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From non- to for-profits, expats to locals, and the personal to the professional: Relocating the scholarly gaze in “Aidland”

Molly Sundberg
p. 203-218

Résumés

Dans cet article, je réfléchis à mes recherches anthropologiques sur les experts tanzaniens de l’aide étrangère et les professionnels du développement du secteur privé au Kenya et en Europe. Leurs cas servent d’exemples de trois changements possibles dans l’attention portée aux travailleurs humanitaires : des expatriés euro-américains aux professionnels du développement du Sud global ; des agences d’État et des ONG au domaine croissant de l’aide à but lucratif ; et du personnel au professionnel. Cet article explore les implications méthodologiques et éthiques de l’étude de ces « nouveaux » domaines de l’aide pour les nombreux spécialistes de l’aide, comme moi-même, qui ont des racines dans leurs zones « traditionnelles » (blanches, expatriées, basées sur des subventions).

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Introduction

1Scholarship on “Aidland” (Apthorpe, 2011), the world of aid workers, has grown in scope over the past decade. Edited volumes like Adventures in Aidland (Mosse, 2011) and Inside the Everyday Lives of Development Workers (Fechter and Hindman, 2011) have made “Aidland” a known analytical object and field of inquiry in anthropology, and in related disciplines engaged in studies of aid work. Research on Aidland has provided detailed insights into the past and present cultural worlds of aid bureaucracies, and into the ways in which they influence expert knowledge and policy in international development. At the same time, it has faced criticism for often overlooking the wider political context of aid and its material effects, the emergence of new discourses and actors beyond state agencies and NGOs, and the overlaps and interfaces between the categories of donor and recipient (Gardner and Lewis, 2015; Harrison, 2013). Recent years have, however, seen the publication of a number of studies that do engage with these issues (e.g. Hart et al., 2021; Peters, 2020; Swidler and Watkins, 2017). My own research on locally recruited Tanzanian foreign aid experts, on the one hand, and private sector development actors in Kenya and Europe, on the other, has contributed to this new body of scholarship. In this article, I reflect on my experience of undertaking empirical research into these two domains of international development work. Through a reflexive analysis of my field research, I discuss opportunities and challenges raised by the breaking of new ground in studies of Aidland. Specifically, I consider these in relation to three shifts in scholarly attention: from Euro-American expats to development professionals from the global South; from public agencies and NGOs to the growing field of profit-making aid; and from an analytical focus on the personal to the professional dimensions of development practitioners. Like many scholars of Aidland, I have based my research primarily on interviews with development practitioners, and I have personal experience from grants-based, expatriate aid work. Therefore, I reflect particularly on the methodological and ethical implications of exploring these “new” territories of Aidland for researchers who have roots in its “old” (white, expatriate, non-profit) areas.

Aidnography and studies of “Aidland”

2Qualitative studies of international development, not least in anthropology, have been shifting their empirical focus for the past three decades, moving away from discourses and institutions and towards everyday practices. APAD (the Association for the Anthropology of Social Change and Development) and its journal Anthropology & Development have been major actors in this shift. Interest in the daily workings of international development work has resulted in studies of the intricacies of policy-making, project design, aid delivery, development partnerships, and brokerage (Atlani-Duault, 2007; Bierschenk et al., 2000; Crewe and Harrison, 1998; Fresia, 2009; Lavigne Delville, 2015; Mosse and Lewis, 2005; Olivier de Sardan, 2005; Redfield, 2013; Rottenburg, 2009; Swidler and Watkins, 2017). In this wider field of “aidnography” (Gould, 2004) some researchers have focused on particular projects as sites in which to study the relationship between discourse and practice, project design and implementation, and the material effects of aid (Bierschenk, 1988; Ferguson, 1990; Fresia, 2009; Li, 2007; Mosse, 2005; Peters, 2020). Others have spotlighted a sub-set of aid relations, notably those between the professionals operating inside aid institutions. In this latter field of research—targeting Aidland—ethnographic attention has been devoted to the daily work, products, and interactions of development technocrats (Mosse, 2011). Another empirical object of Aidland research has been that of the private worlds, relationships, motivations, and life histories of individual development practitioners (Fechter and Hindman, 2011; Fechter, 2014). Those personal dimensions of aid workers have unpacked the common features of Aidland’s socio-professional world (namely, its socioeconomic and cultural homogeneity, global interconnectivity, and socio-spatial separation from the rural poor), and how they influence the reproduction of mainstream development knowledge and what qualifies as development expertise (see also Baaz, 2005; Fechter, 2012; Roth, 2015; Spies, 2016; Stirrat, 2008).

3What is common to many studies of Aidland is that researchers studying that world also have one foot in professional development practice, not least by way of consultancy work. Some scholars have written about past experiences of aid work, while others have done ethnographic research on development while simultaneously working in development as applied researchers—what Mosse and others call “observant participation” (Mosse, 2013: 228). This may help explain some of the criticism targeting Aidland research. Its limited attention to new actors in the aid industry, such as private businesses and donors from the global South, should be considered in light of the fact that many prominent Aidland scholars either are, or have previously been, engaged in work for NGOs and public agencies headquartered in OECD DAC countries (Gould and Marcussen, 2004; Mosse, 2011). This personal experience of aid work could perhaps also explain some researchers’ interest in the private lives and relationships of aid workers. (Interestingly, however, some of the key publications on aid workers as private individuals have been the least explicit about researchers’ own connections to the field: see, e.g. Fechter and Hindman, 2011; Fechter, 2014). Meanwhile, this focus has been criticized for drawing attention away from the wider, political context of aid and its effects. The remainder of this text discusses some of the challenges raised by these three blank spots in Aidland scholarship, and thinks about how they may be filled in. More precisely, I discuss the structural power relations and outcomes of aid, the emergence of new aid actors and discourses, and the intermingling of donor and recipient categories.

Studying “local” aid workers: about donor-recipient interfaces—and power and race

4Attention in research on aid workers has predominantly been focused on individual representatives of donor institutions from the global North. This has drawn criticism for, among other things, ignoring the ways in which the categories of donor and recipient overlap and interact (Gardner and Lewis, 2015; Harrison, 2013). One way to study these overlaps, I propose, is by moving the spotlight away from aid workers from Europe and North America and onto those professionals representing the majority of aid staff worldwide, notably persons hailing from the aid recipient countries and regions in which they work (Roth, 2015: 8). During the period 2016–2020 I studied one such group of practitioners, notably Tanzanian desk officers employed in public foreign aid agencies. My fieldwork included open-ended interviews with 34 such development experts (21 male, 13 female), coupled with office-based observations of many of the foreign donor agencies in Dar es Salaam (18 in all) for which my interviewees worked. These locally recruited technical staff were in charge of managing their agencies’ work in one or two particular sectors, such as education or infrastructure. My interviews with them concerned their professional roles, positions, and contributions to knowledge in relation to their colleagues sent out from donor headquarers. Their testimonies disclosed, for example, how they used their ties to domestic development industries to help their employers navigate conflicting goals concerning aid effectiveness, to expedite project interventions, and to stabilize relationships of trust with local partners. In so doing, they transcended the commonly constructed socio-professional binary that equates donor with foreign and recipient with local (Sundberg, 2019a, 2020a).

5My initial interest in the topic of locally recruited staff in foreign aid arose out of my previous employment at the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Sida (2007–2010). During 2009–2010 I worked as a program officer in charge of managing interventions in a sector-specific portfolio in Rwanda, Tanzania’s neighbouring country. Formally, this job was very similar to that of my Rwandan colleagues also in charge of sector-specific portfolios at Sida’s Kigali office, as well as to the job of most Tanzanian desk officers who later participated in my research in Dar es Salaam. It entailed reviewing project proposals, participating in the design and monitoring of projects, procuring consulting services, interacting with foreign and host country partners, and working out budgets and priorities with headquarter departments (see also Eyben, 2011). The majority of this work demanded knowledge of host-country regulations and politics, but an even more important requirement was expertise in international (e.g. OECD and EU) policy, sector-specific technology, and (not least!) in-house corporate policy and administrative systems. Ninety percent of my Tanzanian interviewees had a Master’s degree, and more than half had studied abroad in North America, Europe, Asia, or South Africa. Many had prior experience of working for, or with, foreign donors. Almost all came from homes socio-economically distanced from the millions of Tanzanians who constituted the targets of their employers’ poverty relief efforts.

6The many similarities between national and foreign staff in technical positions reflect how the recruitment of “locals” represents donor attempts to spread international expertise, rather than to promote its local forms (Bonacker et al., 2017; Sundberg, 2019b). For my research project, this meant that my Tanzanian interviewees and I differed little from each other in terms of academic background and job description. And yet, like most practitioners (and organizations), our positions were marked by one critical characteristic: that of our “hemispheric” origins, whether we belonged to the global North or the global South. In the hierarchical structure of public aid agencies, local recruits are rarely able to attain representative, advisory, or management positions. The jobs in which they serve tend to be those of a clerical and logistical nature. At the technical level, where my Tanzanian interlocutors worked and which generally represents the highest step on local recruits’ corporate career ladder, local staff are employed on significantly inferior terms, even though they share with their posted colleagues similar work tasks and titles. My interviews and office observations in Dar es Salaam also demonstrated how Tanzanian employees enjoyed less authority and voice, and unravelled the fact that their ties to the host country exposed them to suspicions of “local bias”—a distrust manifested, for example, in the exclusion of local staff from certain meetings and spaces within office walls (Sundberg, 2019b, 2020a, 2020b).

7Some critical studies of local–expatriate inequalities are based on personal testimonies by local recruits, such as that in Kumi and Kamruzzaman’s (2021) research on “national development experts” in Ghana. Their work cites statements made by Ghanaians working for or with foreign donors about their expatriate colleagues that are critical or even condemnatory in nature. Their criticism pertains to the expatriates’ limited knowledge of Ghanaian society and aid industry, and their tendency to take credit for work performed by their local, Ghanaian, colleagues. The subtitle of their article—“[w]e do all the donkey work and they take the glory”—is a statement made by one of their Ghanaian interviewees, and a revealing one.

8In my own interviews with local development practitioners, meanwhile, I encountered few statements that directly criticized their foreign co-workers or their employer as an organization. Fault was usually found in systems, rather than in persons or with institutions. Complaints often concerned the aid industry as such, and how it prevented local recruits from attaining, for example, job security or employment at international level. Moreover, few explicitly testified to the existence of colonial legacies, North–South hierarchies or racism as underlying factors when talking about inequalities in their work. This omission can be partly accounted for, I believe, by the shortcomings of my own methodological approach. When interlocutors are interviewed on single occasions only, this limits possibilities for the researcher to build the rapport needed to create the kind of trustful relationships in which delicate issues like racism can be addressed. A related, and also important part of the answer, is that I, as the interviewer, was a former aid worker from a donor country. This meant that I was, unavoidably, tied to the “expat” faction of the tangible national–international binary that lay behind many of the inequalities in the aid industry. This fact most likely discouraged some interviewees from speaking negatively of their foreign colleagues or describing inequalities as racially marked.

9In their study of Ghanaian development experts, Kumi and Kamruzzaman did not represent “the other”, foreign side of international work, and their study was also based on single occasion interviewing (2021). Emmanuel Kumi is himself a Ghanaian development expert with years of experience in, for example, international NGO work, civil society advocacy, and activism (Kumi, 2022). The authors write that the personal background of one of them “contributed to a sense of shared professional identity and understanding with interviewees”, and that it “created an opportunity for the authors to ask sensitive questions about subjects such as power” (Kumi and Kamruzzaman, 2021: 1163). While researcher and interlocutor may share a history of holding the same titles and doing the same kind of job, the fact that one has her “home base” at donor headquarters and the other in the aid recipient country is a marker of difference. It may well have an impact on what is said (or what can be said) in interviews, and should prompt researchers to reflect on their identity and position in relation to research participants.

10Studies foregrounding locally recruited aid workers are growing in number, and integral to many is a critique of the structural inequalities that these practitioners face (see, e.g. Peters, 2016, 2020; Roth, 2012, 2015; Shevchenko and Fox, 2008; Ward, 2021). Inequalities have been identified in the realms of employment terms, career mobility, formal authority and remuneration (Carr et al., 2010; Oelberger et al., 2017; Owen, 2010), voice, trust and official recognition (Koch and Weingart, 2016; Kumi and Kamruzzaman, 2021; Sundberg, 2020a), and in the interplay between employment terms and the way different staff categories are viewed and treated in the everyday work environment (McWha, 2011; Sundberg, 2019b). Common to most of these studies is a depiction of said inequalities as being tied to local recruits’ identity as representatives of the global South. As such, they form part of a post-colonial critique of global North–South hierarchies in the aid industry. Few of these studies, however, are principally concerned with analysing these inequalities as evidence of racism. Among those that do, many are grounded in long-term ethnographic research—unlike my own, interview-based research. Meanwhile, major publications written by white development scholars or former expatriate aid workers (or both) mainly source their observations of racism from their own and other expatriates’ experience of white privilege (see, e.g. Goudge, 2003; White, 2002). Similarly, my own initial knowledge of white privilege in aid work derived from my personal experience of working as an expatriate development practitioner in Kigali. During the course of that year, I came to know a few of my Rwandan colleagues quite well, and was able to talk with them about the differences between local and posted staff. Still, to the best of my recollection, they never spoke to me in ways that indicated that they saw any inequalities they faced as matters of colonialism or racism, and neither did I hear a Rwandan employee explicitly criticize an expatriate staff member for treating local and posted staff differently. Like Goudge and White, I certainly encountered evidence of this, but as a white expatriate, those insights came from my own observations, rather than from personal experiences confided to me by those subjected to racism.

  • 1 Pascucci (2019) could also be mentioned here: in her research on structural inequalities in interna (...)

11Studies that give voice to the experiences of racism among aid workers from the global South are often undertaken by non-white researchers, and often describe personal experiences of being subjected to structural as well as overt forms of racism while working in aid (though often on international rather than local contracts) (see, e.g. Benton, 2016; Crewe and Fernando, 2006; Kothari, 2006; Pailey, 2019; Tegbaru, 2020; Roth, 2015). Importantly, however, while most do call for the breaking of the taboo on talking about race in the aid world, none of them thoroughly address the role of power and race in researcher- interviewee relationships. One publication that does do so is the recent volume edited by Mawdsley, Fourie and Nauta (2019).1 Tellingly, perhaps, this volume is concerned with researching South–South development cooperation (SSDC), and is written by scholars from across the global North–South axis. SSDC is itself a “critique of power hierarchies”, the authors write, and “provides an opportunity and a duty to reconsider researcher identity, power and positionality” (Fourie et al., 2019: 7). The same can be said for the general growth in the share of aid workers who hail from the global South, and the researchers cum practitioners who study that growth.

12Anthropological studies of aid work have been criticized for a general tendency to evade questions of racism (Benton, 2016). Another reason why race does not take a more prominent place in scholarship on aid work may be that it is partly muted in researchers’ empirical material. In the past, this was because the major focus had been on the voices of white expatriate aid workers; today, the muting of racism as a theme still goes on, thanks to researchers’ limited attention to power hierarchies, racialized identities and the risk of self-censorship in interview situations. As scholarship on Aidland extends its gaze onto the majority, non-white population of aid professionals, issues of identity, power, knowledge production and representation—traditionally core themes in anthropological studies of the global South—become important objects of reflexive analysis. They should be an integral part of the attention aidnographers often give to their professional ties to the field of aid practice they study (see, e.g. Green, 2009; Lashaw et al., 2017). Since racism in the workplace is a sensitive topic anywhere (Race at Work, 2021), this is especially relevant for researchers like myself, who share with interlocutors a collegial bond based on practical experience of aid work, while at the same time representing the predominantly white, expatriate side of international development practice.

Researching private sector aid: about capitalism—and ideological conviction and access

13The empirical focus in Aidland scholarship has been on NGOs and public aid agencies from OECD DAC countries. This focus has been criticized for overlooking the changes that have taken place, in recent decades, in aid architecture and development discourse. Such changes include the growth of “emerging” donor institutions from the global South, and the interweaving of security concerns with development objectives (Gardner and Lewis, 2015; Harrison, 2013). They also entail the growing role and number of private development actors, and the integration of commercial models in aid delivery. Since 2020, I have been pursuing research on this latter aspect. Though aid allocations to private sector instruments only amount to about two percent of bilateral official development assistance (ODA) within the OECD DAC, they are rapidly increasing. In 2018, 13 major donors reported plans to scale up aid to the private sector (Meeks et al., 2020: 9). My research spotlights Development Finance Institutions (DFIs), a type of development bank that provides loans, equity or guarantees (mainly), either to individual businesses or through financial institutions and funds in developing countries (Kapoor, 2019). During the past 10 years, European bilateral DFIs have grown by 300 percent, and their budgets are expected to gain parity with public aid flows over the next decade (Spratt et al., 2018: 21). I also study donor countries’ use of guarantees, a type of capital insurance where the donor institution serves as a guarantor in a commercial development investment. Guarantees have mobilized more private funds than any other financial instrument to date.

14During 2021‒2022, I undertook open-ended interviews with 16 (12 male, 4 female) portfolio managers or advisors working with private sector instruments, mostly guarantees, at Sida, as well as 13 (6 male, 7 female) professionals currently working or having recently worked for five bilateral DFIs, based either at DFI headquarters or in field offices in Nairobi, the city in Africa hosting the largest number of DFI field offices.

15Interviews concerned interlocutors’ work tasks, their employers’ organizational goals and business models, their views on the role of the private sector in development work, their personal drivers and career aspirations, and their professional and academic background. As in my study of Tanzanian public agency desk officers, interview testimonies were triangulated with observations of office spaces and analyses of public records, surveys and reports on or by my interlocutors’ organizations. They were also combined with analyses of the DFI websites and LinkedIn pages of DFI workers, and the curricula vitae of staff hired by Sida during the periods 1996‒1999 and 2019‒2022.

16The project is still ongoing, and some findings remain unpublished. So far, my research has brought to light a number of institutional changes linked to the growth of private sector instruments and institutions, such as the relocation of North–South hierarchies in aid organizations (Sundberg, 2023); new forms of sociality in consultancy contracting (Sundberg, 2024a); a diversification of professional drivers among aid workers (Sundberg, 2024b); and new narratives about the role of morality in aid and the meanings of financial risk, profit and reciprocity.

17Common to these findings is that they help unpick some of the popular tropes around private corporations and capital as the new silver bullets in global development work. My experience is that researchers with a background in grant-based aid may be well suited for this task. When I worked for Sida (2007‒2010), the private sector was primarily encountered in the form of contracted consultancies—tools that the agency used at its discretion. Their priorities and motives were often treated with suspicion because of their commercial business models. That aid should generate profits for commercial actors in the global North was not a widely shared opinion. This was especially true for many of my senior colleagues, who had begun their careers in the 1970s, when Marxist dependency theory and support for anti-colonial African liberation struggles permeated the agency’s work (Odén, 2006). Their scepticism of capitalist aid regimes was grounded in ideals of redistribution rather than growth, a preference for debt cancellation rather than the creation of new debt (as occurs through development finance), and a perception of aid grants as entitlements rather than acts of charity.

18During the past decade, politics in international development have changed. An enhanced focus on economic growth and Agenda 2030’s call to seek funding from capitalist enterprises for the Sustainable Development Goals, has spotlighted the private sector as a key solution to global development challenges. Today, Sida, in its use of guarantees, is pioneering that solution within the OECD DAC community. While the Swedish government recently abandoned its goal of spending of 1% of GNI on aid and cut spending on aid by 20%, it continues to increase its use of guarantees and its allocations to Sweden’s DFI (Concord Sverige, 2022; Government of Sweden, 2022). Such changes have spurred the influx of finance professionals into the aid industry. Unlike most development practitioners, these persons tend to have academic and professional backgrounds in banking, finance and trade. Having experience from Sida as it was 15-20 years ago, and having exclusively engaged in grant-based aid, I have found myself representing the opposite end of the aid industry compared to my interlocutors working in private sector aid, both normatively and organizationally. Our different professional experiences have affected our approach to development as a field of practice and a political vision, and our moral convictions about development. Consequently, I have spent considerable time in interviews with development finance specialists trying to both understand and challenge my interlocutors’ lines of reasoning that assume a coherence between capitalism and humanitarianism. Certainly, having a background in non-profit aid is not a prerequisite for being able to scrutinize the logics and ethics of private sector aid or corporate social responsibility (see, e.g. Rajak, 2011; Scheyvens et al., 2016). However, it affords researchers additional empirical ground on which to do so.

19At the same time, such a background may make it harder for researchers to gain access to, and build rapport, with private sector actors. Owing to my history at Sida, some development finance experts assumed I had only a rudimentary understanding of private sector instruments and some also expected me to be a priori sceptical of their work. Sometimes, individual interlocutors addressed me with the plural form of “you”, placing me together with a hypothetical collective of staff working with grant-based aid, and pitting these against a “we” of private sector experts. This would often occur in relation to comments like “maybe it’s not as obvious for you”, or “we have another approach”.

20Moreover, while principles of public duty and legal regulations on transparency vary from one country to the next, on a collective level, the ten bilateral DFIs included in this research project have been significantly harder to reach than the eighteen foreign state agencies I studied in my previous project. I approached most DFIs through cold-call outreach via email to office managers or generic “info[at]” email addresses, attaching a description of my research project that made clear its focus on inductive exploration of the implications of the private sector’s growth in aid. Some DFIs never replied at all, despite email reminders and telephone calls, while a few declined to participate in the research. In a few DFIs, interviews were conditioned on my prior disclosure of the specific questions I intended to pose to my interviewees. Though I agreed to this stipulation, it conflicted with the open-ended nature of my interviews, which were meant to be structured around a set of larger themes rather than specific questions. In one DFI, my emails to individual investment managers were answered by staff at the communications department, saying they would represent the DFI in any potential interview. Time and resource constraints were often used to explain the DFIs’ inability to have staff sit for interviews, or provide documentation I requested. Several DFIs asserted that although they encouraged research about their work, and continuously participated in research projects, their choice of projects to engage with was entirely a matter for their discretion. Clearly, mine was not always a priority.

21To what extent my challenges in penetrating the DFI world have been owed to my identity as an ethnographer with no training in finance and a background in non-profit aid remains unclear. The lack of transparency is a major source of criticism targeting most bilateral DFIs (Preira, 2018). Access to information is often denied on grounds of business confidentiality and the protection of trade secrets (Attridge et al., 2019; Forster, 2021). This suggests that the entry into private sector development institutions as fields of scientific inquiry is generally higher than that for access to public aid agencies or NGOs, regardless of researchers’ professional or academic affiliations. Similar observations have been made beyond the realm of development work, where anthropologists studying private business corporations have reported significant difficulties in accessing persons and documentation, or undertaking participant observation in addition to the more common method of interviewing (see, e.g. Zhao, 2020). Many of the seminal ethnographies of financial institutions have been undertaken by scholars whose research paralleled or followed from their own employment in these institutions (see, e.g. Ho, 2009). We may conclude from this that a researcher’s professional experience may matter. The profit-making model of DFIs, coupled with the inadequate levels of attention they may pay to development impact, has raised doubts about their contribution to aid work, and much of this criticism has come from within the aid industry; from NGOs, civil society networks, and watchdog institutions (see, e.g. Attridge and Engen, 2019; Kapoor, 2019). In this light, DFIs’ concerns about their organizational reputation create few incentives for them to open themselves to explorative, ethnographic studies—especially if those studies are to be conducted by scholars with a professional history in grant-based development work.

“The personal”: an object of research reflexivity rather than analytical focus

22Together, my two research projects represent a general interest in the professional rather than the personal dimensions of aid workers. This speaks to another concern raised about studies of Aidland, notably that their empirical focus has little relevance for policy-making on development goals and practice. In the worst case, Harrison writes, an introverted focus on the personal motivations, moralities and privileged worlds of expatriate aid workers may fuel political winds of anti-aid sentiments in scholarship and public opinion—winds that sweep across many European countries, urging cuts in public aid expenditure and favouring development cooperation that is private sector focussed rather than state-led (Harrison, 2013: 271‒272).

23In my experience, interviews with aid workers may not unravel the practical effects of development “on the ground”, but they can inform on (and, indeed, also contribute to) aid policy and practice if they approach aid workers as categories of labour rather than individuals. This involves inquiring into aid workers’ professional expertise, their roles and functions, and the connections to the institutional organization of aid work. In practice, this means combining interlocutors’ testimonies with, for example, analyses of organizational charts, procurement processes and hiring policies. My research on DFI staff, for instance, has shed light on the role of DFIs in relation to the localization of aid (Sundberg, 2023). Interviews with Kenyan investment managers unpacked how local DFI staff differ from local aid workers in international NGOs and foreign public agencies in three important respects. Firstly, their “local” expertise is neither restricted to national boundaries, nor predicated on the lack of international experience, and neither is it tied to lower-status implementation work. Secondly, their formal authority and opportunities for career progression are not confined to technical or support positions; rather, many field offices are headed by local employees. Thirdly, they rarely face job insecurity given their competitive qualifications and permanent employment contracts. While this suggests that DFIs have done away with the structural North‒South inequalities otherwise integral to international development work, a closer look indicates they have merely shifted the primary locus of those inequalities: from within field offices to the relations between field offices and headquarters. Indications of this are found in the fact that decisions on investments remain a matter for headquarters, not field offices, and that, unlike staff sent out from headquarters, virtually no locally recruited staff have a permanent job in the global organization of the DFI. Such findings are not esoteric to policy-making, but constitute, rather, the ground for dialogue about human resource management and the organizational models of these growing development institutions.

24Meanwhile, turning one’s analytical focus away from aid workers as private individuals should not undermine the necessity of critical reflection on the researcher’s relations to these persons. My studies of aid workers from the global South and commercial development professionals have indicated how Aidland scholarship may make power, racialized identities and ideological conviction all the more important to account for in researcher–interlocutor relations.

Aidland 2.0: who should study it and how?

25In this article I have reflected on my experience of doing research on aid workers from the global South and in the private sector. I have proposed that such studies exemplify an expanded empirical gaze in Aidland that can account for recent years’ changes in aid discourse and architecture, explore the overlaps between the categories of donor and recipient, and shift analytical focus from the personal to the professional. More importantly, I have unpacked some of the ethical and methodological challenges implied in taking up these grounds of inquiry, from my perspective as one of many aidnographers who has roots in grant-based, expatriate aid work.

26Does the latter indicate that some of these “new” areas of Aidland are best left to be explored by scholars without a past in Aidland’s old heartlands? Evidently, researchers in and from the global South with experience of development practice are well suited to elicit and represent the experiences of development professionals from aid recipient countries (see, e.g. Kothari, 2006; Kumi and Kamruzzaman, 2021). A larger share of such scholarship would likely make a significant contribution to the production of knowledge about Aidland. Meanwhile, it is less obvious that scholars in finance or business management (rather than anthropology or development studies) are better able to critically explore the rationalities and roles of commercial corporations as development agents (though they may have an easier time accessing them). In research on Aidland, as I have tried to show, distance from one’s chosen field of research may be as beneficial as proximity to that field, depending on the context.

27A general criticism underlying many concerns with Aidland as an object of research has been the limited ability of researchers to account for its ever-increasing complexity. As categories of donor and recipient overlap, and as the boundaries between aid and other policy areas become increasingly blurred, perhaps Aidland as an analytical construction has outlived its purpose? During most years since 2015, the biggest recipient of Swedish public aid has been Sweden, owing to the sizable funds sourced from the foreign aid budget to cover the costs of the Swedish government’s refugee reception (Concord Sverige, n.d.). Is it still fruitful in such a context to demarcate Aidland as a particular area in the wider landscape of interventions concerned with migration, securitization, diplomacy, trade, foreign investment and so on? It certainly makes that demarcation harder, but it could also help us understand the changing nature of aid itself. The fact that aid expenditure is increasingly used for ends other than poverty relief in the global South; the realization that aid work is now being outsourced to technical specialists with scant interest in international development (Hindman, 2011); and the reality that ODA is competing, complementing and blending with other capital investments loosely associated with development, should prompt Aidland researchers to trace ODA flows downstream, mapping the ways in which they are branching out in different directions. Aidland, in other words, can still be a productive conceptual construction if it is defined as encompassing those who manage resources formally intended for international development. Studying the organizations and professionals entering and exiting this expanded Aidland may offer an interesting entry point for exploring changes and tensions in the very meaning of aid itself.

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Notes

1 Pascucci (2019) could also be mentioned here: in her research on structural inequalities in international aid, she reflects briefly on her own (Southern European) identity in relation to that of the Jordanian and Lebanese humanitarian workers whom she studied.

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Molly Sundberg, « From non- to for-profits, expats to locals, and the personal to the professional: Relocating the scholarly gaze in “Aidland” »Anthropologie & développement, 55 | 2024, 203-218.

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Molly Sundberg, « From non- to for-profits, expats to locals, and the personal to the professional: Relocating the scholarly gaze in “Aidland” »Anthropologie & développement [En ligne], 55 | 2024, mis en ligne le 29 juin 2025, consulté le 11 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/anthropodev/3002 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13d9k

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Molly Sundberg

Dept. of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University; molly.sundberg[at]socant.su.se

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