Seeing like a donor: the unintended harms of rendering civil society legible

Thu Thu Nwe Hlaing, Tamas Wells and Anne Décobert

Development in Practice, 2024, vol. 34, issue 8, 965-976

Abstract: Following the Grand Bargain, there has been increasing focus on aid localisation and partnerships between international and local aid agencies. Yet there has been less scholarly attention on how and why international agency policies and partnerships can cause unintended harm to civil society organisations and their staff. Drawing on James Scott’s seminal work Seeing like a State, and interviews with Myanmar civil society organisation leaders in 2023, this article argues that international agencies often attempt to render civil society “legible” through processes of systematisation and codification. However, these processes can in turn sideline accrued experiential and contextual knowledge, or metis, which is necessary for local organisations’ survival, especially in times of instability. The article highlights several instances in Myanmar where the marginalisation of this more contextual knowledge results in unintended harms. The article concludes that international agencies’ acknowledgement of metis is a crucial and yet still under-recognised pillar of aid localisation.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09614524.2024.2362783 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cdipxx:v:34:y:2024:i:8:p:965-976

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cdip20

DOI: 10.1080/09614524.2024.2362783

Access Statistics for this article

Development in Practice is currently edited by Emily Finlay

More articles in Development in Practice from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().