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

Abstract

Nongovernmental organizations working in international development increasingly follow a neoliberalized management model, hiring professional employees to conduct the work of social transformation under a bureaucratic regime that sees the recruitment and retention of staff members as rational transactions between employer and employee. Such managerialist thinking holds that staff members represent bundles of skills and knowledge to be sorted and allocated according to the requirements of work, that they seek to exchange their labor for payment, and that they may justifiably be fired for misdeeds like misuse of materials, misrepresenting themselves, or poor work quality, as determined by the institution. I use the example of local staff members resigning and being fired from an international democratization intervention in postwar Angola to argue that some development professionals refuse to occupy such management-defined subject positions, asserting instead their independent moralities about the place of implementation staff in international development work. International development institutions misrecognize many such acts, however, leaving intact unequal relations of power within the very industry meant to combat such unequal relations on a global scale.

Refusing aid

“…Racial logics of African difference are so embedded in development discourse that development organizations constantly misrecognize political dissent and creative attempts to mitigate inequities as corruption. Peters's (2019) work in Angola, for example, highlights the plight of Angolan NGO staff who refuse their unequal terms of employment by using the NGO vehicles for their personal needs, just as international staff do; they are then fired for stealing organizational resources. By placing discourses of corruption alongside Mego Flo's frustrated remark that opened this article (“We will not use the bank!”), we can begin to understand the VSLA's actions as a rejection of postconflict development hierarchies between aid providers and receivers.…”

Visible Materials, Invisible People: How Branding in International Development Reproduces Inequality

“…Internally, they also professed commitment to “ Angolanização ,” or “Angolanization,” preferentially hiring Angolan staff in nearly any position for which a qualified candidate could be found and even defining certain positions as simply closed to international staff 5 . Despite their efforts, the GGAP never enjoyed a day of full staffing, and its implementing NGOs understood themselves as underdogs in a fierce competition for local professionals, losing against the state and private industry (Peters 2019). The institutional understanding of this competition for staff was that qualified Angolans were very few and, besides, were commonly attracted to perceived opportunities for participation in Angola’s highly corrupt government or its equally corrupt resource extraction–based economy.…”