International Development and Local Faith Actors

Ideological and Cultural Encounters

Kathryn Kraft, Olivia J. Wilkinson, Kathryn Kraft, Olivia J. Wilkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000053272
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book explores the interplay and dialogue between faith communities and the humanitarian-development community. Faith and religion are key influencers of thought and practice in many communities around the world and development practitioners would not be able to change behaviours for improved health and social relations without the understanding and influence of those with authority in communities, such as religious leaders. Equally, religious leaders feel responsibilities to their communities, but do not necessarily have the technical knowledge and resources at hand to provide the information or services needed to promote the well-being of all in their scope of influence. The book demonstrates that partnerships between humanitarian-development practitioners and religious communities can be mutually beneficial exchanges, but that there are also frequently pitfalls along the way and opportunities for lessons to be learned by each party.

Delving into how humanitarians and faith communities engage with one another, the book focuses on building knowledge about how they interact as peers with different yet complementary roles in community development. The authors draw on the Channels of Hope methodology, a tool which seeks to engage faith leaders in addressing social norms and enact social change, as well as other related research in the sector to demonstrate the many ways in which humanitarian and development policy makers and practitioners could achieve more systematic engagement with faith groups. This book is an important contribution to the growing body of literature on faith and development, and will be useful both to researchers, and to practitioners working with faith communities.

1 Identifying the encounters between local faith communities and international development actors

Olivia J. Wilkinson and Kathryn Kraft

In 2017, two international faith-based humanitarian and development organisations, World Vision and Islamic Relief, began a partnership in Lebanon to train religious leaders in child protection principles using a scripture-based curriculum called Channels of Hope. The curriculum contained content from both Christian and Muslim holy books, as well as general international safeguarding principles, and the workshop was designed to create a space in which religious leaders could wrestle with their beliefs regarding protection of children. The initial training brought together influential religious leaders from across Lebanon, representing several of the country’s different religious sects. Islamic Relief invited Muslim leaders, whereas World Vision invited Christian leaders. During the workshop, the faith leaders began to dialogue about the similarities and differences between the teachings of different traditions. They identified shared values regarding the importance of caring for children while debating areas in which they did not see eye to eye. Both World Vision and Islamic Relief encouraged the faith leaders to speak frankly about the distinctiveness of each participant’s tradition while working towards a shared commitment to caring for children. After this workshop, faith leaders began to work together, across religious lines, to promote some initiatives for child protection in Lebanon.

This is one story of many which have prompted the development of this volume. This story from Lebanon presents, on the surface, a fascinating success story about the ways in which religious leaders have been mobilised by international humanitarians, to promote an agenda for humanity, which is shaped around a set of norms about child protection and safeguarding. However, it also raises a series of questions about how different religious traditions engage with these values and how local faith actors (LFAs) have their own agency in identifying the key best practices and principles which are true to their own beliefs. A safe space was created in the Channels of Hope workshop to debate and challenge the content being presented, but the very fact that international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) convened the workshop already points to potential power dynamics in this encounter-of-values. The very identification of religious leaders as key community influencers, and the selection of religious leaders who attended, is based on a set of assumptions that are based on limited evidence and merit further exploration.

Indeed, international development practitioners bring a certain set of values and priorities to their community work, for example in terms of health practices and avoidance of what are often referred to, often unhelpfully as highlighted in the chapter by le Roux and Bartelink, as “harmful traditional practices.” Faith and religion are key influencers of thought and practice in many communities around the world, and development practitioners can struggle to change behaviours for improved health and social relations. The understanding and influence of those with authority in communities, such as religious leaders, helps them promote change. Equally, religious leaders feel responsibilities to their communities, but do not necessarily have the technical knowledge and resources at hand to provide the information or services needed to promote the well-being of all in their scope of influence. Recognising the opportunities of working with religious leaders and other types of faith actors, many development actors, particularly international faith-based organisations (FBOs) that naturally find partnerships within their own or similar denominational local and national organisations, have developed methodologies for “mobilising” faith actors towards achieving development outcomes. This mobilisation takes various forms, many of which are discussed in this volume, with the fundamental dynamic of international actors working with local and national actors around leveraging the social and spiritual capitals of faith communities for development outcomes. Partnerships between humanitarian-development practitioners and faith actors can be mutually beneficial exchanges, but there are frequently pitfalls along the way and opportunities for lessons to be learned by each party. Although mobilisation has been happening for decades, the evidence can be largely anecdotal, with only very few examples that evaluate impact and effectiveness, and with almost no research comparisons of mobilisation methodologies across different organisations.

A few convenings have aimed to bring different development organisations that mobilise faith actors together over the past few years to discuss opportunities and challenges, and to propose ways forward for research in this area. In 2016, the Joint Learning Initiative for Faith and Local Communities (JLI) convened academics and practitioners to discuss recent results on research around mobilisation methods. Then, in 2018, World Vision convened a research workshop focussing on the Channels of Hope methodology, which also invited contributions exploring the experiences other organisations’ mobilisation methods. The workshop sought to explore the interplay and dialogue between faith actors and the humanitarian-development community in a discussion of learning from practice-based knowledge and research. At this workshop, we discussed the need for this book, noting that the theme of “encounters” was particularly resonant within discussions at the session: how international development and humanitarian practitioners seek to engage and mobilise (i.e. encounter) LFAs, whereas those LFAs have their own priorities and ways of communicating about social issues (that stand on their own) within their own reasons and ways of “encountering” international actors.

This volume builds on that learning by exploring different perspectives on how humanitarian and development practitioners and faith actors engage with one another, with a focus on building knowledge about how they interact as peers with different yet complementary roles in community development. Whereas encounters with religious beliefs, practices, and communities are commonplace in many humanitarian and development programmes, many of these interactions are ad hoc. There are still many ways in which humanitarian and development policy makers and practitioners have not thought through the ways in which more systematic engagement with faith groups could be achieved, from a standpoint of mutual respect. The story from World Vision and Islamic Relief at the beginning of this section is but one attempt at bringing the international development and local faith spheres into dialogue with one another, with an increasing number of international organisations beginning to see the potential of such an approach. With the potential for a proliferation of mobilisation methods, particularly in an age of humanitarian localisation and questions about how to improve people-centred development, there is a need to critically reflect on what mobilisation methods have achieved so far.

The parameters of “encounters”

In this volume, we see international humanitarian and development actors as one part of the equation. The core value that the humanitarian sector and development workers have in common is a commitment to humanity and to promoting the well-being of human beings. Whereas all of the world’s religious traditions acknowledge and promote the value of humanity, they also may see a divine power as even more deserving of their loyalty. This conception in particular makes the encounter between humanitarians and religious communities thought-provoking: whereas both work for the good of humanity, religious actors may also work in service of their higher power. The divide between secular- and faith-based perspectives in humanitarian and development work has been much debated lately (Ager and Ager 2011; Feener and Fountain 2018; Tomalin 2013; Wilkinson 2018), with the argument that a secular paradigm functions within the international humanitarian and development sectors that serves to marginalise religious beliefs and practices. To this extent, we understand in this book that international FBOs are also influenced by this secular paradigm and may alter their programming to fit in with international secular standards (Lynch 2011), even when working with LFA counterparts.

Within this group of international development actors, this book particularly considers international FBOs partnering with local and national faith actors. There has been more work to define FBOs, with various definitions citing their organisational mission and vision, funding flows, hiring practices, and ties to religious affiliations as key defining features (Thaut 2009), as well as their positioning in relation to other actors and methods of working (Petersen 2010). Overall, it is not helpful to see a divide between faith-based and secular actors in a strictly binary way (Fountain, Bush, and Feener 2015; Tomalin 2013; Wilson 2014) but understand that there is a continuum, and the same actor can look different between their operations in the field and ways of working in headquarters. Nevertheless, we take as a basic definition for the majority of development actors described in the following chapters that an international FBO has its headquarters in a country outside its main operations and that it has a faith affiliation in its main organisational identity.

This brings up the discrepancies of power imbalances in the encounters we are studying: namely, that Global North and Global South divides remain pervasive in these mobilisation relationships. As has been pointed out by recent scholarship (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Daley 2019), humanitarian and development actors still operate around North and South divides related to the way financing and decision-making structures flow and the strongholds of power in humanitarian and development fields remaining in the Global North, despite efforts towards localisation in humanitarian action (Wall and Hedlund 2016) and the decolonisation of development (Mpofu and Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2019). These analyses of power and decolonisation have also been specifically applied to the possibilities of various liberation theologies in FBOs (Bowers du Toit 2018), with faith actors from the Global South reacting to power imbalances and looking to theology for answers. As such, LFAs are those headquartered and operating within the Global South, within the histories of colonialism, power, and influence, but there is also south-south collaboration. We use the term “local” to acknowledge that these are organisations working in their country of origin and largely not outside their country’s borders (while recognising cross-border work in response to displacement) but also acknowledge the vast variety of national to grassroots levels this terms covers, as well as the euphemistic way that “local” has been used to disparage organisations from the Global South. We mostly use the term “actors” (rather than “communities”) to demonstrate that there are, in fact, a range of groupings that can be involved in humanitarian and development-type work, including (adapted from El Nakib and Ager 2015):

• “National registered faith-based organisations, commonly development arms of religious traditions, with headquarters in the national capital
• More locally and area-based faith-based organisations, similar to other grassroots civil society organisations, often but not always registered with the relevant authorities
• Religious leaders, across various levels, from those in high level positions nationally, to those working at village-level
• Committees and groupings within faith communities, with varying levels of formality and structure, including zakat committees, and youth and women’s groups
• Faith communities, such as congregations.”

These LFAs are in interaction and encountering international FBOs in a variety of ways. The existence of transnational religious networks demonstrates that the term “local” is often too reductive, as these faith actors are in connection with other “local” congregations around the world, working through relationships connected to not only funding but also other elements of spiritual, personal connection (Ngo 2018). A recent report from South Sudan showed that Christian LFAs mostly rely on funding from Christian international FBOs, demonstrating not only the strength but possibly also the insularity of these networks (Wilkinson, de Wolf, and Alier 2019).

One debate that has opened up is the cultural proximity of some organisations with local actors over others. At its most basic level, this can be summarised as the assumption that because an international FBO is from the same religious traditions as an LFC they will have a cultural proximity that will make it easier for the FBO to operate in certain areas and with certain LFCs and vice versa so that non-culturally aligned organisations may find it harder to operate in certain areas. Whereas denominational affiliations assist many international and local faith partnerships (e.g. the relationships that form the Caritas Internationalis network), recent scholarship has also ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• 1 Identifying the encounters between local faith communities and international development actors
• Section 1 Conceptualising development in the space between faith and secular approaches
• Section 2 Practice-based knowledge on partnerships between INGOs and local faith communities
• Section 3 Parallel systems: how development actors do and do not engage with each other
• Section 4 Deep engagement in complex issues
• Index