Seeing like a donor: the unintended harms of rendering civil society legible

Following the Grand Bargain, there has been increasing focus on aid localisation and partnerships between international and local aid agencies. Yet there has been less scholarly attention on how and why international agency policies and partnerships can cause unintended harm to civil society organisations and their staff. Drawing on James Scott’s seminal work Seeing like a State, and interviews with Myanmar civil society organisation leaders in 2023, this article argues that international agencies often attempt to render civil society “legible” through processes of systematisation and codification. However, these processes can in turn sideline accrued experiential and contextual knowledge, or metis, which is necessary for local organisations’ survival, especially in times of instability. The article highlights several instances in Myanmar where the marginalisation of this more contextual knowledge results in unintended harms. The article concludes that international agencies’ acknowledgement of metis is a crucial and yet still under-recognised pillar of aid localisation.