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A reflection on how humanitarian workers navigate moral and ethical tensions in aid organizational settings, and how this navigation shapes professional trajectories, decision-making cultures and humanitarian outcomes.

Contribution long abstract

This contribution reflects on how humanitarian workers navigate moral and ethical tensions within organizational environments shaped by structural inequities, institutional priorities and uneven access to influence. Drawing on more than a decade of experience in humanitarian field operations and early-stage doctoral research on humanitarian careers, reputation and moral labour, I use “navigation” to describe the everyday interpretive and relational work through which workers engage with expectations, read constraints, assess implications and situate both their actions and their careers within organizational dynamics. I approach these processes through the lens of positionality, paying attention to how power structures shape whose questions, hesitations or objections can move through an aid organization and have the potential to influence outcomes.

I raise questions about how these uneven forms of navigation intersect with professional trajectories, decision-making cultures and the design of programmes. How might uneven access to influence relate to the kinds of ethical tensions that surface within humanitarian work, and those that remain unspoken? What might this mean for an organization’s ability to uphold the humanitarian imperative in practice? And how could exploring these questions help illuminate how responsibility and authority are distributed across humanitarian workplaces?

By situating humanitarian workers’ moral and ethical navigation within debates on inequity, legitimacy and organizational culture in the aid sector, this contribution speaks to the roundtable’s interest in understanding development work as a human, relational and power-laden practice.

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A review of global funding programmes for SDG-focused research partnerships, highlighting equity, capacity building, and sustainability in North–South collaborations. Offers best practices, challenges, and recommendations to design schemes addressing power dynamics and agency.

Contribution long abstract

Contribution

• Evidence from a review of international funding programmes supporting research partnerships which tackle challenges relating to the SDGs.

• Lessons on fostering equity, capacity building, and sustainability in North–South collaborations, best practices and challenges.

• Recommendations for designing funding schemes that address power dynamics and agency.

Why?

Research Ireland is Ireland’s national research agency dedicated to supporting research excellence and innovation. My fellowship project at Research Ireland examines how research performing organisations in Ireland and partners in the Global South engage in collaborative research partnerships under SDG-focused programmes. By sharing findings on best practices, opportunities and challenges in equitable research collaborations, I will contribute to the roundtable’s discussion on reimagining development and shaping inclusive futures for funding organisations.

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Contribution short abstract

This contribution examines the pivotal role of enumerators and survey workers in producing statistical knowledge for development research and practice based on fieldwork in India. It analyses their skills, precarity, social backgrounds and future aspirations.

Contribution long abstract

Statistics have for long been the bedrock on which international development has been analysed and executed. Analysing the statistical infrastructures that underly development and public policy has been an important focus in ethnographic and critical development studies scholarship (Holland 2013; Jerven 2013; Merry 2016; Rottenburg and Merry 2015). While much of this scholarship has analysed the role of technocrats, officials and statisticians in producing quantitative data, a growing scholarship has emerged that focuses on the role of enumerators and frontline workers in the production of socio-economic statistics (Biruk 2018; Kingori 2013; McLellan and Eyre 2025). Based on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork in India, this contribution analyses the crucial labour performed by enumerators and survey workers, the intricate tacit skills they utilise in survey work, their aspirations and social backgrounds. This is analysed in the context of a growing private industry for customised socio-economic data where economists and assorted international development professionals engage private survey firms for producing tailored data that is used in randomised trials and impact evaluations. These firms hire enumerators on short-term contracts for the crucial labour of data collection on the ground. By focusing on these enumerators and their managers in the field, this contribution seeks to highlight an important set of development workers who perform labour that is necessary for development practice. In doing so, it aims to centre their experiences, challenges and ambitions, which can better inform the ways in which development interventions are made socially possible.

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Contribution short abstract

Lived experience of a Dalit development practitioner from India (9+ years) reflecting on caste-based power in NGOs, donor-driven and oppressive work cultures, emotional labour and trauma of workers, and proposing policies for equity, dignity, self-respect and safe organisational spaces.

Contribution long abstract

I seek to speak at this roundtable because my journey as a development practitioner has been shaped by the constant negotiation between moral commitment and material survival. Coming from a marginalized Dalit community in India, I have worked in development organizations not only to “do good,” but also to sustain my own life, dignity, and self-respect, while simultaneously attempting to build and run my own organization. Navigating these two spectrums has been deeply challenging.

Through my work, I have personally experienced caste-based discrimination within the development sector, a space that often claims moral superiority while remaining largely silent on equity, diversity, and internal accountability. Many organizations are led by individuals from historically oppressive communities, and their work cultures frequently reproduce the same hierarchies and exclusions present in broader society. Decision-making is often shaped more by donor priorities than by human values, resulting in dehumanizing practices toward field staff, researchers, and grassroots workers.

The trauma faced by development workers, especially those from marginalized backgrounds, remains largely invisible and unsupported. There is little space to speak about emotional labor, burnout, dignity, and care as core elements of development work. I strongly reiterate that self-respect is not optional; it is central to any just and sustainable development practice.

Through this roundtable, I hope to contribute to an honest conversation on caste, power, and ethics in development, and to advocate for organizational cultures that create safe spaces, amplify marginalized voices, listen with humility, and institutionalize inclusive and equitable policies.

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Contribution short abstract

Based on ethnographic research in Beijing’s NGO (gongyi) sector, this paper shows how moralised ideals of NGO work silence material concerns, reproduce exclusion, and make long-term survival possible mainly for workers with multiple forms of capital.

Contribution long abstract

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the NGO (gongyi) sector in Beijing to examine how moral ideals, material constraints, and everyday survival intersect in the lives of NGO workers. While much existing literature portrays NGO work as driven primarily by altruism, commitment, and ethical motivation, my findings complicate this narrative by foregrounding NGO work as both moral labour and ordinary paid employment.

The paper advances two interrelated arguments. First, I show how over-romanticised moral ideals surrounding “doing gongyi” impose normative expectations that NGO workers should prioritise ethical commitment over material wellbeing. This moral framing conceals the reality that NGO work is also a means of making a living, particularly in high-cost urban settings such as Beijing. As a result, workers often feel compelled to remain silent about financial precarity, long working hours, and limited career prospects. With few legitimate channels to voice dissatisfaction, many experience fatigue and frustration, feeling stuck in work they no longer find sustainable.

Second, the paper argues that the persistent association of high morality with low financial return produces an exclusionary labour regime within the NGO sector. Long-term participation is disproportionately accessible to individuals who possess substantial social, cultural, and economic capital. Drawing on workers’ narratives, I demonstrate how family wealth, spousal income, elite education, and social networks buffer material insecurity. Crucially, no single form of capital is sufficient; rather, the simultaneous possession of multiple capitals enables sustained professional commitment and everyday survival.