Working in the Peripheries

Kenyan consultants and DFI staff face two additional types of challenges which they share with Tanzanian public grants managers as well as various other local aid workers depicted in existing research. They add to the list of examples of the hierarchical relationship between experts from donor- and recipient countries which are reproduced, rather than mitigated, in the development industry's for-profit realms. The first pertains to local practitioners' confinement to the global peripheries in their fields of practice, despite the international nature of their qualifications and responsibilities. The second involves their responsibilities, in these peripheries, to broker relations with their foreign managers' and clients' local counterparts. While this work helps build stable inter-organizational partnerships, it subjects them, as individuals, to suspicions of being ‘locally biased' in the eyes of their foreign employers and clients. Moreover, it puts them in a double-bind where they depend on maintaining good relations with sometimes opposing actors on donor- and recipient sides of development partnerships.