Keele Research Repository

In a crisis, aid providers deliver humanitarian relief across a hierarchy of organisations where influence and capacity map to their scale of operations (Fouksman, 2016; Mercer & Green, 2015). On the front lines of crises, ‘citizen aid’ is what small, local and informal groups offer to fellow citizens. These citizen aid groups are well-networked in place and tend to work through longstanding personal relationships (Fechter, in press; Sanchez et al., 2016). In the Philippines, citizen aid groups frequently support their activities by documenting their work with photos of beneficiaries to solicit donations from within the country and around the world across social media platforms (Bonacker et al, 2017.) This paper builds on recent debates on brokerage (Lindquist, 2015) to examine a case of citizen aid in the relief effort after Typhoon Haiyan (2013 – 2017). We demonstrate how social media has produced new forms of brokerage shaped by circulating images online. This kind of brokerage produced a layered network of brokers that both shaped citizen aid efforts and created new channels for localising aid, enhancing the control of citizen groups in the global Southern over humanitarian aid.