The rush to the local volunteer: A symbolic geography of volunteering?

• In Event: Volunteering for Development: current thinking in addressing inequalities in practice and research

Abstract

Volunteering is a central feature of humanitarian and development work, with growing recognition of the roles of volunteers in fostering social cohesion and addressing societal challenges. Nevertheless, existing research on volunteering in development contexts frequently privileges the perspectives of international volunteers from the global North who volunteer in the global South, sidelining the breadth of volunteering experiences and voices of local, national and international global South volunteers. Local-level volunteering practices have often been overlooked as significant contributors to development (Plan of Action to Integrate Volunteering into the 2030 Agenda, 2020), with volunteers treated as “a unidimensional commodity” (Cnaan & Amrofell, 1994), irrespective of differences, such as those related to their geographies and forms of engagement.
However, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic precipitated a significant change in global volunteer mobilities, as international volunteers across the global South were forced to return to their countries of origin, and volunteer-engaging development organisations were required to rapidly re-orient their working practices. Although a moment of crisis, we argue that this re-assessment did not come out of the blue, but forms part of a longer trajectory – responding to now well-established critiques of the international volunteering model (Baillie Smith & Laurie 2011; Blum & Schäfer, 2018, Shachar, 2014), alongside the recent impetus towards decolonising development (and volunteering) practices. Whilst the contributions of local volunteers thus became more evident and were celebrated during the pandemic (Baillie Smith 2020; Chadwick El-Ali, 2021; Perold et al., 2021), we emphasise that local and community volunteers are not ‘new’ but have been responsibilised in particular ways as a result of these shifts. We therefore explore how this rush towards embracing such localised volunteer efforts reveals particular inequalities and risks which need to be addressed in context-specific ways.
Data is drawn from a collaborative project with Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) which aimed to understand how different types of volunteer work together in the context of VSO’s ‘blended’ approach to the planning and implementation of projects. Case studies in Tanzania, Uganda and Nepal involved qualitative and quantitative methods, including interviews, workshops and an online survey. The 460 participants included different types of volunteers (in terms of geographical backgrounds, duration of placement, skillsets and experiences), staff members, and community beneficiaries.
Situating findings from these three case studies within the broader volunteering landscape, we conclude that whilst an apparently new geography of volunteering that assigns new agency to local volunteers might appear to have emerged in the wake of the pandemic, this is a largely symbolic geography. Through analysing how blended volunteering was operationalised in the specific context of the pandemic, the paper unpacks the historic and contemporary colonialities embedded in this rush to the local. In so doing, we provide critical insight into how blended volunteering approaches might facilitate a move beyond a symbolic celebration of the ‘local volunteer’ by tackling entrenched hierarchies and foregrounding a more granular understanding of the temporalities, geographies, skills and knowledges that underpin volunteering in development contexts.


References:
Baillie Smith, M. (2020, May 19). Coronavirus volunteers aren’t just a source of free labour – don’t take advantage of them. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/coronavirus- volunteers-arent-just-a-source-of-free-labour-dont-take-advantage-of-them-136103
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Authors

• Matt Baillie Smith, Centre for Global Development, Northumbria University

• Katy Jenkins

• Bianca Fadel, Northumbria University

• Inge Boudewijn, Northumbria University