Think Piece Authors: Prof. Jacob Mwathi Mati and Dr Cliff Allum 

If volunteering is to contribute meaningfully to sustainable development beyond 2030, we need to think less about how individual volunteer assignments incorporate global challenges, and more about how volunteering can mobilise people to act on the bigger political, economic and social forces in their own countries that shape those challenges globally. For international volunteer cooperation organisations (IVCOs), we believe this means a decisive shift in emphasis: more action ‘at home’. 

For 25 years, the language of sustainable development has asked volunteering to prove its worth within programmes, mostly in the Global South. Specifically, while volunteering did not feature in the Millennium Development Goal process, volunteers have acquired a greater profile and a clearer articulation of their importance in their contribution towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This has sat comfortably for IVCOs in the way volunteers contribute to programmes in the Global South, and IVCOs responded with real innovations through variations in the length of volunteer assignments, exchange models (especially South-South exchanges), and a growing role for community volunteers. Arguably these developments have enhanced the contribution of IVCOs at a programmatic level. But it has left a harder question largely untouched: does refining assignments actually leverage the power of volunteering against the forces driving global challenges in the first place? We suspect not, and we think it’s time to say so plainly.  

Climate change makes the point starkly. Forum has been researching and publishing on climate change and the role of IVCOs since 2007. Studies have been done, reports written, panels convened, and frameworks proposed. Yet, we struggle to point to evidence that any of it has changed IVCO and volunteer practices beyond the programme level. Emissions driving the global climate crisis are not generated primarily in the communities where international volunteers serve; they are generated by the energy, consumption and political choices made in volunteers’ home countries. If that is where the causes sit, and that is where mobilisation needs to happen too. Continuing to fold climate change into assignment design, however well-intentioned, treats a structural problem as a programming problem. 

This is not a new dilemma for the sector, and we can learn from how the sector has handled it before. IVCOs grew up alongside social movements, not apart from them. Roll back to 1990: the UK’s International Voluntary Service produced an annual report dominated by the anti-apartheid struggle, funded in part by government money that presumably had no interest in that fight. It is hard to picture an IVCO producing that report today. Part of the explanation is money. IVCOs now typically depend on significant state funding, which understandably narrows the space to align with movements that challenge government policy. But NGOs have a long tradition of championing unpopular causes regardless of who pays them, and climate change now sits squarely in the category of a contested political issue rather than a technical one. This should be an opening, not a deterrent. The question worth asking is not whether IVCOs can afford to connect with movements pushing for fossil fuel reductions and climate justice, but whether they can afford not to. 

COVID-19 offered an unplanned rehearsal for what this shift could look like. When international volunteers could no longer travel, host communities and local organisations stepped forward, and it became harder to argue that volunteering only really ‘counts’ when it crosses a border. That experience gave IVCOs both permission and reason to rethink where volunteers’ energy is best spent. Redirecting some of that energy toward mobilising people in their own countries, around the political and economic choices that shape global outcomes, is a natural next step. 

In practice, this could mean IVCOs supporting returned volunteers to organise around climate policy at home, treating alumni networks as a base for civic action rather than simply a source of new recruits, and being willing to back positions that put them at odds with a funder’s line. None of this is comfortable, and we do not pretend it is simple. But comfort was never the standard against which volunteering’s contribution to the SDGs should be measured. Beyond 2030, the sector’s relevance may rest less on how well any single assignment reflects a global challenge, and more on whether it helps people act, together, on the forces shaping that challenge back home.