Labour, mobility and learning to be local

Never-ending debates about why aid is broke or how to fix aid often underestimate a major group that makes aid ‘work’ in the first place: local workers. Representing more than 90 per cent of the humanitarian workforce globally, Labour, mobility and learning to be local centres the daily routines, relations and labour of these local workers to understand the organisation and effects of humanitarian operations during an era of so-called aid ‘localisation’. Drawing upon ethnographic observations and interviews with over 90 workers in Jordan, this book reveals how aid-as-work constructs and produces concurrent, polarised understandings of ‘the local’ that workers literally learn on-the-job. These ambivalent constructions of the local matter because they subsequently organise workers’ daily routines: the labour and (im)mobilities upon which humanitarian operations rely. By fore-fronting aid as a labour process and relation, Learning to be Local advances critical scholarship on not only humanitarianism, but also social inequalities in the global economy.

'In this compact and tightly argued book, Ward deftly traces the work lives of Jordanian aid workers, showing us how inequality, hierarchy and value are reproduced through the fetish of ‘the local’ in the humanitarian and development industries.'
Adia Benton, Northwestern University

'Patricia Ward reminds us that humanitarian aid is, in its nuts and bolts, an industry—and turns our attention to the workforce that makes it run. She shows how the performance of being “local” lies at the heart of this work, producing value for employers while reproducing global hierarchies. Combining rich fieldwork with incisive labor-process analysis, this remarkable book changes how we understand the labor that sustains humanitarian aid, and the shifting meanings of the local and the global.'
Natasha Iskander, New York University

'Patricia Ward offers a powerful account of the labour that makes humanitarian aid possible, in Jordan and beyond. Rigorously theorized, her study challenges prevailing understandings of who is a "local" worker, highlighting how global aid reproduces inequalities in class, mobilities and knowledges, but also how its hierarchies remain unstable and contested. The thoroughly researched chapters offer unique glimpses into the future of a sector in flux, for instance, by exploring the rise of a local "aid consultancy class" as a way for Jordanian workers to "max out" of the sector, renegotiating locality and its racialized divisions of labour. This...read more...