Inside the Everyday Lives of Development Workers: The Challenges and Futures of Aidland

ISBN 10: 1565493230 / ISBN 13: 9781565493230

Published by Kumarian Press, 2011

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Inside the Everyday Lives of Development Workers: The Challenges and Futures of Aidland
• Publisher: Kumarian Press
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1565493230
• ISBN 13: 9781565493230
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Much and warranted attention is paid to the lives of aid recipients - their household lives, saving habits, gender relations, etc. It's held that a key to measuring the effectiveness of aid is contained in such details. Rarely, however, is the lens turned on the lives of aid workers themselves. Yet the seemingly impersonal network of agencies and donors that formulate and implement policy are composed of real people with complex motivations and experiences that might also provide important lessons about development's failures and successes. Hindman and Fechter break new ground by illuminating the social and cultural world of the aid agency, a world that is neglected in most discussions of aid policy. They examine how aid workers' moral beliefs interlink and conflict with their initial motivations, how they relate to aid beneficiaries, their local NGO counterparts, and other aid workers, their views on race and sexuality, the effect of transient lifestyles and insider language, and the security and family issues that come with choosing such a career. Ultimately, they arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of development processes that acknowledges a rich web of relationships at all levels of the system.

Review

This is a superb book, and should be read by a wide range of people, not least those thinking of working in the field. Largely put together as an edited collection of contributions by anthropologists, it marshals a range of views of the diverse and varied people who do the work required to turn tax-payers money, and NGO donations, into development interventions. In doing so, it raises some crucial questions: just what is the distinction between altruistic and selfish motives that so many think important? The evidence presented suggests that this distinction is important but usually muddled, as why people do what they do cannot easily be thought of in such dichotomous terms. A nice story is that of the person hiring people to work with the heavily disempowered, who had come to the conclusion that those who were in part selfishly motivated were better, as they gave the disempowered something with which to negotiate. Other chapters raise the issue of the value of personal relations to Ghanaians working, often in clearly useful ways: it is wrong for them to use such particular contacts? This starts to develop what is a powerful underlying theme in the book - the meaning of current trends to rationalise aid work, often treating personnel as sources of identifiable expertise, to be plugged in to particular tasks identified by senior levels in Aidland's hierarchies. There are useful discussions of the texture of aid work in Madagascar, or Mennonites and others, focussing, not on `development', but on how development work is done, how it is involved with the normal aspects of work and life, and how power asymmetries are apparently inherent in such relationships. An interesting discussion of the effects of contemporary Managerialism in Nepal shows how the `old hands' of the industry, used to linking community and expertise, have been pushed aside by contract workers, often better paid, and clearly far less aware of the contextual and `local' issues that other chapters report on, in all their tensions and confusions. Underpinning this, of course, and this could have been dealt with a greater length, is the dysfunctional element of these increasingly abstract ways of dealing with local realities, which, many chapters show, have their own dynamics to which development workers have responded in various ways. As would be expected of anthropologists, and this book is part of a growing and very useful literature, we learn much about local meanings, the variety of development workers, how they live, their perceptions and concerns, and how these interact with context.

The book is highly suitable as part of any development studies course. It is the sort of thing students should be told to read before the start of Semester 1. It poses major questions for the senior management of aid and other development organisations, for the evidence in it points squarely to the conclusion that use of current management doctrine that assumes much certainty and so use of `plug and play' expertise is very risky. It suggests that powerful conclusions from earlier studies are still valid: that realities vary too much for it to be wise to assume that development workers can be treated like engineers. Indeed, much of the `old expertise' removed from the stage by modern management methods can be understood, and the case studies show this, as an attempt to adapt to such variation. Development studies students, of course, now treat this as mainstream and strongly attack tendencies to `one size fits all' approaches. The sheer diversity and richness of the realities the book describe show how such assumptions will, at the end of the day, prove reckless.

Adam Fforde

Asia Institute, University of Melbourne
(Principal Fellow - honorary)

Centre for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University
(Professorial Fellow, part-time - economics)

School of Social Sciences, La Trobe University
(Professor of International Development - part-time)