Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on how power dynamics between the International Development Experts (IDEs) and National Development Experts (NDEs), and internal political structure and competition between NDEs and politicians lead to the NDEs' exclusion from national policymaking in Ghana's aid sector.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the processes of how the National Development Experts (NDEs) are frequently excluded in Ghana's aid sector including decision making and knowledge production. To understand this, we focus on the narratives of the NDEs in Ghana who are perceived to be well placed in elucidating different mechanics of such exclusionary processes and practice. Insights from twenty-five semi-structured interviews with Ghanian NDEs were conducted in two phases between July and September 2017 and September and December 2018. Two themes seem to explain the processes of NDEs' exclusion in Ghana's development policy practices very closely. First, the power imbalance within the aid architecture between the International Development Experts (IDEs) from the West and the Ghanian NDEs. Second, the internal political structure in Ghana and competition among the NDEs. The existing literature on local aid workers (Sundberg, 2019; Sou, 2021; Roth, 2019) focuses exclusively on their engagements with foreign expatriates. While the main arguments complement the existing literature, empirical evidence presented in this paper also adds new insights about the internal dynamics such as competition and power relations between NDEs and local actors including bureaucrats and politicians that are almost non-existent in current scholarship. At a time when 'decolonising development' is often reverberated either as a slogan or genuine goal it is imperative that the politics of exclusion among/within development experts is critically scrutinised to ensure a just sustainable future of the aid sector through the lived experience and learning of the NDEs.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explains the importance of embedding intersectionality into participatory methods to address climate justice and proposes a methodology based on storytelling, arts and performative approaches to negotiate the principles underpinning a just climate transition.

Paper long abstract:

There is a recognition of how people's identities across different axes (gender, race/ethnicity, class, age, ability, sexuality, citizenship) determine how they are affected by climate change (Godfrey & Torres, 2016) because these identities shape people's geography, livelihood, vulnerability and capacity to adapt (Pearse, 2017). Policies and interventions to deal with climate change may further increase inequalities and injustice largely because they are blind to intersectional inequalities, ignore the complex layers of vulnerability, and lack the participation of the affected stakeholders in designing solutions. In this context, there is need for new climate knowledge to counter the disempowering techno-scientific system dominating CC policy (Nightingale et al., 2020).

Developing intersectional participatory methodologies to CC helps the move away from extractive knowledge creation towards politicised coproduction approaches able to challenge power structures (McArdle, 2021). An intersectional participatory approach can reveal how these intersectional inequalities interact with CC and policies to address it, transforming power relations at the core of social identities, and lead to more just, democratic, multifaceted and multi-scalar climate solutions (Malin & Ryder, 2018).

Building on the author's work to embed intersectionality in participatory processes, the paper explains the importance of intersectional participatory methods for climate justice and presents how they can be developed by adapting storytelling, artistic and performative approaches. Such methods can help challenge the anthropocentric lens and consider the interests of non-human animals, the planet and future generations. They can provide fresh insights into complex issues grounded in people's experience, challenge assumptions, and demonstrate new connections between issues.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I aim to offer a critical take on the way in which the agendas for localization and resilience in contemporary humanitarian practice have been utilized to structure the articulations of development knowledge within international aid and assistance programming in crisis settings.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at the ways in which knowledges of "development" are collected, collated, and organized within contemporary humanitarian actions that target communities living in crisis settings. Starting from a critical cultural political economy perspective, the paper will discuss how international aid programmes designed to deliver humanitarian assistance and support to forcibly displaced and other populations who are enduring "vulnerabilities" due to conditions of crisis make use of the popular agendas of "localization" and "resilience" in order to mobilize donor, organizational, and local resources within a depoliticized framework of knowledge articulations. It will consequently be argued that the humanitarian/development nexus initiative, which may be considered the emergent regulating ideal of new international aid and technical cooperation programming, turns less on the practice of the implementation of humanitarian response activities that are expected to lead to development outcomes than on the pragmatic conceptualization of development both as a limit-process whereby communities survive crises and as one way in which experience of crises can be moderated. In making this argument, the paper will analyze several examples, and the overall architecture, of contemporary international assistance programmes targeting the conflict-affected populations of Northwest Syria, tracing the various ways in which the notion of "resilience" has been introduced into this architecture from the mid-2010s through a process of policy dissemination operationalized via both central epistemic communities and peripheral humanitarian communities of practice.