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The Personal and the Professional: Aid workers' relationships and values in the development process

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  • Anne-Meike Fechter

Abstract

This introduction, and the special issue as a whole, consider how the personal and the professional are interrelated, and how they matter for aid work. Taking up Chambers' call for the ‘primacy of the personal', this paper explores why the personal often remains un-acknowledged in development studies, even though its salience for aid workers is well-documented, for example, in the growing popularity of their blogs and memoirs. One possible reason for this is an implicit narrative of aid work as altruistic and sometimes self-sacrificing, which renders it inappropriate to devote much attention to the experiences and challenges of aid workers themselves. As the contributions in this volume demonstrate, however, their personal relationships and values significantly shape perspectives and practices of aid work. They therefore need to be taken into account in order to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of development processes.

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  • Anne-Meike Fechter, 2012. "The Personal and the Professional: Aid workers' relationships and values in the development process," Third World Quarterly, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 33(8), pages 1387-1404.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:ctwqxx:v:33:y:2012:i:8:p:1387-1404
    DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2012.698104
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    Cited by:

    1. Anaïs Rességuier, 2018. "The Moral Sense of Humanitarian Actors," Post-Print hal-03458441, HAL.
    2. Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde & Lars Engberg-Pedersen & Adam Moe Fejerskov, 2018. "Global norms and heterogeneous development organizations," Progress in Development Studies, , vol. 18(2), pages 77-94, April.
    3. Daniel Abrahams, 2022. "Lessons in a bottle: The outsized impacts of soda in development practice," Journal of International Development, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 34(6), pages 1071-1085, August.
    4. Anastasia Chung, 2015. "Colonial continuities and impossible attempts: Critical engagements in development," Progress in Development Studies, , vol. 15(2), pages 186-196, April.
    5. Rajeshwari, B. & Deo, Nandini & van Wessel, Margit, 2020. "Negotiating autonomy in capacity development: Addressing the inherent tension," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 134(C).
    6. Emmanuel Kumi & James Copestake, 2022. "Friend or Patron? Social Relations Across the National NGO–Donor Divide in Ghana," The European Journal of Development Research, Palgrave Macmillan;European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI), vol. 34(1), pages 343-366, February.

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