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Because the economy is not found as an empirical object among other worldly things, in order for it to be ‘seen’ by the human perceptual apparatus it has to undergo a process, crucial for science, of representational mapping. This is doubling, but with a difference; the map shifts the point of view so that viewers can see the whole as if from the outside, in a way that allows them, from a specific position inside, to find their bearings. (Buck‐Morss 1995, 440)

International volunteering occupies a popular place in contemporary UK public imaginations. It is supported by a range of stakeholders, including the state, the corporate sector and non‐government organisations (NGOs), which increasingly share a narrative emphasising international volunteering’s capacity to develop volunteers whose impacts on global equity or their professional identities emerge on their return as much as during their stay overseas. This paper explores discourses and practices of citizenship, professionalisation and partnership as they produce and are produced through contemporary international volunteering. We do this through interrogating the overlapping genealogies of international volunteering and development. Our analysis explores the ways in which international volunteering seems to both exemplify neoliberal ideas of individual autonomy, improvement and responsibility and at the same time allies itself to notions of collective global citizenship, solidarity, development and activism. To illustrate our argument we examine two sets of volunteering partnerships, those that support the Department for International Development’s £10 million, 3‐year programme focused on sending young, British disadvantaged people as international volunteers, and the corporate citizenship volunteer programmes supported by VSO and the international consulting firm, Accenture. Interrogating contemporary state, corporate and civil society promotion of international volunteering allows us to examine how notions of professionalisation and global and neoliberal citizenship are produced through development imaginaries, and are negotiated and constructed among and by new volunteering populations and sectors at a moment when, particularly due to the credit crunch, economic and career futures are fragile and uncertain.

In this paper we develop a critical analysis of the new paradigm of culture and development, in which culture is taken seriously as a factor in development thinking and policy. Our analysis aims to understand how and where concepts of culture have come into development thinking and planning. Viewing cultures as multiple and development as a set of culturally embedded practices and meanings, our approach raises issues about how development paradigms have adopted explicit concepts of culture and/or carried within them implicit cultural norms. In this paper we develop a postcolonial and poststructuralist account sensitive to the historically and geographically variable and contested nature of the connections of culture with development, and analyze the ways in which ‘culturally appropriate development’ is thought and practiced in the Andes.

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