Global HIV Interventions and Technocratic Racism in a West Papuan NGO

In the era of scale up, global donor-driven HIV activities are transforming NGO work by demanding administrative, technical, and data-oriented activities. Drawing on interviews and participant observation in an NGO in the West Papuan city of Manokwari between 2011 and 2014, I attempt to understand why Indigenous Papuan NGO employees were steadily replaced by non-Indigenous migrant settlers, mainly of Javanese heritage, to deliver HIV services. I show that new rivalries, technical roles, performance targets and efficiency rhetoric intersected with existing racialization to produce a preference for Javanese employees, who were assumed to be more compliant and professional than their Papuan counterparts and to operate more easily within the technocratic regime imposed by donor expectations. I use the term technocratic racism to describe the way that global HIV rationalities intersect with ethnic stereotypes and gendered racial ideas to make possible certain HIV workers and not others. I contribute to anthropological literature on the delivery of HIV services by showing how a technocratic approach to HIV/AIDS intervention intersects with a settler-colonial context to gradually exclude Indigenous employees. Approaches that allow for relational, independent and flexible services would assist to decolonize HIV responses in West Papua.