Resumen de Building trust, gaining truth: The relational work of national staff in Foreign AID agencies
This article centers on a particular category of foreign aid workers: the national or local desk officers employed by public foreign donors to run the daily administration of development cooperation in aid recipient countries. These professionals transcend the socio-professional binary between donor and foreign and recipient and local that is often constructed in anthropological research on foreign aid and its individual actors. While officially representing foreign donor agencies, national aid workers enjoy multiple ties to the domestic development industry—personal, civic, cultural, and professional. Given the high turnover of staff sent out from donor headquarters, national employees are often important for donor agencies’ ability to build and stabilize relations in the host country and gain the trust (and truth) of their partner organizations. Meanwhile, their ties to the host country also expose national employees to suspicions of “local bias” and the risk of personally losing the trust of their foreign employers. On the basis of the testimonies of donor agency employees in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the article explores the relational work of national staff and how they bring to the fore questions of trust, power, and individual relationships in foreign aid.
