B O O K R E V I E W

Anne-Meike Fechter and Heather Hindman (eds):
Inside the Everyday Lives of Development Workers.
The Challenges and Futures of Aidland

Kumarian Press, Sterling, VA, 2011, 224 pp., index, $24.95
(paperback)

Sylvia I. Bergh

Published online: 15 October 2011

� The Author(s) 2011. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com

This edited volume is a very valuable contribution to the emerging field of ‘Aidland’, a

term coined by Raymond Apthorpe, whose epilogue here usefully explores the

criticisms and lacuna in his own concept. The need for this book is evident: so far, most

research on development has focused on the institutions and organizations delivering aid

and on the ‘‘beneficiaries’’ receiving aid, while neglecting ‘‘the human actors who

transform policy into projects’’ (p. 2). The editors locate the main reason for this

scholarly invisibility of aid workers in the fact that their labor has so far been (wrongly)

understood as intermediary rather than mediating (citing Latour, p. 4), denying the

transformative work of the development worker. The book thus seeks to uncover ‘‘the

space in which transformation happens and the motivations of a group of often-invisible

professionals’’ (p. 17), thus reintegrating the private and public lives of aid workers, as

one inevitably affects the other as well as the development outcomes themselves.

One of the most interesting findings is that the stereotypical aid professional is

actually hard to find on the ground—most of the persons interviewed by the authors

of this book identify as engineers, educators or missionaries rather than as aid

workers. This is partly due to the fact that much of development work ‘‘has been

reduced to a set of technical problems to be solved by experts’’ (p. 5) who move in

and out of the public and private sectors in both developed and developing

countries, and who are seen to be easily replaceable.

The various chapters reflect the vast diversity of ‘‘aid workers’’ and their

motivations, and are rich with ethnographic detail and interview excerpts. Sara de

Jong’s chapter on altruism and selfishness in NGO work argues convincingly that

‘‘rather than attempting to label practices as altruistic or selfish, we need to liberate

ourselves of the shackles of this binary and instead critically investigate under

Book Review Editor: Silvia Ferreira.

S. I. Bergh (&)
International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam,

The Hague, The Netherlands

e-mail: bergh@iss.nl

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DOI 10.1007/s11266-011-9224-2



which conditions altruism takes place’’ (p. 37). Thomas Yarrow shows in his case
study of Ghanaian NGO workers how personal relations, although frowned upon by

proponents of ‘‘good governance’’ as potentially nepotistic and unaccountable,

actually were key in upholding the NGOs’ ideological and institutional autonomy in

the face of threats from government and donors. Similarly, Keith Brown’s chapter

on USAID’s democracy promotion work in Macedonia demonstrates how the

personality and commitment of aid workers are shaped by changing national politics

as well as organizational structures and procedures.

The editors are uniquely positioned to have taken on the task of editing this book.

Anne-Meike Fechter is senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of Sussex,

Brighton, UK, and has previously published on corporate expatriates in Indonesia,

while Heather Hindman is assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin

and has focused on expatriate employment structures in Nepal. In fact, their joint

introduction and their respective chapters are among the strongest in the volume.

Fechter’s chapter seeks to provide a typology of aid workers and explores their

commonalities and differences in terms of motivations (linking nicely with de

Jong’s chapter), mobility and the life course, relations to place and local knowledge,

and outlines an agenda for future research on these issues. As such, it should have

been framed as the conclusion to the volume, rather than a chapter on equal footing

with the other case studies. Hindman’s excellent chapter on subcontracting in Nepal

is the only one that speaks directly to another one of the key themes of the book,

namely how ‘‘development work is being transformed by processes such as

deskilling, outsourcing, and neoliberal approaches to staffing’’ that emphasize

efficiency (p. 3), even though the links between such potentially bad employment

policies and concrete development outcomes could have been made more explicit

by citing examples.

Indeed, a major shortcoming of the book is that while the introduction mentions

that ‘‘this book calls for an examination of the labor of aid […] to suggest that the
structure of work itself influences the outcomes of development’’ (p. 2), this is not

the main focus of the book, or at least the chapters for the most part fail to make

these influences explicit. For example, while Ritu Verma, in her case study on a

French development practitioner in Madagascar, does describe the latter’s lived

world in much detail, she does not provide the evidence that the women’s projects

really failed, nor that, if they did, it was mainly due to a disconnect in the life worlds

between the French aid worker and the local beneficiaries, rather than simply due to

a flawed project design led by an ill-qualified aid worker. Similarly, while both

interesting, it is hard to see the direct relevance of Philip Fountain’s chapter on

guesthood in the Mennonite Central Committee’s work in Indonesia, as well as that

by Silke Roth on risk and security issues, for the central questions this book poses.

It is also surprising to note the curious quasi-absence of Norman Long’s work on

interface analysis which would have seemed an obvious starting point to study

‘‘spaces of transformation’’ and could have served as a unifying lens for the various

contributions (it is only mentioned once in the chapter by Ritu Verma).

While not entirely fulfilling its (perhaps too ambitious) missions, this book

provides rich and detailed illustrations of Apthorpe’s observation that ‘‘different

aiders […] live with different Aidlands […]’’ (p. 199) and is suitable for a wide

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audience, including students, scholars and practitioners. It also serves as a useful

complement for another recently published book, i.e., Adventures in Aidland: The
anthropology of professionals in international development (edited by David
Mosse, Oxford: Berghahn, 2011).

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any

medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

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	Anne-Meike Fechter and Heather Hindman (eds): Inside the Everyday Lives of Development Workers. The Challenges and Futures of Aidland
	Open Access