Praxis and paradigms of local and expatriate workers in 'Aidland'

Roanne van Voorst
2019 Third World Quarterly  
This paper discusses practices and paradigms that expatriate and national humanitarian aid workers use to deal with major problems they encounter in their daily work. It views 'Aidland' as an arena where different actors encounter, negotiate and shape the outcome of aid. One of the main findings is that there are consistent differences in the way expatriate and national aid actors perceive problems in their field, as well as in the way they respond to these issues. The paper shows that these
more » ... ceptions often translate into heterogeneous paradigms and practices between expatriate and national staff, particularly around remote control aid, partnerships and donor reporting. These findings are highly relevant in the current context of 'localisation' , suggesting that the so-called North/South divide continues to exist and more explicit attention should be given in aid research to the heterogeneous strategies of different actors working in the aid sector. The paper is based on analysis of data derived from a multiple-round Delphi expert panel study involving 30 highly experienced humanitarian aid practitioners. Humanitarianism aid and capital flows governance conflict and security This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons attribution-NonCommercial-Noderivatives license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
doi:10.1080/01436597.2019.1630269 fatcat:eylynzzu3ffzfncvrrrdcif4ce