Best practices or best packages? Why local workers’ labor matters to understanding humanitarian aid audit culture

• In Event: 3167 - Section on Sociology of Development Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 4. Restructuring of the Labour Market and Employment in Growing Regions

Abstract

Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) activities have proliferated in the humanitarian aid sector as organizations strive to demonstrate their impact, accountability, and transparency through measurement. At the same time, organizations increasingly call for the localization of aid, often understood as the growing reliance on local actors to make aid work. So how do these two concurrent trends—localization and the turn to M&E—affect the role of local workers employed in the aid sector? Based on over seven months of fieldwork in Jordan, a major aid hub globally, I find that workers’ understandings of their relationship with their employers—and their position as local staff—significantly matter to how they perform the role of the evaluator and contribute to data collection for their organizations. Workers are aware that organizations expect them to contribute to M&E processes in particular ways given assumptions—that are sometimes misplaced—of their “local knowledge.” At the same time, workers are aware of the growing importance of these data collection processes to their jobs and livelihoods, and subsequently work to produce desirable results for their employers both in their formal work roles, but informally and outside of the workplace as well. By using the lens of the worker as the point of departure in this paper, I show how the drive for numbers, coupled with localization, affects and is shaped by local workers in ways that is perhaps not fully accounted for in the literature just yet. By thinking about evaluation as a case of labor relations, this papers hopes to elaborate understandings of measurement practices in the aid sector beyond relational negotiations at the macro level between donors and NGOs; and broaden our knowledge of the “unintended consequences” of these practices in how they shape workplace hierarchies within the sector as well.

Author

• Patricia Sarah Ward, Boston University