Taking advantage of the time while working in the garden, I have dedicated myself to listening to the podcast (Living decoloniality) to improve my training in what seems to be the trendy topic. It is a very well done and interesting podcast; However, I have not found anything that was not already talked about in the 90s: listening (except that it is active now), participation (although it was not said then stakeholders), local decision making, etc.
Out of curiosity, I searched on Google Scholar to see how many articles have been written about decoloniality since 2019. They started as , around 1,500 articles have been added annually until reaching seven thousand publications. I am concerned about this trend.
I believe there are three important reasons why as a cooperation sector we are dedicating more time than necessary to discussing decolonization, although this does not mean that the topic should be silenced.
I’m not going to go into the first one, because I already talked about it, where I said that there are not many possibilities of changing the way donors act, because they have the money and they want it to be justified according to their conditions.
The second reason is that there is a deficit of doing things. I am a boomer of cooperation, who in the 90s worked listening to those and Mercedes Sosa: to build this wall, bring me all your hands: the blacks, their black hands, the whites, their white hands.
Today things have changed and due to the prevailing climate the whites do not know what to do with their white hands. In recent years, I have witnessed NGOs in the North being downsized at a faster rate than NGOs in the South have been able to take on to continue doing jobs that were previously done jointly. Among the issues most affected by this deficit are writing new projects and improving accounting control. As a result, colleagues in the sector have confirmed to me that project funding has decreased. The latter partly because not enough projects are written, and partly because the quality control of those that are executed has decreased, with the consequent displeasure of donors. The white hands have been withdrawn too quickly.
A solution to this problem would be for NGOs in the North to dedicate themselves to advocacy instead of executing projects in the South, but their legitimacy is also given by the things they do in addition to the things they say. If they do less and less, there will be less and less staff, and less and less things will be done, until they do nothing and disappear because they are irrelevant. This would not be a bad result if it occurred because all the work has been assumed from the countries of the South. But it is not the case.
The third issue is that spending a lot of time talking about one topic takes away time from talking about others. These are the ones I mention in the previous paragraphs, to begin with, but also the erosion of funds for NGOs in the North, for two reasons.
The first, because the governments of the countries have moved to the right (see the Global Center for Development). The United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden and Norway have made cooperation in their budgets.
The second reason, because: in Spain it shows constant aging, with a current average age of 59 years and 61% of members over 55 years old. Young people are no longer motivated to finance NGOs because their way of getting information has changed. Now it is through social networks, where they send unsupportive messages from the gym. More right-wing young people have less interest in cooperation (when they are not radically opposed).
For NGOs, obtaining their own and discretionary funds—that they can use freely—is increasingly difficult. This financing is what makes it possible to improve participation prior to the beginning of the projects, because this costs money: you have to plan the development of the project in advance, hold meetings with the communities, write the projects slowly. Donors do not usually pay these expenses.
It is not that there is no need to talk about decolonization, nor that participation, inclusion, power sharing and the feminist approach are not discussed or ignored. But there are existential problems that should also take priority. NGOs, both North and South, should be machines for designing projects, investing funds well and justifying them better, as long as governments do not take charge of poverty.
Talks about decolonization in the cooperation sector, both in the North and in the South, remind me of the fall of Byzantium, where the hot topic was the sex of angels. This disconnection from reality led them to neglect a more important issue, the defense of their territory against the Ottoman invasion. The Byzantine Empire became extinct before they had time to finish the discussion.
