The work is asked for, and often done by the people it serves

The argument

A second argument concerns who actually wants and performs the work. Opponents argue that the picture of a foreign agency arriving uninvited does not describe most of the sector. Governments solicit partners for programmes they cannot fund; communities approach organisations with requests; and a large share of the organisations in question are themselves domestic, founded and staffed by nationals of the countries they work in, with foreign funding as one source among several. The mechanism opponents emphasise is agency on the receiving side. They argue that treating recipients as acted upon rather than acting is the characteristic error of the neocolonial framing, and that it is contradicted by what the sector contains: national staff running programmes, local organisations choosing which funders to approach and on what terms, campaigns directed against their own governments and against foreign donors alike, and communities refusing projects they judge useless. Opponents argue that a population exercising this much choice is not in the position of a colonial subject. Opponents accept that power is unequally distributed and argue that inequality is not the same as domination. A relationship can be asymmetric and still be voluntary, mutually beneficial and ended at will, and opponents argue that most funding relationships are of that kind. They add that the framing has a practical cost, since it implies that the appropriate response is for outside organisations to withdraw, which would remove resources the people most affected have generally asked for. On this account the sector is unequal rather than neocolonial, and the remedy is to shift control towards local partners rather than to end the relationship.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that invitation under constraint is not free choice. A government facing debt conditions and a collapsed budget solicits partners because the alternative is nothing, and consent given in that position does not show the arrangement is equal. They add that locally staffed organisations still answer to foreign funders for their budgets and their reporting, so national personnel can be the form through which external priorities are implemented rather than evidence against it, and that the ability to refuse a single project says little about the ability to refuse the system.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] A government soliciting partners because its budget has collapsed is choosing under constraint, and consent in that position does not establish that the arrangement is equal. [Rejecting P2] Locally staffed organisations still answer to foreign funders for budgets and reporting, so national personnel may be the means by which external priorities are implemented. [Rejecting P3] The ability to end a particular relationship says little about the ability to decline the wider system of external provision on which services depend. [Rejecting C] The premises show that participation is voluntary at the level of individual projects, which is compatible with structural dependence at the level of the system.