Working Papers   147

Expertise and Immigrant Status: A Bourdieuisan Analysis of How Citizen-led Aid Organisations Provide Health Care Transnationally

Author(s): Derek Richardson

Published: 02-Sep-2024
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Abstract/Summary

The transnational mobility of people, information, and resources is critical to the success of nonprofit international development projects. Ensuring effective transnational flows arguably takes on greater salience for grassroots international nongovernmental organisations (GINGOs), as these organisations and their leaders are unlikely to have a full-time presence in their intervention sites, instead tending to have short-term, episodic presences in the communities they serve. This is especially true among GINGOs active the health sector that provide healthcare services transnationally in the form of medical mission trips and temporary clinics. This paper presents findings from an ongoing interview-based project with health GINGO leaders, focusing on how they coordinate organisational activities from afar with local implementing partners in their chosen developing country intervention sites. I argue that GINGO leaders’ level of medical expertise and immigrant status are important determinants of how interactions with local implementing partners take shape, which variously simplify or complicate transnational coordination of organisational activities. In making this argument, I apply a Bourdieusian relational framework to illustrate how these two factors shape their habitus and deployment of capital, which affect field-level interactions with local implementing partners.




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