Rethinking Development and Beyond
These thoughts were shared on the Season 3: Episode 1 of the podcast.
As we begin our third season, I want to share some thoughts on the purpose of our podcast and the impact of our past two seasons.
With each episode, we have had the opportunity to be in conversation with a range of diverse practitioners from more than 20 countries. These practitioners have collectively worked with more than 30 different international development and humanitarian aid organizations in more than 80 countries.
Some have spent most of their career working in emergency and humanitarian settings, others have only worked in developing country settings. Some have experiences working in headquarters, others only in the field. Some started as national staff and became international staff, others have chosen to specialize in a specific region.
All this is to highlight that each guest has their own unique professional journey.
Whenever we generalize or use terms like the international development and humanitarian aid sector or industry, we do so with the understanding that there are many shades of gray and that each person has had many different experiences.
Some of the common themes that come up in our conversations include navigating workplace hierarchies and power dynamics, collaborating with diverse stakeholders with competing agendas, negotiating complex partnerships, measuring the impact of programs, learning from mistakes, doing no harm, ensuring accountability, struggling with funding sources and conditions, resisting gender, racial and other forms of discrimination and violence, and much more.
While discussing the micro and macro ways that these ethical issues manifest in the daily working lives of practitioners have been and will continue to be central to our episodes, in our third season we aim to more clearly acknowledge how challenges and dynamics within international development and humanitarian aid are embedded within broader historical and global power dynamics and socio-economic systems of domination and exploitation that have been shaped and reshaped over time and that inform local, national, regional and international relationships through our governments, institutions, families and ourselves.
Our past episodes have often implicitly, if not explicitly, addressed the various ways in which many international development and humanitarian aid challenges are rooted in historical and current day systems of neocolonialism and imperialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, ableism, ageism, and capitalism.
As we continue to share your stories, lived experience and personal reflections, we want to more clearly speak to these histories and systems.
Whenever we call out a lack of diversity in leadership positions, we call out white supremacy, racism, sexism and ablism.
Whenever we call out saviour complexes, we call out colonialism and imperialism.
Whenever we call out a lack of adequate and long term funding, we call out capitalism.
And very importantly, as Dr. Kimberley Crenshaw teaches us with her theory of intersectionality, we also witness and experience first hand how these systems intersect and how they continue to shape our mainstream values, our work cultures, our internalized notions of good and bad, our sense of selves, our imaginations, as well as the dynamics of our resistance and struggles for social justice.
Often we don’t even realize how, for example, capitalistic patriarchy can shape our understandings and knowledge systems, limit our creativity and stifle our ability to imagine more just alternatives. Through a myriad of both subtle and overt, unconscious and conscious, repetitive, rewarded, and violent ways we internalize its values and logic.
Whether we are aware of it or not, this causes us to perpetuate harm to different degrees.
Ultimately, all these systems work through and are upheld by us as individuals.
Beginning With Ourselves
In our past two seasons, we have been fortunate to feature diverse practitioners who each have their own unique values, motivations and understandings.
Needless to say, even amongst colleagues, not everyone is in it for the same reasons or believes in the same values. There is a spectrum of opinions about what is the right thing to do and strategies for impact.
While some are working towards sustainable development, others are working towards social justice.
And of course, despite what they may claim to believe in, not everyone walks the talk.
As Kamla Bhasin taught us, many of the power dynamics and social issues that our organizations are dedicated to addressing live within us and our colleagues and frequently show up in our behaviours and work relationships.
“We have a hierarchy between North and South. We have a hierarchy between whites and nonwhites. We have a hierarchy between men and women. And this hierarchy reaches the international organizations from our families. In my family and your family there is perhaps a hierarchy between your brother and you. And if that brother becomes a UN person, I mean he is not going to change his whole life training at home, that he is superior to his sister, his father is superior to the mother. So my focus, Safa, has always been we have to begin with ourselves. We have to begin with our families. Only then will these values of gender equality, class equality, caste quality, race equality, only then will it permeate up.” - Kamla Bhasin
Beginning with ourselves necessitates that we do the inner, never-ending work of, as Franz Fanon teaches us, decolonizing our own minds, dismantling our internalized bias’ and becoming more aware of how we strategically use, benefit from, align with, and reinforce systems of power in our daily actions. From that process of inner work, we can become better allies and better practitioners.
While this inner work is often neglected, we see and experience how many of the issues our organizations try to address - such as gender-based violence, corruption, nepotism, or racism that in the countries we work in, are also issues that we continue to frequently experience in our sector, organizations, and work relationships.
None of us is immune to simultaneously navigating both our privileges and oppressions. Whether we are in a managerial position or a junior staff member, we all continually exercise our own power and privilege, knowingly or not, even as we work to support and empower the communities we serve.
As Mahrukh Maya Hasan recently shared, it’s not about asking yourself "am I racist?” Its about asking “how racist am I?”
Purpose
Similarly, we all have different motivations for working in this sector.
Some enter this sector having lived through war, forced displacement, poverty, or natural disasters and aim to work to support their local communities and address the issues they themselves have faced in their lives.
Some are in the service of their national foreign policy interests and the interests of governments and donors.
Some are in the service of their own career ambitions.
While quantitative and qualitative impact is the end goal for some, others are motivated primarily by ambition and power.
For many , it is a combination of different reasons.
Both in this sector and beyond, some believe gradual reform can be the answer, while others believe that systemic and meaningful change cannot be achieved without a radical shift in global socio-economic systems.
Sometimes guests have shared how they try to balance or bridge their professional work with their more personal activist organizing and actions - some have had to reconcile or curb their personal beliefs or urge to take political stances with the guidelines and restrictions that some organizations understandably have about their staff members involvement in activism or political organizing and the need to be neutral when working as international civil servants.
Similarly, we often speak with guests about the tension between short term responses, band aid solutions, and more immediate, crisis mode responsive efforts vs long term system change organizing and solutions.
For many who have been working in this field for decades, they have witnessed cycles of crisis leading to some level of aid and support and development followed by another crisis - or as Dr. Burniske taught us - the peaks and valleys of aid and development.
…in most cases international development agencies try and make a commitment and … develop strategic plans for the countries we work in - what our role is in the agency, what our relationships with other institutions, with donors with the government are, and so that there’s usually a strategic plan working over a long period of time. And then you try incorporate what we call an exit plan - so what are the indicators to know when your organization has done its job in the country and capabilities have been increased and it’s time to pack up the bags and leave? And so we try and develop those types of plans - you come in, you’re working in the country, you’ve got a strategic plan over a number of years and then you have a plan for phasing out. So that’s what organizations try and do. Whether that can be accomplished depends upon the donor community in the end, because if funding is available, you can do that. But a lot of organizations pack up their bags when the funding sources dry up, the donors no longer see the country as priority. And so this whole thing about coming in and going out, some countries maybe stable for a moment, and then they go into conflict, and then everything that you’ve tried to accomplish in terms of development - in countries such as in the Middle East - it’s a yo-yo for them, you go through peaks and valleys and you rebuild, and then everything is destroyed by conflict. You come in in an emergency, you transition to development and you make progress, conflict occurs again… so that’s that’s a huge issue. - Dr. Gary Burniske
Speaking the truth is a privilege
As these cycles continue, we also understand and respect that for many practitioners, publicly speaking critically about their body of work can be both triggering and unsafe. There is a culture of silence that looms large.
Sometimes, invited guests do not feel comfortable to speak honestly about the problematic, toxic and sometimes traumatic issues that they have faced in their careers for decades out of a fear of reprisal. Some have to be careful to measure their words and be delicate with how they express themselves. They fear backlash from their supervisors and organizations and partners. They fear the negative impact it can have on their organizations, career and livelihood.
Indeed, for many, speaking the truth is a privilege.
However, neither the issues we discuss or the suggested actions and solutions to them are necessarily new.
For decades, many committed and hardworking practitioners, their counterparts and so called beneficiaries have been speaking truth to power and resisting oppressive and violent ideas, behaviours, colleagues, programs, organizations and systems.
So as we continue to have these critical conversations on the podcast, we acknowledge and are grateful to countless leaders, teachers and former colleagues who challenged injustice in their time and in their own way - both in the sector and in other ways and spaces. They serve as the role-models, mentors and source of inspiration for many others.
Season Three
And because the challenges we face in the international development and humanitarian aid sector are embedded in broader histories and systems, we want to open our platform to hear from those working in different sectors on related social issues.
Rethinking Development cannot happen without engagement with these thinkers and doers as well.
In order to speak to root causes and systemic issues more explicitly, we are excited to announce that our third season will feature some episodes that are inspired by “teach-ins” where we will be speaking with activists, authors, artists and academics about topics such as indigenous future making and decolonial praxis, race and empire, ecofeminism, capitalism and financial systems, disability justice and intersectionality.
As we sometimes speak to on the podcast, there are countless tools, strategies and approaches to achieving social change. International development and humanitarian aid work is one of many.
By mapping international development and humanitarian aid within broader systems, we aim to move beyond conversations that focus on symptoms and better explore and critique root causes as well as collaborative ways forward.
In the coming weeks we will be sharing these new types of episodes in between our usual episodes.
Looking Back
Looking back over the past two seasons, there are some themes that run through many of our past conversations.
Practitioners often spoken about some key barriers as well as skills and practices that are central to their work or need to be rethought.
One overarching barrier is the lack of adequate and longer-term funding and economic resources of many organizations and individuals doing important and vital work in different communities around the world.
Both those working in smaller organizations, NGOs, UN agencies, consultancy firms or other set ups shared the challenges they face- such as qualifying, competing for and securing long term funding or fulfilling the conditions that often come with funds - to name a few.
Often Black, indigenous and people of color who have the expertise, lived experience, networks, passion and positionality to lead the SDG agenda forward in their local communities struggle to access the funds and resources necessary to sustain and grow their critical work and efforts.
No amount of skills or practices such as participatory approaches, listening or trust building can fully substitute for long term substantial funding of local leaders for social change.
Often when we speak about shifting the power, we are referring to economic power.
We will address ideas related to shifting economic power in one of our teach-ins.
But other skills and practices are also important in their own way and need to be fostered.
Countless past guests have reiterated the importance of sincere and active listening in building healthier professional relationships.
Listening is an essential practice - and I say practice as it is something that we have to commit to actively doing on a daily basis. Listening requires time and a suspension of what we think is possible, is right, is best or is technically appropriate or recommended. Listening is an opportunity to witness and try to understand the lived experiences and expertise of those we are trying to work with. It can help us better understand the experiences, realities, needs and ideas of others.
By listening to different perspectives and the feedback others share with us, no matter how uncomfortable that makes us, we can better understand the impact of our words and actions and learn how to be better and do better.
Listening can also support another essential practice, that of building trust.
Building trust is key to any healthy relationship. It is another essential element often spoken about by past guests.
As Leisa Perch shared:
“ I think one of the key tools is listening. And listening with as open a mind as possible. Listening for opportunities where you can probe further. But as I said, a key part of that is building trust. Building trust includes being accessible, understanding that you’re there to help but you’re not there with all the solutions. The solutions you’re likely to come up with are solutions that probably have already been thought of. What you may be providing is the glue that sticks the wood to another piece of wood. Are you maybe providing the link between a feeder road and the market and other markets. So in some cases humility is also a key tool to have. As much as we want to contribute and want to make a difference, sometimes the people in the community have already come up with ideas, what they’re missing are sometimes how to connect those dots or where the opportunities are. And that’s what you bring to the table. Another tool I think is also key is understanding the power and influence dynamics in the community. And when I say community, I don’t mean just a geographic community. I mean understanding the community as a sector. For example, if you’re working in energy - understanding in the energy sector who are the power players, who are the influence players, who are the people who’ve never really had a chance. If you’re saying that you’re going to be involved in sustainable energy, well of course you want to encourage and maintain and bolster and scale up what front runners have already done. But you also want to make sure that people who are not normally involved, not normally engaged or who have had little opportunity can have more of an opportunity. And so it’s also looking at how you balance those kinds of elements as well. Some sound social analysis and gender analysis I think is important. Understanding what the gender dynamics are in any issue I usually find to be quite useful because it doesn’t just tell you about gendered roles and responsibilities which are important, or the differential participation of men and women, but it also usually helps to understand things like age differentiation, rural and urban differentiation, class differentiation, ethnicity differentiation, disability and ability differentiations. It usually tends to open up a door where you can actually see how these issues intersect. I think one of the challenges we often have is that sometimes we put these categories into separate boxes as if somehow they affect different people at different times. The reality is that those who are perpetually or continually and chronically challenged or poor or vulnerable is because they’re being affected by several different challenges at the same time. You need to kind of understand that and better plan and to do that you have to listen.” - Leisa Perch
But trust is not built in a vacuum.
Historical and contemporary power dynamics shape the limits and possibilities of trust in any given moment. For many oppressed and marginalized communities, histories of often state sponsored violence have taught us to be wary of saviours or those who either claim to know what's best or want to help, but that often cause harm and take more than they give.
As many leaders have shared, trust does not trump racism.
Often trust is absent because of the dominating and exploitative structures that have historically and continuously informed our relationships. Trust can not be built on the shifting sands and implicit and explicit violence of eurocentrism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, ableism, ageism and racism.
There are no shortcuts to trust. It is built over time through sincerity and accountability.
Accountability requires practice, humility and frank discussions on harm done, mistakes made, the limits of our knowledge and our lack of respect. It requires unflinching introspection.
In one of our teach-ins, we will be speaking further about accountability.
Another common theme of past episodes has been the hierarchies that exist amongst staff.
The differential treatment of national staff vs international staff as well as experience of staff racism, castism, classism and gender discrimination are concerns for many.
While the issues of differential pay grades, benefits, titles, professional development and training opportunities, and job security persist, another issue is the often lack of celebration, acknowledgement and attribution of credit to national colleagues.
Their expertise, labour and the high personal risks that many national colleagues take are often not acknowledged, awarded, compensated and celebrated in a systematic way that shifts power. And national colleagues who go on to become international staff members continue to experience how hierarchies play out in their career paths.
Ethics
Throughout all our conversations with past guests, ethics has been central. Questions have always tried to address the ways in which practitioners navigate ethical concerns in their daily work in an effort to do the right thing, moment to moment, in the field and on the ground.
As Hugo Slim taught us:
“People were talking about these things. They weren’t necessarily describing them as ethics or moral. They were just saying what’s the right thing to do? And are we being instrumentalized? Are we being abused? So the conversations were all there, they weren’t necessarily labeled as ethical at the time, and a lot of a lot of that persists. A lot of these conversations are just hard operational decisions and problems sometimes which people don’t bother to call ethical, and you don’t have to call them ethical so long as you are trying to work out what is the right thing to do.” - Hugo Slim
Whether you call it ethics, morals, guiding principles, doing the right thing, allyship, solidarity - whatever values guide your beliefs, actions and behaviour, it is important to be conscious of them, reflect on them, and critically interrogate them.
There are many other themes that can be traced throughout our past episodes, and we invite you to take the time to listen.
Positive Impact
However, while our podcast is primarily dedicated to facilitating conversations about ethics and making space for sometimes uncomfortable and challenging reflections, we have often also spoken with guests about their professional successes, times when things have gone well, impactful initiatives, accomplishments, and moments of pride and cooperation that are important to recognize and celebrate and that give us hope.
Indeed initiatives such as the GapMinder Foundation have tracked positive global development statistics and trends over the past decades.
Frequently trends such as more widespread implementation of normative frameworks for human rights, decreases in maternal, infant and under 5 mortality rates, polio eradication, increase girls enrolment in education, increased universal access to water, sanitation and hygiene, decreased rates in the number of those living in absolute poverty, and more are examples are often cited to argue that global development has had positive results.
While we celebrate these very important positive steps forward in the realization of human rights and social justice, we focus our efforts in this podcast on facilitating conversations on the many ways we should and could be doing better.
While we don’t have all the answers, by speaking to practitioners who are committed to this work and shining a light on ethical issues, which for some are blind spots, and promoting the rethinking of often taken for granted systems, tools and practices, we encourage critical and systems thinking, inquiry and dialogue.
I facilitate these conversations with humility and an acute awareness of the limits of my own knowledge, my own privileges and my own shortcomings and am grateful to all our guests and contributors who share their lived experiences and personal reflections with us.
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Finally, over the past two seasons, we have also watched with gratitude as our audience has grown.
We have listeners of different ages tuning in from over 130 countries. While some are at the start of their careers as practitioners, others are veterans.
Many have written to us to express their gratitude to our guests for their honesty and generous insights.
We thank all our listeners for tuning in and encourage you to share your own reflections with us as well.
There are three main ways in which you can do that:
You can go on our website and leave us a voice message sharing a 2-4 minute anecdote related to an experience you have navigating ethical issues in this sector. The home page has a leave us a message button that explains how to do that.
Send us a short letter addressed to your younger self at the time when you first began to work in this sector. What do you wish you had known then? What would you tell you younger self? We will try to read out the letters in our future episodes.
Comment on our social media platforms and sign up for our newsletter!
Through your voice messages and letters, we can include even more practitioner and perspectives on our platform.
Everyone one of us has important experiences and thoughts to share and we want to make space for that.
If you would like to support our team and the work we do behind the scenes, we welcome donations as they help us cover our production costs and the many hours that go into planning, recording, editing, transcribing and publishing our content. You can donate by visiting our website and pressing the donate button.
Thank you again for tuning in and I look forward to sharing our third season with you in the weeks to come.
A Note from Our Founder
When I launched the Rethinking Development Podcast last year, I wanted to challenge many issues.
Two of those are the increasingly short attention spans and the culture of silence that individuals and organizations enable and foster.
As a podcast, we are dedicated to the art of conversation and facilitating long-form discussions on the problematic ethical issues that practitioners confront in their daily work. We promote the practice of passing the mic and taking the time to really listen to what others have to say.
We celebrate inquiry. We try to ask holistic, thorough and non-judgmental questions and make space for reflection.
Oftentimes, our guests and colleagues do not feel safe to speak honestly about the problematic and toxic systemic issues that they have been facing in their careers for decades out of a fear of reprisal. Speaking about it amongst trusted friends is different from calling it out publicly. I have felt that fear myself many times. In the face of it, I often have chosen to stay silent. I respect that we each have to make that decision for ourselves on a case by case basic.
In many cases, speaking the truth is a privilege. But I have learned the hard way that silence doesn’t always protect me and the communities I care about.
Many colleagues and peers that I speak with, both on the show and off the record, struggle with the decision to continue working in a sector that they have profound reservations about. Each has their own individual ideas about what they believe to be the best way to contribute to social justice and systematic social change. Each struggles to balance their values with their career aspirations and the need to make a living. For some, that looks like working at the grassroots level rather than with multilateral organizations. For others, it looks like demanding that management systematically change racist and sexist practices. For a few, it looks like walking away and changing career paths.
Whether you are for reform or revolution, your voice matters and we want to hear from you. Within this spectrum, there are countless personal reflections, lived experiences and lessons learnt that are important to listen to. To reflect on. To learn from. To support. To celebrate. And that is what we are dedicated to doing.
In a few weeks, we will be wrapping up our second season. But we will be back soon with season three. We have taken your feedback into consideration and plan on making some formatting changes. But we continue to commit ourselves to challenging the culture of silence and doing our part to promote thoughtful dialogue, critical thinking and connection.
As one of our great teachers and sheroes, Audre Lorde first said in 1977:
“ What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?
…. In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear — fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live.
… We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”
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