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Paper short abstract:

Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) are leading the way in mobilizing private capital for international development purposes. In the field offices of DFIs, investment managers hired in-country are simultaneously challenging the signature attributes of "local" development professionals.

Paper long abstract:

In the world of international aid, a new group of locally recruited development practitioners is emerging. They work neither for international NGOs nor for donor state agencies, but for Development Finance Institutions (DFIs). DFIs are profit-making banks that invest in commercial businesses in the global South, increasingly using tax-funded aid money. With Agenda 2030’s call to seek funding for the SDGs in private capital, European bilateral DFIs have tripled in size in recent years. This paper posits that locally recruited investment managers working for DFI field offices in aid recipient countries challenge three of the signature attributes commonly assigned to local development professionals. Firstly, their ‘local’ expertise does not contrast with or preclude international expertise, but rather overlaps with it. Secondly, their formal authority and career ladders are not restricted to technical or support positions—many DFI field offices are headed by local employees. Thirdly, they rarely face job insecurity given their competitive qualifications and permanent, rather than short-term, employment contracts. This suggests that DFIs, often used to showcase the private sector’s growing role as a “development partner”, represent a break with the structural inequalities between donor and recipient country staff that are otherwise integral to the (public and non-profit) international development industry. However, a closer look indicates the displacement, rather than elimination, of such global North–South hierarchies. Fieldwork among investment managers in Nairobi shows that, in DFIs, such inequalities are found less within the walls of field offices and more in the relationship between those offices and headquarters.