Léonie Newhouse

@tibg.bsky.social

I show how this opperated in practice by following a volunteer teacher and a midwife/ traditional birth assistant as they sought to secure a fair wage for their skilled work.

More interestingly, perhaps, incentive work proliferated much more widely, as low-level civil servants found that offering volunteers incentives helped them to mobilize labor at a discount.

Now, how did this play out in South Sudan? In the paper, I show how humanitarian actors found this move to incentive work useful, as it was a flexible way to pay a variety of of people they might not otherwise be able to pay.

Incentives replace wages, and the opportunity to work is distributed like a benefit.

Together, these conceptual and practical moves contributed to viewing work as both a benefit, and as participation. But what happens when you see work as a benefit?

I show how this opperated in practice by following a volunteer teacher and a midwife/ traditional birth assistant as they sought to secure a fair wage for their skilled work.

More interestingly, perhaps, incentive work proliferated much more widely, as low-level civil servants found that offering volunteers incentives helped them to mobilize labor at a discount.

Second, the idea of the incetive chimed well with calls for more participatory models of development and humanitarian work, where the aim was that beneficiaries had more of a say in matters that affected them.

I argue that incentive work emerged from two development trends. First, unconditional cash tranfers and guaranteed rural work schemes that saw offering a wage as a form of social protection--that is as a benefit.

In this paper, I look at how paying people small token payments--incentives--instead of a wage became ubiquitous in independence era South Sudan. To do so, I look at where the practice originated-both conceptually and in practice.

New paper out: Creative Fictions Incentive work and humanitarian labour in South Sudan... and its open access.
rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...