Introduction
For decades now non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have faced a battery of criticism from development scholars for perceived failings in delivering their missions of empowerment and social justice (Bebbington, Hickey, & Mitlin, 2008; Ebrahim, 2003; Fowler, 2000; Long & Long, 1992; Mawdsley, Oakley, Porter, & Townsend, 2002; Mosse, 2005). NGOs stand accused of being unaccountable to their intended beneficiaries and (despite the corporate commitment to operational efficiency) being ineffective in delivering sustainable transformation (Andrews, 2014; Crack, 2013a, 2013b). It is widely held that NGO strategies and activities are distorted by donor priorities, often in ways that directly undermine their supposed mission and erode perceptions of their credibility in the target community (AbouAssi, 2013; Arts & Elbers, 2011; Bob, 2005; Chang, 2013; Dreher, Koch, Nunnenkamp, & Thiele, 2009; Morfit, 2011). Criticisms are varied but cluster around a central claim: that NGOs are not sufficiently appreciative of the realities of the lives of people that they aim to assist, nor adequately responsive to their needs and desires (Porter, Ralph-Bowman, & Wallace, 2013). These concerns are mirrored by the anxieties expressed by some NGO practitioners themselves about the extent to which power relationships on the ground may distort decisions about what âcountsâ in practice as an expression of community views (Workshop Report, 2014).
This chapter looks at the ways in which the voices of local communities and the encounters between Northern NGOs and Southern groups are represented in development scholarship. Communication, it will argue, is a two-way process in which listening to the âotherâ is a vital, but as yet largely unexplored, component. The chapter seeks to address this gap by drawing on research in fields outside Development Studies and International RelationsâListening Studies, Cultural Studies and Translation Studiesâin order to propose a new theoretical framework, âThe Listening Zones of NGOsâ, as a structuring principle. By adopting the Listening Zones framework, the book aims to position languages and cultural awareness as key elements in addressing the alleged disregard for local communities on the part of NGOs. The research in this volume suggests that listening relationships that respect the foreign âotherâ are intimately linked to positive project outcomes in development: âNo respect, no effectâ (Krose, 2018).
âVoiceâ in Development Studies
Focusing on the lived realities of the communities NGOs seek to support, as they themselves choose to express these realities, mirrors a broader trajectory in development theory away from prioritising macroeconomic factorsâdebates around the balance between the market and the stateâtowards an emphasis on social capital which is understood as establishing norms of reciprocity and social solidarity in order to empower the poor so that they can act for themselves in processes of community-based local development (Harriss & de Renzio, 1997; Solow, 2000). As Bowles and Veltmeyer (2019) argue, whilst social capital has opened up a space for theoretical discussions which are not purely economic, it has also been accused of fostering a measure of political demobilisation, turning the rural poor away from the confrontational politics of social movements. Writers searching for alternative forms of development, the so-called âPost-developmentâ scholars, with their influential critique of development as colonisation (Escobar, 1997; Sachs, 1992), largely employ, as Gudynas (2019) suggests, a post-structuralist form of discourse analysis which assumes that social science has no especially privileged access to truth in development, that there are no agreed facts, but rather interpretations, and different ways of seeing and understanding. The lens of such development research tends to focus on the micro, on communities seeking to construct social and solidarity economies (Barkin, 2019), which, as illustrated by particular case studies (AlbĂł, 2012; Farah & Vasapollo, 2011; Medina 2011), are clearly non-capitalist paradigms.
Faced with this search for alternative theoretical paradigms within the long-standing narrative of NGO failure, some development practitioners have moved to explore the potentialities of a qualitative approach, emphasising the need to examine relationships both within and between organisations, and to accept a priori the inequality of power intrinsic to the system. Eyben (2006) has claimed that aid workers have implicitly viewed society as a type of machine in which social change is both possible and predictable:
The illusion of being in control leads to a neglect of relationships that would privilege different perspectives and offer new answers to managing the turbulent political environment of which donors are part, and contribute towards creating. (Eyben, 2006, p. 1)
She calls for a greater engagement with the relational processes that define boundaries and create meanings, accessed through a concentration on qualitative factors:
âŚexperiences and concepts will often be shared through stories and anecdote, involving high levels of ambiguity as well as emotion. A relationship is a process, not a thing. It is characterised by conversations, assumptions and the power relations between the parties. (Eyben, 2006, p. 9)
This relational turn is in many ways a direct challenge to the logic of traditional NGO practice which tends to instrumentalise those communities which aid interventions aspire to support: âthe project is a commodity, and thus those helped, the beneficiaries, become part of a commodityâ (Krause, 2014, p. 4).
An emphasis on the relational implies both a context-sensitive approach to knowledges of local practice, and a more focused endeavour to hear the âvoicesâ of those on the receiving end of aid. For NGO practitioners, any active awareness of local contexts is necessarily situated within the framework of long-standing debates about the political and technical nature of âknowledgeâ (Ferguson, 1994; Li, 2007), and of the relationships between so-called expert and indigenous knowledge (Chambers, 2008, 2014; Holland, 2013). As Hayman (2016) notes, promoting more context-sensitive praxis on the part of NGOs involves addressing the vexed methodological question of what actually counts as evidence for NGOs and their donors: material derived from an empirical social science apparatus favoured by the evidence-based policy movement in international development, or the âmore fluid forms of knowledgeâ (p. 131) emerging from constructivist and interpretive traditions which give precedence to the participatory and the relational.
Goldstein (2013) argues that traditional framings of the local/global divide tend to be Euclidean in nature, producing an image of a static, linear universe in which other coordinates appear as intermediate points on the same trajectory. Within such a two-dimensional model, it can be difficult to discern the complexity of other social actors, whilst the language of space itself âimplies magnitude and importanceâ (p. 112), and thus can easily represent concepts as travelling one way along a line from an advanced âtransnationalâ realm to a fixed, and largely ahistorical âlocalâ.
In this situation, the differences between a substantialist approach (prioritising entities, units and structures which are bounded and fixed) and a relational perspective (foregrounding process, fluidity and interaction) (Cornwall, Eyben, & Kabeer, 2008) are difficult to bridge. For example, the Evidence Principles toolkit devised by Bond (2013) to guide NGOs in assessing the quality of their evidence includes âVoice and Inclusionâ as one of its five key principles, balanced together with Appropriateness, Triangulation, Contribution and Transparency. The unspoken assumption is that a clear distance exists between international interveners and the local communities, that there is a barrier which might make it difficult to conceive of any relational mixing between them, any hybridity of the type which Boege and Rinck have discerned in instances of peacemaking practice: âthe boundaries of âthe internationalâ and âthe localâ become porous and blurred in the context of the locale âthere is nothing and nobody purely local (or international)â (Boege & Rinck, 2019, p. 219).
Beyond openness to local knowledges, actually hearing the voices of those on the receiving end of aid is represented within much practitioner reflection as deeply problematic. At the outset, voices from the foreign communities are expected to be difficult to access, so that NGOs find themselves engaged in searching for what is by definition elusive. Their pursuit is often described in the literature as being a process of âcapturingâ: âcapturing subaltern voicesâ (Many...