ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys the many ethical challenges and dilemmas that confront development practitioners while working at the grassroots level with local communities. How is the aid worker best able to deliver development assistance in complex, nuanced, and unfamiliar contexts? International development agencies have money and influence, which in many cases determine the way a development program is designed, implemented, and managed; the resulting fieldwork approach might feed into inappropriate forms of management structures or technology transfers that foster dependency rather than empowerment. Some of the specific ethical challenges faced by the development practitioner include issues related to: pay equity, authentic development needs, urban vs. rural challenges, appropriate technology, cultural etiquette and being humble, and balancing organizational goals, just to name a few. A communitarian ethical framework is applied to work through many of these ethical problems.
