Beyond humanitarianism and development: reconceptualising volunteering in protracted crises

• In Event: Views on "Development" Dynamics

Abstract

This paper analyses the practice of local volunteering during protracted crises and explores its implications for humanitarian and development discourses and practices. Over one billion people in the world are estimated to live in countries facing protracted crises in our times (Urquhart & Thomas, 2020). Despite their critical roles, the presence of local volunteers in these settings is often assumed in practice and obscured in the literature. Based on qualitative data from Burundi, the paper develops a critical conceptualisation of volunteering in protracted crises that reveals how it does not fit established humanitarian and development institutional frameworks but rather shows how volunteers transcend and destabilise them through their local engagement.

Perceptions of Northern/Western skills and superiority have historically reinforced top-down hierarchies based on notions of superior ‘aid givers’ and inferior ‘aid receivers’ (Georgeou, 2012). This is coupled with systems and frameworks dictated by external donor agendas fixing distinctions between emergency humanitarian action (e.g. short-term, life-saving) and development work (e.g. long-term, reconstruction). Such boundaries, however, are not always perceived in protracted scenarios that challenge the ‘exceptional’ condition of crises (Alinovi et al., 2008; Serrano, 2012). Volunteering during a protracted crisis offers a particularly significant ground for questioning such siloed conceptualisations because local volunteers navigate these invisible ‘institutional spaces’ in multiple and intertwined ways through their activities.

The paper discusses key findings from my doctoral research in Burundi, which involved 105 participants, mainly volunteers, in the provinces of Bujumbura (predominantly urban) and Makamba (predominantly rural). It adopted a Freirean understanding of knowledge production as the result of a human, creative process through which we critically reflect on our own experiences (Freire, 1970) and combined semi-structured interviews, participatory mapping, and group discussions, including rural community exchanges.

This paper advances current scholarship that, although increasingly recognising the importance of smooth transitions between relief and rehabilitation (Buchanan-Smith & Maxwell, 1994), remains focused on the ‘nexus’ (OCHA, 2017; Sande Lie, 2020), and therefore assumes an intrinsic differentiation between humanitarian and development ways of working. The findings discussed here provide a critical analysis of the meanings of ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘development’ for local volunteers that showed not only how the concepts are understood interchangeably but also that boundaries between existing institutional systems are blurred in practice. Importantly, these humanitarian and development agendas do not constitute a monolithic set of practices and ideas, but are also informed by the diversity of practices of different organisations and stakeholders in different rural and urban settings. Hence, this paper calls for relocating volunteering in its particular social, cultural and geographical spaces, and recognising how these spaces are shaped by but also challenge established humanitarian and development discourses and practices during protracted crises.

References

Alinovi, L., Hemrich, G., & Russo, L. (Eds.). (2008). Beyond relief: food security in protracted crises. Practical Action Publishing & FAO.

Buchanan-Smith, M., & Maxwell, S. (1994). Linking relief and development: an introduction and overview. IDS Bulletin, 25(4), 2–16.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th ed.). Continuum, New York.

Georgeou, N. (2012). Neoliberalism, Development, and Aid Volunteering (1st ed.). Routledge.

OCHA - United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. (2017). New Way of Working. https://www.unocha.org/sites/unocha/files/NWOW Booklet low res.002_0.pdf

Sande Lie, J. H. (2020). The humanitarian-development nexus: humanitarian principles, practice, and pragmatics. Journal of International Humanitarian Action, 5(18), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-020-00086-0

Serrano, M. (2012). Strengthening institutions or institutionalising weaknesses? Interactions between aid and local institutions in Huíla Province, Angola [Wageningen University, Wageningen, NL]. http://edepot.wur.nl/193127

Urquhart, A., & Thomas, A. (2020). Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2020. https://devinit.org/resources/global-humanitarian-assistance-report-2020/

Author

• Bianca Fadel, Northumbria University