Interpreting and enacting ‘empowerment’ in sport for development: the perspectives of UK stakeholders on a partnership-based programme in Malawi

Abstract

This article examines the interpretation and enactment of  ‘empowerment’ in a transnational Sport for Development programme that involved a partnership between a UK university and local stakeholders and practitioners in Malawi. In addressing whether the programme was underpinned by a neoliberal or more radical, progressive variant of empowerment, we employed semi-structured interviews with three categories of UK actors: university senior managers; university staff involved in project delivery; and student-volunteers. The findings reveal conflicting perspectives and tensions among these groups. The project staff team sought to promote a radical variant of empowerment through the programme. However, this was constrained by the use of the programme to burnish the University brand in the context of a competitive higher education marketplace and a tendency on the part of student-volunteers to uncritically position themselves as ‘superior’ to Malawian participants and view their involvement in instrumental terms. These perspectives had far reaching implications on relations of power within the programme, the extent to which it functioned on a partnership basis and whose interests were prioritised in its delivery.

Keywords:

• Empowerment
• sport for development
• Malawi
• neoliberalism
• postcolonialism
• partnership

Introduction

In the context of development policy, practice and discourse, there have been long-standing debates about the nature of empowerment, how it might be defined, what forms it can and should take and its potential in impacting the lives of marginalised individuals and communities in the global South (Rowlands 1995; Hennink et al. 2012). Within mainstream development circles, empowerment has come to be viewed as a ‘magic bullet’ for redressing asymmetrical power relations while for critical development theorists, it constitutes a ‘fuzzword’ within the development lexicon rather than a vehicle for transformative development practice and social change (Cornwall 2007). Nonetheless, since the early 1990s, empowerment has been almost universally adopted by development institutions, policy makers and practitioners (Luttrell and Quiroz 2009). Reflecting this process, empowerment has also assumed a taken-for-granted meaning among actors and institutions in the Sport for Development (SfD) field and has not only become a pervasive policy objective but is also claimed to undergird many of the practices found within this sector, such as capacity building, peer leadership, participation and, of particular concern for this article, partnership.

In recent years, the interpretation of empowerment in SfD, how it is operationalised and the outcomes associated with it have been subject to critical interrogation. Among the notable scholarship are studies exploring: sport and gender empowerment of women and girls in India (Samie et al. 2015; McDonald 2015; Kay 2013); sport as a tool for HIV/Aids education in southern Africa (Jeanes 2013; Mwaanga 2011; Mwaanga and Banda 2014); the collaborative provision of sports equipment in West Africa (Lindsey and O’Gorman 2015); mentoring and empowerment through sport in Malawi (Wagstaff and Parker 2020); and the use of Northern volunteers as ‘change agents’ to facilitate empowerment in the global South (Darnell 2010; Hayton 2016; Lucas and Jeanes 2020; Clarke and Norman 2021; Giulianotti, Collison, and Darnell 2021). Problematising and politicising discourses of empowerment in SfD and considering their implications for marginalised communities in the way that these studies do is no mere abstract, academic exercise. Cornwall (2007) has argued that continued ambiguity around the meaning of empowerment in the development enterprise allows it to be depoliticised in ways that extend neoliberal hegemony and Northern interests. Similarly, Leal (2007, 545) asserts that ‘institutionalised understandings of empowerment seek to contain the concept within the bounds of the existing order, and empowerment becomes the management of power when in the hands of the powerful’. Thus, the emerging research on how empowerment is operationalised in SfD is critical to developing more emancipatory policy and practice in this field.

This article aims to contribute to this literature by exploring how empowerment is envisaged and enacted within SfD projects devised and delivered by institutions based in the global North that ‘partner’ with organisations and communities in the global South. More specifically, it seeks to uncover and interrogate the versions of empowerment that played out in a transnational SfD programme that ran between 2008 and 2019, involving a partnership between a UK-based university and a range of local stakeholders and practitioners in Mzuzu, the capital of Malawi’s northern region, known hereafter by the pseudonym Mzuzu Sport for Empowerment (MSfE). In addressing whether MSfE was underpinned by a neoliberal or more radical, progressive variant of empowerment and examining what the implications of this are for the asymmetrical relations of power that are pervasive in SfD (Darnell 2012), the paper adopts a multi-level approach. This approach explores the perspectives and experiences of three categories of UK stakeholders involved in influencing the philosophy and orientation of the project (university leadership team); setting its wider ethos and objectives and designing and overseeing the programme (university lecturers and chaplaincy staff); and, delivering project workshops to Malawian sports coaches, youth workers and teachers (student-volunteers).

In focusing on the perspectives of global North actors, we are sensitive to criticisms of academic work that ‘mutes’ the voice of subaltern communities and/or ignores their active interpretation of and agentic engagement with development (Spivak 1985). In particular, we have reflected at length on Banda and Holmes (2017) published response to an article by Manley, Morgan, and Atkinson (2016) that examined the social interactions between UK student-volunteers and actors in Zambia and how this impacted the identity negotiations and (re)constructions of the former. Although they advocate for ‘collecting the differentiated perspectives from a broader range of aid recipients’ (398), Manley, Morgan, and Atkinson (2016), skew their sampling to global North voices, basing their analysis mainly on UK volunteers. In their response, Banda and Holmes (2017) argue that this can be read as a form of hierarchical knowledge production, one that marginalises the voices of subaltern communities.

This article might be viewed similarly given its focus on the views of UK-based actors. However, this study is only one part of a larger project which also involved ethnographic fieldwork in Mzuzu, including semi-structured interviews with prominent community figures (n.7); project staff (n.3); workshop participants involved in local SfD projects (n.10); and project participants (n.30) (Annett 2018). Indeed, this wider study was specifically guided by Jönsson’s (2010) assertion that comprehensive analyses of empowerment should include the views of stakeholders from ‘above’ (global North) and ‘below’ (global South), terms that are used heuristically rather than hierarchically. Furthermore, it was also positioned partly as a response to calls by Darnell and Hayhurst (2011), Kay (2013), and Banda and Holmes (2017) for research on SfD that captures perspectives on and implications of SfD projects across the ‘aid chain’. We therefore agree with Banda and Holmes’ (2017, 723) contention that ‘it is the responsibility of privileged intellectuals in global North institutions to reach out to subaltern voices’. However, in seeking to publish from this wider project in a way that allows us to adequately address how differentiated actors across the aid chain, but particularly the ‘subaltern’, experience and envisage the objectives and outcomes of MSfE, we found academic publishing conventions, specifically word count limits, overly constraining. The approach we have employed therefore is to address the UK and Malawian perspectives across two separate, but related papers. Devoting a single article to the latter will better enable us to prioritise and afford adequate space to the voices of the wide range of community stakeholders and participants from Mzuzu interviewed for the broader study. Returning to this article, we begin by sketching out our analytical framework, broadly rooted in postcolonial critiques of empowerment. A description of the operation of MSfE and an exposition of our methods follows before we outline and discuss our findings.

Conceptualising and problematising ‘empowerment’

In seeking to address how empowerment was understood and enacted through MSfE, it is critical to account for the dissonance between the radical roots of empowerment and its reinterpretation in mainstream development. As noted earlier, in the context of development policy, practice and discourse, empowerment has been conceptualised in different ways. At the centre of its rise to prominence, spearheaded by postcolonial leaders, progressive educators, feminist activists and critical development theorists, was the foregrounding of power within the development enterprise (Batliwala 2007). Of particular importance in the emergence and advocacy of empowerment focused development in the 1960s was the argument that inclusive, equitable, sustainable and participatory approaches were required to counter the Western, ethnocentric and economic bias of the mainstream development industry and the asymmetrical, top-down relations of power that this produced (Kabeer 1994). Interpreting development as the capacity of people to emancipate themselves (Sen 2001), empowerment was framed as ‘the process of challenging existing power relations, and of gaining greater control over the sources of power’ (Batliwala 1994, 130). This progressive, emancipatory vision thus advocated for collective struggles to rebalance political, economic, and social power, enabling the poor and marginalised to challenge the structural conditions that underpin the inequalities under which they live (Rai, Parpart, and Staudt 2007; Petras 2011).

While it gained traction as an alternative approach to development, by the early 1990s empowerment was co-opted within the mainstream development lexicon and fashioned into an apolitical ‘buzzword’ (Luttrell and Quiroz 2009). In the hands of mainstream development institutions, policy makers and practitioners seeking out ‘sexier catchphrases and magic bullets’ (Batliwala 2007, 559), empowerment was stripped of its original philosophy (Rist 2007). Incorporated into the wider neoliberal approach to development, the emancipatory, transformative associations and aspirations that underpinned its emergence in the field of development were diluted (Cornwall 2007; Kingsbury et al. 2012). Thus, rather than denoting a collective struggle for systemic change, the ‘mainstreaming’ of empowerment led to it becoming oriented around increased power, achievement and status at the individual level. As neoliberal Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) were rolled out across the global South in this period, the enactment of this version of empowerment was used to justify the decreased role of the state in development affairs by arguing that empowered communities, participating in a free-market context could control their own development (Leal 2007). For Batliwala (2007), the net effect of this process was that the original meaning of empowerment was subverted and depoliticised. Moreover, by reshaping it in the way they did, development institutions and policy makers were able to present development as more bottom-up and equitable without challenging the status quo and structural conditions that necessitated development interventions (Leal 2007; Chossudovsky 2002).

As we go on to illustrate, the ways in which empowerment was understood and the variant(s) that was promoted through MSfE by UK-based project stakeholders and volunteers, had significant implications in terms of the outcomes of project, who benefitted from it and indeed, the extent to which it had the capacity to empower local communities. In seeking to analyse these issues, we draw on elements of the postcolonial critique of ‘mainstreamed’ empowerment practice. Two related criticisms of the neoliberal vision of empowerment are particularly salient in analysing the data. The first asserts that the purported partnerships upon which programmes intended to facilitate empowerment are constructed, frequently ignore structural power imbalances and in doing so, maintain Northern dominance and control over development (Smith 2015). Partnership has been framed by the development industry as being rooted in equitable collaboration, mutual benefit and the notion of doing ‘with’ disadvantaged communities, not ‘for’ (Crewe and Harrison 1998). However, writing from a postcolonial perspective, Crewe and Harrison (1998) note that these aims ‘often appear disappointingly empty’, while other writers claim that partnership has become a political slogan designed to conceal other agendas (see Baaz 2005). Therefore, partnership, viewed through a postcolonial lens, denotes an asymmetrical, top-down, relationship between development actors in the global North and South where the interests of the more powerful group are prioritised (Kreitzer and Wilson 2010).

The second argues that the forms of empowerment that become manifest in these partnerships are paternalistic, underpinned by a colonial mindset and are both infused by and perpetuate a ‘white-saviour complex’ (Escobar 1995; Spivak 1985). The core premise of this ‘complex’ is a narrative which depicts development actors from the West as engaged in a civilising mission and that they assume the position of ‘saviour’ to ‘passive victims’ in the global South. According to this worldview, the idea that the majority word is at fault for its ‘underdevelopment’ is normalised (Said 2003; Spivak 1985; Escobar 1995) and there is little acknowledgement of the historical and contemporary structural inequalities that privilege countries in the global North and constrain those in the global South (Deepak 2011). In problematising the nature of empowerment within development, these sensitising positions offered opportunities for nuanced analysis of MSfE. Before we present and discuss our findings, we provide some context on MSfE and outline the methods employed in this study.

Research context and methods

Mzuzu Sport for Empowerment (MSfE) was founded in 2008 at a UK university by a core group of academic and chaplaincy staff. The central pillar of the programme was that it should operate as a ‘social partnership’ (cf. Trendafiova, Ziakas, and Sparvero 2017) between the university and an organising committee and other stakeholders in Mzuzu with responsibility for overseeing local SfD programmes. UK student-volunteers were integral to the programme and played a key role in delivering ‘needs-based’ workshops designed to educate and empower indigenous sports coaches, youth workers and Physical Education (PE) teachers to develop and run largely autonomous SfD projects in their own communities. These workshops, first delivered in 2009, were focused on using sport to empower local people to tackle issues associated with poverty, gender inequality, education and the prevention of diseases such as Malaria and HIV/Aids in Mzuzu. Between the inception of the programme and the time at which data collection was concluded (2015), over 40 student volunteers had delivered workshops to 1500 Malawian practitioners.

MSfE constitutes fertile ground to explore questions around the nexus between sports-based programmes and empowerment in the global South. In articulating its mission to ‘deliver contextually specific workshops underpinned by social justice’, the project positioned the empowerment of local people in Malawi at the forefront of its raison d’etre. This was made explicit in the multilevel aims of the programme. At the level of the UK university partner, the first aim was to ‘provide students with a challenging and dialogical learning experience, seeking to empower learners to realise and fulfil their ambitions’. At the Mzuzu level, the second aim sought ‘to build strong dialogical relationships and empower local practitioners to take ownership of their lives.’ Finally, at the international level, the third aim was ‘to provide an authentic and transparent contribution to the Sport for Development sector, alongside building relationships and sharing examples of best practice’.

These aims and the way they are expressed clearly align with the discourses of other global North SfD organisations that send volunteers to the global South (cf. Darnell 2012, 2007) and suggest that the process of students taking on the role of ‘change-agents’ is presumed to be not only empowering to them, but a means of empowerment and social change in Mzuzu. The workshops and associated learning materials produced by university staff were intended to empower Malawian attendees by building their capacity to act independently to become autonomous SfD practitioners capable of planning, implementing, delivering and securing resources for themselves. To create an enabling environment for this, the UK partner provided sports kit and equipment for local projects and developed relationships with Malawian government departments, national sports organisations and federations, local SfD Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and a range of non-sport NGOs, faith and community-based organisations. The role of the locally based committee was essentially to sustain participation in the programme beyond the annual month-long visit by UK student-volunteers and staff. This committee was supported by university staff through ongoing mentorship and the provision of online learning resources for dissemination to local SfD projects.

The lead author in this study was previously involved in the inception, design and delivery of MSfE while studying at the host UK university and this afforded her the status of an ‘insider’ in the research process (Dwyer and Buckle 2009). This made it straightforward to identify and access participants with direct knowledge and experience of the programme through purposive sampling. However, to mitigate potential bias in the selection of participants, snowball sampling was also employed to recruit University staff with whom the lead author had no prior contact, as well as students who were scheduled to take part in the programme for the first time. An ongoing process of reflexivity (Bukamal 2022), aided by the use of fieldnotes, helped the lead author navigate her ‘insider’ positionality and maintain a ‘critical’ distance while the use of documentary evidence detailing the aspirations and structures of MSfE offered a measure of data triangulation.

The primary method of data collection involved individual, semi-structured interviews which were conducted face-to-face across two one-week bouts of fieldwork at the university campus. Three categories of stakeholders were recruited. The first were senior managers at the university who had influence over the financial and policy context in which the programme operated (n.5). The second involved a group of lecturers and chaplaincy staff who worked directly on delivering and supporting the programme (n.8). The interview schedule for these two cohorts was oriented around three key themes: the philosophy and rationale behind MSfE and its alignment with the University’s mission; how empowerment is operationalised in the programme; the outcomes and benefits for the University and participants and communities in Mzuzu. The third cohort were students and graduates who had previously been involved in delivering workshops in Mzuzu or who were about to do so for the first time (n.17). The interview guide for this group focused on four main topics: motivations for volunteering; understanding of Malawi and processes of empowerment; reflections on the volunteering experience; perspectives on outcomes and beneficiaries of the programme including those related to empowerment.

All recorded material from interviews was transcribed verbatim. Thematic analysis was used to collate themes arising from the perspectives of participants. To facilitate more in-depth analysis, the study employed data-driven, ‘bottom-up’ induction (Spencer et al. 2014) and theoretical, ‘top-down’ deduction (Crabtree and Miller 1999). This iterative and reflexive process between data and coding meant that interconnections could be made between the research data and theory (Fereday and Muir-Cochrane 2006). Pseudonyms have been used throughout this article to ensure confidentiality and anonymity of participants. All other elements of the research conformed to the ethical guidelines of Ulster University. In outlining the perspectives offered on the philosophy and perceived outcomes and benefits of MSfE, we begin with the view from members of the senior leadership team at the university.

The view from university leadership: MSfE as institutional outreach and marketing

The philosophy and outcomes of MSfE were situated by university management stakeholders in the context of the Anglican ethos and wider civic mission of the host institution and the neoliberal ‘turn’ in UK Higher Education (HE). In terms of the former, civic engagement, enabled in large part through student-led activities that are intended to benefit not only students but also local disadvantaged communities, have become a defining feature of the host university. Sport has been prominent in this work and MSfE came to be viewed as an international extension of this local outreach work. This was articulated by Stewart: ‘Having had that sense of wanting to root itself in communities that suffer disadvantage in one shape or another, it has actually made the development of MSfE project a straight-forward one’. As such, the initiative was seen by Jonathan as one that ‘connects really well with institutional values, institutional mission, and the things that make this institution quite distinctive’.

Linked to its work with neighbouring disadvantaged communities, MSfE was also framed as arising out of the university’s evangelical Anglican heritage. Indeed, some described it as a form of Christian missionary work, pointing to the prominent role of the Chaplaincy and Faith Department in its inception. As James suggested; ‘It started with a sense of mission…. If you like, as a private faith-based initiative where we went out there and worked in communities in Malawi’. A similar view was articulated by Rose; ‘Malawi has got an incredible record on poverty, and I think [senior chaplain] was interested in seeing if sport was a vehicle for evangelism in that context’. Others were more circumspect about the extent to which MSfE was explicitly missionary per se, with James arguing that while it was broadly informed by the faith legacy of the university, it was not a vehicle for proselytising.

Alongside the civic, Christian ethos that was argued to underpin the project, there was a consensus among senior management that it was inherently altruistic and motivated by a desire to do ‘good’. Sport was depicted by a number of participants as an ideal tool through which actors in the global North could ‘help’ and ‘reach out’ to those in the global South. James, for example, asserted a belief that sport constitutes ‘one element in the armoury of how the wealthy West can support development in Africa’. These perspectives are revealing in terms of the extent to which they reflect wider development discourse and colonial ideas about ‘Africa’ needing to be ‘saved’, both spiritually and materially, and the tendency to essentialise sport and evangelise about its power to function as an ideal development remedy (Coalter 2007; Kidd 2008; Giulianotti 2004; Guest 2009).

The neoliberal environment within which the host university operated was also significant in how senior managers understood and rationalised the university’s commitment to MSfE. Neoliberal reform and expansion in UK HE since the late 1990s has created a scenario where students have become fee-paying consumers in a competitive academic market where measurement and ranking through university league tables increasingly drives managerialist practices (Tight 2018). With individual’s decisions about what and where to study becoming transactional and based on the perceived return that might be accrued from a hefty financial investment (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004), universities have increasingly focused on improving the student experience, employability and internationalisation, as part of a strategy to survive and prosper in this environment (Bush et al. 2013). These three agendas featured prominently in how management articulated the value of MSfE and revealed an orientation towards the project that prioritised its benefits for the university and its students rather than those that might be accrued by Malawian stakeholders and participants.

In terms of the perceived benefits for student volunteers, the creation of opportunities for ‘transformative learning’ (Mezirow 2000) was considered central to their support for the project. This approach to learning aligns with Education for Sustainability which is centred on notions of global citizenship and the need to address global challenges relating to social justice and climate change (McEwan, Strachan, and Lynch 2010). Senior university leaders interpreted MSfE as an ideal space for transformative learning about these issues. For example, Stewart referred to how the project helped in ‘the broadening of their [students’] mind’ and in ‘awareness raising’ while James saw it as offering students ‘very large impacts in terms of their understanding and experience’. In addition, the opportunity to work in Mzuzu for a month was framed as an ‘unsettling’ experience because as Rose saw it, it put ‘students in a context where they would be challenged in a different way and … would hopefully reassess their lives and hopefully become more socially aware’. These excerpts from management stakeholders illustrate that they viewed the ‘transformative’ potential of the project as being more focused on the student-volunteers rather than organisations and participants in Mzuzu and that they were content with this. Rose was most forthright in echoing this sentiment; ‘Was I committed to Malawi? Probably not… it was not so much for me about Malawi, as about our students and what the educative process is really about for me’.

Beyond the benefits to students, senior managers also couched the value of the MSfE relative to other neoliberal tendencies permeating UK HE. In particular, the project was considered a highly effective tool in ‘branding’ the university as an attractive place to study both for UK and international students. This was explicit in Rose’s view that ‘there have got to be other drawers to attract students, because it’s highly competitive and much goes in reputation. I mean if MSfE flourishes, there’s a halo effect…and it’s getting your name out there in the marketplace’. With consumerism now at the heart of neoliberal HE, there is increasing pressure on universities to offer a rewarding, utilitarian experience relative to their competitors. In this context, employability has become a central guiding logic which has seen the value of HE narrowed to an accumulation of qualifications and transferable skills (Bush et al. 2013). Viewed through this neoliberal lens, MSfE was considered a platform for enhancing recruitment but also unique experiences that would help equip students for work. This not only revealed an instrumental perspective on the project but also highlighted that this group of stakeholders rationalised the university’s involvement in and commitment to MSfE in terms of its benefits to the institution and its students. As Jonathan asserts; ‘From the perspective of empowering people here, it serves that aim really well… [but] I would have a hunch that it might be perceived as less empowering for local community groups’. This raises questions about the extent to which the institutional context in which MSfE was rooted allowed it to function in an equitable, participatory, ‘partnership’ based manner, one that was sufficiently focused on contributing to the empowerment of local communities in Mzuzu. These issues were at the forefront of the perspectives offered by MSfE staff on the possibilities and limits of the project.

The perspectives of MSfE staff: constraints on progressive empowerment

The insights offered by those staff involved in the front-line delivery of the project revealed tensions with management stakeholders not only in terms of who benefits from the project but also in relation to the variant of empowerment upon which it should be built. Those in this category generally viewed their role in HE as involving a civic dimension and were committed to ‘engaged scholarship’ (Intolubbe-Chmil, Spreen, and Swap 2012). Their academic engagement with ‘development’ through their teaching and research helped to instil a more progressive understanding of empowerment and how it should be operationalised in MSfE. This was clear in Susan’s reflections:

We should also have awareness of the things we do that can potentially become damaging for the host country… We need to have that expertise because it’s complex isn’t it? It’s not just “here’s a manual and off you go” and it’s all fabulous. It’s a complex area which has potential to do good but also has the potential to be quite damaging as well, so we have to make sure we are on the right side of those tracks.

In articulating what being on ‘the right side of those tracks’ meant, staff challenged the ethnocentric assumptions and top-down enactment of neoliberal development as outmoded, neocolonial and incompatible with empowerment. All advocated for more inclusive, participatory development practice and were attracted to developing MSfE as a project that could achieve this. Dan saw his engagement with MSfE in the following terms: ‘The feeling I got was, “Yes, we are helping people but we’re not kind of patronising them. We’re treating them on a level kind of playing field”’. In keeping with this view, other interviewees repeatedly framed MSfE as involving a ‘dialogue’ or ‘partnership’ that enabled reciprocal empowerment. As Jeremy saw it, this would be best achieved via ‘dialogue…. that you are doing with and enabling people to do it for themselves ultimately’.

Despite espousing a commitment to forms of empowerment more in keeping with the radical roots of the concept, MSfE staff felt that the potential of the project to engender empowerment-based outcomes in Mzuzu was curtailed by its co-opting into the university’s corporate social responsibility agenda and as a tool to market the student experience. A perceived disconnect between how the delivery staff conceived the project, particularly in terms of its political orientation, and the perspectives of university management was the cause of some contention. As Susan expressed it: ‘I feel frustrated because for the university it’s very much about the product, but if you’re bringing back really good practice in terms of community development, they’re really not too worried about that’. The key consequence of this was that opportunities to facilitate a more progressive version of empowerment through MSfE, not least by handing over ownership and responsibility for running the project to Malawian organisations and communities, was being curtailed by the emphasis placed on the value of the project to the university brand and student experience. Susan went on to clearly articulate the implications of this:

A true empowerment model is that it comes from the people… That’s what gets lost in these things; they think they are going and giving something to them. The minute we do that, empowerment is gone. We work with them to build the skills, the environment, whatever their demands are in the host community. The other thing I would think with empowerment is the endgame of empowerment is a removal. Now interestingly, are we ever going to do that with MSfE, given the profile? If we’ve done our job well, we’ve upskilled them to such a level that we no longer need to be there. Empowerment is about power and that is the key point, and we need to make sure we don’t abuse our power in that relationship.

Project staff were committed to the involvement of student-volunteers in MSfE and the aspiration for this experience to be ‘transformative’ and empowering for them. However, some did express reservations about whether an appropriate balance between the benefits accrued by students and the empowerment of Malawian participants was being achieved. Dan, for example, acknowledged that this issue is ‘a contentious area of service learning; who’s being served and if we manage that correctly…. [it] could be a mutually beneficial relationship’. The capacity of MSfE to function in this way was complicated by the emergence of the student as consumer and the role of the project as a ‘product’ to attract and recruit students. In explaining the potential of student-volunteers as ‘change agents’, one member of staff argued that while some students did see MSfE as a space to reflect on their privilege in the world and worked to prioritise local needs, most were increasingly motivated by enhancing their CV and employability prospects and viewed the experience as a form of commodified voluntourism and treated the trip predominantly as a holiday.

The other impediment to the project’s capacity to serve as a platform for a more emancipatory form of empowerment in Mzuzu related to the nature of the interactions between university staff and students and local groups and the relations of power therein. Reflecting on these interactions, some staff acknowledged that the project was at times characterised by ‘unintentional disempowerment’, particularly when information was not shared with Malawian partners and opportunities for local input into decision-making were constrained by workload pressures for university staff and logistical and technical problems in Mzuzu. In reflecting on the consequences of this, Jeremy described how these practices may have been inadvertently informed by and reinforced a colonial mindset that privileged Western knowledge over that of communities in the global South;

It’s possible for all of us to look en masse and even if you’re not doing it consciously, subconsciously saying: “I’ve got more knowledge” and exalt yourself in relation to the people you are teaching; I think almost inevitably that sort of attitude will result in some sort of disempowerment, even if it’s just ignoring worries, fears and problems.

Another staff member interrogated how he approached his interactions with Malawian partners in the following terms: ‘I’d like to say I’m not your typical ignorant white person… with an ethnocentric view of: “We know best and we’re going to tell you what to do”. But in hindsight I had a bit of that in me I think’.

Engaging with project partners in this manner, without reflecting on the implications of or seeking to redress this, would clearly be a significant obstacle to the capacity of the project to engender progressive empowerment. However, most members of staff were conscious of and attentive to the fact that for MSfE to align with this version of empowerment and change what had become a hierarchical relationship with Malawian partners, dialogical knowledge exchange and decision-making was critical. However, as staff saw it, their efforts to shift working relations in this direction were constrained by the ongoing material and psychological legacies of (neo)colonialism in Malawi. For example, some pointed to what they considered as a passivity on the part Malawian stakeholders to actively shape the project. This was not framed in terms of the ‘deficit model’ that undergirds much SfD practice (Coalter, 2013) but rather was attributed to a history of colonial relations that were systematically imposed to deny power to Malawians. In noting the influence of these colonial continuities (Heron 2007) on levels of local engagement with the project Bill observed: ‘It goes back to the idea of the “white men are thinkers and we’re not thinkers”. Robert concurred, observing that; ‘MSfE is a bottom-up model of development and locals can control it. It’s very difficult because they’re not thinking like that’.

University staff also pointed to material colonial continuities as a major factor in how they believed participants understood and engaged with the project. Despite the aim of the programme to encourage dialogical, horizontal relationships, several staff commented that levels of poverty created difficulties for their Malawian counterparts to view MSfE beyond the parameters of the pervasive donor-recipient dynamic prevalent in mainstream development. This, it was argued, was exacerbated by the payment of allowances, or ‘per diems’ in the early years of the project. This practice was in keeping with a culture that has grown up around NGO led development in the global South that routinely uses per diems to incentivise the ‘participation’ of local people in workshops and training designed to build capacity within communities (Hanson 2012). However, allowances were perceived by UK staff as counterproductive to an emancipatory vision of empowerment, perpetuated a view of the programme as being based on an unequal donor-recipient relationship, undermined the development of dialogical relationships, and were believed to reduce the motivations of local participants in workshops to financial considerations. As Dan suggested, ‘because they see the skin colour and think “white person, he’s got money”… They see your value in monetary terms’. Jeremy empathised with this view; ‘If I was in that situation: lacking resources, lacking money, lacking opportunities because of poverty… [which] creates almost a passive mindset, the solution is: do you get it from the rich white people who come?’. Given these concerns, the UK team decided to move away from the practice of paying allowances, a decision it should be said that was not popular with participants (Annett 2018).

In their efforts to encourage greater local participation with the project, staff members were reflexive about how the use of student-volunteers in the delivery of workshops might reinforce asymmetrical relations of power. Some expressed concerns about the pedagogies employed and approaches to knowledge transfer between the UK students and workshop participants. Robert, for example, argued that the dynamics of workshop delivery tended to be ‘a bit lecturey’ with student-volunteers assuming the role of external ‘consultants’ who possessed knowledge that locals lacked and prescribed solutions to complex local problems. Beth concurred and expressed concerns about the extent to which the workshops provided opportunities for meaningful local input;

I still wonder if the Malawians are being given enough of a voice about what they want… I really think there is a role for them [the local educators] leading some of the workshops. I think we are really underestimating some of them and it doesn’t quite fit right with me because the whole project is supposed to be about empowering them to take control.

Despite a desire on the part of university staff such as Robert, for the student-volunteers to operate in a way that was ‘engaging local people in a deep conversation to identify a range of solutions that suit them’, there was a view that opportunities for MSfE to function in a participatory, dialogical and ultimately, empowering manner were being missed. The reasons for this were connected to the ways in which these volunteers understood and experienced their role within the project.

The view from student-volunteers: white saviours and empowering the neoliberal self

The student-volunteers recruited onto MSfE were envisaged to be critical actors in operationalising what staff hoped would be dialogical, participatory workshops that would create an enabling environment for the empowerment of local participants. However, asymmetrical relations of power were often maintained in this environment because some students, albeit not always uncritically, assumed an elevated role, one that they justified by conveying views that were inflected with a white-saviour complex. There have been a number of studies of volunteers from the global North working on SfD projects in the global South, that have argued that these projects tend to reproduce in the minds of volunteers, colonial tropes of white people assuming the role of saviour to non-whites who are perceived to be unable to help themselves (Darnell 2007). These sorts of ideas were explicit in Ryan’s words:

When we go out there it’ll benefit them because they can see from us, and I think they believe us; that’s the main thing – they trust us – that we’re right. I think a lot of people, especially Africans look at England as being quite a rich country, and quite a well-educated country which is correct in most terms, so we’ll be their teacher and they’ll believe what we say.

In keeping with Darnell’s (2007) research on how whiteness as a defining racial characteristic enables global North volunteers working on SfD projects to take up superior positions when in the global South, the whiteness or Northernness of student-volunteers shaped and validated the self-identities and roles they assumed while working in Mzuzu. The racialised hierarchies, and how they played out in workshops, was clearly articulated by Taylor;

With MSfE for that month people take on an identity and you fit into whatever you want to be… because there is an assumption and acceptance that, rightly or wrongly, a white person in that setting has better knowledge than a black person… MSfE has created a platform from which the white person can speak and the black person can listen.

This reflection illuminates how the project presented student-volunteers with the opportunity to assert a racialized sense of power and privilege over Malawian participants, including older coaches and individuals who held senior positions in local sports organisations. This is encapsulated in Scott’s recollections;

They were so happy to have Westerners come over and share. For them to have us sharing an experience that we take for granted but they had no idea of the concepts and the things we were talking about. It was weird because they were a lot older than me and speaking to adults sat down in a classroom and writing down all you had said was a bit of a surreal experience. Everything that was said they took on board… They were trying to get everything they could out of us, and because they were a select group of people, for them it was probably like getting selected for the national England squad.

What is particularly revealing here is that the depiction of the pedagogies employed in the workshops are strikingly didactic and at odds with the stated objective of MSfE to empower participants through dialogical exchanges. It also attests to the tendency of the student-volunteers to view themselves as more knowledgeable depositors of information to workshop participants who are considered to gratefully and uncritically, absorb this knowledge. By assuming a superior role in Mzuzu, student-volunteers were unable to embrace the crucial position of ‘co-learner’ which is paramount to the critical and dialogical pedagogies that can produce emancipatory versions of empowerment. Speaking about operationalising such pedagogies within SfD, Spaaij, Oxford, and Jeanes (2016, 582) argue that ‘continued negotiation, denunciation of hegemonic beliefs and the annunciation of an alternate set of possibilities’ are constantly required between educators and learners’. However, in practice, when knowledge and worldviews presented by participants diverged from those held by student-volunteers, they tended to be discounted. In recalling instances of this during workshops, Anna stated that, ‘It was ultimately like if they had a view that was different from what we were teaching it was: “Well, you’re wrong” basically and so there was that kind of conflict… [and] being point-blank: “Well, that’s rubbish”’. Furthermore, assuming a superior position in relation to knowledge was on occasion justified by painting local participants according to colonial tropes as backward and uneducated. As one student-­volunteer suggested, ‘They haven’t got facts, they are more going on beliefs… You’ve got to go and show them another way… without being horrible but explain where they are going wrong’. This only reinforced the white-saviour complex as evident in Brittany’s response: ‘I could not get over the simple things for me would just blow them away… it made me realise how much we could help in terms of knowledge’.

It should be said that some students, especially those who had volunteered for the project for more than one visit, were able to reflect much more critically and problematise how the elevated role of coach/teacher that emerged through the workshops validated privilege and the white-saviour complex. This was apparent in Anna’s view; ‘We go over there because we think something needs developing and it doesn’t appear to be as good a life as we supposedly live … but is that what matters and what they want?’ In the main though, volunteering for the project and encountering life in Mzuzu did not appear to stimulate critical or ‘transformative’ learning and most student-volunteers seemed unable to connect their privilege to wider structural inequalities arising out of Malawi’s (neo)colonial history. As a consequence, they struggled to articulate how their role might empower Malawians to challenge the structural causes of poverty. Instead, they understood empowerment in neoliberal terms as a process rooted in individual responsibility. As noted earlier, this neoliberal perspective asserts that empowerment is the responsibility of the individual and that through hard work individuals can improve their position materially regardless of the limitations of the circumstances they encounter (Ostry 1990). Given the prevalence of this neoliberal mantra, it is hardly surprising that the student-volunteers understood empowerment, and how it might occur in Mzuzu, in this way. This is captured well by Shawn;

Empowerment is about having that belief and understanding of yourself and knowing what you are capable of, and feeling confident to make decisions that are inevitably going to affect your life… The processes are very much based on training and learning and understanding because if they picked up new skills and believed they could do something then they could go back to their communities and say: ‘Look, I can do this and here it is’. And that is their sense of self-empowerment; that they had been provided with those skills and understanding… The biggest thing is that sort of confidence and self-belief and knowing that they are capable.

Reducing empowerment to a neoliberal emphasis on individualised responses to complex, historical structural inequalities clearly limited opportunities for the workshops to stimulate discussion around how these oppressive conditions might be challenged and opportunities for more radical versions of empowerment pursued. Nonetheless, in the minds of student-volunteers, this did not appear to negatively impact on what they felt they gleaned from the experience.

Participating students mainly framed the value of MSfE in terms of the benefits that they believed they might accrue and the identities that their involvement allowed them to (re)produce. Influenced by the fact that engaging in humanitarian work in international settings is increasingly considered fashionable (Bell 2013), some students saw the project as an opportunity to construct an identity as philanthropic and a morally ‘good’ global citizen. Taylor, for example, rationalised his involvement by suggesting that; ‘going to Malawi has a glamour and an appeal’ and that his motivation was rooted in the notion of ‘giving back’. Ryan’s reflection also revealed how his experience reinforced the white-saviour identity that volunteering reproduced in many of the student participants. He recalled: ‘seeing the smiles on their faces and realising that they actually appreciate us being there, and I could have went there going: “They don’t need us there, they know what they are doing”, but I don’t feel that’. As a result of the perceived appreciation at his presence he concluded: ‘It was worthwhile, worth the money, worth the trip, worth all the jabs’. Ashley spoke in similar terms but also pointed to a more instrumental rationale for volunteering on the project;

It’s something that I want to do so if people ask about me: “Oh well last summer I went and did sport for development over in Africa”. Like I want that to be part of who I am because it makes me feel happy and that’s a big part of it. I haven’t got a lot of experience because I’ve just started my career but to know I’ve that information is exciting; I can build upon that.

Influenced by the instrumental rationality that pervades HE, other students weighed up the cost-value benefit of their participation in MSfE. Going back to the staff perspective discussed earlier, that the project had become a ‘product’ to enhance the ‘student experience’, student ‘consumers’ had to be satisfied that MSfE gave them enough back to justify the financial costs involved. Thus, the benefits of volunteering were also rationalised in narrower, instrumental terms as enhancing their student experience and particularly their future employment prospects. Jason elaborated on how his experience helped him acquire transferable skills that would give him an advantage in the job market: ‘As long as you’ve got the results to get the degree, that placement experience is what singles you out and is an opportunity to improve my CV’. Another graduate, Thomas, who secured a management role within a SfD NGO, recounted a similar perspective: ‘There’s no way I would have got the job if I hadn’t had the Malawi experience. It certainly gave me a passion for international development and it made me feel my skillset was credible and I can contribute’. The CV enhancing capacity offered by MSfE was clearly viewed as beneficial by student-volunteers and was a factor for some in choosing to study at the host university. As Niall indicated, ‘it [MSfE] justified my choice of [name of university] really’. Noting his privileged position, Scott also viewed his involvement in MSfE as largely self-serving:

There’s a bit of compromise ‘cos I’m also trying to get the experience. So, we’re obviously there giving and offering help but I want them and the place to give me the experience I want to come out of it. So, in the timeframe I don’t think I’m terribly empowering because I want the place and the trip to give me something. So, it’s not a purest, selfless experience. I’m not completely going over there and saying: “I’m doing this for you…” My life is going to carry on as normal and I want the place to empower me a bit.

Taylor was perhaps most explicit on this point, arguing that: ‘You never really do it for the people you meet out there… The long-lasting impact will be on those who went on MSfE from England rather than those guys out there’. It is clearly apparent from these perspectives that students readily saw MSfE as possessing an orientation that was focused more on the benefits for the university and its students than on Malawian stakeholders and participants.

Discussion and conclusions

Against criticisms that development is ethnocentric, Western dominated and top-down in its orientation and practices, empowerment is typically conceived of as a bottom-up alternative (Kabeer 1994). Because it is seen as more benign, it often circumvents the same scrutiny levelled at more orthodox development philosophies and practice (Cornwall 2007). The same might be said of empowerment in the context of SfD where only a few studies have examined how it is understood and operationalised. This article set out to contribute to and expand this literature by examining the forms of empowerment that were promoted through MSfE and how their enactment might consolidate or challenge the asymmetrical relations of power that are evident in mainstream development and much SfD practice (Darnell 2012). MSfE offered an ideal case through which to explore these issues given that empowerment and partnership working were its primary objectives. Thus, philosophically and practically, the project appeared to offer insights into how more horizontal power relations between development actors in the global North and partners in the global South might be created and/or what the barriers to this may be.

As Kelsall and Mercer (2003) note, development discourse tends to delineate stakeholders or actors into supposedly homogenous categories of ‘donors’ or ‘recipients’ which can conceal both unequal power relations and conflicting agendas on what can be achieved through development projects. This was evident in our findings which reveal conflicting perspectives among those key UK stakeholders who were involved in setting the objectives, priorities and practices of the MSfE. Members of staff on the frontline of delivering the project held aspirations to promote a progressive variant of empowerment, one more aligned to its emancipatory incarnation. They viewed mainstream development policy and practices as largely ethnocentric, top-down, neo-colonial, and centred on extending Western hegemony and critically, considered them as incompatible with this version of empowerment. In order for MSfE to enable progressive empowerment, university project staff understood the need to avoid paternalistically exercising ‘power over’ (Rowlands 1997) their Malawian counterparts. While some acknowledged that this was not always achieved in the day-to-day operation of the project and that there was a tendency at times to lapse into a colonial mindset that privileged Northern knowledge, this cohort of participants uniformly expressed a commitment to using MSfE as a bulwark for emancipatory empowerment. However, their efforts in this regard were constrained by the wider organisational culture in which the project operated.

This culture was shaped by the neoliberal impulses permeating higher education and impacted on how the empowerment focused objectives of the project were framed and understood by both university senior leaders and student-volunteers. In the context of the neoliberal ‘turn’ in UK HE, MSfE was seen by the former as burnishing the institution’s brand as an engaged, civic minded university committed to community outreach. It was also considered integral to marketing the university as an attractive place to study, one that offered rewarding experiences for fee-paying students, opportunities to enhance their employability and as a corollary, to empower themselves in a neoliberal marketplace. By their own admission, some senior leaders were content that MSfE should be more orientated around the needs, interests and brand of the university and as a consequence, this may have diluted their commitment to seeing the project engender progressive variants of empowerment among local communities.

The same could be said of how student-volunteers understood and worked within the project. Across SfD practice there is an assumption that external volunteers and ‘change-agents’ are required to empower local communities (Darnell 2007) and therefore the field has been criticised for being beset with (neo)colonial worldviews (Hartmann and Kwauk 2011; Tiessen 2011). As our findings show, the perspectives of student-volunteers on MSfE were inflected by (neo)colonial tropes, embodied in the white saviour complex, that people in the global South need to be saved and that it is the ‘moral’ responsibility of those in the global North to ‘help’. These tropes serve to reinforce problematic binaries constituted in colonialism and development such as traditional/modern, backward/civilised, developing/developed, and donor/recipient (McEwan, Strachan, and Lynch 2010; Baaz 2005; Heron 2007) and in doing so, validate the superior position, privilege, and knowledge of development actors from the global North. Influenced by ethnocentric portrayals of the African ‘other’ in the media, including in many aid and development campaigns, and reinforced by their engagement in MSfE, student-volunteers fashioned identities as wealthy, knowledgeable, capable, and altruistic relative to the passive, deficient, needy Malawian ‘Other’. As a consequence, and largely uncritically, they assumed an elevated role of coach/teacher rather than ‘co-learner’. Despite the best efforts of the university staff team to ensure the inclusion of Malawian voices, this undermined the potential for workshops to function as sites for participatory, dialogical exchanges through which North-South asymmetrical power relations and the historical and structural conditions that create these might have been exposed and challenged. Instead, student-volunteers saw their role as revolving around empowering local participants to take personal responsibility to tackle their own problems and that empowerment should be understood and operationalised at the personal or psychological level.

These conflicting positions and agendas among the UK stakeholders and actors had profound implications for the nature of the partnership upon which MSfE operated and the relations of power therein. Informed by Baaz’s (2005, 7) contention that ‘partnership discourse should not be… idealised as reflecting ambiguous intention or wish to recreate power-relations’, we are not suggesting that the use of partnership discourse in MSfE constituted empty rhetoric, was an effort to mask conspiratorial intentions, or that partnership was never intended. Nonetheless, there remain contradictions between the message of partnership and how it was enacted in the project. Those university staff members involved in the design and delivery of the project did work collaboratively with the Malawi team and aspired for them to play a greater role in directing, controlling and eventually leading the project. However, creating an equal relationship proved difficult for two primary reasons. Firstly, the extent to which Malawian ‘partners’ were seen as such was undermined by a representation of them by student-volunteers as inferior, passive and lacking in knowledge relative to their own self-image as superior, knowledgeable, reliable ‘saviours’. Secondly, as the views of both university senior leaders and student-volunteers illustrate, the orientation of the project appeared less centred on empowerment in Malawi and more focused on the needs and interests of the host university and its students. These aspirations were by no means mutually exclusive but for MSfE, and other empowerment-focused SfD projects, to align more closely with emancipatory, progressive empowerment, the dial clearly needed to shift towards a more equitable and less paternalistic partnership. Achieving this is not a straight-forward process but, while it was not the aim of this paper to offer practical solutions in terms of project design and implementation, it is hoped that the critique offered through this article will offer some insights that might aid in this process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).