The Personal and the Professional: Aid workers' relationships and values in the development process

Anne-Meike Fechter

Third World Quarterly, 2012, vol. 33, issue 8, 1387-1404

Abstract: This introduction, and the special issue as a whole, consider how the personal and the professional are interrelated, and how they matter for aid work. Taking up Chambers' call for the ‘primacy of the personal', this paper explores why the personal often remains un-acknowledged in development studies, even though its salience for aid workers is well-documented, for example, in the growing popularity of their blogs and memoirs. One possible reason for this is an implicit narrative of aid work as altruistic and sometimes self-sacrificing, which renders it inappropriate to devote much attention to the experiences and challenges of aid workers themselves. As the contributions in this volume demonstrate, however, their personal relationships and values significantly shape perspectives and practices of aid work. They therefore need to be taken into account in order to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of development processes.

Date: 2012
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DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2012.698104

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