Volunteering, solidarity and development: exploring the links

Volunteering and development have often been explored through analyses of international volunteering, most dominantly North to South exchanges, as a form of transnational solidarity. Through this lens, there remains a strong emphasis on the experiences of international volunteers from the global North being ‘hosted’ by communities in the global South. This framing marginalises diverse forms of volunteering within and between global South settings, their multiple and contested relationships to development (Laurie/Baillie Smith 2017) and the solidarities they can produce. As a result, only certain solidarities are recognised, which echoes what has already been recognised as colonialism’s profound influence on volunteering for development and how this strongly shapes policy and practice in this area (Howard/Burns 2015).