Development Mobilities: Identity and Authority in an Angolan Development Programme

Abstract

This ethnographic essay considers how international non-governmental organisations are able to make claims to authoritative knowledge about development work by offering the transnational mobilities of their staff members as evidence. I examine how one professional’s biography—his trajectory from Angola to Britain and back again—was differentially presented to external donors and internal staff members as befitting the institutional needs of an international good governance intervention in Angola. These presentations reflect a commoditisation of the cosmopolitanism of professionals’ histories in the service of development as a regime of mobility. I argue that, in this development regime, a global hierarchy prevents some individual professionals, particularly those from developing nations, from realising the same benefits of their cosmopolitan mobility as professionals from industrialised nations. While one of mobility studies’ many strengths is that it highlights global interconnectedness, social scientists should not read equality in these interconnections but examine how patterns of transnational mobility may produce and reproduce global structures of inequality.

Biases in low‐information environments: Understanding for‐profit and non‐profit salary differentials in Haiti

“…Empirical evidence from East Asia (Barr et al, 2005; Huff‐Rousselle & Pickering, 2001; Kuah‐Pearce & Guiheux, 2014) and Sub‐Saharan Africa (Cailhol et al, 2013; Pfeiffer, 2003; Warne Peters, 2013) suggests that INGOs pay significant premiums over other employers in developing countries. In the ‘Republic of NGOs’ (Fass, 1988, pp.…”

“…In a cross‐national study of developing countries, organisational behaviouralists find the pay ratios between international and national staff exceed acceptable thresholds and create a sense of injustice, demotivation and workplace dissatisfaction (Carr et al, 2010). Critics further observe that INGOs' compensation schema reinforces global structures of inequality when, for example, they choose to pay an inexperienced European ‘roughly triple’ what an Angolan professional with better credentials and decades more experience receives in the same position (Warne Peters, 2013, p. 280).…”

“…A standard critique in developing countries is that employees at international non‐governmental organisations (INGOs) get paid more than equally qualified individuals employed by governments (Cailhol et al, 2013; Kuah‐Pearce & Guiheux, 2014; Lemay‐Hébert et al, 2020; Warne Peters, 2013; Zanotti, 2010). Yet there is little discussion given to how INGOs' salaries compare to other private employers—such as local NGOs and international businesses—that provide livelihoods, services and tax revenue.…”

Refusing the Development NGO? Departure, Dismissal, and Misrecognition in Angolan Development Interventions

“…Their different responses, however, can be variously interpreted by the program and by development institutions more broadly. Helena resigned from the GGAP to protest institutional logic that rewarded a young British woman’s nationality and education over her own decades of local experience with triple her salary (see Peters 2013). Her departure was seen as a structural fault—expatriate staff required the salary they required, and local staff were capped where they were capped, and this understandably, but unavoidably, caused such grievances once in a while.…”