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This paper explores the different expressions of solidarity we can see in international and 'local' experiences of volunteerism in Tanzania in the early post-colonial period, with a particular focus on the emergence of vertical and horizontal / convivial forms of solidarities.

Paper long abstract

Through a comparison between 'local' and 'international' experiences of volunteerism in Tanzania in the first decades of independence, this paper explores the different forms and modes of solidarity we can see emerging in this period. In particular it contrasts the emergence of a form of global development solidarity in the global North with horizontal, convivial ideas and expressions seen in local, Tanzanian, understandings and experiences of volunteerism. Through this, the paper argues that the newly emerging idea and expression of 'development solidarity' was not a single thing, but consisted of several forms. For global North volunteers, it was embedded in new ways of understanding international development, and ideas around global citizenship linking global North to global South in action against poverty. Tanzanian forms of development solidarity were built upon a more local sense of citizenship, and horizontal, convivial and community based forms.

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Does South-South volunteering transcend Northern hierarchies? Using 10-year data from a Chinese NGO in Kenya, this study reveals how organizational survival drives a neoliberal convergence. Without material autonomy, solidarity collapses into resource-driven pragmatism, mirroring Northern practices.

Paper long abstract

In an evolving post-aid development landscape, South–South volunteering is frequently posited as a vital site of horizontal solidarity promising to transcend the vertical hierarchies of Northern aid. However, this ideological framing obscures a growing convergence: emerging South–South hierarchies increasingly mirror Northern-led practices in their emphasis on professionalisation. Departing from geopolitical binaries that treat these forms as ontologically distinct, this paper reorients the analysis toward organizational survival, arguing that such similarities emerge as structural adaptations to material scarcity.

Drawing on a decade-long longitudinal ethnography (2014–2025) of a Chinese grassroots NGO in Nairobi’s Mathare settlement, the study traces how resource dependence drove a trajectory of neoliberal convergence. While early operations relied on foreign volunteers as essential human resources, the organization’s localisation coincided with a funding vacuum. To survive, the NGO reconfigured foreign volunteers from co-workers into essential social assets, instrumentalising the programme as a resource mobilization strategy to sustain local operations. Sustaining this channel required catering to volunteers’ non-work expectations, effectively repositioning them as privileged patrons rather than solidaristic partners. Consequently, relationships became transactional. Beneficiaries developed performative agency by strategically enacting vulnerability. Recognising volunteers as transient funding sources rather than ideological allies, residents instrumentalised encounters as brokerage opportunities to access scarce resources.

The paper offers a materialist critique, showing that without autonomous material infrastructures, claims to solidarity collapse into resource-driven pragmatism. Thus, South–South volunteering reproduces the organisational hierarchies associated with Northern-led development not through ideology, but through the imperative of survival.

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This study examines South Korea’s state-led overseas volunteerism (1971–2024) as a nexus of national strategy and youth labour, tracing its shift from Cold War politics to a market-oriented tool for managing youth unemployment and national branding within changing global aid regimes.

Paper long abstract

This article examines the formation and evolution of South Korea’s government-sponsored overseas volunteer programme between 1971 and 2024, situating it within broader debates on volunteerism, labour, citizenship, and development in and from the Global South. While overseas volunteering is often framed as an altruistic or solidaristic practice, this study argues that it has been actively shaped by state agency in response to shifting development discourses, domestic labour conditions, and transformations in the global aid regime, thereby moving beyond a conventional North–South aid framework.

The analysis traces how the programme has been instrumentalised to serve changing national imaginaries and policy objectives: initially as a tool of anti-communist diplomacy and domestic social governance during the Cold War period (1971–1993), and later as a strategic response to youth unemployment, labour precarity, and global competitiveness from the early 2000s onwards. Drawing on archival materials and 29 in-depth interviews with policymakers, administrators, and former volunteers, the study demonstrates how overseas volunteerism has been simultaneously reframed as a diplomatic resource, a market-oriented labour management mechanism, and a means of cultivating globally oriented citizenship aligned with state-led development goals.

The article ultimately argues that South Korea, as a former Global South country, mobilises overseas volunteerism to negotiate its position within the contemporary global aid architecture. In this process, volunteerism functions not merely as an expression of solidarity, but as a flexible governance tool through which development practices, citizenship norms, and labour relations are reproduced and reconfigured in a post-aid context.

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This paper examines how diaspora volunteers originating from the Global South leverage hybrid positionalities to navigate political complexities and co-create solutions with local communities as autonomous actors shaping development futures from within and beyond national borders

Paper long abstract

Diaspora volunteering exists in the ‘in-between spaces of development’ and represents a distinctive form of transnational engagement in which actors originating from the Global South, mobilize skills, resources, and networks to address development priorities in their countries of origin (Brinkerhoff, 2016). Thus, diaspora volunteers have the potential for a unique positionality that transcends donor-recipient and north-south relationships.

Drawing on qualitative case studies, this paper demonstrates how diaspora health volunteers leverage hybrid positionalities to navigate political complexities, build trust, and co-create solutions with local communities (Gamlen, 2014). Their embeddedness enables them to resist deficit-based narratives, operating through reciprocal relationships and transnational solidarity.

However, tensions persist when diaspora interventions are mediated through donor frameworks that reproduce Global North–centric development logics (Bakewell, 2009). This paper centres Global South leadership, mutual accountability, and structural transformation as key features of diaspora volunteering. This reframing positions diaspora volunteers as autonomous Global South actors shaping development futures from within and beyond national borders not as intermediaries for external agendas.

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Comhlámh works with a wide range of groups exploring solidarity, global citizenship and voluntary action. In a time when international solidarity is under threat, we need to create space for difficult conversations. Here we share some reflections on that process.

Paper long abstract

As the Irish Association of Development Workers and Volunteers, Comhlámh works with volunteers, volunteer sending agencies, and a wide range of groups exploring solidarity, global citizenship and voluntary action. Our Code of Good Practice attempts to hold contradictions, exploring power and complicity in international volunteering. We need to create space for difficult conversations, asking - Why are we failing? What are we willing to let go of? What do we need to move towards and what does this look like?

International solidarity is under threat, as more governments and institutions realign their resources and priorities towards xenophobia, militarisation, and self-interest. The volunteering sector, characterised by North-South flows, is scrambling to acknowledge legacies of racism, colonialism, and saviourism, while struggling to reckon with power and reparations. Some actors seek to use volunteering as a political tool, linking volunteering to welfare and citizenship. Others attempt to remove the political dimension, amplifying ‘good deeds’ but not the wider social analysis. Global South volunteering lives this reality in the shadow of dominant structures unable to handle difficult knowledge. This failure is typified by the persisting silence about the targeting of volunteers by state actors, whether that be the criminalisation by EU members of search and rescue volunteers saving lives, or the killing by Israel of humanitarian first responders in Palestine.

We will share reflections on the questions that are holding, as Comhlámh seeks to support emerging ways of being through values-led volunteering grounded in solidarity, integrity, respect, ecological sustainability and social justice.

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This paper analyses local volunteering in protracted crises, revealing how volunteers transcend humanitarian-development frameworks. Based on Burundi data, it calls for recognising volunteering's social, cultural & geographic contexts, challenging established practices through grassroots solidarity.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyses local volunteering during protracted crises and explores the implications for humanitarianism and development practices, particularly in the global South. Most of the existing scholarship on volunteering has been framed by siloed humanitarian or development accounts, often privileging perspectives from global North settings. Despite their critical roles, the presence of local volunteers in protracted crises is often assumed in practice and obscured in the literature. Based on qualitative data collected through an ethnographic and participatory approach foregrounding local agency and knowledge in Burundi, the paper develops a critical conceptualisation of volunteering during a protracted crisis. It reveals how local volunteering does not fit established humanitarian or development languages and frameworks but rather transcends and destabilises them as volunteers enact forms of solidarity across and between such spaces at community level. This paper calls for relocating volunteering in its particular social, cultural and geographical spaces, and recognising how these spaces are shaped by but also challenge established humanitarian and development discourses through grassroots alternatives and solidarity practices.

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This paper explores voluntary labour and climate change in the Indian Sundarbans. Analysing volunteering in relation to locally-led adaptation and claims for loss and damage, it shows the importance of a climate justice approach to volunteering and climate change in the global South.

Paper long abstract

Volunteers are increasingly positioned as critical climate actors, reflected in state and NGO strategies for climate adaptation and disaster response and popular celebrations of ‘hero’ volunteers during emergencies. Important interventions have highlighted the invisible labour of climate change, including the role of unpaid labour (Johnson et. al. 2023). But conceptualisations of volunteer labour and climate change in the global South are emergent and uneven. Policy and academic thinking are often rooted in global North experiences, focused on elite conservation practices or framed in terms of management challenges for disaster risk response. There have been limited critical interrogations of the relationships between voluntary labour and key conceptual and policy frameworks relating to climate change. This paper explores voluntary labour in the Indian Sundarbans in relation to the principles of locally led adaptation (Soanes et. al. 2021) and claims for loss and damage (e.g. Boyd et al. 2021). Through these dialogues, the paper locates volunteering’s civic, relational and political capacities at community level in relation to calls for climate justice. Moving beyond popular celebrations and state mobilisations, the paper identifies jumping off points for the development of a more inclusive and critical scholarship of volunteering and climate change in the global South.

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Women in Development Bureaucracies in the Global South face informalized and precarious working conditions due to institutionalised forms of volunteerism by the state for the implementation of state policies.

Paper long abstract

The paper examines the state's conception of women's volunteerism and the nature of women's labour in social policy implementation at the grassroots level in the urban slums of Hyderabad, a city in southern India. Based on a feminist qualitative method using textual analysis of government documents, reports and notifications over a span of decade, and interviews with women 'Resource Persons' for poverty eradication schemes based on the Self-Help Group Model, the study maps the evolving relation between the state, social policies and women's 'voluntary labour' in institution building, social mobilisation and development activities. Using the analytical framework of 'New Development Management', which draws on the critique of New Public Management in governance and Post-Development Studies, it is evident that the rise of neoliberal belief in the responsibilization of escaping systemic poverty rests on the shoulders of overburdened and socially marginalised women. This process, the Feminisation of development Bureaucracy, is accompanied by the use of managerial techniques of control via digital self-reporting, maintaining records of demographic data of their neighbourhood, bookkeeping and accounts, and a gradual increase in responsibilities without accompanying improvement in workers’ incentives, such as salary, health care or social benefits.