Introduction

As the chapters in this volume have shown, the processes and tasks of decolonising development are complex and multifaceted. My comment draws on some of the key points in these contributions to reflect on how development management might be decolonised and re-imagined. I argue here that the increased standardisation of ever more invasive tools and technologies for planning and management in the international aid sector amount to a kind of colonisation by bureaucratisation. The ideas that underpin these enmesh actors and organisations in forms of market coloniality that functions across and through the hierarchies of the aid industry. These institutions and processes are extensions of colonial power relations, predicated upon powerful myths of modernisation, and justifying complex and demanding technocratic processes that conceal the political nature of the sector. While organisations across the aid industry endeavour to grapple with various decolonising agendas and methodologies, the new frontiers of colonial expansion being created through digital dimensions in aid need to be confronted. This commentary begins with a consideration of the managerialisation of aid, exploring continuities with colonialist framings, before reviewing the nature of some decolonising efforts. It asks whether these are aligned with a fundamental reimagining of how development interventions are designed and managed, or recognise the plurality of epistemologies that a radical decolonising agenda suggests.

In this commentary, ‘development management’ is used to refer to a set of technologies, processes and disciplines used throughout the aid system for the organisation and control of people, resources and values.Footnote 1 These range from ideas about how non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are best managed to management practices such as accountancy, audit and human resources (Power, 1999; Townley, 1994). They have also come to include rigid formats and prescriptions for how projects are designed and managed by the institutions that pursue development as planned change (Cowen & Shenton, 1996), be they large bilateral agencies or small community organisations. These technologies are underpinned by a view of development as modernity, pervasive in development practice today with its array of technical specialisms (Quijano, 2000). Complex social, historical and cultural realities are rendered into quantifiable absences or problems that provide justifications for development intrusions (Ferguson, 1994; Li, 2007). This is done by technologies that equip the development professional with a set of standardised approaches that allow a depoliticised assessment of the situation they seek to transform (Scott, 2023).

With development’s end goals long posited as the achievement of western notions of modernity, and the means through which this is achieved a series of technocratic and rational instruments, the management technologies that undergird that rationality have come to play a central role in how development is done. Over the last twenty or so years, managerialist approaches based on notions of rational analysis of efficiency, and instrumentalist consideration of ends rather than means, have come to dominate the sector. The new public management approaches brought into the sector since the 1980s on rising tides of neoliberalism introduced technologies that presumed to fix the deficiencies of the public sector with innovations from the profit-driven private industry (Dar & Cooke, 2008; Cooke, 2008; Kerr, 2008; Klikauer, 2015). Justified in the name of efficient use of funds, for example by the OECD’s Paris Agenda (2005), the ensuing ‘results agenda’ (Eyben, 2015) saw means of management by metrics permeate the sector, forms of managerialism spread through global networks of NGOs (Roberts et al., 2005). Today’s development projects are planned and set out according to tightly defined outcomes and predetermined objectives, inputs and outputs, all of which are set out in standardised results frameworks that are calibrated by an analysis of value for money. A contemporary education project might, for example, have a clearly defined objective of 5000 children achieving higher results on standardised test, and a range of quantified sub objectives to deliver this such as a set number of teacher trainings and literacy improvement interventions, all to be delivered according to a predetermined sequence within a three year time frame. Such a project’s achievements will be regularly verified by tracking complex arrays of progress and performance indicators, within the heavily quantified systems of metrics that are an extension of wider audit regimes (Muller, 2018; Power, 1999; Strathern, 2000). Framed as ethical means for responsible accountability, these audit systems are expansive technologies of governmentality, which transform both organisations and people into auditable entities subject to scrutiny, while evading questions about the ethical premises on which they themselves are based (Scott, 2022; Shore & Wright, 2015).

Critiques of the use of management technologies in development have long noted these as antithetical to progressive development agendas (Dar & Cooke, 2008; Girei, 2017; McCourt & Johnson, 2012), given their roots in systems designed for profit making and in exploitative contexts such as factories where, according to the father of scientific management Frederick Taylor, workers could be treated as mere intelligent animals (Klikauer, 2015). The positioning of management as a science, identifying itself as rooted in a positivistic enlightenment epistemology that seeks universal truths and is objectively premised, presumes the universality of its own world view and hides its status as a product of specific inequities (Cooke, 2008; Reiter, 2018). The exploitative potential of the dehumanised and dehumanising stance contained within management practices is often deliberately hidden or overlooked (Cooke, 2003), such as the lethal impacts of cutting of safety protocols in name of cost savings (Shore & Wright, 2015). As Grosfoguel (2007) notes, modernisation is the other side of the coin of coloniality, part of the modern world system is based on divisions of labour and racialised hierarchies. In effect then management is a key driver and facilitator of modern coloniality, maintaining a hierarchy of knowledge and of power as a subjective form of manipulation but which hides its subjectivities behind a veil of science (Cooke, 2008; Dar & Cooke, 2008; Klikauer, 2015).

The continuities between colonial and development institutions are apparent in the hierarchies of aid, whose mechanisms of grant dispersal and management highlight functional linkages between colonial administration and development management agencies (Eyben, 2014; Ferguson, 1997). Structured with demanding regimes of audit and upwards accountability towards donors, top down management from afar easily reproduces an ethnocentric white gaze (Pailey, 2020). While positioning themselves as advocates for change, most Northern NGOs are embodiments of the structural inequalities that development is founded upon. These inequalities are often reproduced through pay differentials between expatriate and national staff, the use of colonialist language and representations that reinforce stereotypes of modernity. Many western NGOs have been accused of losing sight of the critical or transformative agendas that they claim to have been founded upon and offering palliative agendas as extensions of the state in areas where this cannot go (Banks et al., 2015; Duffield, 2007).

In recent years, in the wake of movements such as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall, some agencies in the sector have moved to publicly question their own practices.Footnote 2 This includes how they represent the people they work with, for example, in fundraising or annual reports, and more structural factors such as financing and decision making within projects. A few key examples include the START Network (2022) for humanitarian action, which commissioned work that notes how reforms need to acknowledge the role of racist and colonial understandings in informing decision making and systems of control. Other initiatives across a number of NGOs include a range of prototypes for ‘reimagining’ methods of assessing risk and compliance management to alternative modes of solidarity.Footnote 3 One such initiative is of the removal of any racist language and abandoning terms such as ‘developed’ and ‘developing’.

The broadly conceived ‘localisation agenda’, covering a range of efforts and views to place more control and funding in local hands and brought to the fore by the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 (Pincock et al., 2021), received new impetus from the logistical impediments generated by the Covid pandemic. Statements such as the Grand Bargain (2016) and Charter for ChangeFootnote 4 have focused the localisation of humanitarian aid on commitments to improve principles for partnership, transparency and support rather than undermining local capacities, as well as to put more money directly in local hands. At times the sheer scale of the transformation of understanding required has been inadvertently revealed. In an off-record discussion amongst senior policy makers about decolonising the sector, the CEO of a philanthropic organisation observed ‘I hadn’t really understood and appreciated the big picture, the anger, the anti-aid movement, the strong anti-North perspectives …. I have never been much exposed to that’ (cited in Aly, 2022).

Meanwhile, the global presence of Oxfam has embarked on what it calls ‘a profound transformation to redesign attitudes and behaviour’ with an ‘intersectional vision’ of ‘anti-racism’. This pledges to recognise systemic and structural elements, and to seek racial justice and power shifts in accordance with the localisation agenda. Mechanisms for achieving this include having diversity champions and an emphasis on co-creation and changing language and storytelling to reflect these principles. While a key indicator of success is ‘when communities tell us we’ve succeeded’ (Oxfam, 2022, p. 12), a radical formula is hard to discern here. On the contrary, what might be decolonial about these new efforts, rather than simply being more inclusive, is not always apparent. In the case of Oxfam for example the model makes the link between racism and the root causes of injustice in poverty that it works to address. However, the initiatives are coming from the top down, initiated by those closer to the control of resources rather than any significant abandonment of hierarchies of power and the colonial modalities these involve.

In relation to localisation it is not clear how giving local partners greater financial control resolves fundamental epistemic issues about what development should or could be, nor how it might highlight ongoing racialised discourses and practices. Rather, localisation itself rests on an implicit binary between northern donors and southern recipients, often involving a poor conceptualisation of the local (Roepstorff, 2020), and echoing colonial spatial relations and power inequalities. Localisation runs the risk of being as ambiguous a term as partnership, which can cover an array of power relationships, used for example in framing British development since the imperial era (Noxolo, 2006). Partnerships are also heavily promoted in the SDGs to promote collaborations with the private sector, thus themselves becoming vehicles for the universalising logics of managerialism (Olwig, 2021) rather than providing spaces for alternative relations.

Decolonisation efforts within development management need to recognise and acknowledge how the aid system promotes new forms of colonisation. As aid becomes a site for investing the excess capital produced by extreme inequalities of wealth, in forms from investment bonds to philanthropic capitalists’ private agendas (Mawdsley, 2018; Mediavilla & Garcia-Arias, 2019; McGoey, 2012), new forms of coloniality are being created. Following Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s (this volume) richly productive framing of eras of colonial structural adjustment, these could form constituent parts of a 6th era of coloniality, with which critique should also engage.

Conclusion

For the aid sector to move from universalist western frameworks of modernity and science to a pluriverse of practice (Narayanaswamy, 2022), while continuing to be underpinned by colonial era inequalities and paradigms, is a difficult and challenging task. It would require a total transformation of purpose and systems, given that the aid sector is itself an expression of colonial regimes. Rather than dismissing dominant management theory as a form of manipulation, aid agencies would need to question their position and their power. We would need to see a much more honest reckoning with the impact of managerialism across the sector, that maintains a regime of surveillance over so-called partner NGOs in the global South, and of the stranglehold this places on reimagining what development and progress might look like. Alternative propositions do exist, as explored in this volume, such as the alternative futures identified by Kothari, and provide a basis on which Indigenous forms of management could be explored. Other alternatives to the current aid regime range from creating grassroots charities that manage their own funding and rejecting aid altogether, to global public investment in basic services (Glennie, 2021). Within the current aid framework more modest changes could include shifting funding directly to communities to further their own goals and managed according to their needs. This could be assessed by and linked to new forms of accountability, that are forged in new dynamics such as that of relational accountability as set out in Tynan’s chapter in relation to research. Management as the organisation of people and resources needs to change and be based on an epistemology that is respectful of humanity, is able to recognise power and seek emancipatory objectives within a transformative agenda. It also requires thinking about the kinds of research that underpin the development of new projects and programmes, and how communities can be active in shaping what futures they want, rather than being the subjects of an off-the-shelf project designed from afar that reproduces colonial paradigms, or being a vehicle for new digital forms of coloniality.