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.