Appropriate approaches for practitioners in international programs: reflections from a Cambodia–Australia collaboration

Ensuring appropriate solutions for communities is an objective emphasised across international development, including the water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) sector. However, attention is rarely paid to ensuring practitioners have appropriate approaches to provide these solutions. Many approaches fail to account for or adapt to differences in how practitioners think and speak, and these concerns are notable for international collaborations where practitioners work across different backgrounds, cultures, and languages. We present reflections from a collaboration between a research group in Australia and a WASH program in Cambodia that aimed to validate a new approach to account for complexity in WASH programs. Insights from these reflections demonstrated the importance of facilitation as well as flexible approaches that can adapt to differences in practitioner mindsets and language. We share these reflections as lessons learnt, and we believe these lessons may be particularly important as international programs continue to action localisation and decolonisation efforts.