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Critique of Aid

From good money to bad

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Ethics post #4

Money, scandal and the Royal Family …  we all love a headline with some spectacle, don’t we? No hint of sex but plenty of blood and potential for voyeurism as we watch the Sackler name hemorrhage its wealth-bought nobility. Plenty of outrage and righteousness as well, as we feed on charges that Sackler fortunes were considerably enriched by unleashing an opioid addiction epidemic.  

Spectacle, though, seems almost definitionally concerned with the tip of the iceberg. As museums say no to the Sacklers, humanitarians should pay attention, particularly to what lies beneath the surface.

The Sacklers were no small donors, charitably contributing piles of wampum to acquisitions and exhibitions across the major museums of the West. Their philanthropy helped establish a great deal of beauty in the world.  One common view is that the ends justify the means – ignore where the money came from as long as it is not illegal or scandalous (and hence reduce future donations).  After all, museums are purposed to house artistic endeavor, not advance one or another of thousands of social causes. In this view, the refusal of Sackler funding does not mean morally cleaner art; it means less art and less public accessibility to art.

And then there is the other view. Renowned photographer Nan Goldin fingered the Sackler family due to her own addiction to opioids, threatening to pull her work out of museums and staging protests. The story flared across the media. Donations from the Sacklers thus moved from philanthropic monuments to scandalous gestures (reputational risks).  Even so, for many museums the money proves too substantial to walk the path of refusal.

Humanitarian agencies are similarly thought of as public goods and moral actors.  They often act pragmatically or in institutional self-interest and they often act on the general moral principle of not taking dirty money.  Further, humanitarian power to act depends heavily upon moral legitimacy, and this prompts a more specific moral principle that often guides agency donor policy: whether or not there is a direct connection of the wealth being donated to the suffering of people affected by crisis. It is easy to understand why a health NGO might have more concern with accepting a grant from the pre-spectacle Sacklers than would, say, an environmental agency. 

Here is a first chunk of submerged iceberg. As I’ve blogged recently, our heightened awareness of the causes of crisis requires a new equation in humanitarian donor policy. “Given its increasingly clear role in the conflict and suffering to which we respond … is an enormous chunk of our support produced in the factories of inequality?” Otherwise said, what of the responsibility to interrogate the consequences on inequality of the business behind hedge fund philanthropy?  And if not inequality, perhaps the destruction of the environment or contribution to climate change?  Or maybe the uber-profitable generation of democracy-killing echo chambers and election fraud? 

This is where the spectacle above comes in.  Because what we have in that headline is not a museum, but the British Royal Family (the Prince’s Trust) cutting ties with the Sacklers. Now, I don’t want to pick on the Monarchy just to make a point (or maybe I do), but their wealth has a particular history, one fused with England’s colonial legacy of violence and destruction. The latter would seem to dwarf even the horrors of opioid addiction.  So what does it tell us when the human embodiment of Empire decides that Sackler money is too dirty?

It tells us that the vilification of the Sacklers does not threaten but actually safeguards the commonplace acceptance of funding from tainted sources. It installs a process whereby demonization of the most pathological masks the pathology of the norm.  At best, this marks the triumph of what Hannah Arendt might label ‘lesser evils.’  It seems more likely, however, that the spectacle of this headline marks a textbook example of how power works to preserve the status quo.  The Sacklers now define and embody the rule; they become not just the devil we know, but the way we picture the devil, the standard of what we relegate to devildom.  It may mean a little less art, but it does not herald a new ethical scrutiny of the way questionable money pays for seemingly unquestionable good works.

Stay tuned. Time to question the unquestionable? The second chunk of the submerged iceberg may be even more concerning.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

A new humanitarian ethics? Blog 3.

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Not completely out of work mode over the holidays, I hunted down this scene from Spectre, where James Bond meets his love-interest-to-be (Léa Seydoux’s Madeleine Swann). The writers introduce her via a cinematic masterclass in cutting the cloth of a character in only a few strokes.  First the visuals. She’s stunning, chic and exudes self-sufficiency to the point of frostiness. To top it off, she’s French.  Thus far: necessary but not sufficient.  How to signal her utter exceptionality?  From the mouth of Bond: “How does one train at Oxford and the Sorbonne, become a consultant, spend two years with Médecins sans Frontières … and end up here.”

A wave of disappointment. In the U.S. alone, Spectre opened in 3500 theatres. My elite club was now registering Kardashian appeal. OK, pride swelled my ego, but I didn’t really want to admit it.

It made sense.  MSFness as a character prop. MSFness as a signifier of a cool, rebellious commitment to ideals.  MSFness as the goop of the beautiful and the anointed. This MSFness that I hold so dear, my own Ferrari of humanitarian cred, increasingly bears resemblance to the sort of acquisition Choire Sicha finds in personal consumption. “Polo shirts, cars, houses, children, purebred dogs, washing machines, golf clubs, boats. These are things we buy as a shortcut to an identity.”  We must add to that the things we do, because in modern society we don’t just hold jobs and take holidays, we consume them, with a meaninfgul life reformulated as an accumulation of purchases and experiences.

Humanitarianess. No less than James Bond was hooked. So was I. So am I. We need to talk about this from an ethical perspective: the role played by humanitarian action as the personal champion of my self-image. This is my exploitation of humanitarianism’s winning formula in the competition for remarkability.  Among other traits, this is my self-curated individuality and selflessness – my ‘sacrificing’ a more common career that would have brought far greater financial reward.  But how can it be selfless if it goes so far to defining my self?

And let’s not be so negative. Work that matters.  Making a difference. Saving the world or just saving somebody. A contribution to the good of humanity. The admiration of those we admire. The praise of family and politicians and donors and beneficiaries. How much is this worth?  What price can be put on personal enrichment and contentedness? Better yet, how much should I be willing to pay for a life of purpose?  Seems a bargain now two generations (in my family) removed from a belief in God that might have conveyed similar spiritual fulfilment. Oh, and it’s lot cheaper than psychotherapy or a swish yoga retreat.

Since Henri Dunant this selfishness was certainly always present. Times, though, are changing, and humanitarianism is arguably ever more co-opted by the modern zeitgeist.  Does the next generation not require a more individualized, tangible participation in the good cause? Do they not possess a thirst to be seen embracing all the right thirsts?  Swipe right for humanitarian action. Can you name a more effective signifier of virtue?  Here is Rob Acker, CEO of Salesforce.org, speaking at a Davos panel hosted by IRIN: “Employees are the new humanitarians.… The number one attribute that millennials look for in their job is to have purpose. And companies need to give them that outlet for purpose.”

This is one example of what the IRIN article labels ‘the new players’, an assortment of newcomers to the humanitarian table who are “unapologetically redefining what it means to be humanitarian.”  A large part of me cringes, wanting to seal myself off in the comfort of humanitarianism’s exceptionality, in my club’s exclusivity.  Corporate humanitarians indeed! Yet I stop with the snobbery: we are not that different when it comes to the quest for purpose. 

Perhaps the more important question is whether this redefinition of humanitarians requires a similar redefinition of humanitarianism.  What happens if this changing of the guard exposes the sector’s ugly secret, the danger that my work has always been (ponderously) about me, then multiplied by the number of humanitarians?  

Even if that pushes cynicism too far, the point is the potential disruption of the charity model upon which the sector rests.  This life of purpose challenges the selflessness of our motivation and its insistence that benefits accrue unilaterally to the recipients of our beneficence.  Aid is not supposed to be self-interested.  Sure, we will admit that aid jobs earn us a decent wage and bring travel to exotic locations, but we treat those benefits more like incidentals.  We do not allow them to undermine the force of the charity model, and we rather easily sink into our faith in compassion as the ‘prime mover’ of our work.

The principle of humanity is compassion and it is definitive. As the sole motivation of humanitarian action it functions to distinguish it from other forms of relief aid. That ethical core needs to be discussed and it needs to change. In Madeleine Swann’s life prop, we can see that the ethics of humanitarian action must include a recognition of the dividends accruing to the humanitarian, and that nowadays act as a tax paid to us (and our organizations and donors) by the denigration of the ‘beneficiary’ to the lowly status of victim in need of being saved.  As I have written elsewhere, these are “the deeply engrained inequities of the Western charity model – plastering hierarchies such as rich/poor or developed/needy and giver/receiver or saviour/beggar upon nations, communities and people.” 

What might a better ethical model look like if not the charity model?  Perhaps it is useful (i.e., perhaps it helps deconstruct humanitarian power) to reconceptualize humanitarian action as an exchange, a transaction.  Not mere embodiments of compassion, but humanitarian action as an expression of mutual self-interest.

Critique of Aid

A new humanitarian Ethics? Blog 2

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[Updated 15 Nov 2018 to clarify that The 80,000 Hours is an organization of which there is a Cambridge club.  Apologies.]

The notion that humanitarian action must be ethical and that humanitarian action must be effective make for complicated bedfellows. As my recent paper argues, it seems a common trap for humanitarians work so hard on effective aid that its ethical character gets ignored.  For example, the need to act now now now that justifies, in seeming perpetuity, sidestepping downward accountability to local people.  Further and even more difficult from an ethical standpoint, accountability to the communities where the organization is not present: decision-making as to who will live or die . . .  is an inherently abusive power when it remains unaccountable for its […] determination of who will and (especially) who will not receive aid (p. 28). So it was incredibly refreshing to speak to a group of Cambridge students who have placed this challenge front and center in their lives.

Enter The 80,000 Hours:  Cambridge club!  That number represents the number of hours in a career.  The question the students here ask themselves – how to make those hours count the most for the good.  This is their quest for effective altruism.   They are working through the puzzle of how to be effective, such as by picking the most promising causes and working on the right problems.  They’ve even come up with some criteria to consider in making these career (or volunteering) decisions: “Working on a cause is likely to be high impact to the extent that it is:

  • Great in scale (it affects many people’s lives, by a great amount)
  • Highly neglected (few other people are working on addressing the problem), and
  • Highly solvable (additional resources will do a great deal to address it).”

Of course, being somewhat more jaded than the average member of Generation Z, I force fed them a heaping dose of my Debbie Downer alter ego.  And you know what? Thankfully, I don’t think it made a dent.

Mostly, I tried to convey the profound difficulty in identifying the best way to do things right and, more importantly, the most right things to do.  I spoke a great deal about the narrowness of our inquiry – evidence that might show activity X worked in doing Y, but does not in any way consider the unintended consequences or the opportunity costs.  I spoke about the deep biases in the way that we assess/perceive a given action as effective, and the even deeper bias involved in deciding upon the right thing to do.  I described our from viewing effectiveness through our humanitarian lens, which explains why people in long-term crisis (e.g., the now-worn example of the refugee who has spent her entire lifetime in Dadaab camp) do not feel that aid has done a good job of meeting their needs and yet the agency reports on that aid will show that it was a rousingly effective success.  Targets met.

Their questions showed a personal commitment to thinking about this quest for effective altruism.  One question in particular left me thinking.  A young medical student posed two possible futures for himself.  He could become an emergency doctor à la MSF – head out into the world to treat people in crisis.  But he asked if that was not too selfish, because he could work as plastic surgeon and make lots of money and achieve a greater quantity of good by donating half his earnings to an effective organization.  Which path, he asked.  I didn’t know how to answer (which didn’t stop me) and I still don’t know.

 

The discussion did not hit a dead end.  When pushed, I had to admit that constant critical questioning of our aid actions can be paralyzing, just as Do No Harm was paralyzing.  For me, the way forward is to press ahead, recognizing that harm will be done: an iterative process of taking the best decisions possible (humanity and impartiality at the fore) and then assessing again and again. But this is an iterative process that I found easier to declare than to operationalize.  The excitement to act holds a powerful allure: to act too often, though, without attention to bias, long-term effects, opportunity costs, negative consequences and the like.

To the students at Cambridge I counselled restraint.  Not restraint in pressing forward.  But restraint in the personal investment of humanitarians in their own actions; an investment that soon overtakes their ability or desire to question it much beyond an immediately useful analysis of whether it ‘worked’, whatever that means.

On the late train home to London it dawned on me that the central ethical issue of the evening’s discussion had absolutely nothing to do with the ethics of our humanitarian work today.  The faces of those students are the faces of tomorrow. We talk easily about the ethical responsibility to bequeath future generations, for example, a liveable planet. Do we humanitarians ever talk about our responsibility to the next generation of humanitarians?  To bequeath to them a sector in which the culture has not just rid itself of top-down programming and #Aidtoo violations, but is a culture in which the 80,000 hours are as effective and ethical as they can be because the culture is one of humanitarians asking themselves and acting upon the hard questions?

Critique of Aid, Politics

A new humanitarian ethics? Blog 1

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I had a Time Tunnel moment in September.  It started in a tricked out Landcruiser, crossing four rivers on a Road sans Bridges.

 

Doktari moment survived, I found myself sitting by the side of the MSF compound in Madaka, Niger State, Nigeria.  Off the grid.  A line of mango trees stretching to my right, following a small ford.  A few butterflies flitted among the rows of corn and okra planted by the team here, an atypical (for MSF) sign of having invested in living rather than just working somewhere.  Truth be told, the idyll was considerably killed by the grind of the generator and the glare from the warehouse’s zinc sheeting.

The field visit included one of those days where I move back to my 25-year-old self.  We bounced our way to Kawo village so that I could talk with the chief about MSF’s lead poisoning intervention.  The corn was in full bloom, his yard abuzz with people, chickens and a pair of playful goat kids.  One woman tended to an infant while the other, his wife (?), used a thin wooden paddle to spread rice across a small cement patio as if butter across toast. It would dry in the sun as rice had dried in the sun for the past thousand years.

The familiarity was strong, uplifting. The scene felt almost identical to scores (hundreds?) of visits during my stint in the Peace Corps, roughly a thousand miles west of here in a very similar landscape.  The chief dripped.  Our visit had interrupted his hoeing ridge beds into place for a field of yams. Even across translation I could sense he was awfully sharp. It would not be undue romanticization to say that there was a timeless dignity about him and the situation.  (But who am I to judge my own romanticization?  Doktari indeed!).

Reuben translated. My mind drifted, settling on a thought that appeared from nowhere. It was a thought that upset me. The scene shifted from one of timelessness to one of time-stoppedness. I am old now. I did not serve in the Peace Corps last year or even last decade. It was 35 years ago. Think back to life in 1983 (if you can even remember it): Apple sold its first Macintosh, Bananarama and Wham! topped the charts and on separate sides of the ocean Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher fast-tracked the ever-snowballing domination of personal wealth.  Kawo village suddenly seemed unjustly at home with a 35-year-old memory of life in these parts.

I thought of how fast and how far the world had come and what that meant in Madaka; touched, to be sure, but not touched enough. Really, what could I see? I could see rooves of aforesaid zinc instead of wood and thatch, and I could see that the children had been vaccinated.  There were plenty of road-beaten motorcycles instead of bicycles, and not a donkey cart in site, if in fact donkeys ever were a means of transport in rural Nigeria.  There were a number of generators and a few random spots where network coverage could be found. Broken plastic housewares lay strewn where once tin ones would have been banged into repair. Yet still, a dysfunctional school (one teacher for five grades of kids), no electricity (though poles had been erected the entire rutted length of the route from Kangara, no doubt in fulfilment of some campaign promise or worse still as part of a scheme to ‘eat’) and young men crowded idly around a market where very little was happening.  It was, simply, underdeveloped too much as used to be.

It is a short distance but a long way back to Abuja, passing a dense chunk of Nigeria’s 185 million people on the way back to a city that seems thoroughly 2018, with its glitzy shopping malls, luxury cars and a family activity centre offering rental pedal-boat swans.

The median age in the country is 18.4 and the youth in Nigeria are hungry for more.  Seems to me that represents equal parts massive potential and peril.  My first concern is neither the poverty nor the underdevelopment but the inequality, and how it will play out.  The gap isn’t widening, it’s flaring. The wealthy are, quite literally, flying off.  And these days the gap isn’t a simply an enduring economic phenomenon, but the manifestation of our deep-seated primate pecking order now supercharged by burgeoning infrastructures of comparison.  The people in Madaka and Kawo villages can see and covet and strive for a life on swan lake. Or New York and London, for that matter.

This inequality represents a fundamental unasked question facing the humanitarian sector.  Given its increasingly clear role in the conflict and suffering to which we respond, what is its role in the donations that pay for our salaries and services? In grim terms: To what extent is an enormous chunk of our support produced in the factories of inequality?  As I set it down in a previous blog,  perhaps Peter Buffett explains it better: Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left.

Even in a sector that seems at time rather mad for money, most humanitarian agencies would avoid (on ethical grounds) donations from the defense industry or diamond miners. Hedge fund managers, such as Buffett’s father? Shouldn’t neutrality go beyond examining relationships with political and military actors in a given conflict and towards neutrality with respect to the conflict’s drivers? What does it mean that the sector has been captured not just by governments but by the financial and philanthropic elite?

Let’s go further. To what extent do our humanitarian works underwrite inequality (in Buffett’s terms: Do the answers delivered by the right hand purchase the destructive capacities of the left one?). This is the problem of moral licensing, where the human subconscious turns good wine into bad. It suggests that supporting charitable work enables people (and governments) to do harm by helping them maintain their feeling and perception of being good. Like the UK government justifying its military support to Saudi Arabia with proud declarations of its humanitarian aid to Yemen.  In other words, is the humanitarian system the sectoral equivalent of a Free Ethical Whitewashing Card ?

That question applies not just to governments and the philanthropic scions of inequality but to humanitarians like me and the organizations we work for.  Does our humanitarian work enable us to maintain self-image in the face of all that we ignore?

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

The New Humanitarian Basics

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ODI/HPG’s 2017 Constructive Deconstruction efforts helped produce my think piece The New Humanitarian Basics – an alternative humanitarian action “that is responsive, ethical and attainable” and also “less paternalistic, bureaucratic and expansive in its ambitions.”  I’ll try blogging a few of the paper’s central themes, because it works better as a discussion piece than as a blueprint. In this blog I pick up the gauntlet thrown by one humanitarian who (managed to) read it. Here is what ‘Archie’ writes:

How does that work when the government is a belligerent with a legitimate interest in winning a war yet a less-than-moral (or worse) approach to the means necessary to attain that end which is an invariable / depressing reality of violent conflict.

He’s referring to two intertwined pillars of the vision: (1) an immediate shift to the primacy of the state (national authorities) in delivering/coordinating response to crisis (a rather simple and long-agreed concept); and (2) actual ‘localization’ (i.e., not the corrupted version that Christina Bennett concludes “reinforce[s] the very dynamics they are meant to be changing.”).

I see Archie’s question as two-fold: (a) an emerging world order’s challenge to hegemonic international humanitarian intervention, and (b) the challenge to the well-protected image of the organization (i.e., its projection of moral purity that is such a key to fundraising, public support and esprit de corps). This blog deals with the former.

A New World Order

Trending up: the primacy of the state, the longstanding call for national authorities to take up their responsibility, the imperative of localization.  This fast-evolving relationship of aid agencies to the national and local challenges power dynamics and challenges the effectiveness of current humanitarian praxis, especially in a conflict setting.  Partly this is a challenge to action – is the agency able to ensure that aid reaches those most in need (impartiality)?  Partly a challenge to perceptions, and hence to agency trust, access and local reputation.  And, as Archie writes, it is partly the challenge posed by a twisted world: by rooting the response in the national authorities the result (e.g., in South Sudan) might be “to put money into the hands of the 5th brigade in Western Upper Nile whose intent [is] to massacre and chase away the Dok Nuer”. Not pretty.

My instinct is to be evasive.  The problem is a thorny one, even if too narrowly framed.  But let’s not debate the framing of the question. In fact, let’s not debate.

Archie is right. I have spelled out a humanitarian action that is far less within the control of the international humanitarian system. That does not create a new problem. Humanitarian agencies work within the boundaries imposed by governments all the time.  This is where they most loudly decry the lack of ‘humanitarian space’ (even though they work in somebody else’s house). Still, humanitarian programs often deliver. By way of extreme example, look at the national Red Cross Societies, who comprise actual auxiliaries of the state.  So not new, but this ‘vision’ certainly exacerbates existing challenges.

Negotiated access will become more necessary and more difficult in a response governed by the host state, especially where that host acts with what humanitarians perceive as bad intent. Impartiality, independence and neutrality provide guidance, but actual control by national authorities will in some contexts alter the nature of assistance and protection. As the paper anticipates, perhaps there will be contexts where agencies provide relief tout court (much-valued relief!) because they are too compromised to be considered humanitarian in their actions (in that context). In other words, there will be places where aid agencies transparently choose not to act under the humanitarian label, in order to avoid further undermining the meaning of that specific designation (see here for more on this). (Hopefully, they will also be strategizing on how to better implement the principles and hence become humanitarian with time).  And perhaps there are places where agencies will have to say no, taking a principled stand in the face of unacceptable compromises. That is a freedom and a responsibility they possess (one not available to the RC Societies).

Unlike impartiality, I note that the principles of independence and neutrality are not absolutes but guideposts that are regularly (always?) forcibly compromised by the context of humanitarian action. They are also a means to the ends of access and impartiality, hence wrongly viewed in puritanical terms, where the perfection of the principle acts as a barrier to access and delivery. Don’t get me wrong, adherence to the principles “helps build the trust and acceptance that is critical to (though no guarantee of) access to people in crisis” (p. 12); but changing power dynamics necessitate rethinking how they are or are not operationalized.

Moreover, any apparent agreement with Archie is oversimplified. A call for more robust negotiated access leaves too much systemic baggage in place. Humanitarians must not simply and grudgingly accept that the ‘golden age’ of unfettered access to people in crisis is trending towards extinction, they must understand that this is a good thing, even though it will have negative consequences in certain contexts.  To begin with, the obvious: nowhere in the West can you find foreign powers with unfettered access, implementing locally unaccountable programming.

Hence, as the paper argues, humanitarians must interrogate and move beyond “the facile conclusion that the humanitarian principles are best preserved by state-avoiding methodologies.” (p. 27). Underpinning the sector’s state-avoidance lies a host of powerful assumptions, including a false binary between visions of a monolithic bad/evil/corrupt state and a saviorist/moral humanitarianism.  It would help to recognize that many elements within any state have an interest in responding to the needs of people in crisis.  Further, as Andrew Cunningham astutely concludes, INGOs should recognize the degree to which they need states.  In other words, humanitarians need to change the way they think.

More importantly, though, is the degree to which Archie’s challenge masks a sector that is full of itself, deeply presumptive of its moral authority and of the effectiveness of its actions. There is a fundamental flaw in this practice of a highly self-interested, Western, unaccountable sector passing judgment on a state’s right to govern.  This is not about principles. This is about power. That is for my next blog post.

Critique of Aid

Four Ideas that

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… I have been thinking about but have not had time to blog.

  1. A confederacy of shitholes.

It has been some months since Donald Trump (apparently) plastered that label across a large chunk of the global South not named Australia.  One has to be surprised by the depth of irony in the humanitarian reaction, which seemed predictably incensed that Trump could be so racist and stupid but which also seemed, just as predictably, rather delusional on their own role in this affair. How far from the truth would it be to suggest that the humanitarian system is no stranger to loudly promoting a fair amount of shitholiness when it comes to these same contexts plastered by Trump?  For the President, at least, ignorance seems a likely excuse.

2. The Wrong Red-Line.

The problem with lines in the sand is that they tend to generate a binary: on one side you’re ok, but on the other side you’re screwed. Saints and sinners.  The use of chemical weapons, we are told, marks not just any line, but a red line. Recent history in Syria, Macron’s or Obama’s own words, validate this. The problem, of course, is that the prohibition on the use of chemical weapons is not so much a red line as a special line. The red lines of warfare prohibit the deliberate bombing of schools, hospitals and playgrounds. I guess that means they prohibit the deliberate bombing of schools, hospitals and playgrounds over and over and over again.  Red lines also prohibit the blockades on humanitarian assistance, starvation of civilian populations, torture and mass murder.

The next question is painfully obvious. Does a bright red line being drawn on the use of chemical weapons relegate the rest of international humanitarian or human rights law to a set of yellowish lines? Obvious, but what is our answer and where is it in public discourse? A less obvious question: What red lines do we as humanitarians draw, and why? Are we unwilling to defend the legal and moral red line against violence targeting civilians because it is a defense that fails to generate sufficient political traction or media attention? Do we effectively decide to sell out less sexy red lines in the name of needing to be heard?

3. The Zuckerberg Defleption (a manoeuvre that merges deflection with deception).

The red line Mark Zuckerberg has artfully drawn in the sand, complete with a mea culpa and genuine-sounding remorse, is the wrong one. It’s also a brilliant sleight of hand.  We now have the crime: releasing or selling our personal data to unscrupulous outside parties. We can now ignore the original crime: Facebook harvesting and selling our data to everyone else (so long as they do not interfere with the democratic process but merely seek to stufficate our lives and kill the planet by targeting us with psycho-personalized dreams directly attainable through the consumption of their products and services)

It seems past time the humanitarian sector establishes its distance from the likes of Facebook, Google, or Microsoft. I have no doubt they will find their way into the most remote corners of our humanitarian world, but do we have to serve as the vector for their spread? Of course, there are incredibly effective uses for their apps/services. But that should not blind us to data (identity) harvesting, echo chambers (just what we need in the midst of ethnic or religious strife), internet porn and what George Monbiot calls the ‘infrastructure of comparison’.

4. Downward accountability? Or asking them to do our job?

There is an entire industry of humanitarian policy wonks calling for downward accountability to beneficiaries. And regardless the ineffectiveness of power bequeathing accountability to the less powerful, it seems more realistic than waiting for our beneficiaries to seize it. Is that good enough? I do believe I’ve declared downward accountability an ethical requirement on a number of occasions. What if I have this wrong? What if this disguises an unethical outsourcing of our own work? An offloading of our own baggage?  I mean, why should people in crisis be forced to ensure the accountability of our projects because we can’t seem to manage them in a way that accountability overrides self-interest? Aren’t they struggling to survive crisis, overcome with grief, adapting to social upheaval, or find tomorrow’s meal? The last thing they should be asked to do is help us to achieve our oft-repeated good intentions and help us to satisfy donor requirements. Finally, I note that we don’t ask this of crisis-affected people in our own societies – it would be shouted down. In the West we have watchdog groups, journalists, and governments that watch over the do-gooders.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Bad apples vs good eggs

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The Oxfam scandal leaves me closer to paralysis than clarity. (Not a good start for the next 1000 words.).

The aid industry desperately needs to overreact, for the pendulum to swing pitilessly against the fortifications of its unaccountable power and faith in its mission.  At the same time, the aid industry desperately needs to avoid scapegoating Caligula-esque abusers such as Roland van Hauwermeiren if it is to change.

The obvious has been said – the scandal is a function of the system, not of bad apples. Bad apples exist everywhere. They are but a symptom of an aid system that struggles to recognize (let alone correct) the manner in which such extremes of abuse are rooted in the everyday inequitable power relationships and weak accountability that permeate so much of the humanitarian enterprise. Getting rid of bad apples is a good thing, but we still need to deal with the tree. To rephrase: the problem is power, not abuse of power.

Where to start? Check out Jennifer Lentfer’s #AidToo mourning of issues that need to change – the ‘interpersonal, gendered, historical, economic, and geopolitical power imbalances’ or ‘our misogyny, our racism, our exploitation and extraction, our history, our willful ignorance, our current reality’.  I couldn’t agree more.  How to say anything fresh?

Trying not to repeat what has been written elsewhere, here are three thoughts on how to grasp the problem.

  1. Lose the assumption of (belief in) our individual goodness.

We humanitarians seem to have an entrenched need to be viewed as and view ourselves as special, as being good as opposed to just working towards it. This defines us; it separates us from our stereotyped image of bankers or lawyers or corrupt politicians. Even where we acknowledge our shortcomings and failures (even discussing them ad nauseum), we do so on the limited grounds of effectiveness and effort, not ethics. How do we go about chopping down our moral overconfidence? Perhaps we can start with opinions that should be read even if it hurts to read them.

There are smart people out there for whom the problem is not those we call the bad apples, but the ones we think of as ‘good eggs’ – the everyday aid worker who forms part of a system inescapably linked to its ‘colonial hinterlands’.  That’s me. I am part of the problem. And so are many of you.  Where I depart from Hirsch’s polemic is her belief that these flaws wholly define me. I am part of the problem (and so are many of you), but I am not only part of the problem (and neither are you).  We can be part of the solution. How? I think it will take us owning the problem in a different way by owning it as agencies and as individuals.  In the form of a logical equation: the aid system is synonymous with imbalanced power + power corrupts + corruption is a form of abuse = personal ownership of abuse cannot be restricted to the Caligulas.

  1. Change the public narrative.

As I and many others have written before, there is much wrong with the humanitarian narrative. Three persistent problems: its reduction of people in crisis to helpless victims, its double-chocolate fudging of our success topped with the creamy concealment of failure, and its holier-than-thou finger pointing. While some have been rightly concerned with the impact of this narrative upon others, it now seems more important to address our having become a prisoner to its narrative force. For instance, we fear having an open discussion of failure and so do not learn from it. We create enormous reputational risks for ourselves – so a Daily Mail article highlighting a botched project leaves half the public apoplectic with shock and surprise. At what? At what should be a common story of precarious circumstances and wickedly complex choices not working out.  Worse still, as the Oxfam scandal has shown, we set ourselves up as an international Jimmy Swaggart, our narrative of global moral rectitude generating a public that clearly wants to believe in us, invest in us, and yet feels both indignation and vengeance at the fall of the sanctimonious.

  1. Fight the entitlement.

Everybody knows the saying ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ Humanitarians know they hold lots of power, but somehow don’t really believe it. That’s because we’re special (see #1). We systematically fail to anticipate our own corruption. Why? Because that’s how power works. Just ask any politician, especially one of the fallen. They never see it coming.

The issue is not just about power, it is about the corruption that takes an individual from power to a sense of entitlement. As this Economist article explains, (brilliant!) research has demonstrated that that ‘people with power . . . think [it] is justified break rules not only because they can get away with it, but also because they feel at some intuitive level that they are entitled to take what they want.’ So the ‘sacrifice’ of our aid work and the power we wield and the powerful self-belief in our goodness produce people who are inclined to believe that it is OK to engage in what we know is wrong for others.  This is the notion of privilege, a word which, as the Economist points out, defines a ‘private law’.

I pray for the pendulum, that these and other reflections on the grey do not dampen the black and white fervor aiming to exorcise the bad apples (sexual cowboys and others) and the culture of acceptance that has empowered them for so long.  I also pray we are not one major earthquake away from the status quo snapping back.

 

 

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

If you’re happy and you know it…

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I am not the first humanitarian to owe an apology to the people of Somalia.  Somalia is one of my go-to catastrophes.  Have an audience and need an example? The all-purpose Somalia does the trick: starvation, war, GWOT, counter-terrorism legislation, diversion of aid, refugees, ethnic conflict, climate change, cholera, co-opted aid agencies, murder/kidnapping of  aid workers, displacement etc etc.

Somalia is no longer a nation but an archetype of a certain kind of nation, joining (depending on the day) South Sudan, DRC or CAR in a string cite of intractable, unfathomable brutality, drought, destitution and conflict.  These are the contexts that substantiate the humanitarian case for why delivering compassionate aid to others is a necessary part of our world.  They nourish our system just as we feed theirs. (And by way of confession, I talk about Somalia though I’ve never been there.  Again, I’m not the first humanitarian to take that license.)

I recently did work that involved taking a closer – though geographically removed (Nairobi) – look at the situation in Somalia, now mired in the yet another staggering drought, only five years removed from the 2011/12 crisis (drought, conflict…) that killed upwards of 250,000 Somalis. At first, nothing I saw or heard challenged my narrative of Somalia the profoundly a tragic context. In blunt terms: one of the worst places on Earth.  Think about that: me declaring it one of the worst places on Earth.

In the course of those interviews, though, I began to notice another story – Western aid workers recounting how the ‘mood’ of the people – seems quite different.  Experienced humanitarian hands used the term ‘optimistic’ to describe how many Somalis felt.  Not what I was expecting, and sufficiently weighty to pierce my own confirmation bias.

Further reinforcement?  A recently published set of surveys from (the excellent) Ground Truth shows a full  35 percent of Somali respondents felt that life is improving ‘very much’ for people in Somalia, while another 41 percent said it was ‘mostly’ improving. In fact, only 6 percent answered that it wasn’t.

Not convinced? Back home, I stumbled across the recent National Geographic issue (November 2017) on happiness, including findings from the World Happiness Report.  This scientific study ranks Somalia in 5th place in Africa, quite distant from the other members of my string cite of misery. South Sudan placed 37th, and CAR was 44th – dead last. Here’s a stunner of a finding: Somalia yielded a higher ‘daily happiness’ rating than either the UK or USA. Most of Eastern Europe wasn’t even close.

We need to let that sink in.  We really need to think hard about the looping narratives by which we define Somalia, yet another narrative divide between a the perceptions of an international aid community looking down and a people looking up. For me, our unchallenged authority to problematize Somalia needs to be at the center of the localization agenda (displacing the turf war over funding?).  Note: it is a power that fits well with our proverbial humanitarian hammer’s bias in seeing a world of nails.

Conclusion?  The redistribution of power within the humanitarian system should be judged by percentages of funding flows and by the inability of the external system to reduce a country such as Somalia to conflict, corruption, drought, crisis and death. Absent that shift, we will continue to miss the opportunity to tap into the optimism felt by so many of Somalis, to explore with them more inspired options for international action in times of crisis. And in this, Somalia is not alone.

[This post was updated (a number of small edits) on December 23rd]

Addendum December 27th.   I came across this as I rushed to the supermarket on Christmas Eve, a few recipe-saving purchases for the next day’s big dinner.

Some messages are universal, meaning they resonate at the level of the nation or society and for each and every individual. As the localization agenda evolves, I look forward to the ‘local’ finding different ways to say Here we are!

 

Critique of Aid

Evidence vs Evidence

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Let’s get one thing out of the way. This is a blog post and a not-so-subtle plug for an upcoming webinar. Check out our panel discussion – it’s part of Humanitarian Evidence Week. We’ll be working counter intuitively, taking a critical look at the call for the greater use of evidence in humanitarian decision-making.

That humanitarians should use evidence to identify the greatest needs of crisis-affected people seems like a pretty good idea.  Similarly, it seems a rather unassailable proposition to use evidence to decide what works and what doesn’t work, or what works more effectively/efficiently.

In the webinar, we aim to discuss the shortcomings and challenges in the way humanitarians use evidence, or the gaps in its quality. Importantly, that discussion will be placed within the humanitarian context.  These are not lab conditions. Uncertainty cannot be eliminated, and will often remain substantial.  The deep political pressures which characterize humanitarian crisis cannot be sidestepped, and often undermine the technocratic establishment of programming.  It is in this complex, dynamic, politicized, inhumane context that humanitarians must take decisions. To seek evidence that provides final answers is often, then, to seek an unattainable perfection.

As a webinar, the critique of sector’s use of evidence will try to remain concrete. Nonetheless, fuzzier questions abound.  Chief among them: Why it is that this sector will spend somewhere around $29B this year on the basis of faith, on the basis of its self-belief that its efforts are necessary, efficient and effective? Put differently, why has it been OK that we simply imagine our goodness? This strikes me as both a cultural issue and a structural one.  Humanitarian action lacks incentives that push in the direction of needing and therefore developing evidence.  Across the entire chain of command, from the field project to the board of directors, and over the past decades, why have so few been insisting upon proof?  My evidence-free answer: Maybe we don’t really want to know.

Looking further at the issue, recent research has shown that the cultural problem is in part a problem of multiple cultures. Practitioners and academics have very different ways of thinking about evidence, about the questions they wish to answer, and hence the nature of the data they need to collect.  Another issue is that all of this ignores the degree to which the localization of humanitarian response requires the localization of our understanding of evidence and its uses.  I don’t hear anybody talking about the risk of exporting our Western ‘scientific method’, let alone our evidence-challenged ways of working.

Finally, in the big picture, this evidence gap is a cousin or perhaps child of our accountability gap.  As such, how likely is it that we can engineer the closing of this gap by external pressure, such as pressure from donors demanding more evidence, or our own internal resolution to emphasize evidence-based programming?  We’ve seen this before.  At least in terms of accountability, two decades of trying to manufacture accountability has not produced much accountability. Our incentives, structure and culture push in a different direction. To make matters worse, one could argue that the big donors are asking for evidence not to know if things work, but to prove to sceptical politicians that things work. In the end, do these combined pressures – set within an aid sector rife with fudged narratives of success – generate evidence that is biased from within? Another evidence-free conclusion: faith and imagination will get us closer to the effective programming than bad evidence.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Localization

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Localization — the agenda formerly intending a shift of humanitarian power?

The Good

The one year anniversary of the World Humanitarian Summit’s ‘Grand Bargain’ offers time to take stock of progress.    At a conceptual level, a key goal of the Grand Bargain is to drive the humanitarian sector towards the irrefutable good of contextualizing its work: re-imagining a humanitarian action that departs from top-down, cookie-cutter approaches and empowers programming that is borne in and is effective in meeting the needs of people within a specific context.  It will do so by shifting greater focus and cash to responders, a departure from a system based on the near monopoly of international aid conglomerates. We call this the localization agenda, even though a more neutral perspective would grasp the humanitarian system as already suffering from an over-localization (in the West).

The Bad

Let us imagine this contextualization in full bloom, a localization that moves beyond its current emphasis on the location of the funding recipient and beyond even the crucial focus on meaningful participation/involvement of local communities. To truly embody the shift in power first envisioned by the localization agenda, it should also comprise a locally-driven rethink of how to address people’s needs. How do we build the freedom for that rethink to occur? How do we avoid the seemingly unstoppable bulk transfer of managerial systems, best-practices and standardized (read: homogenized) methodologies that decontextualize humanitarian assistance in the first place?

This ongoing stampede of North-to-South ‘capacity building’ exercises risks producing globalization instead of localization, a kicking of the humanitarian can down bumpy local roads. [link] We already know the contents of this can — dozens of colourful guidelines on the same topic, neatly venned organizational processes and tick-box exercise after tick-box exercise to ensure quality control.  As the NEAR Network has declared: “Local actors have had more than 30 years of supposed capacity building and ‘partnership principles’ which has not resulted in any significant gains.”

This Trojan Horse of sectoral bureaucracy accompanies a more insidious globalization as local responders clamber for direct funding from Western donors. As I have written elsewhere, the prospect of local agencies tethering themselves to the soft power and avowedly self-interested geo-political ambitions of Western donor funding has already proven itself a debilitating experience for the Western INGO.  We must also guard against the globalizing effects of reducing localization to a donor-driven search for cheap labor, a rationale of efficiency gains by which localization reduces transaction costs by decreasing layers.

More deeply, localization must pierce the imposition of our (globalized) world view, and the universalist approach to exporting our truths, even where the underlying values may be universal in nature.  In other words, humanitarian ideals may be universal, but the architecture and processes designed to realize and defend those deals must be seen as a rather localized product of history and geography.  Let’s not confuse universal with sacred cow.

The Ugly

It has taken nine months of discussion to settle simple questions because they came burdened by complex institutional consequences: What is a local responder? What does ‘as directly as possible’ mean? To answer simply requires only an understanding of the catalyst for the localization push – the spectacular North-South power imbalance and inequitable distribution of resources within the humanitarian sector.  As it turns out, local responders were effectively shut out of owning the local response, even though often sub-contracted to deliver it. One stat summed up the embarrassing state of affairs: a mere 0.4% of international humanitarian assistance in 2015 went directly to national and local NGOs, a situation that makes global inequality look relatively tame.

The definitional debate, however, has compromised this clear intent. The accommodation of political and bureaucratic interests means that a local outpost of a billion-dollars-per-year INGO could be considered ‘local’, and that funding funnelled to local responders via the same old rent-extracting Western INGO intermediaries may count towards the Grand Bargain’s target of going 25 percent local (an issue still to be settled).

Proponents of localization take note.  Lesson 1: wealth and power are not so easily captured. Lesson 2: a logic of localization based on effectiveness and efficiency favors the status quo.

Lost in these debates over effectiveness and efficiency, lost in the scramble of trying to establish INGO standards of financial accounting in smaller, differently-developed local organizations, is any notion of localization as an ethical undertaking. The modern humanitarian sector is founded upon the principle of humanity, that a fundamental human dignity resides within each one of us.  There, we should house the right to self-determination and the ability to possess at least some degree of power over the forces affecting one’s life.

Enter the humanitarian machine at a time of crisis, wielding its monopoly power over decision-making as to who will live or die. That is an abusive power inhering in its unaccountable decisions as to who will and who will not receive aid.  That is a sovereign power being held by a non-sovereign body. It is time then for a realization that localization may or may not yield either effectiveness or efficiency, but those laudable goals should not be the standards by which it is ultimately judged. The ‘decolonization’ of humanitarian action constitutes an ethical mission, not simply a technocratic one; a transfer of power not merely from international to local agencies but from an alien civilization to a home society. Accepting such a meaningful transformation (read: loss) will not be easy for people like me. But our humanitarian action in their house? Time to admit that we haven’t exactly gotten it right, and the principle of humanity means that they should hold the power to get it wrong.

[7 July 2017.  In response to comments that the original blog misstated certain elements, changes were made to the second paragraph of The Ugly.]