Category Archives: Critique of Aid

Critique of Aid

The Prosthetic Breast of Humanitarian Action

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SPARKED BY OUTSIDERS 1. Sometimes I am struck by artists and other creators who seemingly grasp humanitarian action better than I. This realization comes with a modicum of envy. They seem to breathe the human condition rather than analyze it. Humanitarian action is a silo, a sectoral silo that shapes and also stunts our perspectives as we engage with the external world.  It thus resembles other fields of action with the critical difference that humanitarianism relates to just about everything because its purpose is humanity, the whole enchilada. This blog is the first in a series where I hope to pass on some of that envy.

The Prosthetic Breast of Humanitarian Action

In 1999 I entered MSF as part of the “bearing witness” industrial complex, translating my civil rights and rural development experience into support of témoignage by MSF project teams. Twenty-five years later, tired of work-related reading, I picked Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals from the teetering pile on my wife’s desk.  Lorde’s experience with breast cancer in 1970s America, woven into her experience as a black lesbian feminist, accentuated the gap between bearing witness to the struggles of others and bearing witness to one’s own struggles; and how with a patient’s insight and a poet’s words she was able to produce a piece transcendent enough to offer this humanitarian a lesson or two or ten. Proof, if we needed more of it, of the value of lived experience.

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Choices and options

I’m going to have the mastectomy, knowing there are alternatives, some of which sound very possible in the sense of right thinking, but none of which that satisfy me enough. … Since it is my life that I am gambling with…[1]

There are choices, even if humanitarians feel that so much of their work is driven by a singularity of options, an imperative to move with urgence and exceptionalism’s license to do so. Erasing the choices open to Other societies and Other individuals – a reductionist view of crisis – from our internal narratives helps us to justify these decisions to ourselves. And as our explanations move upwards and outwards towards home society – misinformation in the form of fundraising campaigns[2] – we push responsibility away by foregrounding the necessity of our action, the unique effectiveness of our capacities, and the Other’sdependence upon us.

Lorde’s daring exemplifies how selecting among choices may often be calculated, but a quantitative reckoning replies to an institutional logic while defeating a human one. You can neither remove a breast nor identify the most urgent cases of distress via a process of counting, even if the sector dreams of a joint intersectoral global tool. Worse still, these quantitative reckonings come rooted in the biased mathematics of our capacities and their deficiencies. This is the culture of “needs assessment”, our scrutiny of the stuff that people do not have while remaining unaware of or undervaluing what they do have (their assets, capacities, and well-honed powers of survival). Even there, INGOs often assess the stuff that people don’t have based on the stuff which they possess – so the shelter agency with a warehouse full of tarpaulin, employing staff with heavy financial and emotional stakes in delivering tarpaulin to people in crisis, making an assessment of people’s need for shelter, which it and the institutional funders then redefine as people’s need for this shelter agency to deliver tarps, and completely ignoring the fact that people themselves might see their need differently, not for a tarp but for a job so that they could buy a tarp or rent a home, or for security so that they could return to the home that they own.  Lorde is clear: the mastectomy responds to her need.

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The articulation of the alibi

For as we open ourselves more and more to the genuine conditions of our lives, women become less and less willing to tolerate those conditions unaltered, or to passively accept external and destructive controls over our lives and our identities.  Any short-circuiting of this quest for self-definition and power, however well-meaning and under whatever guise, must been seen as damaging, for it keeps the post-mastectomy woman in a position of perpetual and secret insufficiency, infantilized and dependent for her identity upon an external definition by appearance. (Lorde, p. 50).

Lorde lowers the Boom!  That paragraph should hang as a reminder in the room of every strategic plan workshop, every project team weekly meeting, every community outreach worker morning briefing, and every government and UN office. As Global Truth Solutions summarizes this travesty: it “is indisputable that people should be ‘at the centre’ of humanitarian assistance. It is equally indisputable that they are not.”

Frequently critical in her thinking, Lorde seemingly saves a particular disdain for the ‘saviors’. Not the authors and friends in whom she found wisdom and solace, but in the energetic champion of a prosthetic breast that was so realistic Lorde would “never know the difference”.  Lorde’s rebuke thus fell upon a well-meaning woman from Reach for Recovery, who dispensed useful advice and the idea that through prosthesis, Lorde could be “just as good as [she] was before because [she could] look exactly the same.” (Lorde, p. 34).  This injurious comparison to the accepted standard, the unattainable perfection, pokes a particular spear in the ribs of international aid.  

Today, Lorde’s declaration of empowerment – Every woman has a militant responsibility to involve herself actively with her own health (Lorde, p. 65) – seems ever more distant in humanitarian contexts (and more globally?). Despite increased awareness of the sector’s inequitable power dynamics vis-à-vis people in crisis, the distance to a humanitarian emancipation grows because the root of this humanitarian power lies in its capacity to transform.

First, humanitarian action resembles a response to people’s problems yet more accurately constitutes an alleviation of symptoms (of deeper crisis), a shallowness that manages to elicit both hand-wringing and acceptance for decades on end, along with considerable financial backing. In Lorde’s cancer experience, this humanitarian power is mirrored in the sleight of hand effected by mastectomy as a cosmetic experience: “…the concentration upon breast cancer as a cosmetic problem, one which can be solved by a prosthetic pretense.” (Lorde, p. 47).  I have often talked about this in terms of the humanitarian alibi.  Like a prosthetic breast, humanitarian action forges a humanitarian pause, healing enough global anxiety and stopping enough bleeding for the world to look elsewhere. No breast cancer to see here.

Second, and far less visible in our self-criticism, much can be learned by a community sharing the experience of struggling to overcome the destruction and pain of crisis.  The alternative, to which we’ve born witness over the past five decades of humanitarian action, has helped instill reliance and dependency as a degradation that, once internalized, too often becomes self-perpetuating.  Speaking at the individual level, to these geo-political effects (e.g., the causes and politics of breast cancer) Lorde adds personal politics.

The emphasis upon wearing a prosthesis is a way of avoiding having women come to terms with their own pain and loss, and thereby, with their own strength. (Lorde, p. 41). 

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Little or no choice

I think now what was most important was not what I chose to do so much as that I was conscious of being able to choose, and having chosen, was empowered from having made a decision, done a strike for myself, moved. (Lorde, p. 25).

Even in a state of crisis and facing complexity beyond her training, Lorde insisted upon and exercised her agency. Of course, aid is often critical to the survival of people. In practice, we decision-makers, we in the agencies, we often decide for and gamble with the lives of others. We inherited such power, but who gives it to us today? And how is such a hierarchy maintained for years and then decades? We know the answers and yet we resist the solutions. The real task is to think hard about that resistance. How can we resist our institutional and personal resistance?  Can ethics help?

Medical ethical principles, for example, accord a remarkable value to autonomy, creating stringent safeguards that require consent except in very limited circumstances. Even if acting in the best interest of their patients, doctors cannot act without the various options being explained to the patient, who owns and takes the decision. The exception is when the patient is incapacitated (e.g., unconscious), and even there, ethical guidance requires scrutiny to be placed upon the necessity of immediate action and the potential for alternative courses of action. Stripped bare, the logic of charity pales in comparison: the choice – mastectomy or chemotherapy – is taken to be ours (and our donors).

In spite of high-level perennial commitments and policies for accountability to affected people (AAP), the sector remains “stuck in the weeds.” The way out of the weeds is not to create and impose more policies or launch new guidance and conferences. Our path out of the weeds is to recognize and operationalize our existing lodestar principle of humanity. We are stuck not in weeds but in a modern age transgression of that principle. That benefits are delivered does not elude this conclusion.  When necessary, accountable compromises to humanity – properly deliberated and reviewed – may be required in some situations. But pasting the excuse of “emergency” onto years of protracted crisis flunks the humanity test.

There is a progressive cost to ignoring this basic ethic of respect, our own principles, and the consequences of treating communities as societal equivalent to unconscious. A cost to ourselves, as we increasingly become accustomed to unnecessarily harmful ways of working, and they solidify in our processes and our norms. A cost to people, as stunting takes place when this disregard carries on for decades, sequentially divesting people of the opportunity to do “strikes” for themselves. Perhaps one answer to “how much divestment?” lies in the near absence of resistance. The lack of significant resistance from communities themselves suggests prolonged disempowerment; and the lack of resistance from local governments seems self-interested (a discharging or responsibilities).

The alternative is to operationalize faith in people having alternatives. We have alternatives.  This returns us to Lorde, who in the period after the surgery worried about the possibility of a recurrence and how she might deal with her life being shorter than she had expected.  “Would I be able to maintain the control over my life that I had always taken for granted.” (Lorde, p. 48). This control is part of the human experience, and should be part of the humanitarian principle of humanity.

[1] Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (1980) London: Sheba Feminist Publishers; p. 27.

[2] Or is it an acceptable form of disinformation, given the good intentions?  I worry that future societies will view it as a form of organized fraud — telling a false story in return for cash!

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Maintaining Standards

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While the views expressed below may appear critical of localization, this blogsite is an ally: as local as possible; as international as necessary (see here or here).[1]

One particular and necessary strength of the established global humanitarian order has been the production of guidance and standards that govern practice, boost coherence, and safeguard its legendary accountability.  These standards and guidance uphold hard-fought gains in managerialism which ensure humanitarian work contributes vital assistance and protects the safety of people and communities affected by crisis.  Vigilance is necessary.

On a 10-day visit to Ukraine in November 2022 to collect data for an evaluation, I was shocked to find that critical requirements were being ignored in the interest of preserving local ‘culture’, or due to simple ignorance of the standards and risks. Though examples abound, let me draw your attention to what Ukrainians refer to as a hot dog.  It looks like this:

In contrast, and exemplary of the existing global standard, actual hot dogs look like these:

My research into the matter yielded three essential conclusions.

First, categories and standards matter.  Here, there is clear damage at the conceptual level – a significant blurring of the lines. As has a U.S. Supreme Court Justice has declared, a hot dog is a sandwich (see verdict at 2:37). Conclusively, Miram-Webster defines a sandwich as “two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between” (emphasis added).  With neither two slices of bread nor a split roll, the Ukrainian “hot dog” is not a sandwich. This means it is not a hot dog. It belongs more appropriately in the category of miscellaneous meal products such as the burrito, eggroll, or gyro.

These distinctions have enormous consequences for stakeholders such as beneficiaries and delivery agencies. For example, under U.S. law and reflecting a turf war between agencies, a ham and cheese sandwich on one slice of bread is the responsibility of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which inspects manufacturers daily. But a ham and cheese sandwich on two slices of bread is the responsibility of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which inspects manufacturers about once every five years. And that is just the difference between two sandwiches!  In the aid industry, incentives push in the direction of similar bureaucratic regulation and increased managerial burdens. Obviously, this situation constitutes a threat to the stability and coherence of nutritional guidance. Should UNICEF or FAO have intervened in Ukraine?  Nutritionists or health experts?  We need to avoid this sort of uncertainty.

Second, the Ukrainian “hot dog” presents major health and safety concerns.  Research has shown that choking injury is the fourth leading cause of unintentional death in children under five, hence a risk to the primary target of humanitarian funding. Research produced by the esteemed American Academy of Pediatrics explains that the hot dog is the number one choking hazard due to the size, shape, and consistency of a hot dog chunk, which easily becomes wedged in a child’s windpipe; and is responsible for over 10,000 annual emergency room visits.  This peril is precisely the risk posed by the way the meat protrudes from the breading in a Ukrainian “hot dog”, to be bitten off in choke-friendly chunks by unsuspecting children.  An additional concern, still to be researched, is the risk of germ or bacterial contamination due to the lack of full bun protection for the meat.

Third, this is not good value for money. Claims by advocates of the Ukrainian “hot dog” point to the value and efficiency of the lesser amount of breading, arguing that it will free up financial resources for critically underfunded emergencies such as Yemen, the Horn of Africa, or Haiti. This misdirection ignores the significant reduction in caloric value compared to the standard (American) hot dog bun’s sugar, salt, and ultra-processed carbohydrates. Such a tactical narrowing of the focus also manifests a common evidentiary sleight of hand in the sector: humanitarians cherry-picking one subset of data and ignoring others, such as the disastrous inefficiency of condiment distribution in the Ukrainian “hot dog”.  As the photos reveal, it is a false comparison to substitute a barren cylinder of meat for the more nutritious meat and vegetable (relish, tomato ketchup) sandwiches of a real hot dog.

The target of this post is not the Ukrainian “hot dog” but the importance of safeguarding those components of the international aid system that remain necessary to ensure conceptual clarity of responsibilities and effective programming standards. The author intentionally selected Ukraine to demonstrate that this criticism applies to all local organizations and associations, even ones in a “chosen” crisis because it is local to the West.

[Text updated 14 August 2023]

[1] Disclosure of interest: I benefit from the apparent reimagination of this mantra/policy.  As practice reveals, localization work now includes HQ-level international efforts that are necessary to ensure localization is realized as soon possible (e.g., capacity building, webinars, articles, or even this blog). I note how growth in the formal and ‘water cooler talk’ about localization has blossomed.  This reflects, we must assume, the continued necessity of the international sector, even as the direct funding of assistance to local and national actors reached 1.2 percent of total humanitarian funding for 2022.

Critique of Aid

Reversing the paradigm

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Just as they do every late December, the interviews and opinion pieces will come.  Atypically, though, the end of the mere year of 2020 seems to have displaced the usual attention to the end of a decade (no, the decade did not end last December 31st). 

Well, it has been a comparatively eventful year.  So some form of this question will be asked over and again: What’s the biggest thing that happened in 2020?  For humanitarians, given the unique qualities of 2020, perhaps the more interesting question is this:  What will prove to be the fourth most impactful event of 2020, after all-too-obvious triumvirate of (1) COVID-19, (2) Trump loses the election, and (3) Black Lives Matter forces scrutiny on the humanitarian action’s neo-colonial hangover.

My answer comes in the form of news from late last week. Unicef will be supporting a feeding operation that aims to reach between 10,000 and 15,000 children.  That will include for example delivering breakfast meals to 13,000 students over the next two weeks (in-school feeding programs will be closed for the holiday).  This food aid marks as typical and maybe even as innocuous of a Unicef program as you might imagine.  Happens every day.  Literally.  But in Unicef’s 70-year history it has not happened that the agency delivered food to children in the United Kingdom.

Returning to our eulogy for 2020, this small event may be one that eventually sneaks up on the humanitarian sector the way all good disruptions do, because it impacts on the level of ideology and perception. With delivery of this small program comes fruit, rice, bread and the power of South to North humanitarian action (even if the example is not specifically South to North).  Not yet. Not yet an event like a Tanzanian medical mission to combat the pharmacalization of American childhood.[1]  Those examples will come. They should come.  And we should not wait for them to come. We should plan and execute their coming because that is one of keys to saving humanitarian action from itself, from its paternalistic, Othering, saviourism.

Unicef delivering emergency aid in the UK offers disruption via “a well-publicised humanitarianization (problematization) of the many crises in the global North.”[2]  Aside from feeding destitute children, the (ulterior) purpose is to “shift the prevailing charity model to one of an exchange among equals, where the North and South partner in ‘saving’ one another.” In other words, to break the mindset which binds together so much of what is right with humanitarian action with so much that is wrong.  This targets the narrative in which the rich, developed, scientific, virtuous and flat-out most excellent people of the world help those who are poor, primitive, irrational, corrupt and flat-out screwed.  Further, this spoils the incentive structure by targeting the construct or dynamic in which we who live in humanitarian-giving nations are enabled to feel superior about ourselves, while those in humanitarian-receiving nations are helped to feel inferior.

The response of Jacob Rees Mogg, a living caricature of British superiorityness, highlights the received meaning of Unicef’s work here in the UK (which should, after all, have come as no surprise given Philip Alston’s blistering report). In Mogg’s vigorous rejection, he railed against Unicef’s action as a “political stunt”, arguing that Unicef aid should be given to what Donald Trump has less eloquently termed “shithole countries”.[3] The reaction of politicians on the UK left was identical in its assumptions, using the fact of Unicef’s local humanitarian action to shame the Prime Minister and his party, calling it “a disgrace” that Unicef had to help feed children in “one of the richest countries in the world.” As if Congo or Iraq weren’t nations brimming with riches and millionaires.  As if the accumulation of the UK’s riches weren’t intimately connected to the production of either the crises being targeted by the humanitarians or the 14M people in the UK who live in poverty (pre-COVID stat!).

In ten (twenty?) years we will hopefully see that this small disruption forms part of a larger transformation, one in which millions of people will assume the wealth and social capital of a country like Yemen or South Sudan and feel the disgrace when children there need to be fed by international donations, and those people will be the Yemenis and South Sudanese themselves.  And where we in the West will feel and see an identical disgrace in the opioid/drug deaths across the working class America, or the loneliness of the elderly in Japan.  And where we can share this disgrace across the entire human family rather than excepting ourselves from it.

The appeal of that critique lies in certain égalité; in the realization that we are just like them.  It certainly fits with my intermittently critical tone and mounting calls for a humanitarianism riddled with humility. But seeing ourselves just like them is also problematic. After yet another decade, perhaps greater humility will produce the parallel recognition as well.  They are just like us.

[Edited for clarity on 27 Dec 2020].

[1] See e.g. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/big-pharma-s-manufactured-epidemic-the-misdiagnosis-of-adhd/

[2] DuBois The New Humanitarian Basics pp. 26-27.  Or see this script of a rather unscripted Chatham House conversation on humanitarian disruption between me, Urvashi Aneja, Markus Geisser, and Champa Patel.

[3] Putting aside Trump’s language, I fail to differentiate his opinion from either mainstream humanitarian thinking or its public narrative.  These places we work are exceptional in [insert here rephrasing of ‘shitholiness’ in terms of levels of violence, lawlessness, destitution and helplessness].

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

A Nexus critique of Humanitarian Protection

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If the Triple or Humanitarian-Development-Peace (HDP) Nexus were not confounding enough for humanitarian operations, think about our sector’s most misunderstood cluster, humanitarian protection, which has long remained shrouded in conceptual fog.  Even after a decade of the UN’s mainstreaming of humanitarian protection, its 2014 Independent Whole of System Review of Protection in the Context of Humanitarian Action concluded that ‘the widespread perspective among humanitarians [is] that they do not have a role to play in countering abusive or violent behaviour even when political and military strategies and tactics pose the biggest threat to life’ (Niland et al., p. 27).

The Review’s finding suggested a pervasive sectoral malaise with the practice of protection. Humanitarian protection thus struggles against a profound if not foundational weakness, one exacerbated by more ‘mundane’ trends such as the decline of multilateralism, the progressive (non-Western) pluralism of the sector, and the consistent weakening of the sector’s rights-based approach.  The proposition here is that the HDP Nexus offers a rare means for humanitarians to think differently about their work in general, and about protection in particular. 

Thus far, however, humanitarian protection’s (scant) Nexus engagement marks a missed opportunity, seemingly bogged down in a discussion of how to adjust the status quo. For example, a year ago PHAP held a webinar to unpack this vital subject, with the promising (if not somewhat clunky) title of The future of protection in the nexus: The role of the Global Protection Cluster and humanitarian protection in the humanitarian-development-peace-security nexus.[1]  Aside from the ICRC’s contributions, I detected zero evidence of humanitarian protection leadership looking differently at the concept of humanitarian protection.  Rather, the conversation remained embedded in the substantial barriers to nexus praxis, such as coordination. 

The literature remains even thinner than the conversation.  Damian Lilly has produced (for ODI’s Humanitarian Practice Network) a relatively comprehensive and discerning overview of how the HDP Nexus affects humanitarian protection. The discussion focusses on the nexus as a policy initiative, and hence generates more of an updating exercise than a rethink.  His paper usefully examines the challenge to humanitarian protection of an overt or institutional linkage with development and peace actors; and then proposes ways forward in dealing with issues such as collective outcomes, program funding, joined up planning, and so forth. The essential yet less ‘useful’ question remains:  What can the HDP Nexus show us about the nature of humanitarian protection?

My own discussion paper on the Triple Nexus, published earlier this year by CHA Berlin, mostly traffics in the less useful.  It fleshes out the discussion obviated by our preoccupation with the pragmatic challenges of linking together three antagonistic, siloed sectors.  Moving beyond the issue of a tri-sectoral organigram, I believe the Nexus should be used to undermine the humanitarian sector’s inadequate, sequestered thinking. It can do this by helping us to better understand both the needs of people and the (inadvertent) consequences of humanitarian programming.  And then the real goal – to change how we see ourselves. The need for such a new gaze?  I would place humanitarian protection near the front of the queue.  Yet – mea culpa — my paper largely avoids the topic.  So now, a first correction of that mistake.

The HDP Nexus presents humanitarians with two can-openers for their tin-walled silo – looking at it (critically) through the lens of development and through the lens of peace (D & P). In their October conference Triple Nexus in Practice – What about Peace? CHA Berlin allowed space for making a few first cuts in the protection can (see the 30-minute conversation between Florian Westphal and me at #4 on the playlist).  What did that conversation yield?

Protection activities form a humanitarian response to those exercising power in such a way as to harm human dignity (see also the full discussion paper). Yet even the best of humanitarian work simultaneously brings negative consequences for peace, development and human dignity.  Why is it so easy to criticise powerful dictators and yet pay no attention to the exercise of power by the sector? Humanitarians may be excused if these are outbalanced or rendered invisible in the heat of emergency response, and yet we same humanitarians should be held accountable when this outbalancing or invisibility stretches on for decades of protracted crisis.  Hopefully, balance and visibility will be enhanced by ‘nexus-thinking’ that drags the sector (kicking and screaming) to the mirror.  What might this look like for protection?

  • The humanitarian sector has a problem with context. As some of the earlier panels from CHA’s conference described, the level of context blindness displayed by international humanitarian interventions can be staggering.  This cannot surprise us so much as our complacency given the apparent complexity of conflict and context, and yet along that dark road of uncertainty, so full of known and unknown unknowns, we feel it imperative (if not virtuous) to publish highly contentious reports on indiscriminate and discriminatory slaughter by a government, deliberate neglect of populations, rape as a weapon of war, and so forth. Don’t our blind spots matter? Are they really just spots? Where is the accountability (the protection) from the predictably unforeseen consequences?  What power dynamics lay beneath the ethics of, say, a foreign organization publishing a report in the absence of a multi-layered, structured inquiry into the local system of social and political relationships?  
  • Does denunciatory advocacy and finger-pointing produce division and divisiveness? Can it reinforce hatred between groups (as the noted human rights lawyer Philippe Sands has concluded)?  Does this form of protection work – so lucrative to the INGO in terms of its public image — essentially constitute an act of Othering, a heightening of group identity that collides with community peace efforts (‘peace’ with a small P) attempting to bring sides together?
  • How does our reductionist, oversimplified and yet dominant narrative transform complex contexts into stereotypes of poverty and endless conflict that therein call for protection work and international humanitarian intervention? Who is it that protects people in crisis from the humanitarian narrative that trumpets the people’s and government’s incompetence, corruption, primitivism and helplessness?

Finally, if Nexus-thinking from a development perspective spotlights and challenges the inequitable distribution of power underlying so much of humanitarian action, it will necessarily confront the disempowering tactics and processes of humanitarian protection. Nexus-thinking should push the sector towards a protection analysis of what it means to claim the narrative of others, and then to propagate this narrative through the power of well-resourced communications departments and well-placed networks of influence.  What does it mean to sit at the table on behalf of others – what a big fat humanitarian anachronism! – when surely today all peoples can and already do organize to tell their own stories and lobby for their own justice, yet often remain functionally invisible because of the space taken and defended by the major Western agencies? 

Nexus-thinking should bring these and many other conversation-starters to the sector’s table. D and P therefore hold the capacity to end much confusion about humanitarian protection and, at the very least, promise to shake the power of H action and its exercise of H protection.

[Edited 30 November 2020 to correct some unclear phrasing]

[1] I note that PHAP is hosting an interesting humanitarian protection debate on Monday, 30 November: The State of Protection in the COVID-19 Era

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Time for a Punch in the Face?

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Can the leopard change its spots?

Across the humanitarian sector, a surfacing of anger, denial, repent, frustration, recognition, shame, rationalization and hope. The sector moves into action: webinars, all-staff meetings, executive suite statement, and ‘This time!’ promises of a new zero tolerance.  This is not 2020, but 2018.  Did culture or power shift?  Hard to say.  How did our sector perform such a deep dive into abuse of power and not seize upon the issue of race? That remains a riddle to be unpacked.

As it now stands, the aid sector is again being frogmarched into a confrontation with what it has always exercised the privilege to ignore. And we should ask: This time, will the sector’s anti-racist protests  or the mea culpa declarations prove the spark to escape its inequitable relationship with people?

It is difficult to bet on success. The humanitarian sector has established a relatively unblemished track record of escaping from the challenge of transformation, leaving change agendas chopped down to technocratic reform.  The practice of reform – a seeming good – hence becomes a practiced evasion, an avoidance of addressing deeply embedded inequalities that coalesce in a cluster of ugly isms – paternalism, sexism, colonialism, elitism, and racism.  That incomplete list constitutes a straightforward humanitarian defect, namely that the sector is not humanitarian.  We may provide vital relief (as might a NATO or even a McDonald’s food distribution) but we trample at existential peril our distinct purpose as enshrined in the principle of humanity.

The difficulty of achieving transformation from within should not surprise us as much as our faith that we will succeed.  It is not simply that the sector relegates big fat disturbing truths to the bottom of the to-do list (too busy saving lives).  It is also the very humanitarian way in which we address symptoms without unearthing the causes.  Example: As the discussion on racism unfolds, Paul Currion explains that terminology like ‘localisation’ looks “suspiciously like language used to avoid talking about the lingering effects of racism.” In effect, localization, the sector’s ‘solution’ to the problem of its resources and power already being localized (i.e., in the West), employs terminology that functions as a terminus, as a building block of the selfsame problem.

So, will COVID-19 and the climate emergency combine to make this moment a critical juncture? Perhaps. Milton Friedman’s shock doctrine claims that “only a crisis-actual or perceived-produces real change.”  Or perhaps it is clearer in the less academic analysis of Mike Tyson: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”  Will the public outing of the humanitarian system’s institutional racism or its blind fragility amount to a punch in the mouth?  Will somebody “take a sledgehammer” to the entire system, as was suggested in a last month’s must-watch panel discussion hosted by The New Humanitarian? 

A call for disruption

To answer this question, let’s turn it around: what does this sledgehammer look like?  What does humanitarian disruption look like? And can a system disrupt itself from the inside? Can it punch itself in the mouth? In the TNH discussion, the panel explored how the perception of the US as a fragile state might be just such a driver or change. Kenyan cartoonist and political commentator Patrick Gathara asked, for example, if we can imagine African peacekeepers deployed to the United States. 

That question holds the potential to disrupt the dominant narrative, because it asks us to confront the underlying paradigm. To answer, humanitarians must imagine South-to-North humanitarian programming (see my examples, p. 26ff).  This leads to struggle, because we must reconcile our assumed legitimacy of North-to-South humanitarian action with South-to-North humanitarian work, which strikes us intuitively as wrong, or even nonsensical.  Should we not build, for example, a training scenario exercise where Cuban medical teams respond the opioid addiction crisis that killed almost 47,000 Americans in 2018 (compare to last year’s death toll of 11,215 fighters and civilians in the Syrian war)?

In previous analysis of how the humanitarian sector responded to the crisis of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, I concluded that the intervention exemplified a more equitable and limited model of humanitarian action. The difference in how humanitarians conceived of their role in New Orleans versus in ‘humanitarian contexts’ surfaced the bias in the sectoral lens, and we can now recognize this bias as heavily embedded in racialized verdicts on the neediness, competence and agency of some people.

Humanitarian and disaster relief teams descended on the stricken city of New Orleans and delivered stuff – water, food, blankets, shelter. In other words, a decidedly punctual, modest response aiming to meet basic needs via the delivery of emergency relief. Contrary to the way it intervenes in the ‘global South’, the humanitarian intervention did not conceptualise the crisis in larger terms, and did not see the need (or feel the paternalistic urge?) to engage in rights-based political and social engineering with the goal of ‘fixing’ New Orleans. As a result, it did not seek to address long-standing structural vulnerabilities and problems of violence, corrupt governance, substance abuse, racial segregation and discrimination, gender oppression and violence, shockingly poor education and health services and the myriad of other needs the humanitarian system has captured within the scope of the ‘humanitarian crisis’. (DuBois 2018; 6, citations omitted).

The Katrina response hence demonstrated crisis intervention without further ‘humanitarianisation’. In contrast, crisis in the ‘global south’ produces short-term and assistentialist approaches that “are normalized to compensate for the persistence of structural problems related to rule of law, democratic accountability, public services and deep-seated social division.”[1]  Sounds like a key brick in the wall of humanitarian expansion.

The point is that challenges to the assumptions of North-to-South humanitarian action can be illuminating. However, the risk is that we do not probe deep enough.  One surprising moment in the aforementioned TNH webinar came as a number of panellists agreed on the worrying signs of instability in the US – threats of violent military repression of democratic protest, an uncontrolled virus that devastates ethnic minorities and the poor, divisive and corrupt politics, economic ruin of millions of Americans while a stock market sets records, etc.  That discussion included a proposition: “Should we consider the situation in the US a humanitarian crisis?” The audience answered in the affirmative, 45% saying yes versus 20% for no.

Is American really Yemen (or CAR, Sudan…) in disguise? This question, provocative and as emotionally satisfying as it may be, seems like the wrong question. The issue is not that the sector needs to treat the US more like the ‘dark continent’, it’s that it needs to treat the ‘dark continent’ more like it treats the US.  We should reject the idea that the US today is a ‘shithole’ in the way that resembles the ‘shithole’ countries that we have self-referentially defined as humanitarian contexts. We should learn to see that these so-called humanitarian contexts actually resemble countries in the West, full of contradictions and corruption, achievement and incompetence, massive advantages and terrible needs; and full of people whose dignity (a) rejects the assumption of needing to be saved and (b) demands the right to own their struggles.

The TNH poll thus invites the ‘white gaze’, where the deviation from a presumed White/Western norm of wealth and stability generates an exceptionalist break from history and politics, and yields the virtuous hierarchy of giver/savior above the helpless, incompetent victim.  Arianne Shahvisi captures this racially biased gaze in her concept of ‘tropicality’, and David Chandler has described this as a perception of non-Western countries as “incapable of rational policy-development and prone to corruption and nepotism,” peopled with victims in need of Western intervention against their “corrupt and inefficient elites.” 

To disrupt humanitarian power is to remove the legacy of racism from the justification and extensiveness of our interventions in places like South Sudan, Bangladesh, Haiti, or CAR.  It is to subvert the privilege of believing that our good intentions magically overcome our causal relationship to the profound injustices of those places.  For that sort of disruption, though, we should perhaps look outside the sector, because it will not come from within.

[Edits for clarity were made to the original post, on 28 August, about five hours after posting.]

[1] Fiori, J. et al. (2016) The Echo Chamber: Results, Management, and the Humanitarian Effectiveness Agenda. London: Save the Children, p. 54.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

The Privilege of Control

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Anti-racism protests have prompted unprecedented conversations across many parts of the humanitarian sector.  Institutions and their leaders have raised their hands as witnesses and responders to the destructive practices of racism, and to being spreaders and perpetrators of it.  There is a flow of apology and commitment.  We see strong vows to change, to listen, to understand, to do better, to open up uncomfortable spaces, to rectify, and to eradicate.  An odd gap in this litany of promises?  Reckoning.  Justice.

Let us begin with the simple fact that various forms of racial discrimination – both individualized acts of racial discrimination and institutional racism – are not examples of bad behavior.  They are examples of wrong behavior.  They are deemed in much of the world to be an offense, usually a civil offense but in some states a criminal offense.  Legal codes attach this gravity to racism because racial discrimination and racism (just as sexism, etc.) constitutes an act of direct harm upon an individual, and it is a particularly insidious category of harm because it targets and violates that which is immutable about a human being.

In a textbook display of privilege, agencies within the sector have assumed the capacity to act as both defendant and judge or jury. Defining the boundaries of how they will talk about addressing their racism marks an appropriation, so for instance deciding to look forward but deflecting accountability for the present or the past.  Angela Bruce-Raeburn asks the question that is erased by these declarations:  “Can a chief executive ‘apologise’ for racism and stay?”

This is a particular exercise of privilege, because it both masks and is a product of our virtue. As I’ve written before, the legitimacy of the sector is challenged by its susceptibility to moral licensing, allowing its good works to facilitate or counterbalance bad stuff. We downplay the offense and then rationalize our actions.  Why such persistent difficulties with community engagement, localisation or ‘downward’ accountability? Because we justify our inaction and allow our racism to hide in the plain sight of “power over” policies or practices of knowing what is best for them.  Move fast fast fast and you do not notice.  Beware the strong resemblance to the original humanitarian sin of its colonial legacy, the enterprise of subjugation and resource extraction being justified by the civilizing mission.

Self-accountability

In the almost 25 years since the JEFAR first recommended that humanitarians needed to be held accountable by an independent body, the sector has devoted consistent, massive effort to producing codes of self-accountability, an ever-expanding lists of best practices, standards, targets and other technocratic non-fixes to the problem of the sector’s social injustice.[1] Complaint mechanisms, suggestion boxes, agency hotlines and help desks are emblematic of the twinned mindsets of privilege and of charity, a uniquely inebriating potion that mixes good intentions with an (un)conscious “it’s better than nothing” (“happy to get something”?) rationalisation of sectoral shortcomings.  In the end, the underlying distinction of humanitarian accountability is that it does not produce the state in which an agency must give and then be held to account for its decisions and actions. Aid requires a reckoning.  And when an offense is committed, it demands justice as well.

The starting point of the internal discussions to come should be letters of resignation. It is not for me to say if they should be accepted, but they should be sincere and on the table. Truth and reconciliation? Independent adjudicators? National inquiries in the countries where aid takes place? Grace? This is easier for me to write than to now predict if I would have had the integrity to submit my own back when I was director.  I made the choice to remain, a choice rationalized by the good being done and by my occasional and completely ineffective protestations. My decision marked the mistaken weighing of moral obligations against programmatic output.

Critical to change is recognition that weak sectoral and negligible external accountability do not give rise to or permit racism in humanitarian action.  The problem to be addressed is the reverse. Racism gives rise to the sector’s insufficient accountability. The solution is simple in theory.  As Themrise Khan astutely argues, “it is the aid ‘recipients’ who must push back against the white aid system”. Accountability is not an internal treasure for the dominant agencies of the Global North to bequeath, but rather a power, authority and even a vocabulary that will need to be taken and will need to be constructed. 

To do that, society must counter the sector having approached accountability as an internal or isolated exercise.  MEAL programs and internal reporting can and do contribute to accountability, but accountability requires a multiplicity of external prongs.  This is what you would find in the West, where accountability for the work in an NGO (or business) arises from the independent work of journalists, review-based websites (coming soon?), official ombudsmen, law enforcement, lawsuits, citizen watch-dog groups, government regulatory bodies, consumer groups, etc. The blindspot should now be apparent. Efforts to improve governance and strengthen civil society should be pushing for the requisite frameworks and skills to hold foreign aid agencies to account and protect people from harm.  The neo-colonial gaze means never seeing ourselves as the problem to fix, and yet we exert enormous power over the lives of people in crisis.

The external equivalent of Bruce-Raeburn’s taking issue with non-resignation resides in the governments and civil societies of the states and communities where humanitarians work.  How can an organisation that understands itself to have racism threading through its work and culture – driving the conceptualization of programs, framing the narrative and imagery of ‘heroic’ aid, suffusing the relationship with its employees – simply assume that it should or is able to remain engaged in said work? In other words, what is the significance of and process by which we construct ourselves as fit for the purpose of delivering assistance and protection to (predominantly) people of color? This is white privilege at work. Accountability for its racism requires resignation of the humanitarian project, to be accepted or rejected by the governments and communities that have suffered the offense. 

[21/July: I made two edits to this post — minor cosmetic changes in the first para and the insertion of a missing “not” in the fifth para.]

[1] While there is considerable external accountability to HQ or institutional donors, this relates more to responsible financial management and log-framed targets, and not to the character of the aid or to the relationship of the agency to the community.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Finding air

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I can’t breathe. A novel virus that has choked the breath out of over 400,000 people and a white police officer who choked the life out of man by driving his knee press of historical, pervasive American racism into George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. 

A stirring, frightening global juncture and a moment for humanitarian ‘thought leaders’ to offer their opinions on whiteness, racism, and colonialism in humanitarian action.  An opportunity to share my thinking and to engage in the efforts to ‘make a difference’.

I have spent the week trying to find the right words. Long draft essays. Perhaps less is more.  Approaches to privilege:

  1. Listen to our colleagues and to the recipients of aid, because we don’t know enough about the consequences of whiteness. 
  2. Listen to and interrogate the excuses we have made, because we have certainly known enough to act.
  3. Listen to critics (or here) who see a dangerous, active institutional racism in the power dynamics and practices of our sector, not just in the people leading it. 
  4. Think about how to relinquish  space.

I have not posted a blog here since July. To some extent, I was busy.  To some extent, a loss of voice. A birthday reminds me that the time to speak out is not well served by ‘maybe next week-ism’.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Community Engagement — Problems Less Discussed

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Expanding the Rules of Engagement

In sector jargon, the concept of “community engagement” (CE) refers to a process of interaction and exchange between an aid agency and a community.  To my ear, that sounds more like gathering intelligence, or conducting market research. Closer to a modern day ‘getting to know the natives’ [for their own benefit – of course!] than to getting to know the neighbors?  Another way of thinking about CE: Why does human communing need so many conferences, experts and guidelines? 

Well, maybe CE is not so simple as human communing.  A quick look at “engagement” reveals a colourful term, which suggests plenty about CE.  Meanings of “engagement” from the OED (online):

Meanings How meanings might relate to CE
An agreement to marry somebody Engagement as a ‘legal or moral
obligation’
An arrangement to do something For example, a procedure or
contract to meet and find out more about a community?
Actual fighting between two
militaries or armed forces 		This suggests conflict in CE, the
‘violence’ of inequitable power
relationships, armed with the
authority of clipboards
Being involved or in a relationship with somebody or something in an attempt to understand them/it The community as a target of
understanding, a fundamentally
unidirectional process
An arrangement or agreement to
employ somebody 		Such as employing a community to gain information necessary to
access, funding, etc.?

A collision between communities

Reading sector literature one quickly spots the tendency to refer to an agency’s engagement with a community, rather than a community’s engagement with an agency.  Equally telling, the failure to see our CE as engagement by a community, meaning seeing ourselves as a community, and a rather exotic one at that.  The humanitarian/foreign aid and crisis response sector AKA “the international community”.  AKA? Perhaps ASAA is more accurate – Also Self-Aggrandized As.

Therein lies an excess of typically invisible and not so invisible (see DRC Ebola response) collisions.  Of specific relevance here, and largely undiscussed, would be the extent to which this engagement marks a collision between a predominantly Western culture whose fundamental building block is the individual, and non-Western cultures which remain to varying degrees fundamentally grounded in the community or collective.[1]  Is the sector paying attention to the consequences of exporting the West’s historic shift from ‘we’ to the centrality of ‘I’?

Thankfully, some humanitarian organizations have already begun thinking about this problem.  In a recent article published by The New Humanitarian (FKA IRIN) that discusses research by Mercy Corps:  

South Sudan is a collective society, but currently the way much aid is delivered mirrors how Western donors think and is often modelled on their own societies. Organisations tend to work with individuals or households, but in the South Sudan context, everything is communal. Aid actors need to shift our Western notions of individual and household vulnerability to consider our response from a collective perspective.

Mercy Corps’ research concludes “that when humanitarian actors fail to understand these existing local coping strategies, they risk inadvertently undermining them.”[2]  That said, the exportation of the ‘I’ culture of ‘radical’ individualism goes far beyond humanitarian intervention.  It may be as inevitable as globalization or global warming, so let us avoid being overly romantic and focus on mitigation.

Spelling it out: humanitarian action places the individual or household in competition with other crisis-affected individuals and households.  It forces a competition, an individualized misery contest, to qualify for or attract the attentions and deliveries of the aid giver.  The way we deliver aid (not the aid itself) places in harm’s way a community’s social capital, their network of relationships that depends upon trust and reciprocity and which becomes critical at times of crisis. This social capital, rather than being nurtured or developed in the humanitarian response, is displaced by the expectation that the international community can and will solve their problems through individualized sets of technological and material interventions. The community contract (let alone the development of a social contract with the state) is thus eroded. Off the top of my head, I tend to agree with Mercy Corps’ conclusion that the nurturing rather than undermining of these social relationships is vital to peace-building and stability in the future. 

The cultural insensitivity of an aid response based on individuals

The impact of exporting/imposing a particular individuality can be seen in how the paradigm of individual human rights (and individual choice) has governed aid choices even in places where communities and a sense of communal or family duty remain dominant; where they remain necessary to life and to identity.  Think of how an agency might dissuade or even scold the mother of a malnourished child when it becomes obvious that she is sharing the therapeutic food packets among her several hungry children (contrary to instructions to use it to feed only the acutely malnourished child who qualified for treatment).  We can also see it in the lens created by our systemic reverence for the humanitarian principle of impartiality, which essentially declares the individual (or household) to be the fundamental metric for the distribution of assistance.

Communities have to be quite powerful to refuse this power imbalance.  In the response to Typhoon Haiyan, some communities in the Philippines pushed against agency plans to distribute aid to individual families, insisting that this would not be well-perceived in the community and that the community would ensure the welfare of all.  In other words, our ‘impartiality-based’ aid would cause harmful tensions and violate communal norms.  The Filipino example illustrates CE’s inadvertent globalization of a ‘universal’ individual-centered humanity that has the power to erase, devalue or, worse, declare as a pathology, that which constitutes community, tribe, collective, etc.

Ethics as a way forward?

As a process, CE rightfully comes highly proclaimed, helping humanitarians do things right. It is also the right thing to do.  The principle of humanity means all people belong to a common family with a common inalienable dignity, and this dignity requires even-footed engagement rather charity. On this latter ethical principle, communities must be more insistent. Humanitarians have long evaded meaningful CE because they operationalized it as a laudable option, not as a prerequisite to being humanitarian. The result is CE’s being persistently outweighed in the ‘heat of action’ by other pressing needs, such as a rapid deployment.  Even where an agency declares CE as the right thing to do, its de facto translation seems more aspirational than normative. Is poor or absent CE ever deemed an ethical violation? An abuse of power? Was somebody fired? We unnecessarily glorify humanity, impartiality or CE.

The way forward lies in our comprehending the complexity of such principles in practice. For instance, humanity acknowledges the equality of human beings with intelligence, rights and agency; and yet also brings an unthinking globalization of a ‘universal’ humanity that can erase or devalue diversity and reinforce hierarchies.  This paradox then inheres to CE itself: CE might contribute to the success of a very particular sort of humanitarian intervention, one that devalues communities qua communities and imposes a regime of assistance based on individuals or individual households. 

The problem is not CE. The problem is not the principle of humanity. The problem is deploying CE while blind to its potential shortcomings, impositions and negative consequences. CE, so seldom simple human communing and so often unidirectional or hierarchical, is designed to generate empowerment, people-centered and contextually adapted aid, and ‘beneficiary’ buy in.  These luminous goals need to be championed; and research needs to explore how negative consequences might be identified and mitigated.  Addressing CE rather than simply calling for it is the way to address power imbalance between two communities, one a billionaires club of agencies and the other being in crisis; one on a mission and the other at the sharp end of a mission that engages with them as a target.  Sounds too much like meaning #3.

[1] It would be inaccurate to frame this generalization as a binary – it is more about positioning along a spectrum.  I do not think it an exaggeration, and it is certainly receiving a great deal of attention these days, to suggest that the escalating individualism of the West is deeply intertwined with many of the political and social problems in the West. As David Brooks opines in a NYT Op-Ed: “I think we all realize that the hatred, fragmentation and disconnection in our society is not just a political problem. It stems from some moral and spiritual crisis. We don’t treat one another well. And the truth is that 60 years of a hyper-individualistic … culture have weakened the bonds between people. They’ve dissolved the shared moral cultures that used to restrain capitalism and the meritocracy. Over the past few decades the individual, the self, has been at the center.” In other words, individualism may prove to be the sort of invasive species you will regret importing to a new environment.

[2] Mercy Corps, The Currency of Connections, p.4. On this point, Mercy Corps is citing to “Famine in Somalia: Competing Imperatives, Collective Failures, 2011-12” Daniel Maxwell and Nisar Majid. Hurst Publications (which I did not consult).

Critique of Aid, Politics

Boarding the Climate Bandwagon

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Bandwagon

As is the case with many humanitarian INGOs, it is safe to say that MSF has boarded the climate crisis bandwagon.  At AGM after AGM and across the strategic plan drafts for 2020 onwards, MSF has embraced the operational imperative of understanding and responding to the effects of changing climates on people, water, food, conflict and the bugs that make us ill (not to mention the seemingly straightforward connection between humanitarian values and extinction).  MSF is also pledging to examine its own behavior, such as its penchant for using the airplane as a communication device or its love affair with their iconic Land Cruisers. 

Two thumbs up.  But it wouldn’t be a blog if there weren’t at least a minor “but”.  Or two.

“But” #1. 

We know or should be willing to admit that bandwagons in the humanitarian sector have had a tendency to produce greater output than outcomes; useful focus and attention, to be sure, but also heaps of conferences, guidelines and humanitarian churn.  The list is long:  gender mainstreaming, innovation, resilience, protection mainstreaming, accountability, etc.  All delivered improvements, and yet the hellfire of climate fury will be our reward (outcome) if we transpose our bandwagon model from these other areas to this ever-more-visible crisis. One can only hope that the distinguishing characteristic of the climate crisis will improve the effectiveness of our output.  What’s that?  Our own self-interest.  The sector has skin in this game.

“But” #2

In April 1999 somebody in my PPD (a two-week MSF onboarding party) asked about MSF’s environmental policy. The question was swept aside by the wise old session facilitator.  In subsequent years I recall similar arguments and similar sweeps.  Ditto at the cycles of annual or strategic (multi-year) planning sessions.  Climate or environment would inevitably make the brainstorm flip chart but never make the cut.  As I assumed more responsibility, I echoed the accepted wisdom that emergency response meant ignoring environmental destruction and that climate change impact on populations in crisis was, well, intellectually quaint but hardly humanitarian.

The question:  Why is it only now that this topic has emerged as a major concern, if not as a core priority?  I mean, my mother is on the climate bandwagon! Even somebody like Jeremy Hunt can make the connection, ensuring that climate crisis will work for the political interests of his country and the Conservative Party. Why was the choir so late to the church?

This “But” bears closer examination within the sector. As Alternatives Humanitaires points out, way back in 2009, on the eve of the UN’s Copenhagen Summit on the environment, Christophe Buffet asked whether the humanitarian community was ready to tackle the issue of climate change. Were we too busy saving the world? Too dependent on donors?  Or did we just see it differently?  Here’s Jean-Hervé Bradol condemning the COP15 summit as a move to “dominate the Universe to the point of regulating global temperature variations”, a move harking back to “Man’s ancient plan to dominate Nature”. 

“And” #1

Why does a financially independent institution full of progressive do-gooders, of people interested in change and talented enough to deliver on it, consistently and rather easily dismiss responding to climate crisis, either by reducing its own footprint or by paying attention to the harm playing out almost everywhere it worked?  That (quasi-rambling) question is less rhetorical and more instructive than meets the eye.

There are three chunks of humanity.  Chunk 1 = Those on the bandwagon; Chunk 2 = those who will never get on the bandwagon; Chunk 3 = those in the middle, the potential bandwagoners.  In addition to addressing climate crisis programmatically, organizations like MSF should conduct and publish an internal analysis of how and why they missed the boat.  Because they didn’t simply miss the boat.

This was not a case of being unaware, but of how the structures, culture, leadership (je m’accuse!) and belief systems of an organization give rise to disregard, dismissal and dithering.  That lesson needs to be documented and shared, to begin unpacking the barriers to engagement and to move beyond overly simplistic strategies of raising awareness.  It is simply wrong to assume that facts or, worse still, moral grandstanding, will prove sufficient to move corporations, communities or people from Chunk 3 to Chunk 1.

Critique of Aid, Politics

The ethics of turning bad money into good?

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Let’s start with recent content: the hubbub surrounding Oxycontin-tainted donations from the Sackler Foundation “does not threaten but actually safeguards the commonplace acceptance of funding from tainted sources.”  That makes funding an ethical issue.

Accepting a donation constitutes action; and in the Sackler case the action constitutes one half of a symbiotic relationship between public do-goodery and private do-not-so-goodery.  That is to say, the ethical issue is a vexing one. As the New York Time’s art critic Roberta Smith points out (discussing the Sackler story), “this is the way museums survive and that rich people do, in fact, assuage their guilt by kind of giving back.”  Or, as one expert explained donors give in order to “shift attention from business practices that may strike some as unsavory.”

Hardly breaking news.  Yet a story, a situation, that the humanitarian sector too easily ignores. Are we really so willing to play the Marc Cohen of the foreign aid world?  The Winston Wolfe? Hired by donors to ensure that our life-saving programs cleanse the bloody muck out of their expensive cars?

Q1. Humanitarians worry all the time about not getting coopted or instrumentalized by political actors in war zone, so why are we such quiet customers in a market where the purveyors of opioids or violence or inequality can purchase their exoneration?  

Q2. Are we only cleaning up the muck, or enabling it?  Considering everything else the Saudis are dropping on Yemen, their dropping of $1B of humanitarian aid over the past two years is not simply hypocrisy.  

I know what you are thinking. Marc Cohen? The Wolf? That’s too harsh. Well, yes and no. We humanitarians do have good intentions on our side. Not so sure about Cohen or Wolf. Yet practice would suggest that we humanitarians regularly purchase our own forgiveness, that of both our donor public (relatively easy, but ??) and ourselves (much harder).  We are agency and donor rolled into one, where our good works or intentions are used to justify our compromised choices and harmful consequences.  

Look at the backlash against MP David Lammy’s bang-on criticism of Comic Relief’s celebrity ambassador Stacey Dooley use of the impoverished, pathetic-black-child-in-white-savior’s-arms trope.  As Dooley herself answers, Comic Relief funding has “saved” kids’ lives, and that presumably shuts down Lammy as if his criticism were killing babies somewhere in the world.  Judging by public comments, most agreed with Dooley and Comic Relief, failing to register Dooley’s contribution to the perpetuation of stereotypes (and media treatment of it) that undergird the very poverty of the child in her arms.

The sector cannot afford to ignore such avoidable cases of moral compromise, but on a more fundamental level, can it afford a more ethically strict fundraising code?  Purity would come at a high cost. I think that most of us accept that the principles of humanitarian fundraising must exclude the worst offenses and embrace considerable compromise in order for our programs and for our salaries to exist. Regardless, this needs much more deliberation and visibility within agencies.  Are we happy with our choices?  Are we concerned that times are changing?

The ethical risk here is deceptive and increasingly costly.  These funds pay for operations and corrode our moral authority, which often serves as a basis for action. (Let’s sidestep the question of whether humanitarians overestimate their own moral legitimacy.).  Good enough for the goose must be good enough for the gander.  If we are to raise our voice in frustration and pain at the deliberate destruction of human lives and human communities, then we must maintain a legitimacy that is grounded in standing on principle, lest the states and armed groups perpetrating these atrocities explain that they too must compromise in order to safeguard their vital interests.  Can we really protest the rising realpolitik sacrifice of ideals at the altar of national self-interest and political expediency while turning a mostly blind eye to the sources of our funding? Perhaps not a moral equivalence, but nonetheless a moral parallel that increasingly runs the risk of being called out by the very progressives who have supported our cause.

There is another option, of course.  As Marvel superheroes have done, perhaps we should acknowledge our own moral complexity and abdicate from our self-appointed role as global moral governor.  In other words, the sector could put the denunciatory finger of J’accuse into its pockets, allowing populations in crisis to issue their own denunciatory accusations, organize their own protests and take power against their own violators. It could be open about its own difficult compromises.  Note how this would reduce the reputational risk to the sector and at the same time protect humanitarian ideals by neither conceitedly nor paternalistically standing upon the pedestal of moral superiority.