ABSTRACT
The previous chapter highlighted examples of how consulting firms and DFIs, as part of the growing realm of profit-oriented development work, are doing away with some of the hierarchies between donor- and recipient-country staff that have been observed within public and third sector aid predominantly involved in grant-based aid. This chapter and the next bring to the fore the limits to these changes. The following pages describe how Kenyan consultants and DFI staff share with Tanzanian grants managers in foreign state agencies experiences of two types of marginalization. Both resonate with findings in research on local NGO workers and broader sets of development experts from aid recipient countries. As such, they point to for-profit aid's emulation, rather than abandonment, of colonially imbued inequalities. The first concerns local practitioners' lesser professional voice and authority in their workplaces, and the second, their inferior compensation and benefits packages. These two types of inequality are mutually reinforcing. They also have bearing on the meaning of aid localization. They show, first, that localization as described in aid discourse conflicts with how it is actually practiced, and, second, that the reality of localization embodies a contradiction between the work local staff is assigned and the terms on which they are employed.
