Abstract
Humanitarian aid stakeholders increasingly call for localisation: to ensure aid projects utilise, and are informed by, local actors and their ‘local knowledge’. This article explores what this means in practice. Drawing upon the case of Jordan, a major global aid hub, the author shows how national aid workers’ local knowledge is critical for their employers’ projects in at least two ways: they work as ‘vulnerability finders’ to reach communities in need; and as ‘narrative negotiators’ to ensure projects’ designs and evaluations are based on local expertise. However, it was found that workers tailor the ways in which they mobilise their ‘local knowledge’ given their positions and interactions within their workplaces. To make sense of these calculated articulations, the author draws upon Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital to argue that localisation is commodifying and transforming the power workers derive from their local status: from something that relates to their networks and knowledge within the local context to their ability to produce desirable project results. How workers labour in response highlights how localisation and the sector’s prevalent audit culture intertwine, and reproduce inequalities through particular constructions of local workers and their value to aid projects.
Introduction
When a humanitarian crisis occurs, international aid organisations (e.g. CARE, Oxfam, Danish Refugee Council) respond by assisting affected individuals and communities through projects. The latter include activities ranging from food and cash distributions to health and life-skills services. To ensure these projects are effective, aid stakeholders increasingly call for localisation. This is often understood as increasing the role of national and local actors in aid delivery and operations so that projects utilise, and are informed by, local actors’ knowledge and capacities to reach those most in need.
Dozens of organisations and donors have subsequently sought to achieve this in recent years, most notably following the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit, 1 by: pledging to increase their direct aid funding to national and local actors, partnering with more local organisations, and developing strategies to incorporate more local leadership in management roles. Some organisations have even shifted their headquarters from cities in the Global North to the Global South in response (i.e. Action Aid, Oxfam International). One interpretation of these responses is that stakeholders are seriously rethinking the power imbalance between Global North actors (i.e. the major aid organisations and donors who control the projects) and those in the Global South (i.e. the actors who implement and are affected by them). However, localisation could also be framed as motivated along ‘more pragmatic grounds’, given that it allows organisations to reduce their costs, negotiate security and access issues related to international staff employees and populations in need (‘remote aid’), and move towards ‘improved context-sensitive and speedy . . . response’ when they rely on local labour – rather than international hires – to implement their work (Roepstorff, 2019: 3). The multiple motivations and messages undergirding the localisation agenda highlight that what it means in practice, and why organisations pursue particular localisation strategies versus others, is not immediately clear. Its effects therefore require investigation.
Organisation scholars have long called for more attention to intra-organisational dynamics – to more specifically ‘[bring] work back in’ to studies related to organisations and organisational change; noting how micro-organisational processes are critical to our understanding of macro-level outcomes and to avoid essentialised understandings of socioeconomic developments (Barley and Kunda, 2001: 78–79). Such an approach is particularly important in the context of aid localisation. This is firstly because our current understanding of how and why organisations produce these projects and allocate aid is often premised upon sector level or inter-organisational factors and explanations. Secondly, our knowledge about the work experiences and conditions of local employees (i.e. national aid workers), who are central targets of these localisation strategies, is limited. We know little about local workers’ tasks, whether or how their responsibilities and work conditions might be changing under localisation, and how this affects organisations’ production of their projects.
This article subsequently asks: How is localisation changing what local workers do for their employers in the aid sector? And how do these changes affect how organisations produce their projects accordingly?
Using the case of Jordan, a major global aid hub, I find that local workers are critical to making their employers’ projects succeed as ‘vulnerability finders’, who help organisations reach needy communities within the project timeline; and ‘narrative negotiators’, who ensure that projects’ designs and evaluations are based on local expertise. Yet, how and when workers perform these roles – to meet monthly targets, often just days before project deadlines, and in response to international experts’ mistakes – suggest that aid organisations do not necessarily rely on them to produce the locally-informed projects that localisation discourse espouses. Rather, I find that national aid workers mobilise their local knowledge in order to produce successful project results their employers desire.
To make sense of the latter, I draw upon Bourdieu’s discussion of cultural capital as ‘embodied dispositions’ to show how localisation is commodifying, and reshaping the meanings associated with, the capital workers derive from their local status: from something that relates to one’s knowledge and networks within the local context to one’s ability to produce desirable project results (1986: 243). I show that this is due – at least in part – to the labour conditions that employers impose on their workers; which structure, re-label, and transform work tasks such as ‘meeting targets’ and ‘fixing reports’ to performances of ‘local knowledge’. The ways in which national employees subsequently labour to produce these positive project outcomes highlight that workers’ local capital is becoming something that is primarily used to benefit employers’ goals, rather than the workers themselves or the vulnerable communities that projects target. These findings show how localisation may ironically exacerbate, rather than mitigate, inequalities in the aid industry – through work processes and conditions that extend and transform the scope, value and ownership of workers’ local capital in ways that have yet to be fully acknowledged.
By examining the role of local labour in the aid sector, this article elaborates understandings of what drives organisations’ production of projects; to show that intra-organisational dynamics, and the role of local workers specifically, are an often overlooked dimension that is central to this process. Second, this article brings more attention to the ‘unintended consequences’ (Viterna and Robertson, 2015) of aid: to show how localisation and the sector’s prevalent audit culture intertwine and reproduce inequalities through work practices.
Producing the aid project as a case of labour relations: A review of the literature
Why and how international aid organisations produce projects – to whom, where and how they allocate humanitarian aid – are often explained by organisations’ mandates, political or donor interests, or industry norms that increasingly identify successful aid projects as those that have measurable impact and results in the communities they target. Scholarship is increasingly critical of the simplicity of thinking about only one of these factors to explain how aid organisations operate: often noting that these elements collectively shape why organisations do what they do. Literature is rich, for example, in showing how aid donor demands and a growing global ‘audit culture’ together shape how and why organisations implement projects in particular places and manners (Krause, 2014; Mebrahtu, 2002; Strathern, 2003; see also Barman, 2016; Carruth, 2018). As Viterna and Robertson (2015) so succinctly suggest, the aid sector is increasingly characterised in terms of ‘what we can test’ – or measure – rather than ‘what we can change’ (p. 259). These macro-level explanations frame organisations’ aid allocations (i.e. the production of their projects) as reflective and an outcome of external relationships with actors like donors, political players, or other aid organisations.
Yet, to understand macro-level dynamics and relations, scholars have called for ‘bringing work back in’ to studies of organisations. Because organisations are employers, and ‘composed of people who react or fail to react to . . . [the organisation’s] environment . . . it is the activities of people that determine how organisations become structured’ (Barley and Kunda, 2001: 78–79; Cohen et al., 2016); and what organisational policies and practices are produced (Lipsky, 2010 [1980]). Interdisciplinary scholarship on aid similarly highlights the importance of accounting for micro-level interactions within organisations to understand how aid ‘works’ and operates at the macro level. This work emphasises that organisations’ outcomes are reflective of social struggles among individual stakeholders operating within them (Hilhorst and Jansen, 2010; Long and van der Ploeg, 1989; see also van Voorst, 2019 for an overview). Such actor-oriented approaches provide critical windows to conceptualise everyday work practices as producing – and reproducing – various, and often contradictory, project outcomes for organisations, as well as competing conceptualisations of ‘aid effectiveness’ (Beck, 2016; Krause, 2014; Mueller-Hirth, 2012; Watkins et al., 2012). This alerts us to the urgency in which we need to consider intra-organisational dynamics in the aid sector and beyond, because ‘failing to link macro-organisational changes to micro-organisational processes, therefore, risks not only overlooking the proximal reasons for variation; it risks promoting an overly homogenous and undifferentiated image of socioeconomic development’ (Barley and Kunda, 2001: 78–79).
However, and somewhat surprisingly, the extent to which aid literature ‘brings work back in’ is limited given that it overwhelmingly overlooks the relations, interactions and experiences of a major group of employees in the sector: national, or ‘local’ hires (for some key exceptions, see Malkin, 2015; Ong and Combinido, 2018; Pascucci, 2019; Peters, 2016). This omission is striking, first given the fact that local hires account for approximately 90% of the global humanitarian aid workforce and already play a key role related to implementing projects (Roth, 2015: 8). Paralleling scholarship related to global norm diffusion and translation more broadly (Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Zwingel, 2012), important work touts ‘locals’ in this latter role as critical ‘translators’ or ‘brokers’ that mobilise their ‘local knowledge’ and social networks to make ‘global’ agendas, donor demands, and other goals of ‘altruists from afar’ fit within the particularities of local contexts (the latter of which are often imagined along Global North–Global South and global–local binaries) (Swidler and Watkins, 2017; see also Lewis and Mosse, 2006). Yet, we know little about how locals’ work conditions shape, if at all, how and why they work as brokers and translators in the ways they do (see Pascucci, 2019 for a discussion). Rather, national aid workers are often portrayed as enthusiastically using their local knowledge and networks and desiring jobs with international aid organisations. The latter is often explained as workers’ efforts to improve their own economic well-being as residents of ‘poor’ countries; or to enhance their personal and professional status and reputation within their communities. Our understanding of how and why workers work in the manners that they do is subsequently and primarily premised upon global economic disparities or local culture explanations conceptualised as outside the workplace; and located in an ambiguous ‘local’. This means that workers’ positions and agency has yet to be fully accounted for within the context in which they operate (i.e. as employees of organisations), and in relation to aid project production processes. Given this omission, our current explanations of how aid ‘works’ are limited; and may reify global–local binaries in unexpected ways as a result.
What we do know about local hires’ working conditions, albeit limited, are that they have long distinguished nationals as a different category of workers in comparison to their expatriate colleagues: in terms of their salaries (pegged to the national labour market if one is a local hire); contract lengths (for locals, often contingent on the project and project renewal; usually ranging between three to six months 2 ), benefits (i.e. health care and pension are not always included for locals), and opportunities for promotions (Fassin, 2011; Pascucci, 2019). These distinctions have been shown to lead to ‘capacity stripping’ (Carr et al., 2010, cited in Oelberger et al., 2017; McWha, 2011), affect protection from violence and disease (Fassin, 2011) and shape interactions with aid recipients (Heathershaw, 2016; Heaton-Shrestha, 2006; Peters, 2016; Swidler and Watkins, 2017). We are still, however, in need of a more elaborate analysis of how actual work practices and relations – the labour conditions that workers experience and negotiate as aid employees – contribute to these distinctions, and matter for how organisations produce projects as a result.
We also know from previous research that racialised meanings undergird ‘local’ classifications (Crewe and Fernando, 2006: 47; Kothari, 2005; White, 2002): even if and when workers in the contemporary aid sector no longer neatly ‘fit’ into these categories in the ways these classifications predict (Benton, 2016). While ‘local’ is contextual and relational, the latter highlights how it is constructed as constantly distinct from the global despite such ‘change’ (see Roepstorff, 2019 for a discussion of this). Engaging in ‘critical reflections around the conceptualisation of the local’ is therefore needed to address the ‘blind spots’ in our analyses ‘of exclusionary humanitarian practices’ (Roepstorff, 2019: 11; van Voorst, 2019).
This article therefore considers how meanings of the local – specifically the concept of local knowledge – structure and shape how workers perform their jobs; and subsequently the production process of their employers’ aid projects. By ‘bringing work back in’ during this period of localisation, the present study shows how local workers’ labour is a critical component that drives organisations’ production of projects in roles that have expanded beyond implementation and into realms of project planning and evaluation. However, this expansion does not always equate to, or mean that, organisations are harnessing local capacities in the ways that localisation discourse describes. Rather, I find that employers’ desires to produce successful project results are embedded in how they value their local workforce. This subsequently constrains how locals use their ‘local knowledge’ in response.
Bourdieu’s (1986, 2012 [1990]) concept of cultural capital – ‘long-lasting dispositions’ that are ‘embodied’ and map onto class relations and structures in society – provides a useful frame to make sense of the latter and its tentative effects on aid operations (1986: 243). Most sociologists have often framed cultural capital in somewhat narrow terms, as generating advantages for the individual possessing it, ‘as a weapon and as a stake of struggle [which] allows its possessors [of that capital] to wield a power, an influence, and thus to exist, in the field’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 98; see Mears, 2015 for a discussion of this). In our present case, the argument would be that workers’ familiarity with the local context as locals is their cultural capital in the aid industry because it is something that they possess – in the form of local knowledge – that is recognised, and desired by, organisations to make their projects work. This cultural capital – what I refer to as their ‘local capital’ in the aid industry – subsequently becomes something they can leverage to improve their own economic and personal well-being (e.g. how local brokers might be framed by others): it is their ‘weapon’ and ‘power’ in the field of aid. However, critical work has shown how cultural capital can also be extracted from the individuals who possess it – transforming it into a tool of ‘systemic extra-individual advantages’ that does not, or may unequally, benefit the ‘owners’ given that it functions within global hierarchies articulated along class, gender, racial and colonial lines (Mears, 2015; see also Barron et al., 2016; Carter, 2003). This is because one’s capital is inevitably intertwined within multiple fields of power in which it operates: practices ‘flow from [this] intersection’ between one’s capital and one’s positions within these fields (Swartz, 2008: 48). This helps us to recognise that capital is, firstly, premised on an entire portfolio of individuals’ past and present positions. Secondly, this highlights that capital is a fluid resource that multiple actors can negotiate to ‘capitalise’ on accordingly. Both of these elements become particularly salient during periods of changing power (or perceptions thereof) within fields. Mears’ (2015) work on what she calls ‘girl capital’ is illustrative of this: in which she shows how women only receive short-term profits for their strategic intimacy in nightclubs, whereas men are able to use it to extract significant social ties and business deals given gendered codes of sexual morality and patriarchal power structures more broadly. Similarly, we can see how localisation provides the space for aid organisations to articulate – and extract – local capital from their employees in new ways to produce the project results they desire. This is because localisation, albeit aspiring to expand local ownership within aid, is still very much an industry that is embedded in global economic, social and colonial hierarchies of power (Benton, 2016; Stroup, 2012). This means that significant space exists for aid employers to direct how their local workers use their cultural capital in ways that have yet to be fully acknowledged. Using Bourdieu to explain local workers’ labour practices in response to this aid localisation agenda therefore serves as an important tool for us to systematically trace the relationship between these practices to the reproduction of inequalities in the aid sector: ‘to connect struggles internal to the firm to broader power conflicts in society’ (Swartz, 2008: 49).
Methodology and the case of Jordan
This present exploration is based on data collected through ethnographic observations and from semi-structured interviews conducted with aid workers (75 ‘national’ or ‘local’ workers; 20 ‘expatriate’ staff) between August 2017 and March 2018 in Jordan. I refer to local workers as anyone who is (or was within a six-month period of this research) formally employed based on their Jordanian nationality by an international aid organisation (i.e. CARE, Oxfam, Action Against Hunger). 3 While referring to workers hired in their home country as ‘local’ has the potential to reproduce inequalities through binary constructions of the local as distinct and somehow ‘different’ from the global, I use ‘local’ and ‘national’ together because not all workers I interviewed considered themselves ‘national staff’ (e.g. temporary hires and consultants).
I interviewed workers in a variety of positions at the field and mid-management levels, including workers in new positions that had evolved for locals within the past few years (most notably monitoring and evaluation [M&E] jobs). Workers were within the age range of 20 to 45 years (reflective of Jordan’s broader employment trends 4 ). Workers who identify as women are slightly more represented in the sample: typical of the aid sector globally, but rather exceptional for the Jordanian context (where women’s labour force participation rate is around 14% 5 ).
Based on my previous research and work in the Kingdom, I was able to use a combination of key informants, snowball sampling and cold-call outreach to connect with workers for this study. I purposely positioned myself as an external researcher for this project (rather than a researcher-aid worker) because I wanted workers to be able to speak as freely as possible with me about their workplace relationships, challenges and experiences without worrying how our conversation might affect their positions and reputations in their organisations and in the sector more broadly (which was a major concern that arose in interviews). My status as (another) expatriate, white researcher in the Kingdom also informed my decision to position myself as an external researcher rather than a researcher-worker.
Interviews subsequently took place during both work and off-work hours, and in private and public settings (offices, cafes, or workers’ homes) throughout the country. I conducted interviews in both Arabic and English (usually switching back and forth during interviews); and relied on translators on several occasions given my limited command of some Arabic dialects. Interviewees always chose the place and location of our meeting. Almost all of the interviews were recorded, and then transcribed by the author. In order to understand the relationship between workers and organisations’ project production process, I asked interviewees questions about their daily work routines, including: how their organisations identify aid recipients; their own data collection roles (if they have them); and how they allocate their work time (i.e. reporting, working in the field, assessments, emails). I refer to my interviewees’ responses through coded three-letter acronyms in this article (i.e. HUB 2017; ABC 2018).
I also conducted ethnographic observations of various aid-related activities, including inter-sector coordination meetings (international and national aid organisations, United Nations [UN] entities), training and outreach activities targeting aid recipients, and daily work routines (e.g. workplace interactions; travelling with workers to and from work or meetings). I simultaneously collected and coded job advertisements for positions targeting local workers, with specific attention to job descriptions that included M&E-related responsibilities (i.e. data collection, project evaluations, assessments). The data from these observations and job ads were helpful in terms of triangulating my interview data: in order to more fully understand the scope of local aid workers’ roles and responsibilities related to producing projects and the particular qualities organisations formally (and informally) seek from their local employees. I used a combination of pre-set codes and line-by-line coding to analyse the data (and used NVivo software to code the job ad data).
Jordan serves as an ideal case study to examine aid operations. The Kingdom is situated in the Middle East – the region considered the largest regional producer and host of protracted humanitarian conflicts. Displaced populations from these conflicts have long resided in the country (e.g. Palestinians, Iraqis, Sudanese). With the designation of Syria as one of the world’s ‘mega-crises’, Jordan now ranks as one of the top recipient countries of humanitarian aid in the world and has become a global hub for aid operations (with more than 65 international humanitarian aid non-governmental organisations [NGOs] now registered in the country). 6 At the time of this research, organisations were also engaging in various interpretations of aid localisation: shrinking staff sizes (both international and national staff); shifting from direct implementation roles to ‘grantors’ (i.e. local organisations are sub-contracted to interact with aid recipients and implement projects); and hiring more nationally based consultants in lieu of international ‘experts’. The following sections show how these changes are affecting local workers and the production of projects.
Local workers’ roles in producing successful projects
In addition to a plethora of implementation tasks, aid employers expect local workers to play at least two critical roles in producing projects: roles that I call ‘vulnerability finders’ and ‘narrative negotiators’. These roles are critical in ensuring two essential components of any project: reaching a target number of aid recipients in a given timeline and documenting the project’s positive impact on these recipients.
Local workers as ‘vulnerability finders’
During the project planning phase, aid employers rely on local workers to use local knowledge to help them determine suitable locations and aid recipients for projects. Many workers shared how their non-local, expatriate managers ask them both in formal work settings, as well as outside the workplace, where they might ‘find’ vulnerable communities in need of aid (AVF 2018; DAM 2018; MMA 2017). As one American manager requested from her ‘Jordanian staff’ in a meeting: ‘ID good pilot populations’ based on your ‘local knowledge’ and familiarity with the organisation’s goals and assessment frameworks (BEE 2018).
As part of this work, national employees are also and often expected to mobilise their ‘local knowledge’ to determine the community-based organisations (CBOs) and individuals within these selected locations that will be included as partners and aid recipients, respectively. As one worker described to me, ‘we [national staff] scout [the organisations] . . . we choose the one[s] that have the best space . . . and the owners of the CBOs have to be cooperative. [So, once we determine that], we start talking with the owners and signing the agreements’ (HIJ 2018). For aid recipients, workers ‘scout’ and vet individuals through home visits (OCF 2017; RAL 2018; HIJ 2018; KDR 2017), where they collect information that determines if an individual or family qualifies for aid based on their employers’ criteria: [When] we do home visits, you . . . cannot deal with them in an opportunistic manner like extracting something and running away. You establish a relationship . . . I try to be very respectful because they are giving me their time and information . . . You don’t push too hard . . . Because you don’t want to jeopardise [your relationship with] the community. (RAL 2018)
As these quotes suggest, workers’ relational labour is crucial to produce projects. Their ‘local knowledge’ – their ability to socialise and build networks with local actors to reach those most in need – is the local capital their employers desire. How workers continue to discuss their work in this ‘vulnerability finder’ role, however, nuances this framing. It shows that their employers expect them to use their ‘local knowledge’ in particular ways in order to meet ‘targets’.
Throughout the project, but more pressingly near the end of a project’s timeline, local workers are expected to ‘find’ aid recipients to meet their employers’ target numbers included in the original proposal. If employers’ targets are not met by a given deadline, continued funding for the project may be at risk of being cancelled. As one worker shared: ‘We are always running, especially at the end of each project . . . running trying to get the data collected, trying to see how they went to target’ (HIJ 2017). Or, as another worker described: My organisation was a ‘results-based organisation’ . . . I heard it 10 or 20 times a day . . . but as a result of the results, you will put pressure on [us and partner organisations] to force, or fake, or create the numbers you want. Like you put the target at 100,000. And if you collect all the children in the area, there is not 70,000 . . . so you need to deal with ghosts then. We used to see this a lot. We went to many centres, where they have a reporting of 300 children, and at the same time, you can barely find five . . . at some point we stopped reporting such cases, because we felt the response . . . to [just] ‘correct it’ . . . [of course] we want to [do this] . . . but it is a mess. (LUN 2017)
We can see how this drive to meet targets affects when and how workers mobilise their local knowledge to perform their jobs. They work more or longer hours to retrieve the necessary data from the field, and also, must decide as to how and with whom (if anyone) to share this information as part of their daily work. Workers even shared how they strategically plan home visits in places where they know they can ‘find’ families or individuals that ‘meet the criteria, even if they don’t need the services’ to ensure the project targets are met on time (AVF 2018; IOC 2017; LUN 2017). Such calculations represent a particular form of labour that workers subsequently embed into their daily work routines given these ‘target’ expectations – highlighting how the workplace conditions the scope and meaning of workers’ local knowledge.
Workers further shared how they were willing to use, or even tailor, their local knowledge to achieve these targets because they personally realised that if their projects were cancelled, their contracts could be too. As one local manager in an international NGO described to me: Most of the frontline workers from the UN agencies down to the smallest organisations, [what] they have in front of them, [is] the target. That is what is driving them, this is how we monitor and evaluate their achievements, and that is how we see if they are working or not. How much of the target are they achieving on a monthly basis. And I am sorry to say that but even me, I had a target. I am a person that cares about humans and wants to help them, but I have responsibilities and a target I have to reach. (AVF 2018)
This latter expectation makes it difficult for locals to not work towards achieving these targets, particularly in a dire national labour market (the official unemployment rate is 18%
7
); even and when they know this comes at the expense of excluding vulnerable communities in need. As another worker shared in reference to his former colleagues: The focus was not on the [aid recipients] anymore. It was on the numbers they would give to [the donor]. [But] these people [my colleagues] are insecure. They don’t know by the end of 2017 if they are going to have a living. And that unfortunately does impact their performance and even their interactions with each other. (JOM 2017)
How they mobilise – and tailor – their local knowledge as part of their work is therefore critical to their own job security in a sector that has long pegged local employees’ contracts to project timelines.
However, it is important to highlight that workers’ decisions to tailor their local knowledge are not solely motivated by job security: ‘practices cannot be deduced [only] from the present conditions which may seem to have provoked them’ (Bourdieu, 2012 [1990]: 349). Rather, workers often described their employers as having ‘no investment in people’s capacities’ to explain why they or their colleagues ‘were more interested in delivering [just] the basics . . . the data, the analysis’ (OCF 2017). Others shared that their employers ‘poached’ them from their former jobs specifically because of their perceived abilities to meet targets: to ‘find’ individuals that fit the projects’ vulnerability criteria right before deadlines (LUN 2017; RAY 2017; SAL 2017). Why workers mobilise their local knowledge to deliver ‘just the basics’ is therefore evidently shaped by workers’ perceived sense of worth to their employers as workers who ‘meet targets’: it is their social value and ‘perceived chances’ as ‘a class of agents’ within the workplace that inform their actions (Bourdieu, 2012 [1990]: 356).
Local workers as ‘narrative negotiators’
Another central element to organisations’ production of projects relates to documentation: how the story of the project is captured in the initial proposal, the mid-term report and the final evaluation. Such documents are recognised as the tangible record organisations use to demonstrate project impact in response to various stakeholder demands (i.e. donors) and industry norms. Like their ‘vulnerability finder’ roles, local workers are expected – and do – use their ‘local knowledge’ as ‘narrative negotiators’ to subsequently ensure that their employers’ documents include these desired impact results.
During project planning, for example, local workers play a crucial role in obtaining approvals from the government of Jordan. International aid organisations must submit their project proposals and corresponding budgets to government ministries (most notably since the onset of the Syrian crisis) before they can access funding to implement their projects. 8 Locals are often responsible for this submission on behalf of their employers: ‘I am always the frontline when going to meet government officials, to [present my employer] as . . . “national” which [my employer hopes] . . . gives us an advantage’ (JMA 2018). Or, as another worker shared: ‘Once they [the expatriate leadership in my organisation] saw me in the field . . . felt my authority . . . they started listening to me . . . they were not aware of my [government] contacts’ (HCF 2017). As these quotes suggest, workers are recruited – and desired – to serve as the ‘face’ of their employer: to facilitate their employers’ working relationship with the government because of their national status and networks as Jordanians. In fact, the importance of obtaining – and expediting – government approvals for projects has even led to the development of specific liaison positions within organisations; where aid employers hire locals (like the worker in the latter quote) presumed to have particularly ‘good’ social connections to government officials (HCF 2017; AQS 2018).
We can subsequently see how workers do possess a particular form of local capital that their employers desire that is premised upon their local networks, which may explain why nationals might work to ‘show their authority’ with government officials to their employers in response. However, how employees describe their interactions with government officials suggests that their local capital is also conditioned on something else: their ability to ‘fit’ the government’s criteria into their employers’ proposals to obtain approvals in the first place.
Here I provide just one example of the latter. At the time of this research, international organisations like the UNHCR and UNICEF, and international and national NGOs like Oxfam and the Jordan Hashemite Fund for Human Development (JOHUD), met with government officials during a three-day conference (the Jordan Response Plan Annual Meeting) to discuss how the government would evaluate projects for approval. In one session of the meeting, workers exchanged how to frame ‘social protection’ projects for approval, an area that the government has scrutinised in terms of its measurable outcomes. Workers subsequently discussed with government representatives how and what they could and should measure to demonstrate the impact of their social protection activities in the ways their employers want; and how they could strategically link these indicators to the government’s interests as well. I witnessed how workers would meet one-on-one with some government representatives between sessions of the official meeting to discuss more particular issues related to their specific proposals; or spend significant time both during and after work hours following the meeting to exchange ‘best practices’ with other local workers on how to obtain these approvals in the fastest possible manner (‘how to insert numbers that work’ [MAJ 2017]). As one local worker in this meeting described his role to me, his job is to ‘find a middle ground’ between his employer’s project indicators and the government’s interests (LUN 2017). Or as another worker who was formerly in a similar position shared: I was doing so much beyond . . . I was handling so much . . . as well as the liaison part. So, all the governmental approvals . . . and so much reporting. I had to do [a lot because] the expat workers to be honest with you . . . they [don’t] have this experience [with the government]. The government controlling the work [of] the humanitarian agencies. So, I had to lay down the information for them. So, this is the project, here are the objectives for each sector, and for each sector, you should have specific outcomes that we tell the government we are going to be doing. (OCF 2017)
These quotes highlight the ways in which workers’ local capital is not necessarily tied to their networks exclusively, but also relates to their ability to negotiate and mediate indicators as part of their daily work tasks to ensure projects collectively ‘fit’ the interests and stipulations of the government, their employers, and the donors. Their ‘local capital’ is therefore premised upon their labour: a ‘strategic calculation’ and application of their ‘embodied dispositions’ to obtain the approvals their employers seek (Bourdieu, 2012 [1990]: 347).
Local workers also play a critical role in producing organisations’ project evaluations. These reports are particularly important at the end of a project timeline, as one might expect given that almost all organisations and donors request some form of documentation detailing the project’s outcomes and impact. As one worker shared about her role in this regard, and how it has been changing under the localisation agenda: The donor community . . . they appreciate more having someone with local knowledge . . . in terms of career, this is very good for me now . . . plus bringing in a sense of reality. Because when you, for example, get an international consultant who does not speak the language, who has been for example in Asia, but not to the Middle East, which is totally different . . . and this happens . . . [and] it’s problematic. (RAL 2018)
In this case, donors seem to ‘appreciate’ and want someone with ‘local knowledge’ – in the sense of understanding the country and regional dynamics – to contribute to their evaluations; to show their projects are truly locally-informed and directed to those communities most in need. Yet, I also spoke to many workers who were recruited either as in-house staff or short-term local consultants, to redo evaluations poorly prepared by international consultants: They end up calling us last minute before the deadline and they will say there is this crappy report prepared by [an international expert with organisation X] and we need you to fix it. And you know, this is where they say, ‘Oh, I am really sorry, but we spent the money [on the international expert], so we can only pay you [a bit] . . .’. (MZY 2018)
Framed in this way, it is not clear if employers actually desire workers’ local knowledge at all, or simply need someone who is willing to ‘fix’ poorly prepared evaluations in short timelines and for less compensation. Workers further shared how they often must go back-and-forth with their employers to write these evaluations in ways that the organisation ‘likes’, which means that they do not always include all the local knowledge or information that organisations initially say they are looking for. One worker lamented that he does not always report all ‘the truths in the field’ – such as issues of corruption, unfavourable effects of projects on communities – in his assessments or updates to management because his employer ‘do[es]n’t want to hear it’ (LUN 2017), and because such information may undermine the positive project results their employers desire (AFH 2018).
Local workers, however, were still willing and working to ‘fix’ these reports in condensed timelines and with less compensation; to tailor their local knowledge in ways they seemed to quite blatantly disagree with. When I probed about the latter, workers first talked about how they consider themselves ‘advocate[s] on behalf of the community’ given their local status (RAL 2017; SUH 2018) and, therefore, better positioned to represent the realities in the community accordingly. However, these comments were almost always followed by discussions related to how project evaluations were contracted in the aid sector. Rather than independent auditors, the organisation implementing the project pays the salary for the person writing the report. This means that local workers, who are contracted to redo these reports, must literally work to find a balance between what their employers want them to report, and the actual effects (or lack thereof) of the project in order to maintain their jobs: ‘something nice on paper or . . . the real stuff’ (OCF 2017). In the case of independent consultants who perform this role, they must be particularly attentive to the latter, to delicately balance the interests of their client organisation with the findings in the field, because their ability to attract and gain new clients often happens through the recommendations of their current ones (AFH 2018; ZMQ 2017). This places workers in a difficult position because they must demonstrate their value by ‘fixing’ reports in the ways their organisations seek – even when they explicitly ‘despise’ doing this (SUH 2018; WAB 2018) – in order to develop their professional reputations and networks as the local consultants employers desire accordingly. As Bourdieu describes, ‘An agent’s practical relation to the future . . . governs his present practice . . . [one significant part of this being] the chances objectively offered to him by the social world’ (2012 [1990]: 357).
As the culmination of these examples suggest, locals’ work conditions shape how and why they mobilise their ‘local knowledge’ in particular ways; subsequently revealing that workers’ ‘local capital’ is only partially premised on ‘local knowledge’ in the first place. Rather, and amidst competing stakeholder interests and pressures to demonstrate project impact, it is workers’ ability and willingness to contribute to positive project narratives that become the marker of their local capital – and their distinction as ‘local’ employees in the aid hierarchy.
Conclusion
This article has shown how local workers play a critical role in how aid organisations produce successful projects in a country that is situated in one of the world’s largest aid hubs, the Middle East. It is clear that in this era of aid localisation, local workers are not just implementers of their employers’ agendas, but rather actively contribute to at least two additional components of any successful project: reaching a target number of aid recipients in a given timeline and documenting the project’s positive impact on these recipients. These roles of the vulnerability finder and narrative negotiator, respectively, show how local workers’ experiences, perspectives and labour are instrumental to understanding how – and to whom – aid is distributed: emphasising the need to be attentive to intra-organisational dynamics in order to more fully understand how aid operates and projects are produced. While the localisation agenda situates harnessing ‘local knowledge’ as a crucial dimension within aid operations, how workers labour on behalf of their employers to produce positive project results suggests that how and why ‘local knowledge’ is valued in particular ways requires more consideration; and urges more elaborate analyses of how meanings of ‘local knowledge’ are constructed through practices in the aid sector in the first place. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s discussion of capital, this article has shown how workers tailor and calculate how they use their local knowledge and engage in particular forms of relational labour as part of their daily work given their particular labour conditions, positions and interactions in the workplace as national hires. Such labour to produce positive project results draws attention to the ways in which the sector’s prevalent audit culture, along with ambiguous conceptualisations of ‘local’ and ‘local knowledge’, reproduce national workers’ distinction within aid hierarchies through work practices. Such findings subsequently suggest that the ambiguity embedded in the localisation agenda, as well as measurements of worth in the aid sector more broadly, generates considerable forms of precarity and uncertainty for local aid workers and the communities they work with. By examining the role and routines of local workers, this article nuances understandings of the inequalities undergirding localisation and ‘how aid works’; showing that particular constructions of local employees and how they can provide value to aid projects are central to this process.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the workers who participated in this research and made this project possible in the first place. This article has also benefitted greatly from the generous feedback from the two anonymous reviewers. I would like to also especially thank Julian Go, Emily Barman, Emily Bryant, Zophia Edwards, Muath Abudalu, Adriana Qubaia, Emily Springer and Jake Watson for their helpful feedback in the process of preparing this manuscript.
Funding
The Council of American Overseas Research Centers–American Center of Oriental Research (CAORC-ACOR) Fellowship program provided funding support for this project.
