For the Country,the Corporation and the Métier: Alternative Drivers Among Practitioners in Private Sector Aid

Abstract

The financialization of development and the outsourcing of aid work to contracted businesses are strengthening the role of alternative drivers among practitioners engaged in international development work. These relate to but also transcend the dichotomy between altruism and personal self-interest, which often frames scholarly research on aid worker motivations. Focusing on consultants and development finance experts, this article highlights three institutional impetuses that guide practitioners’ work. They are concerned with the international competitiveness of donor operations, the stakes of one’s employer in cross-sectoral partnerships and the reputation and position of one’s professional sub-field. Consultants and development finance experts also highlight considerable staff movements across non- and for-profit institutions. In the increasingly complex architecture of aid interventions, such boundary-crossers operate in a new space of development brokerage, as mediators between public and private sector actors.

I. Introduction

Few people would contest that practitioners working in international aid and development ¹ are driven by a moral impetus to help those less fortunate. Research has also highlighted how aid workers’ altruistic motivations often parallel self-interests to do with, for example, career goals, opportunities to travel and live abroad and learning about other cultures. This article addresses three additional, though related, impetuses that guide practitioners’ work. They pertain to the international competitiveness of their business, the stakes of their organization in partnerships across the non- and for-profit divide, and the reputation and position of their professional sub-field. Pursuing these three interests rarely benefit individual experts in any direct way, nor do they primarily seek to help the target groups of aid. Hence, they reach beyond the opposition between altruistic incentives and individual self-interests which have often structured scholarly representations of aid worker motivations. Rather, they reflect the less visible, though significant, incentives that are tied to actors in the aid industry as institutions rather than individuals.

The practitioners in focus belong to two groups of development professionals: consultants and development finance experts. Both have increased in number and influence over the past decades following the proliferation of private sector actors and instruments in international aid. My interlocutors’ testimonies about their responsibilities and concerns in everyday work elucidate how the rise of market actors in international development means that the self-interests of ‘developers’ are increasingly found at institutional, in addition to individual, levels. While scholarship on private sector aid has focused on the workings and effects of this former aspect—notably how the prerogatives of private sector institutions and vehicles impact the design and outcomes of interventions—this article explores how such institutional impetuses are pursued and experienced by individual practitioners.

Some of these pursuits are tied to the career histories of my interlocutors, which highlight considerable staff movements across non- and for-profit institutions. I show how boundary-crossing practitioners partly serve as brokers in partnerships between public and private sector actors. Their mediating work also brings to the fore conflicting perspectives in the industry about the role of capitalism in aid and exposes brokers to stereotypical constructions of professionals from different sub-fields. As such, they highlight the importance of studying empirically both institutional and individual imperatives in development work and how the growth of private sector aid complicates the relationship between the two and the way they materialize in everyday practice.

II. The Drivers of Development Workers and Private Sector Aid

Much has been written about aid workers’ moral imperatives to help those in need—literature that largely centres on non-profit development work and humanitarian aid (Bornstein, 2012; Fast, 2014; Roth, 2015; Vaux, 2001). Defined as, for example, ‘the helping imperative’ (Heron, 2007) or ‘concerns for the person in need’ (Vaux, 2001), these incentives share the common attribute of altruism. In some cases, the altruistic motivations of non-profit aid workers have been juxtaposed with the motivations of professionals working in the private aid sector, primarily as consultants. In these cases, the latter have largely been described as driven by selfish rather than selfless interests. Even within the industry itself, scholars have shown, consultants are stereotyped as ‘development mercenaries’, representing the moral opposites to the benevolent ‘missionaries’ of non-profit NGO workers (Stirrat, 2008). Consultants are construed as overpaid, distanced from the humanitarian objectives of their clients’ projects, complacent about their marginal to insignificant contribution to development and primarily incentivized by career advancement, self-enrichment and ensuring a continuous stream of new assignments (Hindman, 2011; Koch and Weingart, 2016; White, 2020). At the same time, a number of studies addressing the psychology and sociality of aid work have sought to empirically unsettle this dichotomy by highlighting how career paths in development often run across, for example, NGOs, consulting firms, public aid agencies and academia, and how practitioners are motivated by a combination of aspects that includes, but is not limited to, altruism (Carr et al., 2005; Eyben, 2011; MacLachlan et al., 2010; Roth, 2015; Stirrat, 2008; White, 2015).

Meanwhile, non-altruistic incentives have so far been tied primarily to personal interests. Aid practitioners’ devotion to creating a better, more just world is understood as rivalled principally by their pursuit of goals pertaining to their personal careers, salaries and benefits, travel opportunities, the comforts of expatriate life, existential self-fulfilment or their social relationships with colleagues, family and friends (De Jong, 2011; Eyben, 2011; Fechter, 2016; Kumi and Kamruzzaman, 2021; Vaux, 2001).

Two factors help explain the dominance of this person-centred understanding of the opposite to the helping imperative. One concerns the institutional context in which researchers have explored the motivations of aid workers, notably non-profit assistance delivered by NGOs and state agencies. During the 1990s, this industry (not least the humanitarian NGO sector) began a process of professionalization, and the reforms enforced to this effect have been credited with undermining the role of altruistic imperatives among aid workers. Institutional efforts to enforce codes and standards of professionalism, NGO accreditation and systems for demonstrating evidence-based results have implied that entry-level qualifications in many NGOs and, not least public aid agencies, concern less a demonstrated interest in relieving human suffering, and more academic degrees and certificates verifying standardized forms of technical expertise (Fechter, 2016; Kothari, 2005; Malkki, 2013; Roth, 2015). As a result, humanitarian and development work has become a career path like many others, rather than, or in addition to, a vocation.

Another related institutional change concerns an increased propensity among donors to outsource aid work to external contractors. Tied to larger neoliberal reforms in the name of new public management, outsourcing is based on a corporate rationale favouring the use of flexible, specialized labour, mobilizing human resources in a just-in-time manner as a means to reduce labour costs, increase efficiency and minimize economic risk (Hindman, 2011; Whitty et al., 2023). In international aid, outsourcing (and the interrelated spread of audit culture, see, e.g., Vannier, 2010) has implied that many of those executing interventions lack experience or interest in development work. Rather, they work for large auditing firms or consulting companies specialized in, for example, solar energy engineering and take on short-term assignments wherever in the world their expertise is in demand.

Both of these institutional reforms have been seen to effect changes in the aid industry’s human resource base in the sense that development organizations now engage professionals whose altruistic imperatives are increasingly rivalled (if not substituted) by individual interests related to personal professional growth, career advancement, remuneration and so on.

A second factor supporting the construction of personal self-interest as the main opposite to altruism is theoretical. In moral philosophy, altruism pertains mainly to the individual’s care for another person as opposed to caring for oneself (Kraut, 2020; Seglow, 2004). It is usually associated with 19th-century French sociologist and philosopher Auguste Comte, who coined the term based on the word ‘other’—in Italian altrui, in Latin alter, and in French autre. Altruism, in other words, is ‘other-regarding’ (Seglow, 2004: 2), and its contrary is selfishness or egotism (Kraut, 2020). In scholarship on the motivations of aid workers, the designated ‘other’, as the object of altruism, has largely translated into the end beneficiaries of aid. That its opposite has primarily been explored among aid workers’ personal self-interests follows logically from moral philosophy’s construction of individual selfishness as altruism’s opposite.

Some studies go beyond the ‘altruism versus personal self-interest’ dichotomy by addressing the impetuses of individual practitioners in relation to those of the organizations they serve. They describe how the professionalization and outsourcing of aid compels organizations to balance ethical and ideological concerns against bureaucratic and managerial demands. In the neoliberal development landscape, where NGOs and commercial firms compete against each other for donor funding, winning contracts and meeting contractually agreed terms require forms of strategic manoeuvring that conflict with the moral imperatives of individual practitioners. This has been observed in non-profit organizations (Fechter, 2016) as well as in the world of consulting (Stirrat, 2000). Other scholars have found that they complicate the altruistic drivers of individuals and organizations alike (Baillie and Jenkins, 2012; Lashaw et al., 2017).

What has attracted less attention is how individual aid workers pursue non-altruistic objectives for the benefit of their employer or their profession in ways that do not benefit them personally, hence making them difficult to categorize as either altruistic or selfish. That is the focus of this article. I posit that such pursuits can usefully be understood through the lens of philosopher Keith Graham’s (2002, 2004) notion of ‘pure collective identification’. Pure collective identification combines features of both altruism and self-interest while it simultaneously differs from both (Graham, 2004: 58–59). Graham defines altruism as consisting of two components. One is a concern for the interests of another person, and the other is the absence of self-interest. Pure collective identification embodies the second component, in that it lacks consideration of one’s own interests. But it does not necessarily include a concern for another person. In pure collective identification ‘[m]y concern is in the most literal sense a concern with … something of which my self is a part’—a kind of identification that is ‘irreducibly plural’ (Graham, 2004: 62). This something, Graham notes (2004: 58), can refer to a corporation or a country, and I propose it could also denote an institutional sub-field within a particular industry—such as that of consulting or development finance in the broader realm of international aid.

The growth of these two sub-fields over the past decades is part and parcel of a general increase in private sector actors and instruments in international development, brought about, not least, by the financialization of aid and the outsourcing of aid work to contracted businesses. For example, while official development assistance (ODA) in the OECD DAC has been stuck at 0.3% since 2005, aid to private sector instruments has increased substantially. During 2018–2021, it grew by 55% in Sweden, and over 400% in Japan (Caio and Craviotto, 2021: 9; Craviotto 2023: 26).

The spread of market-based regimes in development is attracting increasing scholarly attention. Researchers have studied, for example, public–private partnerships (Bayliss and Van Waeyenberge, 2018; Languille, 2017), impact investment, philanthropy and microcredit schemes (Banerjee, 2021; Elyachar, 2005; Harrison and Mdee, 2018; Kilby, 2021; Mader, 2018) and corporate social responsibility, corporate community development and fair trade (Banks et al., 2016; De Neve et al., 2008; Dolan and Rajak, 2016; Luetchford, 2008; Rajak, 2011). Like my own research, they have also explored blended finance institutions (Cohen et al., 2021) and development consultants (Roberts, 2014; Stranger, 2009; White, 2020; White and Haapala, 2019).

So far, the focus of this scholarship has largely been on how market forces reshape the general workings of development interventions and their effects on partnerships, aid policy and the design and outcomes of particular projects and programmes (Hart et al., 2021). Most of these studies testify, in one respect or another, to the basic dynamic addressed in this article, notably the growing influence of ‘developers’ own prerogatives and interests, not least those of making development efforts profitable and low-risk through the enforcement of capitalist logics (Bayliss and Van Waeyenberge, 2018; Gabor, 2021). My research seeks to add to this scholarship by unpacking how some of these institutional interests vested in private sector organizations and funding schemes are pursued and experienced by individual practitioners. In so doing, I illustrate the complex relationship between personal and institutional drivers in aid and how the pursuit of the former expands the repertoire of aid worker motivations beyond its ‘traditional’ focus on either altruism or individual self-interest.

Central to this dynamic are the interpersonal relations and interactions involved in my interlocutors’ work. Social relationships have been found to serve a number of organizational and political purposes in aid, for example, as a source from which to build more equal and self-reflexive partnerships between donor and recipient organizations (Eyben, 2006); as a means by which members of expatriate communities advance donor harmonization and policy congruence or, contrarily, further the interests of their own organization (Eyben, 2011); or as a tool used by field offices to create and maintain partnerships with local organizations by exploiting the local social ties of their staff recruited in-country (Sundberg, 2019, 2020). The latter function ties in with scholarship on development brokerage, which explores the intermediary roles of actors working to articulate the needs of potential aid recipients in manners that match the assistance schemes of donors (Bierschenk et al., 2002; see also Lewis and Mosse, 2006; Olivier de Sardan, 2004; Swidler and Watkins, 2017). My research seeks to contribute to this scholarship by highlighting how the growth of private sector actors and instruments engenders job exchanges and interactions but also tensions between practitioners with non-respective for-profit backgrounds and different ethical convictions about aid and capitalism, and how it creates a demand for inter-organizational brokers who can mediate in partnerships that conventional (public and non-profit) aid organizations forge with commercial actors.

III. Methods and Material

Empirical findings are based on anthropological research undertaken within the frame of an ongoing project about two roles that the private sector plays in international aid: as contracted suppliers of goods and services (where I focus on consulting) and as development partners leveraging private capital for development purposes (where I focus on development finance institutions [DFIs] and development guarantees). During 2021–2022 I undertook interviews with 39 development practitioners engaged in these realms of private sector aid.

Thirteen interviewees (six male and seven female) were development consultants working in eight consulting companies originating in four European countries. Five firms were headquartered in Sweden and all eight had offices in Stockholm. My interlocutors were based in either Stockholm or Nairobi. All firms but one specialized in international development work, either fully or in part, where my interlocutors worked in development-centred offices or sub-divisions of their firms (the other firm focused on business development but had offices in major aid-recipient countries). The largest firm had over 2,000 employees spread across some 50 offices around the world, while in two others my interlocutor was the sole proprietor.

Another 13 participants (six male and seven female) were currently working or had recently worked for five bilateral DFIs. DFIs are banks or subsidiaries that invest, mainly, in the private sector in developing countries (Kapoor, 2019). Generally, they provide capital in the form of debt, equity or guarantees either to individual businesses or entrepreneurs or through larger funds and financial institutions. Most DFIs have a dual mandate: to be profitable and to further societal development (Attridge and Engen, 2019). DFIs can be wholly state-owned or partly privately owned where donor governments are majority shareholders. An increasing number of DFIs obtain capital sourced from tax revenues, mostly ODA (Caio and Craviotto, 2021: 4). Combining DFIs’ own-account resources with other forms of finance such as ODA is a structuring approach called ‘blended finance’, which is increasingly used for attracting private capital to fund development projects. Today, there are 17 major bilateral DFIs and 7 large multilateral DFIs, representing the private sector arm of international finance institutions (OECD, 2022). All but two DFI staff I interviewed worked with investment management, the core function of DFIs. They were based either at headquarters or in regional offices in Nairobi, the world’s largest hub of DFI field offices.

The third group of interviewees, 16 ² in total (12 male and 4 female), were portfolio managers or advisors working with private sector instruments, mainly guarantees, at the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida). Development guarantees are a form of blended finance that works like an insurance (Development Initiatives, 2016: 4). The guarantor commits to pay the lender parts or everything due on a loan, equity investment or other instrument in case the borrower defaults (Andersen et al., 2019: 7). Guarantees have leveraged more private funds than any other financial instrument, constituting close to 40% of total private development finance during 2012–2018 (Garbacz et al., 2021: 26). Unlike in most other donor countries, guarantees in Sweden (and the United States) are issued by the state aid agency rather than by the DFI, and Sida is considered a pioneer in the field of guarantees among OECD DAC donors (Garbacz et al., 2021: 17). In 2022, the budget for guarantees was approximately USD 1.6 billion, corresponding to over a third of Sida’s entire budget for aid grants (USD 4.4 billion) (Government of Sweden, 2021: 8, 17). Since 2017, the agency has recruited guarantee experts to four out of five operative departments with the purpose of raising the general interest in guarantees and assist programme officers in working with them (Swedish National Audit Office, 2020: 38–39).

Most research participants were recruited through cold-call outreach to their offices or organizations. All bilateral DFI offices in Nairobi were approached. Some participants based in Europe were reached via snowball sampling.

All interviews were open-ended and structured around a set of themes rather than specific questions. The flexibility of this interview form allowed interlocutors to steer the conversation and elaborate on what they found relevant (Schensul and LeCompte, 2012). The themes were: interlocutors’ work tasks and their organizations’ operational goals; the role of the private sector in international development; their personal drivers and career aspirations; and their professional and academic background. Findings are also based on observations of some interlocutors’ office spaces, an analysis of the curricula vitae of all operational staff hired by Sida during the periods 1996–1999 and 2019–2022; and assessments of public records, surveys and reports on and/or by my interlocutors’ organizations, and of employing organizations’ websites and individual employees’ Linkedin pages.

Though field office observations and the nationality of interlocutors are concentrated in Sweden and Kenya, the nationalities of the agencies and firms for which they work covered a number of OECD DAC countries. Since the purpose of this article is to highlight a set of institutional interests in international aid (and individual practitioners’ approach to these), the geographic spread of these organizations should add to the representativeness of the research sample.

For the Country: Strengthening International Corporate Competitiveness

One institutional imperative that surfaced in my talks with consultants and development finance experts concerned growing the market for their business internationally. Pursuing this objective often positioned their institution as a competitor against similar actors of other nationalities. Moreover, it sometimes meant favouring compatriot businesses over foreign ones when selecting partners, clients or sub-contractors. While such strategies were often rationalized as helping their organization achieve overarching development goals, they were also recognized as protecting interests tied to their donor country and motivated by ideas of nationally specific expertise.

OECD DAC donors’ pursuits of economic and political self-interests have been well-documented for the past 60 odd years. Research has unpicked how the operations of bilateral public aid agencies are linked to their governments’ national and international security agendas and domestic economic interests (Lancaster, 2008). In Sweden, the right-winged government elected in 2022 recently initiated a comprehensive reform of state-funded development assistance which ties Swedish aid, officially purposed to reduce poverty and repression, closer to Swedish business interests and more restrictive migration policies (Government of Sweden, 2023). Indeed, the past decade has witnessed an intensification of donors’ self-interests, where aid allocations are increasingly instrumentalized to advance short-term, unilateral benefits (Gulrajani and Silcock, 2020). An important factor behind this trend is the financialization of international development, fuelled by an enhanced focus on economic growth and Agenda 2030’s appeals to seek funding for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in commercial businesses and capital markets (Scheyvens et al., 2016). In blending concessional development funds with commercial trade and investment, aid is increasingly conceptualized as creating ‘win-wins’ for donors and recipients alike. As the main actor engaged in blended finance, DFIs have grown in size and number. During the past 10 years, European bilateral DFIs have tripled in size and their budgets are expected to reach parity with public aid flows within the next decade (Spratt et al., 2018: 21).

Unlike public aid agencies, which are often encouraged to collaborate in the name of aid ‘harmonization’, bilateral DFIs are formally market competitors (though they are authorized to coordinate their work). A common challenge facing DFIs is to find bankable investments. Virtually all interviews with DFI staff included narratives about other bilateral DFIs as competitors. Interlocutors compared the resources and structural (dis)advantages of their own institution (regarding instruments used, risk tolerance, profit margins, ESG-related requirements, ownership structures, etc.) to those of other bilateral DFIs in the same sector or country, in order to explain the comparative size, growth and content of their respective portfolios.

Moreover, over half of all major bilateral DFIs favour in some ways investments in companies that share the nationality of the DFI (TUDCN–RSCD, 2018: 30–32). None of my interlocutors working for DFIs raised the economic interests of donor country markets and businesses as primary objectives in their work. At the same time, none of them, either, found such DFI programmes and policies problematic, and several insisted that their office never discussed questions about tied aid. Moreover, in the competition for bankable projects and profits, collaborating with businesses of one’s own nationality was sometimes described as a strategic advantage. The fact that such partnerships simultaneously benefited the donor country’s economic interests was appreciated as an additional positive result towards the creation of synergies between their donor country’s domestic and development objectives. John, who had 25 years of experience working for a DFI, in consulting, as well as for a public aid agency, described to me the benefits of close collaborations between his country’s DFI and a range of other compatriot actors engaged in aid and business promotion. In one African country to which he had been deployed, his DFI employer had shared offices with his country’s national organization for business promotion. Though they did not formally collaborate, they shared all information. If a car company from his country wanted to sell its cars in that African country, he gave as an example, they first turned to his colleagues across the hall for advisory and networking services. He and his co-workers at the DFI would then join the initiative by offering the car company funding to establish themselves on the local market. His government’s public aid agency would also pitch in, by sponsoring vocational training of local mechanics who could be hired by the car company’s local retailers. These latter, in turn, were eligible for funding from the DFI or the donor country’s export credit agency. Sure, John pointed out, like in many OECD DAC countries, most of his country’s aid was officially untied, meaning it was not delivered on the condition that it could only be spent on goods or services provided by companies from his country. Even so, he preferred investing in his own country’s businesses. First, it made everything easier. Everyone spoke the same language, and he and his colleagues could trust their partners to be honest with them. If the investee was from Bangladesh, however, John inferred as a counter-example, everything would be strange even if it looked fine on paper. Second, if he and his team succeeded in closing a successful deal with a national company, everyone would want to bask in the glow of that partnership. Because his country had a national strategy for international trade and nobody really worried about the issue of tied aid. They—the DFI, the aid agency, the national business promotion organization and the car company—were all part of the same national team.

My interlocutors working in development consulting expressed similar concerns about securing markets for firms of their own nationality (see also Roberts, 2014). Many Swedish development consultants shared experiences of increased international competition during the past two decades, following a decline in Sida’s use of consultants in project implementation, new EU directives supporting international competition, and Sida’s enhanced use of framework agreements that privilege large, international firms with a broad range of expertise (see also White, 2020). These changes implied that Swedish firms now needed to compete with international firms for Sida contracts and also bid for assignments with foreign clients, not least EU institutions and other bilateral European state agencies. This had created experiences of country-based favouritism, where contracts were perceived to be awarded based on firms’ nationality rather than expertise. Rather than taking issue with this, several Swedish consultants expressed a similar sense of national protectionism, seeking to advance the position of Swedish companies.

Maria, who had been working in development consulting for almost two decades, insisted that it was difficult for a Swedish company to win contracts with other bilateral aid agencies. Not only was the European market fiercely competitive, but most clients chose firms of their nationality. The only foreign contracts her firm bothered to bid on were those procured by the multinational EU delegations, which were less prone to the influence of single national interests. Even then, her firm only tendered for those EU contracts in which Sida was involved. Swedish money needed to be at stake for her firm to have a chance at winning the bid, she and her colleagues reasoned. Meanwhile, Maria added, national favouritism in development contracting was not hard to understand. Beyond state authorities’ prejudices against companies of other nationalities, a key reason was that they all wanted to support their own businesses and grow their own markets.

In order to strengthen Swedish firms’ competitiveness internationally, Swedish consultants advocated vis-à-vis Sida to increase the agency’s budget for consulting services. Mirroring Maria’s logic, Mark, another Swedish consultant, argued that doing so was in Sida’s own interest. As a procurer, Mark recounted, Sida often complained about receiving low numbers of bidders and particularly that few of the bidders were Swedish. Since the mid-1990s, Mark had worked for, and later led, a small, staff-owned Swedish consulting firm. Following Sida’s rollback of consultancy procurement, his firm had to merge with a larger, international company. Compared to foreign consultants, he asserted, those from Scandinavia had their own, unique philosophy. Their expertise was special and valuable. More importantly, Mark reasoned, echoing John’s argument about the strategic advantage of partnering with compatriot businesses, Sida benefitted from using consultants who shared its own logic and values. When Sida contracted firms for assignments overseas, choosing ‘likeminded’ consultants meant everything ran more smoothly. During a long-term mission in an African country, Mark gave as an example, the Sida-funded local authorities with which he had been tasked to work had expected him to translate to them the logic of their foreign funder and what it expected them to deliver. Likewise, in his contacts with his client, the Swedish embassy, issues about Sida’s partners had occasionally arisen which were too sensitive to be written down in a formal report and instead needed to be addressed in informal talks. In both contexts, Mark explained, it had helped that he and the embassy staff had all been Scandinavian, since it meant they had all understood each other.

For the Corporation: Advancing Organizational Interests in Cross-sectoral Partnerships

A second imperative in my interlocutors’ work pertained to the organizational stakes of their employer in cross-sectoral partnerships. Accounts of this arose most often among public agency staff who described how they brokered relations with their employers’ private sector partners and contracted firms by exploiting their previous experience in either consulting or banking. My interlocutors’ testimonies support earlier observations of the diverse career paths of practitioners in international aid (see also Eyben, 2011; Roth, 2015; Stirrat, 2008). They indicate, especially, cross-overs between for- and non-profit work. Eight of the 13 consultants I interviewed had previously worked for non-profit NGOs, public aid agencies, government ministries or universities (see also Nagaraj, 2015). A review of the CVs of operational ³ staff hired by Sida discloses that a growing share of new recruits have a professional background in consulting, development finance or international trade with countries in the global South (in addition to academic degrees in business or finance): from 35% in 1996–1999 ⁴ to 52% in 2019–2022. ⁵ True, development finance experts at Sida and the DFI staff I interviewed rarely had experience from non-profit NGO work but generally came from the professional and academic world of banking, finance and business. However, as private sector instruments and partnerships grow among ‘traditional’ development organizations like Sida, more ODA is allocated to DFIs, and DFIs are pressured to demonstrate their commitment to SDGs and environmental, corporate and governance (ESG) standards (see e.g., Spratt et al., 2018), staff movements between the world of finance and public and third sector organizations are likely to increase.

Some of my interlocutors employed at Sida who had a background in consulting or DFIs described how they tapped into their knowledge and contacts from their previous field of work for two purposes (among others): On the one hand, to connect their employer with relevant actors in that industry and mediate between them, and on the other, to help their employer ‘see through’ the professional lingo of these actors in order to protect their employer’s investments and negotiate the terms of partnerships. For Tim, a guarantee specialist, working with guarantees in a public aid agency meant, in part, attracting market investors to fund development initiatives for which his aid agency could serve as guarantor. This implied acting as a promoter of ‘good will’ vis-à-vis potential investors and as a mediator between these and his employer. Such tasks were facilitated by his previous experience in banking and the DFI community. Getting investors to commit ‘for real’, Tim explained, depended on making them overcome their preconceptions about developing economies as too risky, uncertain and, ultimately, not worth the trouble. Ideally, that work required him and his unit to bring potential investors with them to Africa, having them meet local actors in person and experience for themselves how local markets and businesses worked. At the same time, Tim’s job also entailed scrutinizing such investors, examining whether or how their discourses on global responsibility translated into measurable efforts and results. His current department was managing the agency’s involvement in an international network for financial institutions and corporate investors engaged in impact investment and the mobilization of private finance for SDGs. That engagement, Tim explained, entailed critically investigating which commitments by these investors were more than window dressing. His former employer, he recounted, was a commercial bank. It had recently announced its launch of a new, intensified investment scheme centred on green stocks. But what did that actually mean, Tim asked me rhetorically. Another bank profiling itself as an investor in good will, he added with a laugh, had recently been revealed to base that claim on investments in two oil companies. Some commercial banks were merely interested in building a reputation for themselves as advocates for global sustainability, Tim, explained, and part of Sida’s job as a potential partner was to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Prior to Anna’s current position as a posted desk officer in one of Sida’s field offices, she had spent several years working as a development consultant for two Swedish firms. Her last assignment, which she had left two years ago, had entailed technical assistance to the same Sida-sponsored project to which she was currently managing public funds as an in-house Sida employee. Switching positions within the same ongoing project had offered her first-hand insight into the perspectives of both client and service provider, she recounted. The Sida-funded project currently involved contracted assignments carried out by three consulting firms with offices in Sweden, including her former employer. After starting her job at Sida, one of the other firms had notified her in the middle of implementation that they would not have time to undertake a task that, in her view, was included in their contract. This had annoyed her. Their contract with Sida, written and signed prior to her joining the agency, left no room for extensions. The situation could have been avoided if the firm had budgeted for more workdays in their tender instead of pretending to have the capacity to complete the assignment as proposed. In her view, the case was symptomatic of the need for a franker dialogue between Sida and its consultants about the actual costs of procured assignments. There was a limit beyond which efforts to keep fees at a minimum tampered with the quality of consultants’ work. Of course, she added, she understood why these situations arose. Winning tenders depended on the bidder’s ability to keep costs down. Consequently, winning firms rarely entered into an agreement with a client on honest terms (see also Eisenhardt, 1989). Because she had worked as a consultant for Sida, she was well aware of this. Therefore, she was well-equipped to help dissect tenders submitted to the agency. Like Tim, in other words, Anna used her experience among Sida’s private sector partners to scrutinize the latter, in her case by identifying unrealistic numbers presented by tendering consulting firms. A similar brokerage dynamic has been observed in partnerships between foreign state donors and local NGOs, where locally recruited donor staff tap into their previous experience from aid-funded organizations to help their foreign employers reach a deeper level of ‘truth’ behind their local partners’ project applications and progress reports (Sundberg, 2019, 2020). Tim, Anna and other public agency staff with a background in consulting and finance indicate how the growth of capitalist regimes in aid is expanding the need for such brokerage in state agencies, to also encompass agencies’ dealings with private sector actors.

For the Métier: Protecting the Position and Reputation of One’s Profession

A third imperative is located within the realm of internal office relations between staff. Given that one of the principal purposes of my interlocutors’ brokerage work was to reach a deeper level of truth assumed to lurk behind private sector partners’ official reports and formal meeting parley, a measure of distrust usually marked these collaborations. Donor organizations’ distrust of their commercial partners and service providers spilled over to their employees who used to represent them. Most of my interlocutors testified to being targets of prejudices and suspicions about their former line of work. Such experiences sometimes compelled them to defend the reputation of their original professional subfield and the people currently inhabiting it.

Several Sida workers with a background in consulting had chosen to work as consultants in the hopes that it would serve as a springboard to jobs at Sida. Sida desk office jobs offered more reasonable work hours, greater job security and paid more than most consulting jobs. Moreover, in partnerships with Sida, I was told, consultants generally had limited influence and status and were often subject to exaggerated or conflicting expectations. Virtually all present and former consultants recalled facing prejudices from clients, not least Sida staff, who conceived of consultants as lacking empirical knowledge of poverty, only caring about their service fees, or exaggerating their capacity and skills in tenders. Projections of such stereotypes had materialized in situations where they, as consultants, had been socially excluded in client office environments and collaborative work processes, forgotten or purposefully omitted in acknowledgements of project contributors or told by colleagues of clients that their services were unwanted. Complaints about such treatment were rarely voiced, however, since consultants could not afford to bite the hand that fed them, as one interlocutor put it. In response, several former consultants now working at Sida said they served as mediators between their co-workers and the consultants they contracted. They took it upon themselves to help consultants ‘think’ like their clients and act in ways that would not elicit Sida’s disapproval. Moreover, they defended Sida’s consultants against accusations or misinterpretations by their in-house colleagues. Anna, mentioned above, who was sometimes annoyed by consultants’ failure to deliver due to having priced their services unrealistically low, also acknowledged how some consulting assignments failed because of changes that were out of the consultants’ control. This was not always something her Sida colleagues recognized, however, Anna added. In those situations, she tried to help the consultants argue their case vis-à-vis her department and make sure they were paid for any extra work they put in.

Anna’s former colleague Elisabeth likened the position of consultants with that of Sida’s partner organizations in the global South. Both were recipients of aid funds and both were tasked with implementing development interventions that were more or less dictated by Sida, she reasoned. After a few years as a consultant for a Swedish firm, Elisabeth was offered a job at Sida as a junior expert deployed to one of Sweden’s embassies overseas. Her job at the embassy had involved managing donor funds to a set of local authorities and organizations with which she had previously worked within the frame of a consulting assignment. It had been interesting, she told me, to move to the other end of the table in that project. In her former role as a consultant, she had been diligently responsive to Sida’s demands. When the latter had asked her to submit an additional report not included in the contract, she willingly agreed because she had been keen to maintain a good track record with the agency. Consulting for Sida had given her a good understanding of the position of dependency held by Sida’s partners, Elizabeth insisted. In her new position as in-house staff, she had discussed a lot with Sida’s controller at the embassy about how external partners perceived the agency. Her colleagues rarely appreciated the potency of their own power, she contended. It was important they understood that most partners, like herself in her previous job, did their best to live up to Sida’s expectations and that dialogue rather than demands and reprimands should permeate Sida’s interaction with them.

Among my interlocutors engaged in private sector collaborations at Sida, there was a shared sentiment that those working with commercial aid models constituted an odd bird in the agency, exposed to suspicions and opinions rather than facts. Several of them worked for Sida’s Department for Partnership and Innovation, which is the central hub for the agency’s engagement with development guarantees and collaborations and interactions with private businesses. Unlike their colleagues with a background in consulting, most of these interlocutors had previously worked in finance and were said to have taken a step down on the career ladder when joining Sida. Though Sida offered shorter workdays and more opportunities to work internationally, it paid less and offered employees less status and prestige. Partly because of their background in the privileged sphere of finance, as one interlocutor described the international DFI community, other staff at Sida disregarded their work as aid. Peter, a former DFI employee, argued that an elite group of employees had been created at Sida when his unit, dealing with guarantees, had been set up. He and his colleague had been hand-picked from the finance and banking industry where salaries were set in relation to, for example, venture capital firms, rather than NGOs and other ‘losers’ in the Swedish salary market with which Sida wages were compared. When Peter joined Sida, his salary cut still meant he earned more than the head of his unit who had worked for Sida for many years. This was dangerous business, he argued. Not only did he and his fellow colleagues from the finance sector earn more than most Sida staff, they also worked with things that some Sida employees believed were morally questionable based on their disbelief in the compatibility of capitalism and global solidarity, concerns about rising debt burdens in the global South, and an aversion to aid regimes that generated profits for donors. Moreover, many Sida employees found development guarantees complex, cumbersome and bureaucratically counterintuitive. While their responsibility was to spend tax money on aid interventions, guarantees made money. Consequently, Peter regretted, it was sometimes difficult to convince Sida’s programme officers to integrate guarantees in their portfolios. Importantly, when Peter and his colleagues advocated for the use of private sector instruments within the agency, they simultaneously promoted and defended a particular institutional subfield of aid work—development finance or profit-making aid. This latter constituted an alternative to the grants-based operations and moral economic perspectives of aid as a gift (if not an entitlement), which dominated the public aid agency. Moreover, it was represented by an alternative and privileged group of professionals—that of development finance experts—to which Peter and his co-workers belonged by virtue of their professional background in banking as well as their current work with guarantees.

IV. Conclusion

The financialization of aid and its outsourcing to private firms throw into relief how the stakes for development experts go beyond the needs and interests of ‘the poor’ but also those of ‘the (individual) self’. This article has spotlighted three related, institutional self-interests which individual practitioners also pursue. They pertain to the competitiveness of their organization and compatriot donor businesses in relation to ‘developers’ of other nationalities, the stakes of their employer in cross-sectoral partnerships, and the reputation and interests of their professional sub-field. These reflect development practitioners’ collective identification with their profession, their organization and the country which it represents in ways that unsettle the opposition between concerns for the self and concerns for the beneficiaries of aid (Graham, 2004). Though none of these institutional interests are new, private sector actors and instruments are bringing them to the fore. The latter are also carving out new spaces of development brokerage between non- and for-profit actors, facilitated by staff movements across public agencies, consulting firms and development finance institutions. An example of this, I have shown, is the mediating work of public agency employees with a past in consulting and finance, who broker relations within their agency’s partnerships with contracted firms and financial institutions.

Beyond these main findings, let me end with two related reflections.

One is concerned with the relationship between these three institutional imperatives, on the one hand, and the altruism–individual self-interest binary, on the other. The growth of profit-making institutions and funding schemes owes much to the development industry’s continued embrace of neoliberal ideals. The latter constitute, in part, the common origin of both personal and institutional self-interests in aid. Outsourcing development labour to commercial firms and professionalizing aid work—identified in the beginning of this article as factors behind the increasing importance that development experts give to personal, non-altruistic goals—are rooted in some of the same neoliberal tenets promoting the mobilization of private capital for development purposes: free-market competition, the pursuit of value-neutral utility maximization and the commodification of aid labour (Hindman, 2011; Kothari, 2005; Kotz, 2010). Hence, institutional and individual self-interests are related and intertwine not just on the level of economic governance ideals but also on a personal, practical level. Consultants’ concerns about securing a share of the international consulting market for firms of their own nationality, for example, certainly speak to the interests of their own company as well as their personal careers. This alludes to the practical difficulty, sometimes, of excluding concern for the self from concern for that of which one is part, which is a qualification of Graham’s (2004) notion of pure collective identification.

In other instances, this difference transpires more clearly, when efforts made by individual practitioners to further certain institutional interests come at a personal price. Those with a background in finance, for example, face suspicions and prejudices among their state agency colleagues working with grants-based aid when promoting the use of profit-making instruments in-house. Graham (2004) recognizes how tensions can indeed arise between the collective and the self. While Thomas Scanlon (1998), another moral philosopher, argues that the prioritization of collective goals over individual ones constitutes a personal sacrifice, Graham maintains it does not, since the choice is one of ‘us’ over ‘me’, rather than ‘you’ over ‘me’ (Scanlon, 1998: 127–28, quoted in Graham 2004: 63). While my research offers no firm ground for taking a position in this debate, the debate itself is illustrative of the fact that when development practitioners prioritize the ‘us’ of their organization or profession, ‘me’ is impacted in different ways.

A similar complexity can be found in the relationship between practitioners’ pursuits of institutional self-interests and their altruistic dispositions. My interlocutors’ concern with their business’s international competitiveness, the status and reputation of their professional sub-field, or the stakes of their organization vis-à-vis its partners, does not mean they lack a humanitarian calling. Certainly, unlike many humanitarian organizations, DFIs are not in the business of saving lives in crisis, and to the extent they invest in the least developed countries, they rarely target the most vulnerable citizens in those countries (Meeks et al., 2020). Moreover, some DFI staff I interviewed did not self-identify as aid workers, preferring labels tied to the broader concepts of development and investment. Still, virtually all consultants and development finance experts, including DFI staff qualified for work in the more lucrative world of commercial finance, motivated their career choices based on a desire to contribute to poverty reduction, economic growth in the global South and/or a more equitable distribution of global resources. In their eyes, institutional self-interests do not necessarily contradict one’s helping imperative. Meanwhile, in the finite realm of everyday work, they inevitably compete with it. DFIs’ mandate to promote compatriot businesses demands from their staff that they demonstrate measurable results towards this end. Similarly, the brokerage work undertaken by Sida staff with a background in consulting and finance alludes to the time and energy ‘conventional’ developers like state aid agencies invest in understanding and relating to the needs and logics of not only those they are meant to help but their many commercial partners and service providers.

Overall, my general point here is that while scholars have interpreted the growth of private sector aid as a return to a more openly self-interested mode of development cooperation, the focus in these studies has been on the benefits reaped by donors at the level of nation-states and organizations rather than individuals (Gulrajani and Silcock, 2020; Mawdsley, 2012). My research suggests that both deserve empirical exploration and that the relationship between the two—and specifically, how individual practitioners purse, understand and are affected by these institutional self-interests—cannot be taken for granted.

Second, the scepticism facing (former) consultants and bankers in public aid agencies suggests that staff movements across institutional sub-fields have not done away with, but sometimes rather accentuate, stereotypical images of different professional groups in the aid world. Importantly, it indicates that for-profit instruments and institutions and the professionals representing them (still) create ‘culture clashes’ with those in the industry who question, for example, exposing aid work to free-market competition and privatization or the notion that donors should profit from aid while raising debt in the global South (see also Shutt, 2021). This seems at least to be the case in Sweden’s public aid agency, Sida, which serves as a flagship among OECD DAC countries for the use of development guarantees, and which continues to spend millions of dollars on consultants. The salary inequalities brought about by the recruitment of guarantee specialists and other finance experts point to an area for future research about Sida and other public and non-profit organizations adopting private sector instruments. They exemplify the many economic inequalities inherent in international development work to which practitioners need to relate (McWha 2011; Shutt, 2012). Importantly, they indicate how the growth of profit-making instruments and institutions is creating new hierarchies that structure relations not only between donors and recipients but also between different categories of development workers.