This latest issue of Development in Practice is on development actors and organisations and their roles, participation, and communication in various aspects of global development. Articles in the issue address international and local NGOs, grassroots organisations, vulnerable and marginalised citizens, women, diaspora migrants, governments, donors, corporate philanthropists, and pracademics. The articles explore how these actors and organisations can work together to best ensure that marginal voices are heard and those most in need receive appropriate assistance. Some articles (e.g. Couche-Franquet et al.) discuss how NGOs might effectively disengage when necessary to ensure that the fruits of their collaborative efforts are not lost. The articles here also raise nuanced questions about relationships between Global “North” and “South”. For example, Vandeputte argues that we are in post-development era in which the ideologies of non-local actors have no place, while Koch and Roden caution against engaging in localisation without an awareness of its potential unforeseen consequences.
The issue opens with the winner of the 2023 HDR Prize in Development Studies, awarded by the Development Studies Association of Australia and Development in Practice. Bhupesh Joshi, in co-authorship with Valentina Baú and Paul Ryder, was awarded the prize for the article “Looking beyond organisational approaches to advance communication practice: an examination of development projects in India”, which takes a collaborative communication approach to the fields of development communication and public relations. Joshi et al. argue that methods for including marginalised communities in participatory development need to be formalised and consistently implemented to ensure that the voices of these communities are not overridden by organisation-centric practice.
Continuing the discussion of communication for development, Oliver Carrick considers participatory planning in the Galapagos Islands and looks at recent efforts to engage citizens in strategic development plans. He finds that despite citizen engagement in and successful influencing of government planning, such input is still constrained within certain parameters and women and other vulnerable groups are subtly marginalised.
Susan Appe examines the role of grassroots international NGOs, arguing that it is important to consider different types of international NGOs, and that such organisations are not homogeneous. In particular, she looks at international NGOs founded by diaspora members, suggesting that the creation of such grassroots organisations is another way that migrants can contribute to the development of their home countries, aside from remittances, and which may have powerful effects on the development on their countries of origin.
Debashis Sarker and M. Adil Khan turn to the role of the researcher in communicating with local communities, revealing some of the challenges of reaching out to and working with people with disabilities in Bangladesh and gathering data on their lived experiences. They discuss how, in Bangladesh, disability is stigmatised and often results in social exclusion, so great care must be taken to afford dignity to people when seeking to engage them in research. They point out the necessity to gather qualitative data, in particular, on this vulnerable group to ensure that their voices are heard and their needs can be met.
Considering India’s Swachh Bharat Mission, Jamie Myers, Naomi Vernon, and Robert Chambers explore the role of research partners in rapid action learning, immersive research, and rapid topic explorations. They narrate the dynamic processes involved in working with government and various other knowledge holders to implement and adapt policies while monitoring their effects among local communities. They stress the importance of local perspectives and adaptability as part of rapid action learning.
Moving the discussion to Aboriginal-led development in Australia, Louise Stanley discusses the case of the Warlpiri Education and Training Trust in remote central Australia, finding that despite the constraints of the Australian political environment in regard to Indigenous affairs, the program was able to assist in facilitating Aboriginal self-determination in regard to local development. Stanley identifies a suite of institutional practices that were instrumental in this, and which hinged on transparency, communication, respect, learning, and adaptation.
Turning to Uganda, Nathan Vandeputte discusses the failings of “politically smart” aid. Looking at the case of the suspension of the Democratic Governance Facility, Vandeputte argues that the very premise of democratic aid is flawed. Using decolonial criticisms of development, he points out that such aid does not “align with local understandings of a good society”, but more easily perpetuates Western hegemony. As such, aid should be given over to local ownership, rather than delivered under a Western-devised political framework.
Continuing the discussion of aid, Dirk-Jan Koch and Axel Roden argue that the devolution of the North-to-South structure in aid projects and endeavours to ensure localisation can have unintended consequences. Providing an historical overview of the drive toward localisation, they identify five of the most significant unforeseen results: an increase in administrative burden for local agencies, the perpetuating of hierarchies among local NGOs that must compete for partnerships with international NGOs, inconsistency in the pursuit of “universal” values such as gender rights, the reduction of civic space for NGO projects, and a reduction in climate emissions. Awareness of these consequences is not an argument against localisation but a move to better understand its effects.
Taking up the mantle of the pracademic, as exemplified by many of the articles in this issue, Alan Fowler et al. draw attention to the role of pracademics, ahead of their forthcoming special issue with Development in Practice: Pracademics as Change Agents. In this viewpoint, they call for the development of a like-minded community of pracademics, with pracademia recognised by institutions, equipped by resources, and promoted as a career path.
Abhishek Gawande and Atul Arun Pathak turn to the issue of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in India, where the practice is mandatory, and interrogate where the majority of CSR funds are going. They find that the most underdeveloped and economically disadvantaged states receive the least in CSR expenditure, while those states that are performing well in terms of socio-economic development receive more. They suggest approaches that may entice companies to direct their philanthropy to more remote and underdeveloped regions of the country.
Maxence Couche-Franquet et al. turn to the difficulties that arise when an NGO wishes to disengage from a country and consider how exit strategies can be devised to best ensure the continuation of local sustainable development. They describe how Swiss NGO, the Antenna Foundation, developed Bilada (meaning “Cheerful Child” in a local Burkina language) as a social enterprise in Burkino Faso that could gradually be taken over by local entrepreneurs and managed to pursue the goal of long-term sustainable development in the region.
Finally, Patrick Kilby reviews two recent books: The Paradox of Agrarian Change: Food Security and the Politics of Social Protection in Indonesia, by John F. McCarthy, Andrew McWilliam, and Gerben Nooteboom, and Food Security: Availability, Income and Productivity by William Kerr. He discusses how both books make important contributions to the food security debate.