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Paper short abstract

This paper reframes post-aid development outcomes through emergent governance, using Rwanda’s Saemaul Programme to show how poverty reduction emerges through relational practices and engagement with local knowledge, and to rethink partnerships around inclusivity and reciprocity.

Paper long abstract

In international development cooperation, outcomes such as poverty reduction, capacity building, and sustainability are often not the result of implementing pre-designed plans, but rather emerge through accumulated relational interactions across multiple actors and scales. Despite this, dominant development knowledge systems and donor-centred evaluation frameworks continue to reduce development outcomes to linear and visible results, marginalising the relational practices, informal coordination, and learning processes that shape development on the ground. Even approaches that emphasise “local voices” have tended to treat community experiences as evidence of participation, rather than as constitutive of agency and governance in the Global South.

Building on this critique, this study reinterprets development outcomes in the post-aid era through the concept of emergent governance. Drawing on field observations and in-depth interviews from three communities involved in Rwanda’s Saemaul programme, the analysis shows that Global South agency did not arise through formal policy ownership or donor-designed partnership arrangements. Instead, it emerged through situated responsiveness, improvisational adjustment, informal cooperation, relational repair, and sustained engagement with local knowledge. Such agency is embedded in a governance order constituted through repeated interactions among actors positioned across different scales, including community residents, local governments, overseas volunteers, and national research institutions.

In this sense, emergent governance offers a conceptual shift for theorising fair partnerships in the post-aid era—moving beyond institutional transplantation or one-directional transfer, and conceptualising cooperation as a relational mechanism grounded in inclusivity, reciprocity, and relational balance within specific local contexts.