Who's the ‘Self' in Selfish? Profit-Making Developers' Institutional Interests and the Individuals Pursuing Them

This chapter belongs to a series of three ( Chapters 5 , 6 and 7 ) that together highlight additional dimensions of the roles and labor of professionals involved in profit-making aid. Through the lens of East African and OECD-DAC finance specialists, consultants and public grants managers with a past in consulting, this chapter probes how contracting and development finance are conceived of, carried out by and variously affect, practitioners from donor- and recipient countries, illustrating the complex relationship between monetizing and localizing aid. The first dimension, which this chapter addresses, involves a diversification of drivers or incentives that orient development practitioners' work (Sundberg 2024 ). For-profit aid, I relay, brings to the fore developers' pursuits of self-interests that are institutional in nature, rather than individual. I describe three examples of these, concerning corporate interests, donor-country national interests and the interests of particular sub-fields in development work (consulting and finance). These institutional drivers relate to but also transcend the individual-centered binary prism through which researchers usually analyze the drivers of aid workers—that is, one between their altruistic ethos, on one hand, and personal self-interest, on the other.