Many of us from privileged areas of the world are experiencing a growing unease in our roles as project managers and consultants. We are becoming more aware of the power imbalances that exist between us and the partners and communities we work with. How do we deal with this awareness?
It does not appear all of a sudden but comes as bursts of insight in our daily work. You might recognise them as moments of discomfort and questioning, or even of concern that our projects, precisely because they all too often have a colonial set-up, have had negative effects in the societies we thought we were serving. These insights are hard to coalesce and to address. They seem to lie dormant in the bottom of our consciousness until the next insight triggered by personal, professional, or social developments.
If we want to talk about decolonising international cooperation, this process needs to be more conscious and more visible. I’d like to start this blog series by sharing some of my insights from the past 12 years.
1. Awareness: a subterranean river that found its source in Eastern Europe
Surfacing awareness
For me, an awareness of my privilege came to feel like a subterranean river – persistent, mostly running beneath the ground surface, suddenly emerging into daylight to plunge again into the earth. I got my first sense that the international cooperation system was inherently inequitable over a decade ago. I was working at an organisation which I have kept since then in high esteem for its relentless engagement of duty bearers and communities in unstable political contexts.
Working as a project manager with countries in Southern Caucasus and Ukraine from 2010 to 2013 (long before the present war, and before the annexation of Crimea by Russia), I was responsible for project design, implementation, and outcomes, and relations with donors. In managing projects, I relied heavily on what we then referred to as ‘local staff’ and ‘local implementing partners.’* These ‘locals’ were NGOs based in Georgia and Ukraine.
Nitty-gritty reporting vs. agility
As the person responsible for projects, I took my role seriously and kept especially high standards on reporting. I demanded the same from our partners. I provided extensive feedback to ensure their reports would amount to more than a list of mere outputs. My highest priority was for the reports to present a clear, consistent, and balanced account of challenges and mitigation measures taken.
My partners usually addressed my requirements without comment or complaint. However, I came to realise that the time they spent on reporting kept them away from all the critical tasks they needed to perform to deploy the project itself. From dealing with increasing political pressures, grappling with bureaucratic obstacles and delays, to handling community mobilisation issues, staff-related challenges and logistical hurdles, my reporting priorities kept them away from what really mattered.
Our Ukrainian partner, for example, who was also working in Crimea, tirelessly navigated obstacles like these. He drove his own car from the offices of the Ministry of Education and Science across Crimea’s hilly landscapes to unheated village schools to run training sessions on intercultural skills for local teachers by regional experts in the week-end. As a result, countless schoolteachers and students, whether Ukrainians, Russians or Crimean Tatars (to take the main groups living in Crimea back then) developed mutual tolerance and understanding towards peers who had other ethnic, religious or linguistic backgrounds. Looking back, I have often wondered how these teachers and youth have dealt with Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the annihilation of Ukrainian identity, and the harsh repression of Crimean Tatars since 2014…
But let’s go back to the point I wish to make here. Our partner’s capacity was invaluable to the deployment of the project and this individual was irreplaceable in this respect. He had an immense talent for engaging his networks to improvise solutions to problems in ways that were invisible from our office in The Hague. As a matter of fact, this was not reflected by either of us in the reports to the donor. With insufficient mention of this critical ‘local expertise’ in our reporting , we lost the opportunity to design alternative projects that took this capacity into account, and to develop better, more context-responsive criteria to assess progress.
The setup, narrative and templates we used were all based on a Western, donor-oriented understanding. So were the principles (accountability to the donor), indicators (mainly quantitative) and activities that were considered appropriate for the project.
This realisation made me more conscious of colonising practices in my work. As time went on, however, I realised that this wasn’t an isolated occurrence or some kind of unavoidable flaw in project design. Colonising practices went deeper and played out in every instance of international cooperation, manifesting (mostly unspoken) expectations from both sides, as the following two experiences show.
Palm trees
Another episode clearly showed a disparity of treatment between ‘international’ and ‘local’ staff. I was traveling across Georgia with our country-based coordinator, a smart, capable, and elegant young lady we referred to in our Hague office as ‘our eyes and ears on the ground.’ This was a woman who had the capacity to maintain relations with difficult stakeholders, to be discrete when necessary, vocal when needed, and had the intelligence to discern changes in the political climate.
Before heading to schools where I would meet enthusiastic students broadening their mindset and communication skills during an exchange in the hills behind the Black Sea coastline, we planned to stay overnight in Batumi. The city had turned into a glitzy ‘Las Vegas of the Black Sea’ thanks to president Saakashvili’s efforts. Upon arrival, my Georgian colleague checked me into a classy hotel with palm trees out front. When I suggested we have breakfast together, she politely declined. As I continued to ask questions, she said with a smile that she was staying in cheaper accommodations. A decolonized relationship would afford two partners traveling together the same accommodation, to say the least.
Stage setting for distinct roles
In another instance, I held a supervisory role on a project combating hate crime against minorities in Crimea. On that project, the partner brought me to visit several project locations.
One such visit brought me to the prosecutor’s office in Simferopol. When I arrived, I was sat down before a flowery porcelain tea set and a table covered with an array of local sweets. An official then went to great lengths to convince me that his staff was closely monitored for any discriminatory behaviour. Given my role, it was natural that my visits to ‘the field’ were somewhat engineered. Still, this meeting was orchestrated as a PR visit and was even photographed for the institution’s website.
Another visit brought me to an elementary school classroom for the project on mutual understanding between Ukrainians, Russians and Crimean Tatars I evoked above. The pupils sat so obediently and were dressed so neatly, it was clear they’d been prepped for a visit by someone ‘important.’
I was also eager to meet the group of teachers who were participating in that training which fostered intercultural tolerance. When I first made the request to meet the teachers, my partner said it wouldn’t be interesting for me. When I insisted, we went to the training location. It was a small building and the teachers sat in a poorly lit auditorium. The partner quickly freed a seat for me on the first row, then launched into a short speech on the project’s progress.
Next, he invited me to join him at the podium. Three teachers stood and approached me with large smiles and offered me a gift – a bunch of light purple grapes made of glass. As my visit had been unplanned, this ornament obviously was meant for someone else. I was exceedingly embarrassed.
I had hoped for an open exchange with the teachers. I emphasised my goodwill, and my eagerness to learn their perspectives. I spoke Russian. However, it wasn’t enough to overcome the barriers between us. In the teachers’ eyes, I was a representative of a Western organisation that provided funding. This is the relation that set the stage for our short encounter.
In hindsight, it occurs to me: How could that exchange have ever been spontaneous? It was our first meeting. And within that short afternoon, there was no time to build the kind of trust that would have let us escape our roles for a brief moment and talk freely.
From the very get-go, therefore, our work was “bound” by a structure that limited outlooks, wasted country-based partners’ time, didn’t recognise their contributions, and didn’t sufficiently account for local realities.
The lesson? Power imbalances go deep and are inscribed at every level of cooperation and interaction, including decisions about where to sleep and how to meet people.
Socialising rituals and isolation
I found my sense of undue privilege confirmed in an in-depth analysis of structural imbalance in the aid sector published in 2009. In a piece analysing practices of US donors (Hammack and Heydemann 2009), Sada Akartsova describes in juicy detail the Western ‘institutional logic,’ in which ‘socialising rituals’ played a key role:
‘US democracy and civil society assistance presumes that locals, with no previous exposure to democratic values and practices, need to be inculcated into Western values. Training, seminars, and roundtables are venues where the inculcation takes place.’
For local NGOs this socialisation into Western donors’ worldviews opened doors to funding. Once they’d mastered the tools and terminology to acquire it, those funding opportunities were eagerly seized.
This ‘inculcation’ – which we now call ‘capacity building’ – led to the isolation of NGOs and donors from the rest of society. This was the so-called ‘NGO-cracy’ of aid. Orysia Lutsevych brilliantly analysed this 10 years ago in the Eastern European context and defined it as follows:
‘professional leaders of local NGOs use their access to domestic policymakers and western donors to try to influence public policies, yet fail in these efforts because they are disconnected from the public at large.’
As research conducted by the Ford Foundation in Russia and by INTRAC in Kyrgyzstan demonstrated, the position and work of NGOs raised suspicion among the general public. The public felt ‘aid’ was for developing countries, not for post-Soviet states, complained that the terms ‘NGO’ and ‘civil society’ were confusing, and accused NGOs of using jargon that was difficult to understand. These findings are fascinating. However, even as I participated in conferences and other ‘socialising rituals’ at that time, and met quite a few teachers, students, journalists, and civil servants, I was unaware at that time that these realities – and this gap between NGOs and communities – existed. I now have three hypotheses about this. First, there was no gap between our partner NGOs and communities. Second, there was a disconnect with some community groups, but I got to meet only those with which our partners had a trust relationship. Third, and most likely, our partner NGOs were poorly understood by other people than the groups they were working with, that is, outside the education and justice sector.
We have anyway two interconnected phenomena. On the one hand, Western agencies single-handedly shaped colonial cooperation mechanisms, which both they and non-Western partners perpetuated in myriads of actions and interactions. On the other, by sustaining and perpetuating these mechanisms, we all indirectly contributed to the isolation of country-based NGOs from communities.
Our current ways of working may be effective in the narrow scope of projects, yet they may have had some detrimental effect on communities and country-based NGOs that we seldom measure. We cannot say we were not warned about this negative impact. Nowadays, in quite a few East European countries, NGOs experience not only growing distrust from the general public, but also blatant discredit nourished by right-wing populist current in politics and media. As a result of these developments, civic space is shrinking alarmingly fast.
A feeling of retrospective shame for not having done anything to address these issues is not uncommon. I feel it myself. However, it’s not the time to be crushed by a sense of guilt. Rather, it’s time to acknowledge the role we’ve been playing in consolidating inequity.
What situations have you observed, witnessed, or unwillingly been part of? I invite you to reflect on your experiences of power dynamics. These may range from a vague sense of unease, to indignation in the face of blatant disparity, to total abuse of power. These conversations are difficult ones to have. But let’s dive in together.
My next blog will continue to dive into my personal response to inequities realised in project management. I’ll say more about what my realisations have led me to do.
*Spoiler: for many terms used between quotation marks, there now are more equitable alternatives, which I will talk about in a next blog.
With a big thank you to Christine Mitchell for editing this blog.
