The Personal and the Professional in Aid Work

Anne-Meike Fechter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780415705615
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134909186
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book considers how the personal and the professional dimensions are related, and how they matter for aid work. The contributions to this edited volume are based on the assumption that all actors are relevant in development, including national and international aid workers. A key question which the book explores is why the personal so often remains un-acknowledged in development studies, even though its salience for aid workers is well-documented. One possible reason is an implicit narrative of aid work as altruistic and self-sacrificing, which renders it inappropriate to devote much attention to the experiences of development professionals themselves. In order to redress this, this book critically considers the kind of difference they make, and aims to understand how they respond to the challenges of their work. The book explores their efficacy as human beings and employees with individual subjectivities, social and cultural beliefs and practices, and documents how these shape their involvement in development processes.

This book was published a sa special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Introduction

The Personal and the Professional: Aid workers’ relationships and values in the development process

ANNE-MEIKE FECHTER

ABSTRACT This introduction, and the special issue as a whole, consider how the personal and the professional are interrelated, and how they matter for aid work. Taking up Chambers’ call for the ‘primacy of the personal’, this paper explores why the personal often remains un-acknowledged in development studies, even though its salience for aid workers is well-documented, for example, in the growing popularity of their blogs and memoirs. One possible reason for this is an implicit narrative of aid work as altruistic and sometimes self-sacrificing, which renders it inappropriate to devote much attention to the experiences and challenges of aid workers themselves. As the contributions in this volume demonstrate, however, their personal relationships and values significantly shape perspectives and practices of aid work. They therefore need to be taken into account in order to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of development processes.

The question of the relation between the personal and the professional dimension in aid work is not new. Academics and practitioners have commented on the relative lack of attention directed at the personal in development studies. Chambers finds that ‘the neglect of the personal dimension in development at first sight seems bizarre’,¹ whereas he proposes, in the context of participatory rural appraisal, the ‘primacy of the personal’.² Much of development research has tended to focus on institutions rather than individuals, although an incipient emphasis on personal change and agency may be emerging.³ The situation is remarkable insofar as those involved in aid work are acutely aware of the relevance of the personal, while ‘formal development discourses and institutions tend to be anxious, silent, or even hostile on the subject’.⁴ The contributions in this special issue aim to investigate the personal dimension and its relations with the professional, and to explore their potential relevance for aid work. This introduction will outline how the personal has been conceptualised in existing literature, and identify possible reasons why these approaches have remained underused. I suggest that this situation contrasts with the salience of the personal for aid workers, which becomes evident, for example, in the burgeoning popularity of their blogs and memoirs. I argue that it is important to recognise the ways in which the personal and the professional are intertwined in aid work. Drawing on a diverse range of case examples, the contributions in this special issue aim to shed light on this, with particular regard to individuals’ relationships, their belief systems and values, and how they matter for practice.

The few instances in the literature which explicitly conceptualise the personal dimension share a set of basic premises. These hold, in the first place, that individuals are relevant as actors, and thus constitute significant objects of analysis in the development process. They also assume that aid workers’ personal beliefs and attitudes are implicated in, and impact on the outcomes of aid work. They are further underpinned by the view that recognising the relevance of the personal provides a more comprehensive understanding of how aid works, and can therefore help to improve practice. If individuals—aid workers as well as recipients—are seen as having agency in the development process, they can become points of intervention.

The first premise—that the agency of individuals matters—may seem commonsensical rather than contentious. It follows development actor theory, which proposes an actor-oriented analysis of development processes, recognising their perspectives and agency.⁵ This is nevertheless not reflected in much of the development studies literature, which has been mainly concerned with aid institutions and programmes, policy making and knowledge construction. One might interpret this as a structural bias, in both research and practice. Even though this situation may be changing, it does not mean that acknowledging agency is about to supplant the focus on structure. As Blackmore cautiously reckons, ‘the emphasis on agency therefore complements (rather than replaces) more structural approaches and recognises that both types of interventions are necessary for successful development’.⁶

One such approach has been formulated by Chambers within the paradigm of responsible well-being.⁷ The imperative to foreground the personal is based on the assumption of individuals’ agency, and embedded in the notion of responsible well-being. His call for the primacy of the personal cited above is premised on the view of individual actors as subjects of change. More specifically, he proposes devising a ‘pedagogy for the non-oppressed’,⁸ in order to change the attitudes and practices of those involved in the aid process. This applies to aid workers in particular, as he reasons that ‘the wealthier and more powerful people are, the greater the actual or potential impact of their actions or inactions, and so the greater the scope and need for their wellbeing to be responsible’.⁹ Because of the extent of their agency, and its potential impact on the lives of the poor, powerful actors have a particular responsibility to fulfil their obligations towards others. This is why an ethical code for development actors matters and why ‘one might have supposed then that trying to understand and change their perceptions, motivations and behaviours would have been at the center of development and development studies’.¹⁰ In order to achieve responsible well-being, the obligation to change rests in particular with powerful individuals. Effecting such changes, and implementing an ethics for the ‘non-oppressed’, would make a difference: if ‘all development professionals were tomorrow to become aware, committed, honest and courageous in serving and empowering the poorer … most field programmes would be transformed’.¹¹ The particular changes required include, ‘sensitivity to the power of language and to who controls it … an openness to listening … and an openness to self-criticism, including about one’s own lifestyle, and to learning how to be more while having less’.¹² While change on the level of the individual does not substitute the need for change in institutions, it remains important. As Gasper emphasises in an introduction to development ethics, ‘development as good change relies, [Chambers] argues, on individual persons and personal actions, in addition to and underlying the action of organisations and policies. The most fundamental ‘‘means’’ that should be imbued by a development ethic … are professionals’.¹³

The emphasis on professionals’ self is also the lynchpin of a related approach, namely Giri and Ufford’s notion of ‘care of the self’. They argue that, in order to make development a joint endeavour, care of the other needs to be complemented by care of the self. Considering development as a responsibility shared by aid-givers and recipients, they aim to ‘rethink development as an initiative in self-development on the part of both the subjects and objects of development, and ethics not only as an engagement in the care of the other but also as an engagement in care of the self’.¹⁴ However, while care of the other is understood as a matter of ethics, care of the self is defined, following Foucault, as a matter of an ‘aesthetic ethics’.¹⁵ Such an ethics is primarily concerned with the restraint of the self with regard to exerting power over others. In the development context this means avoiding unnecessary intervention in others’ lives. Such emphasis on selfrestraint appears to fall short, however, of Giri and Ufford’s proposal that aid practice should provide an opportunity for self-transformation of both aid recipients and workers.¹⁶ Arguably, both Chambers’ concept of responsible well-being, with its emphasis on the moral responsibility and personal change of individuals, and Giri and Ufford’s view that aid practice ought to include transformation of the aid worker self, do not seem to have triggered the kind of broad response from researchers, aid agencies or aid workers as they might have.¹⁷ There may be a number of reasons for this; one could be that the demand for aid workers’ personal transformation sits uneasily within key development paradigms, which are aimed at changing not oneself, but an Other. As international aid is fuelled by the imperative to change the lives of the poor, its narratives do not usually feature changes in aid workers themselves. It may be part of a deeper reluctance to consider aid workers’ selves, which I return to below.

The approaches mentioned above tend to be normative, that is, aimed at changing individual actors’ attitudes, partly on the basis of ethical codes. Others have adopted a more analytical stance, which frames the personal such that aid actors’ subjectivities and relationships need to be understood in order to make them operational for the aid process. While they all recognise the personal dimension as an important component of good aid delivery, the second kind of approach draws on analytical insights in order to improve practice. This places emphasis on the agency of individual development actors, but through taking it into account, rather than relying on personal change. Long suggests that, since the mindsets of practitioners and researchers are shaped by their own interpretations, ‘the trick of good development practice and ethnography alike is to learn how to turn such subjectivities to analytical advantage’. He notes that an actor-oriented approach is useful as it ‘helps us to determine the degree to which specific actors’ lifeworlds, organizing practices and cultural perceptions are relatively autonomous of or ‘‘colonized’’ by wider ideological, institutional and power frames’.¹⁸

In a similar vein the approaches adopted by the contributions in this special issue are analytical rather than normative. The aim of this collection is to respond to the call for the ‘primacy of the personal’, but rather than taking its relevance for granted, the articles explore if and how this might matter for development processes. Before returning to this issue in more depth, it is useful to consider why these approaches do not seem to have yet gained much traction or, more generally, why interest in the personal dimension within formal development discourse and policy has been relatively muted. Chambers suggests that ‘part of the neglect stems from academic culture with its anathema of evangelism, its value of objectivity, and its search for general rather than individual explanations’.¹⁹ In addition, he considers other possible reasons such as hypocrisy (as one might be held to the personal changes one is postulating); the lack of a psychological perspective on development, and a lack of capacity among trainers as potential facilitators of personal change. Ultimately, however, he remains unclear why the personal appears as the ‘Cinderella of development’.²⁰ Chambers may be right in pinpointing academia’s aversion to ‘evangelism’—in the sense of making value-based judgments and aiming to influence others—but this does not explain the relative scarcity of analytically oriented accounts.

As indicated above, one reason for the reluctance to focus on the personal is a belief that development is, or should be, essentially a selfless enterprise. It may thus be seen as unduly self-centred, perhaps even distasteful, to dwell on the trials and tribulations of aid practitioners, especially international (rather than local) ones. This position is expressed most emphatically in Vaux’s account, The Selfish Altruist. He argues that a precondition for good aid is the self-effacement of the aid worker, because ‘in order to understand the person in need … we need to obliterate our own self’. An altruistic attitude thus involves a ‘minimizing of the self’ and increasing awareness of the ‘other’.²¹ Such abandonment or obliteration of self in aid work is necessary so ‘aid workers can do their job without interference of personal distortions’.²²

While this might be an implicit and pervasive view, it is problematic insofar as it is apparently based on an understanding of aid which has altruistic, well-meaning individuals at its heart. As has been argued, however, good intentions are never enough (and can indeed be harmful). In this sense a fundamentally altruistic view of aid, which arguably underpins popular imaginations and the self-definitions of aid agencies and workers alike, with its moral imperative not to give undue attention to aid workers appears not just simplistic, but ultimately unprofessional. This is demonstrated by the fact that other professions whose members may at least be partly motivated by a ‘helping’ imperative, such as nursing, counselling or social work, have established academic debates as well as systems of practice which focus on the ‘helper’ in order to improve recruitment, reduce turnover, and generally enable sustainability of their profession. These include nurse mentoring, supervision of social workers, as well as therapy and supervision for counsellors and therapists. This is not considered inappropriately self-centred, but a rational measure which is integral to ensuring good work practice. A comparable response to the question of the personal in aid work would not be calls to obliterate or ignore the aid worker self, but attempts to understand its efficacy in the process, and account for it accordingly.²³

Recent debates on the professionalisation of relief and development work have not led to a greater acknowledgement of the role of the personal; in fact, they may have contributed to relegating ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. Introduction: The Personal and the Professional: Aid workers’ relationships and values in the development process
• 2. Fellow Travellers in Development
• 3. Befriending the Field: culture and friendships in development worlds
• 4. Aid Relations and Aid Legitimacy: mutual imaging of aid workers and recipients in Nepal
• 5. Professionalisation Trends and Inequality: experiences and practices in aid relationships
• 6. ‘Living Well’ while ‘Doing Good’? (Missing) debates on altruism and professionalism in aid work
• 7. ‘Struggling to Do the Right Thing’: challenges during international volunteering
• 8. Is the Non-unitary Subject a Plausible and Productive Way to Understand Development Bureaucrats?
• 9. A Moral Economy? Social interpretations of money in Aidland
• 10. Effective Aid: the poetics of some aid workers’ angles on how humanitarian aid ‘works’
• Index