Article

Critique of Anthropology
33(3) 263–279
Beyond the looking ! The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0308275X13490308

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Elizabeth Harrison
University of Sussex, UK

Abstract
This paper engages with an emerging genre in anthropology’s engagement with inter-
national development – writing about ‘Aidland’ which focus attention on the lives,
motivations and personalities of ‘development professionals’. It suggests that there
are two possible problems with the growing popularity of work on Aidland: first, that
it rests on a reified and dated view of the worlds of aid and development; second, that
an ethnographic focus on development professionals may serve to divert attention to
the significance of both the politics and the material effects of development intervention
and the relations of power within which they are embedded.

Keywords
Aidland, aid, development, ethics, anthropology

Introduction: Anthropologies of ‘Aidland’

The long history of anthropology’s engagement with international development
has recently witnessed the emergence of a new genre of writing. This focuses atten-
tion on the lives of ‘development professionals’ themselves, treated as an object of
enquiry in their own right, rather than primarily the vehicles for the creation and
implementation of policy. A common thread running through much of this work is
the concept of ‘Aidland’, first developed by Raymond Apthorpe, but now more
widely articulated. For Apthorpe,

‘Aidland [. . .] is the trail (to use a word that usefully is both verb and noun, and about
both process and place) of where foreign aid comes from, where it goes, and what then.
Stepping into Aidland is like stepping off one planet into another, a virtual another, not
that this means that it is any the less real to those who work in or depend on or are
affected by it in other ways’ (Apthorpe, 2005: 1).

Corresponding author:
Elizabeth Harrison, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9SJ, UK.
Email: e.a.harrison@sussex.ac.uk

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264 Critique of Anthropology 33(3)

This Aidland is a compelling allegory. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland

and Through the Looking Glass, it is similarly something of a fantasy land, detached
from the realities of the other ‘lands’ it is meant to be aiding. Indeed its attract-
iveness for those who read and write about it might partly lie in the fact that it rings
true. There can be something fantastical about the workings of much aid work; it
can appear to be sealed and separate – a ‘bubble’, with its own rituals, symbolism
and language. It is also parochial, nostalgic, imbued with ‘good intentions’, but
often riven by self-doubt, and fear, unspoken racism and hypocrisy.
In this paper, I explore the reasons for the emergence of this genre and raise
some questions about its broader implications for anthropology’s engagement with
international development, which includes, but is not limited to, its manifestations
in aid. I appreciate that in writing of a ‘genre’ I am in danger of glossing over the
significant differences between the approaches and arguments of different scholars.
Importantly, a distinction should be made between that work which is rooted in
analysis of institutional processes and that which focuses more on the personal. It is
the latter which gives rise to my particular concerns. Nonetheless, I would argue
that there are sufficient commonalities – and indeed that ‘Aidland’ itself has
become a sufficiently recognised trope – for my argument to have substance.
There are two principal aspects to this argument. First, that there is danger that
‘Aidland’ presents a rather dated picture that fails to account for the emergence of
new actors and discourses in the architecture of aid and in the relationship between
aid and development. Second, that an ethnographic focus on development profes-
sionals may serve to divert attention from the significance of both the politics and
the material effects of development intervention while reinforcing a dichotomous
picture of the relationship between ‘developers’ and ‘recipients’. It may also inad-
vertently contribute to a growing pathologisation of aid processes and practices.
The paper thus aims to be a reminder of the value of insights that provide
understanding of all dimensions and actors in the development process and the
relationships between them. I am not suggesting that analysis of ‘Aidland’ is the
only way that anthropologists are currently engaging with aid and development –
far from it.1 It is also the case that most of those who write about ‘Aidland’ have
also written extensively about development outcomes and structures in other pub-
lications. The object of my criticism is not this body of work, so much as the
construction of ‘Aidland’ as an object of enquiry in its own right, and particularly
its emphasis on the personal. Has it become too inward looking, even narcissistic?

Aidland: The emergence of a genre

So what is the ‘Aidland’ genre and why did it arise? I have noted that Raymond
Apthorpe probably first coined the term, but many writers are now contributing to
it. One influential manifestation is Stirrat’s (2008) paper ‘Mercenaries, missionaries
and misfits: representation of development personnel’, published in Critique
of Anthropology. In this paper, Stirrat argues that we still know relatively little
about the people involved in the aid industry and an anthropological

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Harrison 265

understanding should focus on the ‘culture’ of such individuals: what people think
of each other and themselves ‘and how they understand their role in the development
process’(2008: 408). In an earlier paper, Stirrat (2000) made a similar argument,
with particular attention to the culture of the world of international consultancy,
which, he suggests, is as much about aesthetics as it is about the pragmatic effects
of consultants’ work. More recently, the genre has been manifested in a forum in
the online magazine ‘the Broker’, in which contributors discuss and reflect upon
their experiences as development professionals, and in web-based discussions of
‘aidnography’ (e.g. the blog, aidnography.blogspot.com).2 Researchers working
within, and associated with, the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at
Sussex University, although not all anthropologists by disciplinary background,
have also stressed the importance of ‘relationships for aid’ (Eyben, 2006).
The genre has come together in particularly clear form in the last two years
with the publication of two volumes, Adventures in Aidland: the Anthropology
of Professionals in International Development, edited by David Mosse (2011a)
and Inside the Everyday Lives of Development Workers: the Challenges and
Futures of Aidland (Fechter and Hindman, 2011). Both volumes have an ethno-
graphic, anthropologically-informed, approach to their subject matter. In this,
the ways in which development professionals negotiate issues of identity,
gender and race, as well as the tensions and difficulties of their jobs, take
centre stage. Contributors to the two volumes have, in different ways, been
engaged in the project of development – as practitioners, advisers, consultants,
insiders. Some are ‘old hands’, reflecting on years of involvement; this is par-
ticularly the case with Adventures in Aidland. Others are newer to the business;
the majority of contributors to Inside the Everyday Lives of Development
Workers are relatively earlier career anthropologists, often having spent time
as PhD students associated with aid organisations and in this context explicitly
conducting research on development actors.
The books differ in focus: Adventures in Aidland is more engaged with institu-
tional relations and knowledge practices, primarily within multilateral and bilateral
aid agencies such as the World Bank and DFID – the ‘mercenaries’ of Stirrat’s
characterisation. It thus builds explicitly on well-established anthropological inter-
rogations of the development industry. Inside the Everyday Lives of Development
Workers is more directly concerned with the social worlds of aid workers them-
selves and with the nature of the work they do, more with personal relationships
and less with wider institutional analysis. Its contributors draw primarily on
research and experience with national and international NGOs – perhaps more
like Stirrat’s ‘missionaries’. Each book contains a concluding reflection by
Raymond Apthorpe, which, perhaps anticipating criticism, serves to somewhat
destabilise the apparent coherence of ‘Aidland’. As he puts it, the metaphor of a
‘land’ tends to ‘accentuate the essentialist, holistic singular, and perennial . . . ’, as
opposed, for example, to ‘space’ metaphors which accentuate the interpretevist,
plural, and the dynamics of a pattern of organisation and power’ (Apthorpe,
2011a: 199).

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266 Critique of Anthropology 33(3)

The idea of Aidland has both pragmatic and reflexive roots. As noted, many of
the authors contributing to the new genre, particularly those contributing to
Adventures in Aidland, have spent considerable time directly engaged in aid
work. Some have been consultants to or formal employees of aid organisations.
Many did not set out explicitly to ‘study developers’ and have also already written
extensively in ways that directly contribute to aid through consultancy reports or in
their day-to-day employment. With time to reflect, the world of aid thus provides a
rich vein of material, gathered through daily encounters and gradual familiarity.
These commentators on ‘Aidland’ then refer back to the usual source material
of the anthropologist, collected over time: journal entries, notes, ‘odd snippets of
emails to family and friends’ (Eyben, 2006: 92), memory, detailed accounts of
events that all contribute to provide ‘thick description’.
The existence of such material may be more serendipitous than the result of
a specific set of research questions. Stirrat (2000), for instance, draws on some
10 years of experience as a short term development consultant for much of the
source material in his ‘Cultures of consultancy’ article, though this is also supple-
mented by material from a specific research project on the development industry in
Sri Lanka. As David Mosse puts it in the foreword to Adventures in Aidland: ‘Their
insights do not arise from conventional anthropological research projects, but are the
result of reflection on experience of living and working as part of the interconnected
expert world of international development (Mosse, 2011a: vii). He points out that for
many anthropologists in the 1980s, himself included, the squeeze in job opportu-
nities for anthropologists in the UK academia resulted in them taking up employ-
ment in non-academic institutions, including in international development. Later,
positioning within an academic department provides an opportunity to reflect upon
these experiences.
Such reflections are not necessarily, ‘confessional tales’ (Van Maanen, 2011),
only occasionally referring to the position of the ethnographer him/herself.
However, reflexivity can also play a role in the emergence of ‘Aidland’. A 2010
special issue of Anthropology Matters, the UK journal for postgraduate and early
career anthropologists (Pollard and Street, 2010), considers the opportunities and
problems for anthropologists as – and engaging with- development professionals.
As they note, for those who have been engaged with international development
over many years, ‘watching developers’ is an opportunity to reflect on their own
role in this – to interrogate their own motivation and actions. It is also important as
part of a sensitivity to the politics of representing others which has become so
important to contemporary anthropology. This can become particularly acute
when working in contexts of trauma and grief, in which attention to the ‘the
affective, as well as representational’ aspects of ethnography is important
(Pollard and Street, 2010: 2). Shutt (2006) is explicit about her motivation: the
concept of Aidland provides an opportunity for reflection on her own role as an
aid-worker, and on the power relations that this entailed. As she puts it, this pro-
cess can be ‘deeply discomforting’ (Shutt, 2006: 79) as it forces one to acknowledge
the possibility of one’s own role in reproducing unequal power relations, or having

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Harrison 267

‘selfish’ motivations alongside ‘noble intentions’ (Shutt, 2006: 80). The honesty of
her account of a gradual movement from idealistic volunteer to competent profes-
sional, able to speak the language of ‘Aidlish’ and command a salary to match, is
compelling. Similarly, Eyben (in Pasteur, 2006) points out that it was only on
leaving her senior position in DFID that she was able to reconsider and analyse
her experiences there. Prior to this, issues of status and fear of exposure precluded
such reflection. For Green (2011: 38), writing about her time working in inter-
national aid is based on a ‘reflective consideration of my own practice’.
This pragmatic use of existing data combined with such serious reflexivity results
in insights and commentary on processes that have been left largely unexamined in
the neglect of ‘developers’ as actors with personalities, hopes, fears, good and bad
intentions, altruism and selfishness. It certainly provides an important corrective to
the more depersonalised accounts of aid-as-machine. As both Fechter (2011) and
De Jong (2011) demonstrate, the motivations of aid workers combine a complex
and not entirely predictable combination of ‘altruism’, ‘selfishness’ and happen-
stance. As such, surely there is a place for analyses that, for example, draw in
psychology as a way to engage with aid processes (c.f. Eyben, 2006: 2)? Fechter
has recently further argued, following Chambers, for the ‘primacy of the personal’
(Fechter, 2012a: 1387). She suggests that such an actor-oriented perspective on aid
workers is essential, not only for fully understanding their work, but as a way of
improving outcomes. But is this creating a reified, even dated, picture of the world
of international aid and development? And does it in fact, divert attention from
development outcomes? It is to this that I turn next.

The changing nature of ‘Aidland’

The UN Millennium Development Goals, Paris Declaration on Aid Harmonization
(OECD, 2005, 2008) Accra Agenda for Action are all manifestations of an apparent
consensus among key players in international aid. These policy statements are
accompanied by the widespread articulation of some familiar orthodoxies: ‘partici-
pation’, ‘partnership’, ‘transparency’, ‘civil society’ and the need for strong insti-
tutions supporting democratic regimes. The OECD-DAC ‘club of donors’ remains
central to the way that aid is organised and, alongside large international NGOs,
has a high profile global presence. However, the context for international aid and
development is changing fast; there have been significant shifts in its discourses,
practices and institutions, not least because ‘aid’ itself is becoming a concept with
decreasing salience. These changes are likely to have profound impacts for those
living in poverty and are processes into which anthropologists could usefully insert
themselves. Below, I outline some of these changes, before considering whether and
how they fit the picture of ‘Aidland’.
There are several linked aspects to the changing aid and development context.
First is the increased significance of non-DAC or ‘emerging’ donors such as China,
India, Brazil and South Africa and the reduction in the number of ‘aid recipient’
countries. Discussion of non-DAC donors in development studies literature and

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268 Critique of Anthropology 33(3)

among policy makers has been characterised by a combination of a wish to cat-

egorise these donors and anxiety about the effects of their activities, particularly
while they are not subject to control by the ‘traditional’ aid architecture as por-
trayed in discussions of ‘Aidland’ (e.g. Chandy and Kharas, 2011; Dreher, 2011;
Kragelund, 2008, 2011; Manning, 2006; Woods, 2008). Categorisation is elusive;
there are significant differences between, for example, a country with established
practice of aid giving since the 1950s such as China, and a donor such as India for
which giving substantial aid is a relatively recent phenomenon, and which con-
tinues to be an aid recipient. India and Brazil also tend to categorise their ‘aid’
activities less in these terms than as ‘south–south cooperation’. Nor do terms such
as ‘emerging donors’ do justice, either to the long history of aid giving (such as
among some Arab states), nor to the fact that the forms of donation may vary from
the Euro-American model and norms that have dominated in the past. Because the
non-DAC donors also do not have the same reporting requirements and systems as
DAC donors, their contribution to the changing landscape of international aid is
almost impossible to quantify. Nonetheless, engaging with and understanding them
is becoming a priority, especially for those DAC donors who are concerned both
with the ideological and resource control implications of their activities and with
the challenges to human rights and environmental sustainability standards that
they may pose.
A second significant element of the difference between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ aid
architectures concerns the role of the state versus the private sector. Chinese and
Indian aid, for example, has focused strongly on the state as the legitimate and
central actor in development and worked from important principles of recipient
state autonomy. This has resulted in criticism from the west that China, especially,
has given overly unconditional support to ‘rogue states’, such as Zimbabwe and the
Sudan.3 Conversely, the DAC donors embrace the role of the private sector and
‘civil society’ as major aid actors. They also increasingly work through them as
conduits for aid. This is not surprising; there has been a dramatic increase in aid
from the private sector in recent years, comprising the activities of corporations
and foundations such as the Gates Foundation and the growth of smaller and often
not for profit organisations that focus on ‘business’ rather than on charity as the
basis for international aid such as (PRODUCT)RED.4
Alongside these changes in the overall aid architecture is a shift in aid, particu-
larly from western donors, towards a greater emphasis on the role of aid for secur-
ity and a continuing concern with transparency and governance. As Beall et al.
(2006) argue, the mingling of security concerns with those of international aid and
development is not new. The US, for example, has a long history with regard to
this. But the explicit linking of security with both international development and
national interests among other bilateral agencies, such as those from Canada,
Denmark and the UK is a marked change. Accompanying this redirection of aid
towards security, anti-corruption, governance and transparency have taken centre
stage in donor policy discourse. As Mosse and Lewis (2005) argue, this represents a
growing acceptance of the legitimacy of the idea that western powers have

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Harrison 269

the right (even duty) to intervene in the domestic affairs of those that receive
their aid.
So, to return to my question, how are anthropologists analysing this new envir-
onment? First, is the emergence of the non-DAC donors part of the anthropology
of ‘Aidland?’ Fechter (2011) notes that it is important not to reify ‘Aidland’ and its
constituent parts because it comprises a great diversity of individuals. Similarly,
Apthorpe comments that:

‘While it may be difficult for some specialized humanitarian and development agencies to
accept, it is the case that militaries and mercenaries, multinationals (with and without
corporate social responsibility) and missionaries (and other religionists of many faiths),
media and academia are also part of the scenario, scene, plot, and action’ (Apthorpe,
2011b: 194).

However, this observation notwithstanding, for most of those writing about

‘Aidland’, the focus is the world of the OECD-DAC donors – multilateral and
bilateral – and the activities of western-dominated NGOs, both large and small.
‘Aidland’ in this sense, is a world of broad (and for many hegemonic) consensus,
both about the meaning of development and about the ways in which it is to be
achieved. As Mosse puts it in the introduction to Adventures in Aidland: ‘There is
today unprecedented expert consensus on how poverty is to be eliminated and the poor
governed (Mosse, 2011a: 3)’.Obviously, there is no shortage of anthropologists
conducting research in and on countries such as China, India and Brazil,5 but
this is not in terms of their emerging status as aid donors.6 As I have suggested,
this is partly because this is where anthropologists of ‘Aidland’ research material lie.
And, to be fair, the changing aid environment also sits alongside continuities: the
world of consultancy described by Stirrat in 2008 has not disappeared; the World
Bank that is the subject of so much ‘Aidland’ discussion also remains a significant
force, even in the context of new actors. But it would seem that the world of
‘development professionals’ as seen by some anthropologists is at the very least,
becoming dated.
This is not to say that there are not anthropologists researching aspects of the
changing context. For example, anthropologists of corporate social responsibility
and business in development have been productively engaging with (and challen-
ging) the premises and practices behind their growing prominence (e.g. Rajak,
2011).Other anthropologists have also been active commentators on the emerging
security-development nexus, especially in the US, but also for the UK (e.g. Keenan,
2008; Spencer, 2010). Silke Roth’s research on risk and danger among aid workers
examines how they have responded to their own increased vulnerability, particu-
larly in the context of securitisation and militarisation of aid activities and the
blurring of boundaries between humanitarian and development aid (Roth, 2011).
She argues that the tendency of aid workers to downplay risk and emphasise their
own control is part of the ‘professionalization’ that intersects with the securitisa-
tion of aid. At the same time, she observes that, in a context in which all aid

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270 Critique of Anthropology 33(3)

workers are increasingly threatened, it is local staff who actually face most risk and
are most frequently the victims of violent attacks. Lastly, the focus on governance
and anti-corruption has been scrutinised by anthropologists who interrogate the
ways in which simple international discourses of anti-corruption are at odds with
the complex operation of local moralities and responses to such discourses
(e.g. Olivier de Sardan, 1999; Parry, 2000; Sampson, 2005; Webb, 2010).
Some anthropologists are therefore indeed analysing the world of aid as it is
becoming rather than as it once was. The difference from ‘Aidland’ writing is that
most of the work cited above engages with outcomes and effects of such changes.
Anthropologies of CSR, for example, interrogate, not just meaning creation among
private sector development actors and the intellectual history of corporate philan-
thropy, but also the effects of their actions. For instance, Dinah Rajak’s (2011)
analysis of the CSR activities of Anglo American also examines how these are
played out among the mineworkers of South Africa. Research on the new secur-
ity-development nexus involves concern with both those who are now under scru-
tiny and those that may be losing out from the re-direction of aid. Anthropologies
of anti-corruption argue for the importance of understanding how power shapes
the ability of different people to engage in such discourses (e.g. Webb, 2010).
But the focus on individuals, and on the personal travails of development pro-
fessionals, tends to not stretch to such analysis of power. It is therefore arguably
less well placed to comment on how aid processes are played out. Returning to
Apthorpe, he notes that there is considerable boundary-crossing between ‘aca-
demia’ and ‘aidemia’ (defined here as ‘ . . . ‘‘aid practitioners’’ and their world of
work and wisdom’ (Apthorpe, 2011: 203)). Such boundary-crossing is illustrated by
the activities of anthropologists who work within and with aid agencies. However,
Apthorpe also argues that those in ‘aidemia’ have little knowledge of, and less
interest in, academic products, whether this is human capital theory or Sen’s
work on development and freedom. If this is true in general, then it will be espe-
cially pronounced for work on ‘Aidland’, which is a particularly ‘academic’ endeav-
our, precisely because of its rather inward looking nature. This brings me to the
crux of my argument: the importance of not losing sight of, and continuing to
interrogate, the aims and outcomes of aid and development work, while at the
same time not undermining the entire legitimacy of such work. It is to this that
I turn next.

Ethics, anthropology and international development revisited

In 1997, Cecile Jackson argued that a problem with the ‘postmodern turn’7 in
development thinking was that it had a tendency to focus on texts, discourse and
language over materiality (Jackson, 1997). It was thus, for her, worryingly silent on
material conditions. For the work I have characterised as ‘watching developers’,
the issue is possibly somewhat different: it is not just that materiality is subsumed to
discourse; it is that there is a problem where there is an absence of engagement with
those on the receiving end of aid at all. This does not mean that aid is by definition

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Harrison 271

good, thus adopting some kind of moral high-ground in which the giving of aid is
beyond scrutiny. Quite the opposite. But it is important to my concerns about the
‘Aidland’ genre, because, I would suggest that engaging with the current aid con-
text should also be about such ‘ends’ – and how they are met and assessed. Fechter
(2012a: 1401) has recently argued that a focus on the personal among international
aid workers matters – ‘not least because it could help improve aid delivery’. But is
this really likely to happen if the processes of aid delivery are not part of the
scrutiny? The problem is both that we find out little about the effects of develop-
ment on those that it affects, and that we are in turn given little leverage to argue
with those that continue to have an influence in these people’s lives.
This is important because, in a climate in which the private sector is increasingly
seen as a panacea and any form of planned, especially state-based, aid is subject to
critical scrutiny, there is also a danger that anthropologists of Aidland could be
bolstering such critical positions. Anti-aid texts such as Easterly’s (2006) White
Man’s Burden, Moyo’s (2009) Dead Aid and Bolton’s (2008) Aid and Other Dirty
Business have joined a long tradition of critical literature, the most famous of which
is probably Hancock’s (1989) Lords of Poverty. In popular discourse, regular ques-
tions are raised about aid expenditure, particularly in the context of ‘austerity’ in
rich countries. In the UK, public opinion is apparently turning against support for
aid (Henson et al., 2011). Together, these critical perspectives find fault with both
the rationale and the practice of development aid. Most emphasise as an alternative
the potential of the private sector, through a combination of charismatic individ-
uals, philanthropy and private corporations.
Development cannot be reduced to international aid; factors such as trade,
remittances migration and climate change are also critically important. National
development planning also plays a significant role, particularly in those countries
with strengthening economies. As Banerjee and Duflo (2012: 5) note, most pro-
grammes ‘targeted at the world’s poor are funded out of their country’s own
resources’. Equally, locally initiated development and activist organisations may
do as much if not more than aid to initiate change. But aid does still remain an
important aspect of the picture and arguments for its abandonment and a focus on
the private sector and the market could have serious effects on lives and livelihoods.
Green (2011: 51) has suggested that pro-market policies in the context of aid ‘foster
and accentuate social dislocations’. Others (e.g. Evans, 2011) have argued that aid
still has a place in poverty alleviation but that it needs to adapt to, and work with,
other mechanisms for financing development and the range of new actors.
These are discussions with which anthropologists can – and should – be enga-
ging. However, are they sometimes unintentionally bolstering the position of the
anti-aid lobby? For the most part, analyses of ‘Aidland’ are subtle; they do not seek
to expose weakness for weakness sake and they often pinpoint aspects of aid that
have not been much discussed. But, as noted, one of the starting premises for Inside
the Everyday Lives of Development Workers is that ‘projects fail’. And, while inter-
rogating institutional processes is not by its nature anti-aid, focusing on the behav-
iour and motivations of individuals may be. This happens when ‘Aidland’ is

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272 Critique of Anthropology 33(3)

portrayed as dysfunctional for those that work within it (Hindman, 2011; see also
Kaufmann, 1997), when its occupants are a ‘global elite’ (Eyben, 2011), moving
within this world as if they were ‘bearers of universal values’, yet also subject to a
rather privileged parochialism. In this, the luxury of international salaries and
conditions is tempered by nostalgia for both ‘home’ and the pasts of the countries
in which they live: ‘At times this becomes somewhat pathological’ (Rajak and
Stirrat, 2011: 172). There are therefore aspects of this literature that, in focusing
on ‘developers’ but also in some senses pathologising them, provides support to
recent anti-aid arguments.
This is then a matter of both ethnographic focus and the need for engagement
with the effects of international aid and development through global economic
change more broadly. Ironically, the more ‘detachment’ is achieved, the more
the ability of anthropologists to engage with this development is lost. And this
matters if it is accepted that aid is an ethical project, seeking to engage with and
alter poverty and injustice. Anthropologists have commented on this extensively in
the past. For example, for Gow (2002), development anthropology is – or should
be – a ‘moral project’, providing substance to discussion about the meaning of
‘development’. Gow draws on the work of liberal moral philosophers and devel-
opment ethicists such as Martha Nussbaum (2000) and Mozzafar Qizilbash (1996)
to provide such substance. These thinkers have set out various core aspects of
‘human flourishing’ which could be seen as the ends towards which development
aspires. They revolve around certain capabilities that ensure personal dignity, free-
dom and the capacity to make choices. Gardner and Lewis (2006) similarly refer to
‘moral absolutes’, with which anthropologists of development should engage, stres-
sing the underlying moral basis of the development project. Such absolutes range
from basic material needs through to rights associated with freedom and economic
independence.
In a recent defence of the analysis of the lives of development professionals,
Fechter (2012a, 2012b) also considers the role of ethics in international develop-
ment. She argues that understanding the ethical and moral dilemmas faced by
development workers themselves is essential; on the one hand this goes some
way towards addressing the more simplistic caricatures of development workers
as immoral, greedy and lacking in altruism. Indeed they are shown to be people
who are at least as beset by ethical concerns about ‘doing good’ as anybody else.
More importantly, perhaps, she argues that this can contribute to a re-envisioning
of development as ‘shared responsibility’ (Fechter, 2012b: 1476) rather than the
‘othering’ in which aid givers and recipients become compartmentalised into
entirely separate categories. For Fechter, a ‘pervasive tendency to foreground ‘the
other’ – the world’s poor’ (Fechter, 2012b: 1489) is problematic because it makes
those who deliver aid invisible and their motivations unexamined.
I have sympathy with the position that it is important to avoid overdrawn
binaries between aid workers and ‘others’. Indeed this is precisely what much of
the anthropology of development has attempted to do. However, there is a danger
that this is exactly what a focus on ‘Aidland’ will achieve to the extent that it diverts

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Harrison 273

attention from the ways in which aid processes function for the full spectrum of
relationships they entail. This then provides only a partial analysis of the ways in
which power functions and how different people negotiate and respond to this.
Importantly, and returning to Jackson’s argument, while ‘the world’s poor’ is cer-
tainly often used as a simplistic and ‘othering’ category, engaging with the politics
of how people are, and how they become, poor is surely important too.
Much of the ethnography of ‘Aidland’ is rather different from earlier anthro-
pologies of development in its refusal to do this. There are several important
examples of such work: when Ferguson (1990) published The Anti-Politics
Machine, he commented not only on how the aid industry worked, but also on
the effects of this on material outcomes in rural Lesotho. Similarly, in his ethnog-
raphy of an ODA/DFID project in India, Cultivating Development, Mosse (2005)
considers not just the development of policy in ODA/DFID but also how devel-
opment intervention works in practice. The concept of ‘brokerage’ that has under-
pinned much other recent work (e.g. Bierschenk, 1988; Long and Long, 1992;
Mosse and Lewis, 2006; Rossi, 2006) similarly interrogates the ways in which a
wide spectrum of actors involved in aid and development relate to and understand
one another. In this, ‘Aidland’ (if one were to call it this) is not a bubble but a range
of places and situations in which relations of power are played out. For example,
Rossi’s (2006) discussion of a development project in Niger illustrates that aid
donors and recipients cannot (or should not) be neatly compartmentalised. Often
drawing on Actor Network Theory (Latour, 2005), work on brokerage enables an
understanding of how power and politics are played out in practice.
Similarly, earlier analyses of development ‘partnerships’ that sought to under-
stand the relationship between nominal development partners and the power rela-
tions that these entail (e.g. Lister, 1999; Mawdsley et al., 2005) also provided
insights into a wide spectrum of development actors. This is not so much the
case with certain examinations of ‘Aidland’, in which arguments focusing on ‘cul-
ture’ and individuals may be at the cost of analysis of such relationships.
I am not here making an argument for a return to ‘development anthropology’
in the simple sense of anthropology working at the service of development. Nor am
I suggesting more initiatives which over-simplify ‘local voices’, an obvious example
being the World Bank’s much cited Voices of the Poor project (Narayan et al.,
2000). This brought together the words of some 60,000 ‘poor men and women’ with
the aim of ‘understanding poverty from the perspective of the poor themselves’
(WorldBank.org), but has been criticised for its presentation of decontextualised
voices and for its tendency to ventriloquize these voices to confirm World Bank
conclusions (Rademacher and Patel, 2002). But my argument does imply a need to
continue to engage with the ‘ends’ with which aid itself is concerned. Campregher
(2010) has suggested that there is a need for a ‘‘symmetrical’’ approach that ana-
lyses anthropologists, development workers and development recipients in the
same way. I agree, and suggest that in the first instance this might involve a devel-
opment of some of the approaches to brokerage and partnership referred to above.
This does not preclude anthropological reflexivity, but it might also include a

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274 Critique of Anthropology 33(3)

turning ‘outwards’, a reconsideration of the ‘interfaces’ between differently pos-

itioned development actors in order to enable commentary on the power relations
they experience. Here, the ethnographic focus is not so much on ‘development
professionals’ as on the interface between these and development recipients, and
critically on how these identities may fluctuate, including how people move into
and out of the category of ‘donor’ and ‘recipient’.
As part of this, we also need to reconsider the firm boundary that is often
presented between aid and development ‘over there’ and issues of poverty and
social justice in the global north. In his contribution to Adventures in Aidland,
David Lewis makes the important observation that the distinction between ‘domes-
tic’ and ‘international’ development among third sector organisations is becoming
‘increasingly untenable within the globalised world of development practice’
(Lewis, 2011: 178) Accepting that the extremes of poverty in certain parts of the
global south cannot be simplistically equated with poverty and inequality in the
north, ‘it makes little sense to obscure or deny the global relationships and continu-
ities which connect social and economic change within such different contexts’ (Lewis,
2011: 186). Hossain et al. (2010) have recently argued that there are similarities in
the experience of global economic crisis between people living in poverty in the
global south and in the UK, particularly in terms of the gendered dimensions of the
costs of social reproduction and a deepening sense of disenfranchisement among
some groups. For the anthropology of development, such issues of poverty, social
justice and political engagement, wherever they occur, need to return to the fore.

Conclusion
In this article, I have suggested that a focus on ‘Aidland’ risks a failure to engage
with the most important contemporary challenges for international aid and devel-
opment: geopolitical shifts in power and influence; the emergence of an increasingly
strong focus on the private sector; assaults on the practice and rationale of planned
aid. ‘Aidland’ is not a bubble of northern-based expatriate workers, but is often
presented as this.
This article has also raised questions that are fundamentally about ethnographic
gaze. Is ‘Aidland’ too inward looking? Too narcissistic? Does it divert attention
from development outcomes? To the extent that the genre I have characterised as
‘Aidland’ includes work that does indeed engage with institutional relationships
and power, then my criticism might be misplaced. It is certainly the case that some
of the best examples of such institutional analysis come in the ‘Adventures in
Aidland’ volume.8 However, I would also suggest that there are good reasons for
caution. This is because an emphasis on understanding the personal, individual
agency and relationships is also a strong feature of ‘Aidland’ discussion. The prob-
lem arises when this rests exactly there: with the ‘development professionals’, their
own hopes, fears and uncertainties; with their relationships with each other rather
than with the outcomes of their work. Further questions are important: agency for
what? Relationships between whom? Yes, relationships are important, but when it

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Harrison 275

comes to understanding aid outcomes, some relationships may be more important

than others. This is where the work on brokerage and partnership I outlined above
is significant and useful.
The question of ethnographic gaze also requires engagement with the contested
categories of ‘donor’ and ‘recipient’. My argument is that this should not be an
issue of ‘either/or’. Rather, that understanding how people negotiate their identities
as both remains as important as ever.

Notes
1. As I document later in this paper, anthropologies of ethical business, of anti-corruption
and of the relationship between security and development are examples of this.
2. More generally, there has been a surge in popularity of ‘aid blogs’ which give voice to the
experiences and concerns of aid workers. However, there is not necessarily anything
explicitly anthropological about these.
3. Though this is an argument that Woods (2008) finds to be without substance
4. (PRODUCT)RED was launched by Bono in 2006. It is a branding tool through which
companies using the brand (including Gap, Starbucks, American Express and Armani)
donate a proportion of their profit from such sales to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS,
Tuberculosis and Malaria.
5. And in these countries, work by national anthropologists may also engage with the
development context. This is again different from the genre I have characterised as
‘Aidland’ which is dominated by English language writing.
6. Doctoral research is proposed which examines both Chinese and Brazilian aid workers
(Meike Fechter, personal communication, July 2012).
7. By which she meant the writings of Escobar (1995) and others who criticised the ‘dis-
course’ of international development.
8. For example, in Adventures in Aidland various critiques of the World Bank demonstrate
the problems when ideas that do not fit the dominant paradigm are excluded, and both
social and economic relations are reduced to the ‘technical’ and ‘manageable’ (Li, 2011,
McNeill and St Clair, 2011, Mosse, 2011b)

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Author Biography
Elizabeth Harrison is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of
Sussex. Her research has involved ethnographic examination of the discourses
and practices of international development, with a particular focus on gender,
community, citizenship and voice. Empirically these themes have been explored
through the lenses of natural resources management, governance and public
engagement around ageing. Elizabeth Harrison has worked predominantly in
sub-Saharan Africa and, more recently, in the UK. She is the author, with
Emma Crewe, of Whose Development? An Ethnography of Aid (Crewe and
Harrison, 1998).

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