“We have agency, we have power”

You are an expert on the decolonization of development cooperation. What personal experiences shaped your view of development cooperation?

I began my career as a grassroots activist in India and worked for the non-profit and government sector there for almost 20 years before moving to Canada and the US. And what a change it was! When I started engaging with bodies like USAID, my first impression was: I thought I knew English. But I clearly did not because the language in the sector is so full of jargon. There are very few spaces where we are able to translate and hear each other’s perspectives and begin to understand each other. Therefore, coming to this part of the world and engaging in these conversations has been both frustrating and illuminating. It has enabled me to understand the myriad perspectives of very diverse stakeholders.

When you talk about the “Minority World” and the “Majority World”, how do you understand these concepts?

Historically, we have used a lot of words to describe countries in what we call the Majority World – Africa, Latin America, Caribbean, Asia – from least developed, Third World, resource-poor countries to now the Global South. Each of these terminologies not only has a strong power dynamic embedded in it, they are inaccurate. They portray the Majority World as less than the Minority World, as if they are inadequate and need to catch up.

Where does the term come from?

The term Majority World was coined by Bangladeshi activist and photographer Shahidul Alam in the early 1990s. He used the term to challenge the Minority World: if you truly value democracy, how can it be that a small fraction of the globe continues to make decisions for the vast majority? Personally, I adopted the term for one more reason: it’s a reminder to us, in the Majority World, that we are the majority of the world’s population and we have the agency to transform it; we are not powerless.

You are a vocal advocate of the #ShiftThePower movement. Has the power already shifted towards local communities and organizations?

The Movement for Community-led Development was launched in 2015, and we were one of the early adopters of the term #ShiftThePower when it was coined in 2016. At that time, it was a radical concept because it recognized the power imbalances reinforced by our sector. But now we have moved on from the term. Because “shifting the power” implies that someone (the Minority World or the funders) has power in the system and they need to give it to us – communities, and organizations in the Majority World. However, we in the Majority World do have power. We have always had power. Colonialism sought to erase our power and imbued in us a sense of powerlessness and dependency. The funding structures and ways of working of the development and humanitarian sectors exacerbated this feeling of powerlessness. As the conversation on the decolonization of aid has gradually picked up in the last few years, people are beginning to realize this. But the idea is still not mainstream. 

What is holding us back?

I truly believe that most people come into development cooperation with good intentions, not to push forward a colonial legacy. We work in this sector because we genuinely believe in human rights and want to make a difference. However, the institutions of international development, be they government agencies, philanthropists or NGOs, were not designed to create an equitable, just world. They were designed as instruments of control and “soft power”. And by falling into the ways of this sector, development practitioners inadvertently promote and strengthen the very power imbalances they seek to address. So, people: good intentions. System: reinforcing dependency and continuing the colonial legacy. And that is what is holding us back.
 

So, how can we shift the power or, in your words, address the coloniality embedded in our system?

Addressing the inherent coloniality in our system requires us to rethink our roles. We need to recognize that we are not all just protagonists or side actors. Whatever role we play in the ecosystem is equally important and there is space for all of us. The discussion on localization has created a huge fear, where INGOs worry that they and their knowledge may not be relevant anymore. But it is not that. Your knowledge is important in some part of the work and the knowledge of local actors is relevant in other parts of the work. So, we need to radically rethink our roles based on our strengths. We need to move away from the current competitive mindset to a collaborative one. And we need to make a very conscious decision to listen to each other. Although it seems so easy to do, that’s the most difficult thing. We have lost the art of listening.

How could we better listen and therefore better understand each other?

Listening requires a fundamental shift in our mindset. We need to believe that people who don’t look like us, sound like us, speak our language, people who do not have access to elite institutions and fancy degrees and who may never have travelled outside their part of the world, possess knowledge, experience and wisdom. Their worldview matters, their ideas matter, their values matter. We need to address language barriers, get curious, ask questions. Listening requires humility and a willingness to learn. 

Would listening be the key to fixing the system and eliminating the current power imbalances in development cooperation?

Let’s be clear, the system cannot be fixed. Development cooperation was created as a system of control and power to keep former colonies geopolitically and economically close. The whole locally led conversation is about making an unjust system a little less unjust. The current system was never designed with nor for Majority World communities. It was designed to keep out communities, to keep out local organizations, to keep out Majority worldviews.

I am not saying Official Development Assistance or ODA needs to be abolished. That would be a disaster – there are millions of people around the world who do not have access to even basic services and human rights because of continuous exploitation. But we need to think of ODA not as assistance or charity but as reparations to right historic and ongoing wrongs. And we need to gradually pave the way towards a post-ODA world that is just and equitable. For this to work, however, the global financial and economic system must be restructured. A just approach to debt and taxation is urgently needed. This would enable the Majority World governments to better provide for their people, without depending on external aid that comes with many strings attached. 
 

Which roles do you see for INGOs in this post-ODA world?

Minority World organizations have the power to influence the people and policies of the countries they are based in. Influencing public opinion is so important because the public does not understand global solidarity anymore. This makes it very easy for anti-rights groups to dominate the narrative.

And there are contexts where Minority World actors can do things which Majority World actors cannot. For example, if you are a LGBTQI+ activist in Uganda and you are being persecuted in your country, it may be more difficult to speak up. INGOs can use their reach to amplify the voices of local actors or shine a spotlight on atrocities and innovations alike. There are definitely roles for INGOs, but they will be very different from the ones they are used to. And to be clear, neither international nor local organizations should continuously be doing service delivery.

But they are key for poverty reduction, why should civil society not engage in those areas?

I think this has been a huge part of the problem in our sector. Health, education, water, electricity, roads, these are basic human rights, guaranteed by constitutions and governments. It is the mandate of elected governments to provide their population with these services, not NGOs. Besides the need for these services is only going to increase. So, if civil society continues to do service delivery, we are going to need an ever-increasing budget to do so and a very different set of expertise. The role of civil society is not service delivery; it is to enable governments to provide services to their people and to ensure people are able to hold their governments accountable, and that people are aware of their rights and work with their governments to realize them. 
 

What about contexts, where service provision is not fulfilled by the State?

History has shown us that the most brutal and authoritarian regimes get overthrown if they completely stop listening to the people. There are revolutions happening for that reason. If the government is not able to provide basic services, people will stand up against those regimes. If you see your family members starving, you have nothing to lose so you will rise up and protest. Service provision by outsiders is never a sustainable solution. It may help in the interim, and is definitely required in cases like humanitarian disasters and conflicts, but civil society will eventually run out of resources. And frankly we have neither the skill nor the mandate, resources or infrastructure to keep doing this. 

At the same time, it’s important to remember that many Majority World governments are not in a position today to provide basic services to their people, because the taxes they collect and their resources go into debt servicing. The global financial architecture and the rules of taxation enable multinationals to exploit the resources of Majority World countries without paying taxes or compensating the communities to whom those resources belong. This needs to change and that requires strong advocacy by civil society, particularly by INGOs as it is often Minority World governments that are upholding this exploitative financial architecture. 
 

Bearing in mind the role of Switzerland, for example, in the extractive industries, what call for action do you have for the Swiss government?

Switzerland and Swiss people have long prided themselves on being the upholders of humanitarian law and human rights values. If you are serious about these values, you have to stop upholding the systems that attack those values. Tax evasion schemes or cutting ODA is, at this point, directly signing the death warrant for many communities around the world. ODA doesn’t have to stay, it shouldn’t stay. But how it is phased out needs to be a decision made collectively with the people who are directly affected by the change. We are living in an interconnected world, so we cannot afford to think only of “our people” first. If you want to put the safety of Swiss citizens first, you’d do better to tackle the bigger and broader issues. 

What call do you have for Swiss civil society?

Currently, the anti-rights forces are coming together to root out the rights and the freedoms we have been fighting to uphold. And we are so busy in our silos trying to dot the i’s and cross the t’s first, that we fail to come together and address this threat. We have to get out of our boxes – these majority and minority, INGO, local, social movement, or organized civil society divides – and come together. We have to go back to the actor that is most powerful in this system, and that is the everyday citizens. We have to start listening and we have to start engaging with them if we want to uphold human rights.