Paper details

Paper authors	Patricia Ward
In panel on	The Politics of Difference in Humanitarian Practice
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which localization agendas in the humanitarian aid sector condition and confine national aid workers’ upward mobility as humanitarian professionals. Localization policies call for humanitarian aid organizations based in the global North to increasingly rely on global South actors to make aid more sustainable, equitable, and effective amidst an unprecedented number of protracted humanitarian crises globally. However, it is not yet fully clear what are the effects of these policies on aid operations, particularly for national employees: a significant group of ‘the global South actors’ targeted by these agendas. Drawing upon over 90 interviews with aid workers in Jordan, as well as ethnographic observations of their daily routines in urban and rural areas throughout the Kingdom, I find that localization policies produce particular constructions of who ‘local workers’ are, and how they can provide valued to their aid organizations in ways that often are at mismatch with workers themselves, and the contexts they operate in. I find that these constructions of the local manifest temporally through the structures of recruitment, tasks, and turnover(s) that local workers experience in their jobs. I consider insights from sociological theories related to work and the labor process to argue that the organization of time in workers’ lives and daily routines, including how they strategically pace time and think about their futures both in and outside of the workplace, maintain and delineate local workers as a distinct other within the sector and in the global division of labor more broadly.

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