosper together. Meritocracy, uncorrected and unconstrained, serves some of that purpose some of the time for some of the people. A government that is genuinely committed to freedom, equality, and shared prosperity needs a richer, more demanding, and more honest account of what justice requires. FINISH
