DEVELOPMENT VOLUNTEERING DUCHESSED
by Nichole Georgeou
More and more Australians are getting involved in volunteering for development. The Australian government has welcomed this interest, linking volunteering closely to the aid program. These closer ties have removed the traditional radical elements from development volunteering that were present when the idea first emerged with work camps after WWI. Gone is the emphasis on cross-cultural engagement, participation and empowerment at the grassroots level of people in their own development. Now a service-driven approach has volunteers as the human face of Australian aid. They provide funded, specialist and “non-political” advice. Volunteering has become “duchessed”, but it looks great on a CV.
NGOs are part of civil society; they are formed by
volunteers who have ideals and causes. By their very nature, they are
political. Yet since 2004, for
Australians, the ethos of volunteering for development has been methodically
stripped of its political element. Australia ’s volunteer sending program has been systematically
restructured and integrated into our Overseas Development Aid agenda. In May this year the final nail
went into the coffin. AusAID’s organisational restructure now clearly reflects
a market-based logic. NGOs and businesses, which would appear to be two
unlikely bedfellows, are now linked in the same section, while the Volunteer
Branch has been delinked from NGOs and placed with Scholarships.
These changes in AusAIDs organisational structure
exemplify the shift in the Australian Government’s volunteer sending program –
one that has occurred in conjunction with the deepening of neoliberal ideology
in Australian aid policy. Our “embedded neoliberalism” has provided the
ideological and procedural
rationales for the tendering and
contracting out of volunteer sending to select “service providers”. It has
firmly linked the objectives of creating open markets and efficient state
sectors to serving Australia ’s national interests. While the market is deified, the
language of “participation” and “empowerment” is utilised to distract from the new managerial
processes that facilitate and obscure the economic, ideological and political
intent of these restructures in the overseas aid program.
In this context I employ the term “duchessed” to describe the
“professionalisation” and “institutionalisation” of development volunteering. Old-time leftists used the term duchessed to describe comrades neutralised of their
radicalism when drawn into the
system they opposed through flattery, rewards, promotions and other such enticements. Those duchessed, maintained they were still true believers serving the cause. The term originally referred to
people, but I use it here to describe the de-radicalising of once “dangerous”
political ideas such as “participation”, “partnership” and “empowerment” that
were once historically central to much development volunteer activity.
Volunteering and the National Interest
Development volunteering as a practice has exploded
globally. There are well over 50,000 volunteers from the 23 OECD sending
countries (plus programs sponsored by developing countries), working in
development activities in any given year. This amounts to well over one-fifth
of all skilled international personnel working in developing countries who are
in government funded volunteering placements for periods of over one year.
These numbers are swelled by a diversification in the
form that development volunteering has taken including the proliferation of
for-profit businesses in development volunteer sending (often for short term
“voluntourism”), as well as electronic volunteering, south-to-south volunteering and reverse volunteering.
Since 2001 the Australian government has capitalised on
this popular interest and recognised the importance of volunteer sending
programs. It developed a series of Ministerial statements titled “Volunteers
and the Aid program” (Downer 2001; DFAT 2004). More recently, on 24 October 2011
when Australian Volunteers International (AVI) celebrated 60 years of volunteer
sending at the Royal Perth Yacht Club, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, the
Hon Julie Bishop, referred to volunteers as the “human face” of the aid program
— they spread goodwill in our region and bring hope for a brighter future to
thousands of developing communities. The Australian aid program also claims
that volunteers build people-to-people linkages between Australia and developing countries. This veils the political
agenda of volunteer assignments that “support the priorities of the Australian
Government’s aid program”.
The emphasis in volunteering on “participation” and
“partnership” masks the centrality of “national interest” to development aid.
It is this radical contradiction in intent that often confronts development
volunteers when their altruistic humanitarian concerns and motivations sit
uncomfortably with the regional and economic agenda of the Australian
government. Both the 2003 foreign policy White Paper and the 2006 overseas aid
White Paper emphasised “Australia ’s national interest”,
and demonstrated a willingness to
use the foreign aid budget to advance Australia ’s regional and economic ambitions. This is now clearly
seen in Australia’s increasing militarisation of the aid program, but also
through its push at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in July (2012) in Rio for mining to be adopted as a
sustainable development practice, and for aid to be used to promote private
financing.
From “Participation” and “Empowerment” to
“Vocationalisation”
Historically, “participation” referred to the process of
redistributing power through the involvement of oppressed peoples in decisions
that affected their lives and opportunities. The concept was shaped by the
ideas of Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire who in the late 1940s linked
emancipation from poverty to the empowerment and liberation of disadvantaged
people. He put this into practice in the 1960s. Political change was central to
his praxis, and such an approach joined education and mass literacy programs to
collectivist political agendas that were often anti-capitalist. Volunteers
lived in solidarity with local people, working alongside them towards local
agendas of political change — volunteering was a radical activity centred on
cross-cultural relationships and learning.
Now volunteering has been “duchessed”, along with the
emancipatory language of “participation”, “partnership” and “empowerment” – it
is no longer seen as politically radical but as part of the “development
industry”. While it looks good on CVs, the view of volunteering that now
dominates is one disassociated from political action. Volunteering has been
reconceptualised as “service provision”. This framework has been adopted by multilateral
institutions and governments and is reflected in the Australian Government’s
Volunteer Sending program. Specifically, development volunteering has been
reduced to “technical exchange” and the transmission of skills.
The focus on service provision promotes the
“vocationalisation” of volunteering. The emphasis is on the job to be done.
Placements become assignments requiring particular “skill sets” within the
development project. The direct linking of the aid program to volunteer sending
agencies means local elites encourage placements that align with “good
governance” agendas. The reconfiguring of institutions in recipient countries
to speak to the market benefits the elites in both recipient and sending
countries. Some 45% of volunteers work in the governance sector or professional
bureaucratic positions in government departments. The remainder are spread
among private enterprises, NGOs (often international) and educational
institutions. Grassroots
volunteer placements are becoming a thing of the past.
Ethical volunteering?
Development volunteering has been stripped of its
political meaning and has lost its social justice and political dimensions — in
short it has been “duchessed”. Government sponsored volunteer placements
emphasise a technical approach of experts “doing development”. Yet some
volunteer agencies still cling doggedly to their principles. While the majority
of volunteers are motivated by humanitarian and social justice concerns it is
imperative they consider the political framework they engage in when they undertake
development volunteering. They should carefully research the agenda of the
sending organisation and the form of development that its placements promote.