Category Archives: Our Western Identity

Our Western Identity

The New Humanitarian Basics (blog 2)

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At the core of the humanitarian enterprise lie the twinned tendencies of being highly self-centred and poorly self-aware.  Add to that mix the power of the core aid sector to shape the humanitarian narrative and what you have is the systemic equivalent of nationalism – the difficulty to see the world in any other way.

My paper is one attempt to provoke a degree of self-awareness. However, as my friend ‘Archie’ argues, this proposal for a future humanitarianism looks ugly in places (see my previous blog). Actually, he suggests, it doesn’t even look like humanitarianism, as it would seem to increase the number of people who are suffering.  To some extent, this might be true, especially if measured through the humanitarian lens.

The answer? The sector must learn to embrace certain types of ugly. Why? Because the humanitarian lens is fine for humanitarians, but not for a society that is so much more than the location of a crisis.

DRC provides an example. The UN has declared/signed/affirmed time and again the primacy of the home state in crisis response (see, e.g., the Sendai Framework or conclusions of the World Humanitarian Summit).  The sector has seemingly signed up to that pledge. Until it hasn’t. What happened when the government of DRC boycotted the UN’s major aid conference, upset with the portrayal of its country as a humanitarian basket case? The UN agencies and the INGOs quickly asserted their collective paternalistic right to know better. (And trust me, I see DRC the way the sector sees it). But ‘time to let go’ means time to embrace (in some places) the ugly.  Localization means localization, not localization but only until you disagree with its outcomes or judge yourself better able to do it. In my vision, listening to the Congolese government is not ideal, but it is a less worse option than international governance. Just like accepting the US government’s refusal to accept aid from Cuba in response to Hurricane Katrina.

What is missing from the humanitarian lens? First and foremost is the ethical component of humanitarian action, and the way the humanitarian sector’s framing fails to place value on people struggling to overcome their own problems (i.e., self-determination).  In this regard, the paper points to “a ‘decolonisation’ – a transfer of power not merely from international to local agencies, but also from a ‘global’ to a home society.” (p. 28). Should last century’s political decolonization have been blocked in anticipation of states whose homegrown leaders proved even more brutal or greedily indifferent than the colonial powers? Of course not.  And neither should the presence of bad or incompetent states impede the decolonization of humanitarian action.

Second, humanitarians must stop hiding behind their self-serving conceptualization of effectiveness; removing their blinders to the fact that their effectiveness is just that, a self-serving construct.  As Jeremy Konyndyk describes in his recent analysis of the humanitarian business model, the humanitarian system “shapes interventions to conform to agencies’ mandates regardless of the priorities of crisis-affected populations”. A hammer sees a world of nails, and hence success equals having driven X number of nails into Y pieces of wood.  In short, the metric of humanitarian intentions and success – the moral crusade by which it usurps the power of the state – isn’t just a foreign metric, it is a skewed metric.

Even worse than the slanted view of its own effectiveness is the failure of humanitarian action to calculate the impact of its occupation of the crisis response space.  The humanitarian system does not simply respond, it aggressively preserves its market and the predominance of an emergency response that cannot alleviate structural problems or satisfy the full range of human aspiration.  So, for example, the power of the sector’s advocacy, amplified by a mass communication capacity often greater than the entirety of local civil society, means that “the urgent displaces the important (the systemic or structural) in perpetuity.” (p. 6).

As the sector clamors for the urgent, is there room for a state or a community to say no, to conclude that it might be better to invest in the long-term, not the immediate? Are we willing to allow a state to let children fall ill today because it wants to prioritize building the school system of the future?  Are we at least willing to admit that this is not our decision, given that we do not have skin in the game, except for the powerful skin of self-interest in preserving the supremacy of humanitarian action and our personal sense of contribution?

Lastly, where in our calculations of effectiveness do we consider the opportunity costs? With regard to occupation, if the sector were to stand back, what might evolve in the same space?  Would states step up and take more direct responsibility? As research into the West Africa Ebola outbreak concluded, the “state’s capacity to deal with needs and crises is partly a function of how socially embedded it is in the first place.” Do states in the global south have the same freedom enjoyed by Western nations – the freedom to struggle without being subjected to foreign intervention?

This cost undermines the development of the social contract, a lengthy process necessarily full of blunders, as was evidenced by the early months of Liberian or Sierra Leonean Ebola response.  But those governments learned and grew enormously over the course of the epidemic, in part because the humanitarian community lacked the power/willingness to take command.  Ebola is not a lone example. As the Economist recently reported, the response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake marked a critical juncture in the development of the trust between the government and civil society with regard to crisis response, a reversal (though as yet incomplete) of the Communist Party’s deep suspicions.

The point is not that humanitarians are wrong to intervene.  It is that humanitarians are wrong to assess their interventions through such narrow framing, one that produces projects which hit targets but ignores too many other benefits and costs.  Of even greater concern is that humanitarians ignore the real challenges, like stopping war or ending severe poverty. “The best thing the aid system can do is step aside and stop confusing the issue with projects that help small groups and divert attention from the central issue.” – Tony Vaux, Trumped-up Aid and the Challenge of Global Poverty.

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.

Our Western Identity, Politics

A dog’s life

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Consider this an addendum to my previous post.  There, I waded into the aid system’s #MeToo / #AidToo deliberations.  Across the aid system we see agencies dealing with ‘bad apples’, holding difficult conversations and exploring initiatives that promise improvement.  This recent IRIN panel discussion and accompanying articles explore a number of ‘solutions’.

A caution: we should heed the lessons of past experience and avoid false binaries.  Great that the system invests in pruning the bad apples and building better safeguarding or whistleblowing programs and procedures.  But it must equally maintain a healthy dissatisfaction with such an approach, understanding that such reforms mollify calls for deeper changes, and hold steep opportunity costs in a overstretched system.

Deep changes? Easier said than done, as illustrated by my previous blog’s three suggestions.  Nobody disagrees that the system also needs to address more fundamental causes.  The problem is the rarity of plausible suggestions. Can I defend my offering of ‘food for thought’ if the system cannot and could never swallow it?   Do we already know that my call for deep changes is a call for pigs to have wings? NRC’s Joel Charny responded to my blog with a tweet that’s hard to disagree with:

https://twitter.com/CharnyJ/status/971738294110294016

The problem is that messiah complex coupled with the marketing imperative to maintain or grow leads us down path of delusions of grandeur.

I have raised some of these concerns myself. What if we can’t dump the savior routine, because it runs through the heart of our authority to act, our model of recruitment, and our financial support from the public and donor agencies? In other words, what if we are addicted to being messiahs?

Until February 4th, I had no answer.  Now I have two, adapted from the WORLD CHAMPION PHILADELPHIA EAGLES.  That’s right, I’m from Philadelphia and the Eagles won the Super Bowl.

The first is the story of being an underdog. Jason Kelce’s profanity laced speech captures it perfectly. Nobody believed the Eagles were any good because, because, because. So even though they had the best record, earned the top seed in the playoffs and held home field advantage, few of the pundits or even the money guys (the Vegas betting houses) picked the Eagles to win its first playoff game, its second playoff game or the Super Bowl itself.  After their first playoff win against Atlanta, star players Chris Long and Lane Johnson wore dog masks. It built miraculously from there, solidifying and motivating a team, capturing a public. Underdogs. That was the story and that was the team’s fire.

For us humanitarians, the point is that as an underdog, as opposed to as a savior, we would be free to engage honestly with the public about aid’s complexities (read: snafus, failures, missed targets, bad behaviour, unintended consequences, etc.). We would be free to play the role of sidekick. We would be free to take risks and fail.  And the public would love us (read: fund us) because we are underdogs, trying our best against insurmountable odds.  As this Forbes article notes:  There’s something intrinsically human about the tale of an underdog, and it taps into our capacity to hope for the future and dream big.

The second is one of Eagles head coach Doug Pederson’s mantras: “An individual can make a difference, but a team can make a miracle.”  If I think about my own performance, I wonder if I was too often trying to make a difference rather than aiming for outcomes of more collective, outsized dimensions. An old story: Aid strategy, be it programmatic design or systemic transformation, needs to be steeped in (rather than selectively blind to) an analysis of aid’s political economy. I now think that we also need a parallel analysis, one that comes to understand aid through a political – psychological analysis of the humanitarian. Making a difference may sound good, but it doesn’t seem to be adding up.

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!

 

Our Western Identity

Headlines of Harvey

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Have you heard about the Cajun Navy?  Google it.  644,000 hits. The Cajun Navy is not a one-off story, it is one of the top Hurricane Harvey storylines. If I had to sum it up: ordinary people coming together in the face of extraordinary adversity to save the lives of other people.  Mother with small children stuck in waist deep water? Some bass fisherman on a boat will haul them out.  Elderly man drowning in a car?  A human chain forms and performs the rescue.  The Lt. Governor of Texas likened the civilian effort to the rescue of Dunkirk. If nothing else, this makes for great TV.  But there is more than nothing else.

The accompanying story is that Hurricane Harvey has met its match.  Unprecedented destruction? Sure, but this is Texas, and even a storm like this will not defeat the spirit of the Texans. Is there anyone who has not seen that story?

Exit Harvey and back to the world. When was the last time coverage of a disaster / crisis somewhere in Africa sounded like that?  Or Asia?  These are not occasional human interest stories sunk within the reporting on a major catastrophe, these are top, persistent headlines. The hero is not a brave individual but a brave population. Here’s a sample headline: Spirit of Texas: People pull together to help Storm Harvey victims. I’ve blogged before about the narrative divide, about the power of the narratives that shape our world view. It’s not a new story.

Media and even aid agencies are doing better, but neither the Western public nor aid agency fundraising targets are ready for the courage, resourcefulness and agency of ordinary Sudanese or Bangladeshis as a predominant image of crisis response. We may be able to feel admiration for the fortitude of an IDP mother and rape survivor who has lost a husband plus two children and has now walked 100 miles to find medical care, but that story is of a heroic individual, the victim of a pervasive venality and brutality.

The core humanitarian principle of humanity manifests itself in the compassion to respond to the suffering not of family, neighbours, clan or countrymen, but to anyone, anywhere in the world, simply because they are human beings just like us.  Our hardwiring sometimes works differently, though, and we see and feel attachments or bonds to family, neighbors and fellow citizens that get in the way of us seeing the entire human race through the lens of a dispassionate equality.  Ethnocentrism may even prove biological in origins, which makes humanitarian ideals all the more important, even if ‘unnatural’.

I choke up and find tears on my cheeks when I watch the videos of the Cajun Navy.  I feel pride at the American can-do spirit. There is a special sense of connection because I lived in New Orleans for several years.  I know quite a few actual Cajuns.  Beyond the near-hegemony of a Western worldview, that helps explain why the Western media run with these headlines. Because I will read them and be touched by them.  Of course I am interested and often moved by stories – in the media or the ones I’ve heard in person – of the extraordinary resourcefulness of disaster-affected communities in the so-called global south. But that is different in both degree and quality.

Two conclusions come to mind.  The first is that the depiction of Hurricane Harvey lines up so much better with the reality of humanitarian crisis.  The people of Houston and Beaumont and Port Arthur will rise to the occasion and overcome this catastrophic event. At the same time, they require support from outside to overcome the immediate needs, to support reconstruction, etc.  They do not need to be saved or rescued as they sit there, helpless.  And they do not need the international community to arrive with the intention of solving painful structural issues such as gender/racial inequality, illiteracy, violent crime, drug addiction, undemocratic institutions, environmental degradation…  (Or, at the least, they might very well need that, but it is not how we as humanitarians understand our role.). So why do we humanitarians think so differently about Sudan or Haiti or Bangladesh?

The second is to consider what the people in places like Texas (or Bihar) need most at a time like this.  Water, shelter, food etc come to mind.  Hope and reassurance come to mind.  But perhaps more than these is that spirit, the one Texans reportedly have in spades, the one that sits not in a briefcase or in a convoy full of water bottles but in a bar, shelter or church full of people. It also sits in and is inspired by headlines and stories and Tweets across the media machine. It is a manufactured swell and it is vital to crisis response. Which raises the question, what happens when there is no such inspirational headline, where 99% of the story reinforces a swell of helpless incompetence or the hope that rescue will come in the form of a foreign intervention?

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.]

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

Let’s Ideate Our Way Out of Here

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Constructive deconstruction. That is the label placed on an intriguing initiative led by HPG/ODI.  How could I even question the value of disassembling the humanitarian system?  I jumped in. The process is based on design theory, a recently-arrived savior of humanitarian action, in case innovative phone apps and cash don’t live up to their advertizing.

And in that previous sentence lies a clue to design theory’s promise. As a humanitarian no longer in the field, I am drawn to the ills of the sector before those of the people in CAR or Syria.  I am hardly alone in that regard.  To fix that proximity bias: design theory.  Because one doesn’t design a new sofa with the furniture sector in mind. The trick in design theory is to immerse oneself in the user experience; to empathize with them.  The other trick is to prototype, to churn out new ideas, see how they fare, adapt them, see how they fare…

In one exercise, we were asked to ideate. That involves said churning of ideas without the brakes of affordability, feasibility or desirability. I churned. My small group astutely relegated these ideations to the ‘kill’ pile. The beauty of having my own blog site is being able to re-animate them here, for you, even at the risk of generating the ideation equivalent of false news. (This blog not to be confused with a few of my legitimate ideas). In no particular order:

  • Ban innovation. That seemed like a contrarian place to start.  Remember the kid who couldn’t dribble a basketball, couldn’t shoot it, couldn’t play defense, but spent a spectacular amount of time perfecting his alley-oop slam dunk?  That’s the humanitarian system’s relationship to innovation.  As donors dump money into innovation and we all drink the Silicon Valley Kool-Aid of gadgeting our way out of crisis – as the system devotes ever more resources and effort to innovation – it seems further away from getting the basics right.  Here’s an innovation – deliver emergency aid to people in crisis.  Here’s another innovation – engage in protection work as part of your efforts.  And another — ensure that the needs of people determine what you do.  Get those right and maybe we can start celebrating the latest phone apps.
  • Translate it. Mandatory – in the form of contractual obligations to donors, technical agreements (or regulations) with host governments — translation into local language(s) and community-level dissemination of key documents, including project proposals, budgeting and progress reports.
  • Invoice it. More than once at last month’s DRR conference (see previous post) did we hear that governments refused to invest in disaster risk reduction because that was ‘for the internationals’. Yes, that old issue – aid undermining responsibility and building dependency. But it is not just that we perform/replace the work of governments, armed groups and communities. It gets much worse. Take South Sudan, where an MSF hospital might get burned down and looted a few times over the course of a decade. Or where the government has managed to transform international goodwill, billions of dollars and the joy and hope of millions of South Sudanese into violent catastrophe.  That much destruction and squander takes dedication and it takes talent. It takes intent. So why does MSF rebuild its hospitals?  Why do humanitarians continue to provide healthcare when the government didn’t even try, but instead looted the goods? Why do we feed people who were driven into man-made famine?  Well, because that’s often what humanitarians do. That’s our job. But why don’t we do something more?  I mean, something other than shaking our finger and holding press conferences to declare that we are deeply peeved?  How many hundreds of millions has the international community spent in South Sudan due to the gross negligence and wilful misconduct and criminal behaviour of those in power? I say, send them the invoice. Hire some clever lawyers. Get a judgment. Garnish their wages.  Freeze a few bank accounts.  Invoice it even if you never get a cent back. Invoice it out of principle.
  • Context testing. Everyone working in the aid sector in a foreign country (for longer than six months) must pass a test to show that they have grasped the basic history, geography, culture, economics etc. of that country. They must take an induction course run by a local business or university. They must prove that they are capable not just of being neutral (read: completely disconnected), but of being contextual.

[To be continued in a few days]

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

Be Careful What You Ask For

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The discussion of localization is beginning to deepen. Here (summarized) is an opening salvo from Charles Lwanga-Ntale, director of the Kenya Academy Centre:  localization often seems to resemble ‘deconcentration’, a process whereby the systems and structures of the existing humanitarian sector are exported downwards.  Certainly an interesting reflection to lead off a conference entitled “Localization and Contextualization of Disaster Risk Reduction and Management (DRRM) in East Africa”. Hosted by the Humanitarian Leadership Academy and the (Kenyan) National Drought Management Authority, the conference mixed government, NGO and academic communities, and placed a particular focus on regional examples of DRRM at the sub-national level, where counties and districts struggle directly with fires, landslides, refugees and drought.

True enough – localization can be many things to many people. Yet the warning on replication was eclipsed as quickly as it was issued. Localization has momentum and it has an engine – from diverse voices a rather uniform set of calls for more capacity building. A palpable hunger for knowledge and learning peppered our two days of discussions. A desire not only for the processes, tools and know-how of the humanitarian sector but also a deep conviction in the power of capacity building to change the behaviour of communities and people.  Have the past five decades of capacity building not curbed our appetite?

I’m not advocating that the global south build a wall (although that argument holds surprising merit), but something needs to keep all these consultants, UN careerists and INGOs busy.  The call seems to aim at training from the very INGOs and agencies that shaped local NGOs into mere implementing partners, and undermined their capacity as autonomous civil society actors. Beyond that, the headlong rush into capacity building raises Trojan Horse concerns. What comes with the sector rebuilding its systems, as Lwanga-Ntale phrased it, “further down the road”?

This much is true. The core of the humanitarian sector – the UN agencies and INGOs elsewhere referred to by many (e.g., me) as an “oligopoly” or “cartel” – has developed an immense amount of experience, know-how and (sadly less publicised) comprehension of what doesn’t work. At the same time, my less optimistic appraisal is that very little about humanitarian action warrants the dash towards replication. It’s not like we are passing on a bandolier full of silver bullets. And that is the good stuff.  What about the bad stuff, which often comes along with the good stuff? Or the bad stuff that we mistakenly think is good stuff?

Take for example the seemingly innocuous technology of the logical framework.  Or the constitution of a humanitarian action upon the foundation of projects. These are exactly the sort of capacity building initiatives the system loves to export. Yet aside from their bureaucratic appeal, they come riddled with proven deficiencies: reducing humanitarian work to tick-box processes and quantifiable targets, output without outcome, short-termism, top-downism, risk aversion, fear of failure, etc.  In the end, a sector full of successful’ projects that leave behind such staggering unmet needs that we needed a Grand Bargain full of transformative ambitions.  Local actors using contextualized logframes? Is that really as far as our ambition travels?

I note that those at the forefront of development thinking (and even a few donors) have embraced the need for Doing Development Differently, exactly by unlogframing it. As agencies scramble to maintain relevance and contracts by delivering capacity building, are we replicating an obsolete and ineffective technology simply because it is so ingrained in our thinking; in how we practice aid?  Isn’t that one of the problems we hope localization and contextualization will solve?

Even beyond the issue of effectiveness, here’s question getting too much focus: What value do does the system want or expect the north to transfer to the south?  Opportunity cost asks a second question: Does that value outweigh a flood of workshops and ‘best practices’ that will bury the south’s opportunity and right to author value for itself? To author a new rather than receiving an old value?

Capacity building strikes me as expedient, but not particularly ambitious. I would think development requires more of localization and contextualization. First and foremost, the space for local actors to respond to problems in their way, and to struggle in the creative process at the same time.  This involves going through frustrations and failures in proximity to communities, to arrive at successes through effort, invention and ownership, not effort, mimicry and dependence. This also involves less of an employment scheme for the existing aristocracy.

Crucially, it is through this struggle that NGOs in the north have built not only their practices, but their institutions as well.  It may be a crap slogan for fast food, but Burger King gets it right, as does Zen Buddhism.  Be your way. Endpoints are less important than pathways. For example, what is the cost of local institutions not developing organically but instead having their financial plumbing supercharged by the global north just so that they can be declared eligible to receive direct grants? Why not change those eligibility standards? This is exactly the sort of mimicry that we should block; a mimicry whereby we reproduce a humanitarian system in which subservience to its business objectives evolved as the dominant structure of the agency, while the operational response to the needs of people became at best secondary, at worst a simple input to a financial transaction.

This call is not for reinventing the wheel. This call is for reinventing the imperfect devices of humanitarian action, because local organizations with a relationship to the community and deep knowledge of the context might just invent something entirely glorious.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

The Localization Surge

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MSF used to run an ad: “The world is our emergency room.”  Snappy, no?  Raises an eyebrow or two if wiped over a photograph, say, of dusty civilians shouldering a wounded neighbour, or starving children swallowed by their swaddling.   It also raises an important challenge to the implementation of the “localization” agenda.  By definition, responding to crisis – to extraordinary levels of need – requires some form of surge, a capacity to scale up aid operations in response to crisis.  The UN- and Western NGO-led humanitarian system already struggles in this regard (see, e.g., MSF’s “Where is Everyone”). Local organizations might struggle further. In how many nations could even the combined NGO community open and maintain 19 surgical theatres, as MSF did within weeks of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, or mount 53 million Euros of operations in about 4.5 months?

The general view seems to be that local organizations can surge, but to a lesser degree.  As Schenkenberg’s study explains, local NGOs often have a very limited ability to scale up. He goes on to describe the causes, such as difficulties in attracting/receiving funds or the unhelpful reality that in an emergency, newly arriving international agencies will often Hoover up staff from the local NGOs. Management capacity for rapid growth poses another stumbling block. While the World Humanitarian Summit’s Grand Bargain and the general strengthening of local NGOs may address some of these issues, they do little to address constraints in the model itself.

Within most Western societies the response to crisis rests upon our fortune, upon the wealth necessary to pay armies of soldiers or battalions of firefighters to sit on their ass – dead capacity that comes to life when the siren sounds. The aid sector can ill afford this model (although they increasingly pay armies of people to do little more than sit on their asses, that is a different blog).  Essentially, surge capacity in the major international NGOs exists because the world is their emergency room, meaning they are able to maintain surge capacity by distributing it globally, and then redistributing it when an emergency arises.

I suppose this marks an economy of scale. That same model works poorly on a national or provincial scale. There may be exceptions – Eastern DRC? South Sudan? – that could support such excess resources, but it is difficult to imagine many.  Note that this economy of the global scale plays a similar role when it comes to expertise.  Major international agencies can maintain in-house expertise along a wide variety of themes – nutrition, shelter, water, sanitation, etc. – because at the global level, there will always be enough business somewhere to keep such expertise busy (to justify the expenditure). Again, national NGOs do not have this economy of scale (or simultaneous diversity of crisis types/themes).

The point is that local NGOs cannot be expected to become local versions of the large international NGOs. No duh, right? And yet the bigger point is that they will nonetheless be judged for it. Rather mercilessly, I fear. They will be judged as deficient because they cannot surge. Deficient because they lack sufficient in-house expertise.  Let’s be clear. These are exactly the sort of weaknesses that the existing system will capitalize upon to claw back its pre-Grand Bargain dominion. Beyond the issue of power and control, these perceived deficiencies generate a truth in which local responders remain dependent on the existing international system for surge, one more nail in the coffin of second-class citizenship.

If we start now, can we work our way out of this?  Can we can imagine some form of standing capacity at the national level? Perhaps we should be investing now in developing/testing a number of approaches to national-level rapid response mobilization. Let’s embrace strategies based on dispersed teams/networks rather than centralized agencies. Perhaps we can imagine local chapters of an organization such as Human Surge? Or maybe we can just begin a conversation, and see where it leads.