Space,Time and Structure: Unpacking Relationships in International Development Volunteering

Relationships in IDV

The rise of IDV spotlighted volunteer–local interactions in international development. Volunteers, typically from the North, spend time working and living alongside (Southern) locals. IDV programmes are wide ranging. They include long-term, immersive programmes like the Peace Corps and United Nations Volunteers, where a few skilled volunteers build capacity within partner organizations. They include voluntourism, shorter programmes where ‘less-skilled’ or ‘unskilled’ volunteers work and sometimes live with local communities, teaching English or building infrastructure. Alongside development outcomes, both IDV varieties often include non-development aims of cross-cultural understanding between volunteers and locals (Lough and McBride, 2014). The cross-cultural exchange and aspect of working together require attention to interpersonal relationships and interactions between volunteers and locals. Reciprocal, mutually beneficial and trusting relationships between volunteers and locals are seen as crucial to IDV’s success (Devereux, 2008; UNV).

With the importance of relationships in IDV, key factors affecting their development have been discussed. Lough and Oppenheim’s (2017) review on reciprocal relationships and relationality in IDV highlighted repeat, longer-term interactions, mutual benefit and effective communication between volunteers and locals. The importance of mutuality and horizontal exchange is echoed in literature foregrounding Southern perspectives, which called for greater partner organization agency and voice in IDV programme decisions (Perold et al., 2013; Tiessen et al., 2018). While volunteers’ inability to speak the local language hinders communication, the literature is unclear on whether this barrier reduces volunteers’ perceived effectiveness by partners (Lough et al., 2018; Tiessen and Lough, 2019). This language barrier can be mitigated with interpreters (Thuo, 2018) or even become a motivation for relationship building through language exchange and learning (Chen, 2021; Everingham, 2015).

Time or IDV duration is a widely debated factor for relationship formation. The literature distinguishes between short-term voluntourism and long-term skilled IDV (Tiessen, 2017). Voluntourism includes leisure and tourist activities for the volunteer, and is often cast as less ‘serious’ or committed to achieving development outcomes. While voluntourism has been blamed for negative relational and development outcomes (Mostafanezhad, 2014; Palacios, 2010), long-term IDV has been lauded for its ability to create reciprocal volunteer–local relationships and positive development impact (Devereux, 2008). Repeat, longer-term interactions are seen as preferential and more effective over one-off, shorter-term interactions. However, the possibility of convivial relationships and mutual learning in short-term voluntourism (McIntosh and Zahra, 2007) point to the inadequacy of time (and volunteer skill) alone in determining volunteer–local relationships. While partner organizations prefer long-term over short-term volunteers, what they deem as ‘long’ enough varies (Tiessen and Lough, 2019; Tiessen et al., 2018). Long-term IDV programmes are not guaranteed successes. Often, volunteers’ skills take precedence over their time spent with partner organizations, and IDV programmes can be broken up to short trips over a period of time (Lough et al., 2018). Analysing time alone in volunteer–local relationships is therefore insufficient and needs contextualising.

The Spatiality of Relationships in IDV

A spatial perspective complements a temporal discussion of IDV by grounding relationship formation in specific contexts. Unlike time and temporality, space or spatiality has only recently been explicitly discussed (Laurie and Baillie Smith, 2018). Schech et al. (2015: 3) proposed greater attention to ‘how [volunteer–local] roles are negotiated and the circumstances under which volunteering becomes a mutual learning space where the actors are able to question dominant notions of development and its pursuit’. Volunteer–local relationships invariably play out through interactions across IDV spaces. An attention to space sees IDV relationships as situated and negotiated practices, and recognizes how development spaces themselves can influence the formation of IDV relationships. Re-reading literature on volunteer–local relationships through a spatial lens offers several insights.

Volunteer–local interactions and relationships are primarily discussed in unequal spaces of development work. These are spaces where volunteers and locals engage in formal work activities: the workplaces of partner organizations, schools and local villages where volunteers work with local communities. Like international development, IDV is premised on a socio-economic and power inequality between volunteer/sending (North) and receiving (South) countries. Volunteers from more privileged countries and backgrounds render ‘expertise’ or contribute to Southern communities. IDV workspaces are therefore inherently unequal. With this unequal starting point, scholars examine how formal volunteer–local power relations are negotiated in these spaces. As Lough and Oppenheim (2017: 202) write, ‘relational reciprocity’ requires ‘disrupt[ing] the helping narrative by recognising the mutual sharing and giving of experiences, expertise and culture-specific knowledge and capabilities’. In other words, formal reciprocal relationships require a double movement: first, a disruption of the hierarchical volunteer–local power relations; second, a mutual exchange of knowledge, cultural practices and learning—the horizontal, cross-cultural interactions between volunteers and partner organizations or local communities.

Because of the inequality inherent in development workspaces, reciprocal relationships are difficult to enact in practice. Development workspaces can be structured by sending and local organizations around the giving of items, the doing of care or the imparting of knowledge or skills from volunteers to locals (Mostafanezhad, 2012). Volunteers and locals respectively embody giving and receiving roles. Volunteers ‘enter into these hierarchies’ and hierarchical spaces (Georgeou, 2012: 146) which in turn influence and shape formal volunteer–local interactions and relationships. These hierarchies can be exacerbated when volunteers harbour negative attitudes, behaviour or insensitivity towards the local culture (Baxter, 2018; Loaiza, 2018; Nalungwe, 2018). They can be reified when locals and partner organizations view Northern volunteers as purveyors of superior knowledge or better resources (Thuo, 2018; Viquez, 2018). These reinforce hierarchical and inequitable volunteer–local relationships, exacerbating local dependency on foreign assistance (McLennan, 2014) and simplistic justifications of North–South disparities by volunteers (Palacios, 2010).

Conversely, positioning volunteers and locals as counterparts or equal contributors in development spaces leaves room for more equitable, reciprocal relationships to emerge (Impey and Overton, 2013; McWha, 2011). These relationships require a giving back of power from volunteers to locals, from sending organizations to partner organizations. Tiessen et al.’s (2018) edited book featuring Southern partner organizations across nine countries showed how equity in power between partners and volunteers is crucial. Partners could identify suitable volunteers and make beneficial decisions for their organizations. Mutual exchange takes place when volunteers share technical and domain expertise while locals contextualize them and add valuable perspectives (Chen, 2018; Devereux, 2008; Schech et al., 2018). These acts build trust and reciprocity between volunteers and locals in development workspaces. They produce beneficial partnerships and bridge unequal volunteer–local power relations, leading to social and development impact for local communities.

The emphasis on development workspaces contrasts with the limited theorization of informal interactions and non-workspaces. Informal interactions occur in both work and non-workspaces. Riddering (2020: 4) describes ‘everyday encounters’ as the ‘unseen, unplanned, unexpected activities that can be more transformative than the planned activities’. Riddering gives the example of the ‘hallways of NGO offices’ where volunteers and locals are not strictly working but are still in the workplace. These unplanned interactions sans work agenda are temporary opportunities to disrupt the volunteer–local inequality and promote informal interactions. Cross-cultural exchange occurs when partners and locals teach volunteers the local language and nuances of working in another country (Everingham, 2015; Davis, 2018). Spaces outside of development work (e.g., homes of volunteers and locals, social and dining venues) present opportunities too for informal interactions. Here, volunteer–local inequalities are suspended or even reversed, as volunteers struggle to adapt to living in a foreign country with fewer resources. Locals show volunteers the ropes and help them when trouble emerges (Tiessen et al., 2018). Simple and embodied acts of eating or cooking together bring locals and volunteers closer and facilitate deeper interpersonal connections (Griffiths and Brown, 2016; Sobocinska, 2016). These informal interactions, while less-discussed, are worthy of further exploration.

This spatial mapping of the literature unpacks and contextualizes volunteer–local interactions and relationships in IDV spaces. My brief review demonstrates the literature’s emphasis on formal relationships in development workspaces over informal relationships in work and non-workspaces. Both spaces and relationships matter. The possibility of different relational outcomes highlights the complexity of their formation. Left underexplored too is the interplay between informal and formal volunteer–local interactions across IDV spaces, and the resultant relationships that emerge. Extending this conversation, this article uses spatiality as an integrative lens for relationship formation. It locates volunteer–local relationships as the outcome of situated and negotiated practices in particular spaces. Examining IDV spaces allows contributing factors like time and language to be discussed in-situ. It tackles the puzzle of long-term versus short-term IDV by contextualising them in the spaces where development encounters unfold. Power is distributed and manifested in IDV spaces, challenged or consolidated through volunteer–local interactions over time. Ultimately, a spatial analysis of relationships in IDV contributes to development studies by illuminating how spaces can be reconfigured and reimagined for better development relationships and outcomes.

Structured Spaces

Structured spaces comprise the bulk of IDV encounters. They are the spaces of development work where much of the literature’s discussion on volunteer–local relationships takes place. They are the ‘learning spaces’ where volunteers and locals engage in development activities (Schech et al., 2015). As SIF’s IDV projects emphasized the doing of development—teaching, training, building water filters, and so on—volunteers and locals spent most of their time together in these spaces.

Structured spaces are structured by sending and partner organizations, with volunteers and locals embodying distinct roles. They are set up often with volunteers taking leading or teaching roles, and local participants taking learning or following roles. Specialist and In-field projects were designed around volunteers conducting workshops or training for local participants, giving feedback on or supervising their techniques. As Bona, a Specialist participant in a medical ‘Training of Trainer’ project shared:

At the beginning, we practice on soft bone, plastic bones. We go to the patient after [a] few trips but [the volunteers] guide us, they supervise us. And the last two/three trip before we finish the project, we can practice ourself but in they [are] there just to see, to supervise us.

In Direct Service projects, volunteers installed bio-sand filters in local homes, conducted hygiene demonstrations and distributed hygiene packs to schoolchildren. Structured spaces are where IDV actors become trainers or trainees, givers or receivers. These activities allow volunteers to directly demonstrate expertise and contribute to the locals. They reflect hierarchical relationships, as Nigel, a Specialist volunteer, noted:

As a volunteer you are in a superior position, whether you like it or not you have a tendency to be in a superior position and [the locals] will look up to you. So, if that’s good enough for you, it’s good enough for them.

The volunteer, whose role is to stand in front of locals to demonstrate, teach, is vested with greater power, knowledge and ability than the locals, whose role is to learn or receive. These structured spaces reflect a power inequality where volunteers are purveyors of foreign knowledge (Davis, 2018; Viquez, 2018), one that is accepted and valued by locals.

Hierarchical difference and volunteer–local interactions depended on how organizations configured structured spaces. As Specialist and In-field projects aimed to build local and organizational capacities, they were structured to progressively give locals greater autonomy and leadership. Bona’s quote demonstrates how local participants became independent practitioners towards the end of the Specialist project, doing the work while volunteers watched and supervised. Embedded in these structured spaces were thus principles of local participation (Impey and Overton, 2013) and ownership over time. In contrast, partner organizations could configure structured spaces to prioritize tasks over volunteer–local interactions. As two Direct Service partners shared:

When [the volunteers] come to [our organization], first day they go to build water filters. Second day, they go to the community to install filters. But the volunteers only do filter installation because we have baseline [research] at the community already. —Raskmei

With the number of staff that we have, if we did not have this programme, I do not think we would have achieved what we have achieved. What [the volunteers] achieved in two days is what we achieved in one week. You can just imagine. Because I only have two [staff] installers. —Toch

For Direct Service partners, the more bio-sand filters installed, the faster their work could be completed. Volunteers were seen as a valuable bonus source of labour, and structured spaces centred on the building of filters and their installation at villagers’ homes. Often, these were brief as partners ushered volunteers onto the next household, cognizant of the short trip duration. These structured spaces limit volunteer interactions with the local community, and focus these interactions on work. Shaped by organizations, structured spaces may not be what volunteers or locals desire. In one indelible Direct Service experience, the volunteers and I (as a fellow volunteer and observer) arrived at a school to conduct hygiene demonstrations. Two neat rows of children greeted us. As we walked down between the rows, the children broke into applause, urged on by the partners accompanying us. When I discussed this subsequently with the volunteers, Don mentioned:

We do not know how long [the children had been] standing, we can be late for some reason, [and] that will add to their burden [of] standing in the sun. The second thing is that I do not feel that [anybody] is a VIP [Very Important Person] in the [volunteer] group. Actually, we feel very embarrassed. We go there to help them, not to be treated as a VIP. To me we are from the same level. Maybe to them they want us to feel more welcome.

Whether set up by the school or the partner organization, the children’s clapping and lining up demonstrated an extreme manifestation of ‘posturing’, ‘rituals of gratefulness’ that locals perform when receiving gifts (Korf, 2007: 369). While the volunteer articulated a common intention to help the locals (Sin, 2010), the local response of exaggerated gratefulness undermined instead of affirming this altruistic motivation. His discomfort with this overt demonstration of hierarchical difference reveals the disjuncture between the discourse of IDV as ‘service’ to the locals (Wearing and McGehee, 2013) and the resultant upholding of volunteers as ‘VIPs’ or greater in importance/status. It reveals organizations’ role in embedding care and difference/hierarchy in structured spaces, and potential conflict between organization and volunteer over how spaces should be structured. Organizational influence in structuring spaces is a blind spot in IDV literature, which centre on the volunteer’s role in volunteer–local interactions. In structured spaces, organizations place volunteers and locals in particular roles. These spaces can reflect hierarchical caring and unequal discursive volunteer–local relationships and invoke the binary of active volunteers and passive locals.

Negotiating Relationships in Structured Spaces

While organizations create varying structured spaces for volunteer–local interactions, volunteers and locals actively negotiate these spaces. Cultural and social norms affect their interactions. For Singapore volunteers, their task-oriented and KPI-driven mindset impacted their actions. A common refrain from Direct Service and Specialist volunteers was that there just ‘was not enough time’. Keeming, a Direct Service volunteer, shared, ‘maybe because [SIF] gave us KPIs [Key Performance Indicators]. You have to [install] 28 filters within three days. So, it is a bit tough for the team to sit down, and drink tea, interact with the family’. The volunteers conceptualized structured spaces as primarily ‘work’ spaces. While recognising the importance of socialising and interacting informally with locals, their commitment to the tangible target of building 28 water filters superseded this. With the partner organization also prioritising filter building, informal interactions with locals became secondary, to be done when time permitted. A further barrier to informal volunteer–local interactions in structured spaces was the Cambodian culture of respect and distinction for elders or teachers. Nhean, a Specialist participant shared, ‘teacher and student [are very separate], not like friend. Teacher is teacher, student is student. We need to respect the teacher’. Here, cultural norms reinforce the hierarchical categories of ‘teacher’ and ‘student’ set up in structured spaces. Although the language of ‘teachers’ and ‘students’ was not explicitly used in the projects, local participants recognize their roles as such. Their culture of respect accentuated this social and power distance. Volunteers’ and locals’ embodiment of distinct hierarchical roles in structured spaces—teaching while locals learned, building filters while locals watched or assisted—serve to separate them and influence their interactions. This nexus of sociocultural norms, structured space, time and volunteer–local interactions creates three kinds of formal relationships: passive exchanges, learning engagements and inclusive partnerships. These relationships form across different IDV projects and actors, challenging, reproducing or reducing the hierarchical difference in structured spaces.

Passive Exchanges

Passive exchanges are one-sided formal relationships where locals take on passive or absent roles in structured spaces. They are mainly transactional and involve the giving and receiving of development outputs. In Direct Service projects, the short duration allocated for filter installation or hygiene demonstration, and language gap between volunteers and locals, meant that villagers or schoolchildren often did not or could not participate meaningfully. While some joined voluntarily or upon volunteer or partner invitation, these interactions were fleeting. Passive exchanges take the form of volunteer-initiated gift-giving of stationery or books to children. These exchanges were characterized by children’s ‘gratefulness’ and ‘happiness’ in receiving gifts (Korf, 2006). While a means of extending volunteer care beyond the planned volunteering activities, these passive exchanges reinforce the structured hierarchical difference between volunteers and locals.

Passive exchanges also can be initiated by locals. The Direct Service hygiene demonstrations at schools included a welcome message by the principal. On one occasion, after the principal shared several financial challenges faced by the school, a few volunteers responded by handing over money to him. When warned by a partner that there was no guarantee the money would be spent on the school, the volunteers went along with the principal to shop for items. Don, one of them, recounted:

It was out of my naivety, just giving [the principal] the cash, and it was good to get guidance [from the staff]. I still do not know if he had a prepared list or not, because [when] I made him come with me, he had two sheets of A4 [paper] and everything [he wanted] was written down: at the top were the books, the chairs. I do not think he did that in the time we said we got a thousand dollars [and] jumped in the van to go to the shop. I think he had that in his pocket. You can look at it as negative or positive. He knew that we were going to give it. He was prepared for it, let’s say that.

This incident underscores how locals can strategically deploy passive exchanges. Passive exchanges do not necessitate local inaction. By emphasising the school’s financial challenges and subsequently furnishing a ‘wish-list’ of items, the principal performed passivity or helplessness, demonstrating poverty and playing to the volunteers’ generosity. As Georgeou (2012: 158) posits, there is a ‘local expectation that volunteers will ‘do development’ for the community…and hosts viewed the volunteer as a whole resource to be utilised’. This strategic use of volunteers to access resources, power or influence is not uncommon in IDV (Thuo, 2018). Within structured spaces, locals can accentuate the unequal giver–receiver volunteer–local hierarchy to extract additional benefits from well-intentioned volunteers.

Passive exchanges can happen when locals passively or reluctantly participate in IDV. In one Specialist project, partners resisted being ‘trained’ by volunteers despite endorsement from their organization leadership. A multitude of factors were involved: their low salaries, multiple jobs and the opportunity cost of attending the workshops. While I did not manage to interview them, Ruth, a Specialist volunteer, described:

[The staff] felt very threatened, I felt. Because they thought that they were already good enough, basically. When we came in and we started to probe, and we showed them that they were slightly inadequate in certain areas, then you could see many of them getting very defensive.

In probing and highlighting local ‘inadequacies’, volunteers accentuated the hierarchical difference in structured spaces. Although well-intentioned in uncovering potential areas for ‘improvement’, this overt positioning of the volunteer as the expert in local workspaces may have confronted the locals. It transformed their workplace from a place of mastery into one where they were incompetent. Locals’ enactment of passive exchanges can then be read as a reluctance or refusal to participate as ‘trainees,’ to be considered as ‘inadequate’ or less adequate than the volunteers. Passive exchanges allow locals to challenge and negotiate the unequal structured spaces of IDV through a passive resistance.

Learning Engagements

While passive exchanges accentuate volunteer–local inequalities in structured spaces, learning engagements involve the active participation of volunteers and locals. Because of the hierarchical power and difference, volunteers often took the first step to build rapport with the locals. As two interviewees recounted:

I called my sessions sharing rather than teaching and tried to break [locals] up in small groups so that they felt a bit more comfortable in discussing and coming up with ideas. Yea, those were the ways I tried to make them feel a bit more at ease with the sharing sessions.’ —Mike, In-field volunteer

It’s good that the teacher has many techniques. They had role play, they had Powerpoint, they had some question and answer and gave a reward [prize] to the student who can give the right answer. It made our team interest[ed] in the workshop.’ —Sikha, Specialist participant

Specialist and In-field volunteers held group discussions, role plays and competitions to engage local participants. Unlike the top-down, didactic notion of teaching, sharing and role play connote a horizontal and reciprocal exchange of information and knowledge (Lough and Oppenheim, 2017). Locals contributed their knowledge to enhance the sessions. Local participant motivations to learn and ‘exchange experiences’ further facilitated a two-way exchange. In learning engagements, local perspectives are acknowledged as essential contributions instead of being ‘inadequate’. Through activities to foster mutual exchange, structured spaces can be transformed through learning engagements.

Inclusive Partnerships

More than active participation, inclusive partnerships transform structured spaces through a co-created process. They mainly occurred between partners (who could also be participants) and key volunteers. Caroline, a Specialist volunteer reflected: ‘the dynamics [were] very mutually beneficial. I think our team enjoyed working with the [partner organization] team a lot and [they] enjoyed [working] with our team a lot. It was a very close collaboration and a very strong friendship’. Chann, one of the partners, echoed:

We plan together. When they come to conduct the training, they change a little bit. When they change, we have a discussion with each other [about] what they change. Because sometimes they change based on the understanding of the participant. Sometime [the workshops are] hard to understand. They are [a] very flexible team.

This language of volunteers and locals working and planning together contrasts sharply with the earlier language of ‘helping’ in passive exchanges and ‘learning’ in learning engagements. Volunteers and locals here did not occupy hierarchical roles but collaborated on the same tasks. Speaking the common language of English facilitated this collaboration. Working towards shared development goals, they built a sense of commonality and togetherness, achieving unity, solidarity and friendship over time (Schech et al., 2015). Inclusive partnerships, with their qualities of mutuality and partnership, place power firmly back from volunteers into the hands of local partners.

Time gives depth to inclusive partnerships. Longer-term, repeat volunteer–local interactions matter (Lough and Oppenheim, 2017). In-field projects unsurprisingly facilitated the formation of inclusive partnerships that blossomed as volunteers and locals worked collaboratively. The recurring short-trips of Specialist projects over a few years also enabled this, as volunteers and locals corresponded virtually when the volunteers were not ‘on-site’. Time in terms of commitment to the IDV project continuity matters too. Specialist Training of Trainer projects were designed as a tiered progression. Key local participants become ‘Master Trainers’, taking over projects and training their colleagues after volunteers leave. Lynn, a Specialist volunteer, shared:

I never planned to make the change at the ground level because in the system [the locals] must be the ones to [make the] change, not me. I do not even know what is the cultural sensitivity, whose feet I am going to step on if I do this, so they must work it out themselves.

This sentiment was echoed by Samang, a Specialist ‘Master Trainer’: ‘the foreigner cannot come back here every time. They cannot. We must be the foremen, the team here so we can continue the training’. Both volunteer and local articulated a desire for change beyond the temporal and spatial confines of the IDV project. For the volunteers, this meant recognising their fundamental difference as foreigners outside the local system and ignorance of the Cambodian cultural context. In this recognition, the volunteers shifted away from an ‘expert’ role, opening up space for local participation and inclusion (Schech et al., 2015). As volunteers stepped back, locals stepped up to become the ‘experts’, recognising and embracing their role as ‘forerunners’ to take over after volunteers leave. Inclusive partnerships are as much local-driven as they are volunteer-driven, where local participation is not just ‘instrumental’ or performative but ‘transformational’ and an end in itself (Mikkelsen, 2005). The formation of inclusive partnerships therefore occurs through an intersection of local motivations, time and continuity, volunteer responsibility and more equitable volunteer–local structured spaces and interactions.

Social Spaces

Compared to structured spaces, social spaces comprise a peripheral part of volunteer–local development encounters. Valuing tangible development outputs and outcomes over tourism or leisure, organizations gave less priority, time and structure to social spaces and the activities there. Social spaces were often spatially distinct from structured spaces. Restaurants, dining venues, shops and tourist spots were some of them. Volunteers and locals did not ‘work’ but spent time socialising, eating and conversing. For Specialist and Direct Service projects, where each IDV trip spanned a few days, volunteer–local interactions were overwhelmingly in structured spaces. Conversely, In-field projects over a continuous period of six or more months afforded ample time for volunteer–local interactions in social spaces, outside of development work.

Despite their relative unimportance, social spaces are crucial to the formation of informal relationships and friendships. Spatially and temporally separate from structured spaces, social spaces allowed volunteers and locals to meet at a non-hierarchical level, to have the in-depth, informal interactions needed for building personal relationships. These cross-cultural interactions were not uniform across actors. Social spaces featured smaller groups of IDV actors who shared closer interactions, namely volunteers, partners and key participants. Heng, a Specialist participant, shared how his friendship with a volunteer developed:

I met her [the volunteer] not very often, but [the] second time after I met her, I talk[ed] with her, then went out with them [the volunteers] to dinner, and then I think that she is a soon-to-be-friend because we used to go to dinner.

As Girgis (2007: 357) writes, ‘[friendship work] requires physical presence, time, and a commitment to spending non-professional time together’. Social spaces facilitated this doing of friendship work. In the act of eating together, outside of professional time and space, volunteers and locals connect and converse with each other, discovering commonalities and differences in their cultures (Griffiths and Brown, 2016). Social spaces provide a place for horizontal, cross-cultural volunteer–local interactions and relationships to be forged.

The volunteer–local conviviality and connection through social spaces contribute to building inclusive partnerships. Volunteers, partners and key participants mentioned the usefulness of social activities in establishing rapport and trust. Bona, a Specialist participant, reflected:

When [the volunteers] come we assist them in training, in workshops or in operating. We are very close. We are with them almost the whole day. They come on Friday and they fly back on Saturday or Sunday morning, really tight schedule. We stay with each other: we have lunch nearby and go back for operation.

Interactions from structured spaces flow into social spaces and vice versa, strengthening volunteer–local relationships. Rather than being separate from development goals, social spaces and the leisure activities within them are important (Sobocinska, 2016) or even crucial to achieving them. Their lack of development ‘agenda’ helps foster trust between volunteers and locals who are unfamiliar with each other. Volunteer–local reciprocity and mutuality in less-hierarchical structured spaces lay the foundation for inclusive partnerships, which are enhanced by informal encounters in social spaces. Over time, volunteer–local interactions in In-field projects and the recurring trips of Specialist volunteers or Direct Service volunteer leaders provide the continuity for cross-cultural friendships to form. Charlene, an In-field volunteer, described: ‘You also continue as friends, even until now. Sometimes [the partner] asks me if [I] know of courses [she] can attend in Singapore, or plans … to come here, things like that’. Such friendships are instrumental, caring and mutually enjoyable. Starting from inclusive partnerships, these ties continue across borders, beyond the project, such that volunteers and locals no longer just connect over work, but to enquire about opportunities, make plans, or simply catch up on each other’s life.

Transition Spaces

Similar to social spaces in the lack of hierarchical structure are transition spaces. Transition spaces exist in the spatial and temporal margins of structured spaces: they were the coffee breaks between workshops in Specialist and In-field projects, the commute between venues, and the wait for structured spaces to be organized for development work. Rithy, a Direct Service partner, described:

We [volunteers and partner staff] walk from this house to that house, and then sometime we walk and see an animal or rice field. Sometimes we [see] small kids, and then they [volunteers] stop and play for a while and then continue to work.

Transition spaces were the walks volunteers and partners took between houses to install bio-sand filters. These walks were not particularly useful, but are part of ‘getting on with’ the work. The task-oriented culture of Singapore volunteers contrasted with the slower pace of Cambodian life. Volunteers were frustrated over long hours spent stuck in traffic getting to and from homes and schools. Rachel, a Specialist volunteer, humorously recounted trying to remove the break times between workshops to end the day earlier. This was resisted by participants, who were accustomed to coffee breaks and longer lunches. Locals liked coffee breaks despite the workshops being longer and less efficient. From the lens of efficiency and development impact, transition spaces take precious time away from ‘real work’.

From a relational lens, these transition spaces give rise to unscripted and convivial volunteer–local interactions. Their lack of structure and agenda—sitting, eating, waiting, doing ‘nothing’—meant that volunteers and locals could temporarily shed their hierarchical roles and meet as individuals:

Because of my short timing with [the trainees] during the break, [I] eat with them, talk with them, ask about their family members, about Cambodia, about their people, about the[m]. Do not talk to them about your [own] country, they [are] also very interested for you to ask them [about theirs]’ —Nancy, Specialist volunteer.

[The communication between volunteers and locals is] like friend: [I do not] feel afraid and feel a good relationship speaking or talking [together]. During the coffee break, the trainee can sit together, talk about training [topics] relating to our life and how Singaporeans live.’ —Sathea, Specialist participant

The transition, liminal space of the coffee break became places where volunteers and locals could engage beyond cultural and structured difference, on topics unrelated to work. Transition spaces provided a temporal and structural break from the structured workshop spaces. Coupled with the volunteer and local’s interest to engage with each other, they created a window for horizontal relationships of conviviality and cross-cultural exchange to emerge. The brevity of Specialist trips made these connections over the workshop breaks even more crucial. Transition spaces function as ‘third spaces’, ‘intersections of the agency of the volunteer… and members of the host community’ that offered ‘ways to overcome the structure of the dominant hegemony’ (Zahra and McGehee, 2013: 23). These unexpected encounters (Riddering, 2020) draw volunteers and local participants closer, building rapport and contributing to the learning engagements in the structured workshop spaces.

Language plays a varying role in the convivial interactions in transition spaces. Mliss, a Specialist participant, lamented that ‘Sometimes, participants cannot speak English well. They have no chance to chat during break time.’ Locals who were fluent in English were better able to chat and interact informally with the volunteers in transitional spaces. Like the IDV literature examining language and volunteer effectiveness (Tiessen and Lough, 2019), a common language for convivial interactions is not always necessary. In one Direct Service experience, while waiting at a home for the owner to arrive, some volunteers took out a ball and bubble blowers. They started a game with the children. Volunteers and locals went from passively waiting and staring awkwardly to laughing, playing or looking on in amusement. In this unstructured transition space, having no work agenda facilitated an unexpected opportunity to play. The volunteers’ offering of games became the common language, the bridge and the basis for mutual recognition and fun. Here, gifts do not reify difference (Korf, 2007) but connect across differences, letting volunteers–local hierarchies give way to moments of togetherness. In these transition spaces, the informal encounters are nevertheless brief, ‘providing memories, rather than lasting friendships’ (Raymond and Hall, 2008: 537).