Compliance and coloniality: aid bureaucracy and the failures of ‘localisation’ in Myanmar's complex emergency

Abstract

In this article, we explore how logics and systems of coloniality are reproduced through the bureaucracy of international aid. Drawing on qualitative research with civil society and international aid workers in Myanmar, we examine tensions between international agencies' ‘do no harm’ and ‘localisation’ commitments and their compliance requirements. We demonstrate that international compliance frameworks are experienced as top-down and overly rigid by civil society actors leading aid programmes, and that they can have unintended negative consequences, causing harm to Myanmar aid workers and communities. These frameworks also reinforce logics and systems of coloniality, by valuing the technocratic knowledge and approaches of international agencies over the ‘ways of being’ of civil society actors, and by crystallising artificial and hierarchical distinctions between the ‘local’ and ‘international’. Compliance systems in turn highlight the inadequacies of current ‘localisation’ endeavours, which fail to recognise and redress deep-seated inequalities and injustices in the international humanitarian industry.