Looking for the local: the politics of humanitarian recruitment in DRC

There is renewed energy behind “going local” in the humanitarian sector: transferring power and funding to “local” actors to make aid more equitable and efficient. Yet, this obscures how claims to localness are highly contested. This article examines the tensions generated by humanitarian recruitment of “local staff” in North Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Hiring “locally” is deeply contentious because who is “local” is up for debate. Humanitarian recruitment of “locals” becomes another arena for political struggles over who has a claim to positions of authority and access to resources, based on disputed claims of “localness,” which continue to shape, and be shaped by, violent conflict. Humanitarian agencies become embroiled in existing conflicts about who belongs, in contexts where slippery notions of local belonging have long been used as a political resource in power contests, and as a strategy for armed mobilization. While humanitarian agencies look for an imagined “local,” representations of the local are negotiated through encounters with external organizations. Pragmatic attempts by humanitarian agencies to hire “for acceptance” concern a simultaneous rejection and embrace of contested notions of ethno-territorial belonging, in a way that ultimately risks reproducing ideas of “the local” that present ethnicity as a rigid and territorial notion. This contentious politics of recruitment reveals how aid agencies can fuel social tensions when the “local” aid category interacts with existing discourses around belonging, authority, and territory. “Going local” is thus not straightforward, but deeply political.