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Paper short abstract

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.