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This article considers the Institute of Development Studies' (IDS) concept of 'engaged excellence' from a postcolonial perspective, interrogating notions of 'excellence' determined in the global North, and calling for deep, long-term and mutually constitutive 'excellent engagement' between institutions in the global South and North. It offers a case study of how excellent engagement has developed over a decade-long relationship between researchers from IDS and from a partner organisation in Uganda, the Refugee Law Project, and how incrementally these have extended to include intensive engagement with the lives and advocacy commitments of an association of male survivors of sexual violence. Engaged excellence, it argues, can only be the outcome of excellent engagement, itself a process that is challenged by structural arrangements related to funding from and academic enterprise within the global North.

This article explores the changing narratives of volunteering in development and the interplay of volunteering with global and local theories of how change happens. Firstly, we analyse the links between the evolution of mainstream development trends and changes in volunteering approaches and programmes. Secondly, we look at how changing conceptions of volunteering have repositioned international volunteering in relation to national and local contexts. Thirdly, we present the implications of shifts in understandings of knowledge creation, which happens from the ground up, on volunteering research and programming. This discussion is situated within pressure for 'results' within contemporary development discourse and practice. The article concludes that the volunteering sector is at a crossroads; organisations working in meaningful partnerships with volunteers from local to global levels must remain at the forefront -questioning mainstream trends and advocating people-centred development. This article draws on a literature review undertaken to inform the Valuing Volunteering project.

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