Critical Cultural Competence in Social Impact

Culturally-centred approaches to PMEL are an essential precondition or foundation to make your work truly localised and inclusive. In applying this approach, you may come across the term 'crticial cultural competence' so here are some ideas for how to apply it to your work.

It's a multifaceted concept beyond just being aware of cultural differences; it involves reflection, deep inquiry about biases and privilege, and acts upon them. It represents a deep and reflective understanding of how culture shapes individuals, communities, and societies. At its core, critical cultural competence involves acknowledging that our own cultural lens can influence our perceptions, biases, and behaviours.

You can start by thinking about the many influences on your ways of thinking and interacting with the world around you, and try to place where in your cultures that behaviour comes from.

Critical cultural competence requires actively examining these biases and how they influence you - including how it can influence your PMEL work for the worse. It also involves actively seeking to understand, respect, and appreciate the diverse perspectives and experiences of others. This level of cultural competence also involves a willingness to challenge and confront systemic inequalities and injustices rooted in culture, advocating for social change and equity. It goes beyond surface-level cultural sensitivity and extends into a deeper commitment to dismantling barriers and promoting inclusivity, and anti-racism.

In applying it to PMEL, we can make our projects more relevant, localised, and sensitive to important contexts. It could alert us to ideas we had previously neglected because we assumed it would not arise in our data, such as the need for translators and sign language interpreters during feedback sessions with communities. I like it because it involves working with others to check each other's privileges and biases, rather than being an individual process of self-reflection (which has its own challenges because we're often unaware of our own biases, so a self-reflection is redundant!) If facilitated well, it can also build trust and respect in teams, and you can use these conversations to check each other's and hold yourselves accountable to acting in culturally relevant ways.

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