When Esther McIntosh finished her Master’s in Governance and Development at IDS, it took her six months to find her first job. When we speak, by contrast, she is wrapping up her role as Director at the four hundred million AUD Papua New Guinea-Australia Governance Partnership, the most recent step in a varied and rather exciting career.

Arriving in Brighton, Esther remembers, ‘I was one of the very few who had very little professional experience’. She had previously studied political science and history at the University of York (UK), and then pursued a master’s programme in Rural Development Planning in India. While there she became aware of Robert Chambers’ work. The same year her first master’s concluded, the IDS opened a brand-new MA Governance course; Esther leapt to join it.

“I thought I was so fortunate to be part of the first batch of governance students. It was a very colourful, engaging, out-of-the-box type of space where you were really encouraged to think, to debate… You sort of recognise that you’re in a very unique space.”

From Concept to Practice

At the end of her studies, Esther imagined she would return to Guyana, where ‘my government would welcome me and I would work there on strengthening institutions, which is what I initially wanted to do.’ Democracy was only reintroduced in Guyana in 1992. One of Esther’s key memories involved standing at the side of the road watching the funeral procession for Dr. Walter Rodney, one of Guyana’s most recognised development scholars, after he was assassinated. She was five at the time. The strengthening of democratic institutions was clearly vital in Guyana, but the enthusiastic letters she wrote to government officials after her studies at the IDS yielded only polite rejections. She was too politically unknown, she suspects, and may also have been perceived to be potentially disruptive.

Esther found herself working instead for Conservation International, focused on giving greater voice to community and regional leaders in protected areas in the Rupununi, a remote area on the Guyana-Brazil border. This was a departure from McIntosh’s expectations: work with NGOs had not been on her radar while at the IDS. The role emphasised bottom-up advocacy, which has remained a thread in her career. The willingness she showed in taking it to seize opportunities as they arise, including those she had previously not considered, has remained another constant. ‘You have to be a bit adaptive’, she advises.

Arriving in her first role felt like ‘building a plane while learning to fly’. The Rupununi were starting to organise themselves politically, and she was working for democracy and empowerment within a complex context of pioneering new efforts at multi-level resource governance. She had a foundation to build on, however, and found that many of the ideas she had encountered at the IDS came into their own. The concepts of power relations that she had read about in John Gaventa’s Power and Powerlessness, she recollects, ‘really resonated with what I was seeing on the ground.’ The shift from studies to work was not from ivory tower to rude shock, but from concept to practice. She remembers in particular a very practical idea of Robert Chambers’ that proposed twenty-one different seating arrangements for participatory meetings: ‘the idea of [sitting in] a circle and indigenous people seeing themselves as equal with power holders was quite revolutionary.’

Advice for Future Development Professionals

Since those early days, Esther has worked in numerous contexts with different teams and different aims, but her initial lessons have remained. ‘Despite the length of experience that you have,’ she reflects, it’s ‘about being humble’. A willingness to ‘loosen up’ and listen is crucial; an outsider will never know the context as well as those who live there.

 “One reality of working in the development sector is the lack of institutional memory.”

Staff leave a given project or office on a regular basis, and after a certain period ‘no one really knows what [the organisation] did before’, or why a particular decision was taken. It’s always impossible to have all the information, but this only makes it harder. You have to ‘take knowledge wherever you can find it, and really value local knowledge’, she concludes. Relationships are foundational to this: on entering a new situation, ‘I always know that I need to find someone who I can build a relationship with and develop trust’, whether that’s a minister or someone quite different. Unless you invest in understanding a context, she says, you will never know why a bottleneck is blocking progress— or even perhaps that a bottleneck is there at all.

Young professionals, McIntosh urges, should remember that they have a lot to bring to the table. While it’s easy to be discouraged at the start of a career, she recognises, ‘you also have knowledge and skills’; the challenge is to learn how to apply them to a situation in a way that’s useful. It is also a fantastic time –if a difficult one— to enter the development sector.

 “I don’t think that there’s a more important time for the development sector to energise itself and to redouble in its commitment to its values and principles.”

Women in Development

As a woman, McIntosh has often had to be tenacious in working toward those values and principles herself. ‘Women in leadership, or women in certain areas of development, are still significantly underrepresented’. Each woman in a higher position contributes to ‘breaking barriers’, causing a ‘domino effect’ of positive reinforcement rippling outwards and inspiring others.

Those inequalities aren’t always visible from the friendly discussion spaces of IDS, ‘but the moment you go back to your reality, they’re so glaring.’  At the same time, McIntosh observes, her relatively unusual identity as a Guyanese woman has at times opened doors. When she started working as Sri Lanka Country Director for the World University Service of Canada, she initially wondered whether she would be afforded the same respect as her predecessors: until her appointment it had been a male-dominated role. Instead, however, she was appointed to several Prime Ministerial committees and ended up chairing the NGO forum, building relationships a white Canadian man may have found harder to establish.

Confidence, McIntosh suggests, is crucial. ‘At different times you introspect,’ she muses, especially early in the career: ‘it’s sometimes really important to establish your credentials, in a sense— don’t let the fact that I’m young, or the fact that I’m a woman [detract]— I can do the job just as well as anybody.’ Speaking with Esther as a recent graduate of the most recent MA Governance course, this blend of humility, optimism, and confidence seems a wonderful approach to follow.