Paper: The structural barriers to locally led aid: the role of representation in the structuration of the humanitarian field

Paper details

Paper authors Femke Mulder
In panel on What is holding us back? Humanitarian Reform and the Shift to Locally-Led Response
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting In-Person / Online

Abstract

The humanitarian sector has struggled with the same problems for decades: poor coordination with local actors, lack of accountability to disaster affected people, elite capture of aid, short-termism and a failure to address local patterns of vulnerability. Locally driven aid has (again) been put forward as the solution to these problems. However, as before, the current drive for localisation, accountability and participation in aid does not address the structural causes underlying the sector’s problems. This paper goes further than arguing that current initiatives are not effective - it contends that they actually contribute to the side-lining of local self-organized aid and the deepening existing patterns of vulnerability. In order to understand this paradox this paper will deploy a structuration approach, analysing the sector as a network, a discursive / institutional field and an industry. Its focus will be on the role of representation in the emergence and persistence of centralized top down approaches to aid. Its main argument is that the structuration of the sector is closely interlinked with representations (of local circumstances, people and projects) that 1) are fine-tuned to the interests and expectations of leading humanitarian actors or local elites; in order to 2) meet non-humanitarian goals of representors; and 3) place local disaster affected groups in a subaltern network position, rendering their agency and initiatives invisible to decision humanitarian makers. This paper draws on 4 months of fieldwork in post-earthquake Nepal and uses a case study of a local participatory accountability project to illustrate its findings.

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Presenters

Femke Mulder
Vrije Universiteit