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Scaling back humanitarian action

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The ICRC Law and Policy team has posted my blog response to an earlier blog critique of my argument to scale back humanitarian action. Writing in a personal capacity, the ICRC’s Ricardo Fal-Dutra Santos suggested it was time for humanitarian action to expand, not contract, as argued in my paper The New Humanitarian Basics.

Not that I’m thin-skinned, or maybe I am, but I took the opportunity to push back. A sample: “is the sector responsible for stranding people in the humanitarian alibi—in crises where the urgent trumps the important in perpetuity? ”

Thanks to the ICRC for their being so open to this discussion.

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The Old-sounding New Humanitarian Basics

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Can you handle a third blog about the paper I wrote?  (For the first two, check below, June 8 and June 19).

Thanks very much for the team at ODI’s Humanitarian Practice Network for posting this new blog. It continues with the discussion not just of where we want to go, but how to get there.  In short, this is a new humanitarianism predicated upon dismantling the power dynamics that safeguard the old one.

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Thomas Jefferson and the 22nd Century

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A New Year and a new baby have sparked my inner Carl Sagan, pondering the next century, musing on the meaning of life. That sort of thinking delivered me rather quickly to Thomas Jefferson.

Speculation about the future remains a dark art. When I was a kid, people imagined life in 2016 would be like The Jetsons (which, btw, takes place in 2062) not Downton Abbey with an internet connection. Extrapolating trends, the pundits prophesied both horrors and nirvanas. We watched 2001, A Space Odyssey and were convinced by its promise. We lamented never seeing a tight-suited Mick Jagger singing about Satisfaction again. Oh, how we were wrong.

Humanitarian crystal balls fare no better than others. When it comes to such predictions, I produced this piece in 2010, looking forward to 2020. Much more serious analysis can be found, for instance, in Randolph Kent’s work with the Humanitarian Futures project (e.g., see here). What about the far future? Not 2020 or 2050. What about a century or two from now? That’s where Jefferson comes in.

It would be difficult to identify a more brilliant politician, philosopher or steadfast champion of democracy, liberty and equality. Enter, stage left, the inconvenient truth that the man who found it “self-evident” that “all men are created equal” also bought and sold men as slaves. Let’s avoid a discussion of the historical and moral context circa 1775. The more pertinent question: When they study the current humanitarian age, what will prove our Jeffersonian blemish? What will leave people in 2116 shaking their heads, outraged at our deep moral and logical flaws? What constitutes our unrecognized racism? One answer: speciesism.

In scores of presentations during my MSF days, I used the slide below (stolen, with thanks, from JAB) to highlight the critical specificity of humanitarian action, distinguishing it from the much broader remit of do-gooderism issuing from a ‘humanitarian’ spirit (development, rights literacy, democracy promotion, gender equality, etc.). As the colored lines appeared, I asked participants whether they thought it a suitable definition of ‘humanitarian.’ Moving left from “doing good for people”, after a few iterations I would then jump out to ‘animal humanitarianism’ for comic relief, perhaps making fun of the (surprisingly successful) organization Donkey Sanctuary. “Has somebody lost the plot?” I would ask. “Is there some confusion over the first five letters of the word ‘humanitarian’?” Hell no doubt reserves a special pitchfork for the sanctimonious.

What is humanitarian action? JAB chart

 

The paramount principle of humanity places the fundamental human dignity of all people at the heart of the humanitarian ethos. This amounts to and is part of a larger exceptionalism – granting to humans a set of protections that are denied to other species. It yields a classification, as did race, onto which we graft great significance, including a conviction in our own superiority. There is too much similarity with racism not to wonder whether a future enlightenment will unfold, one holding that all life merits an equal degree of reverence, or at least conceiving of all life as possessing a magic, a magic so singular and astonishing that it renders irrelevant the differences between all of life’s diverse forms.

Right now, there are six boneless chicken thigh filets marinating in my fridge. In other words, I have not yet gone off the animal rights deep end, nor have I adopted dubious New Age philosophies such as Why I Identify as a Mammal. It seems almost inevitable that the proud leaders of humanitarian action today will have their names sandblasted off memorials in the future, with 22nd Century students protesting our virulent speciesism and moral decrepitude (i.e., when we become history, we are not likely to become the heroes we secretly yearn to be).

The import of speciesism to humanitarians is to consider whether the most powerful way to protect humanity would be to stop pushing human exceptionalism. Why does humanitarian action neither embrace nor deploy a reverence for life itself, and does this deficit undercut respect for its central message that family, clan, tribe, race, gender and nationality must be subordinate to the single family of humanity? Perhaps all exceptionalism warrants condemnation because exceptionalism, be it that of Joseph Kony or the US government, inexorably yields atrocity. The Jeffersonian problem, of course, is that we may have to live another hundred years of tomorrows to recognize the atrocities of today.

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Building Resilience? Turn Crisis into a School

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[This is the second in a series of posts aimed at the World Humanitarian Summit.  Along with the previous post (see it at WhyDev as well!), the idea is to suggest how development and humanitarian organizations can work better together.]

Over the past years, the ‘new’ grail of resilience has sparked debate within the aid community (see e.g., here, Dialogue 12). Importantly, few disagree on the ambition of strengthening national and local resilience to crisis, and resilience has been named one of four core themes for the World Humanitarian Summit. The central, somewhat distracting argument seems to pertain to its home.

Is it humanitarian work to build resilience? Or is it development work, with humanitarian content? My pedigree places me squarely in the latter camp. In crude jargon, humanitarian work is about immediate harm reduction, not building for the future. But this sort of dogmatism breeds argument, not progress (and ignores the degree to which funding streams for resilience work determine its home).

Perhaps it is more useful to consider How? rather than Who?. In broad terms, the humanitarian community lacks the skills, experience and, frankly, patience to effectuate transformation. And what humanitarians do possess – technical knowledge – is the relatively easily transferred part of crisis response. Where resilience in terms of government response capacity is most lacking, improving the responsiveness of national authorities requires long-term planning, facilitation rather than implementation, and commitment on the scale of years rather than a reporting cycle.

Let’s take this example: How does one help a district ministry of health develop the capability to deal with a cholera outbreak in a remote cluster of villages? Well, here is how not to do it: run a workshop for a week, hand over pristine copies of the cholera guidelines, and then wait to see what happens. My years working with MSF left me all too familiar with the workshop approach, and the subsequent bout of accusations of incompetence or unwillingness when MSF had to step in because the ministry failed to respond.

This workshop approach creates piles of paper, heavy expectations and, too often, little more than a virtual response capacity. The obstacle is not technical understanding of cholera. You can download that here or here. Faced with actual cholera — with the requirement to scale up exponentially in a short time – the government health service or local NGO (just like many INGOs) are often more seriously impaired by the pre-planning (preparedness), scaling up, management of ongoing services, and the lack of access to emergency funding. Building that will take persistent effort over time, not a specialty of humanitarians; will take hands on experience, rarely available during workshops; and a commitment to learn from failure.

Let’s return to that example of cholera response. A well-placed INGO specializing in development could start by working with the ministry to develop recognized contingency plans, such as for the creation of a temporary Emergency Response Management Team, or a plan for identified ministry staff to be allocated to the emergency response and for how remaining ministry staff will cover the gaps caused by shifting resources to cholera. All of this would require agreed TORs, and new job descriptions, contracts, training, etc. for staff. (It may also require striking a deal with its donors, one that will allow contractual flexibility to engage in rapid onset emergency response).

The development team should then play a bridging function to the experienced humanitarian NGO (i.e., INGOs such as MSF, that have experience running cholera treatment projects), facilitating agreements that come into force during an actual outbreak, allowing the national/local to shadow and then take on progressively greater responsibilities over time. In other words, cholera outbreaks rather than cholera protocols become the driver of resilience. The development team ensures proper ministry presence, and removes the burden from the emergency INGO (the Ebola outbreak is an exception to the rule that humanitarians cannot take on responsibilities for training others during the height of crisis).

With the ministry, an agreed plan for rotating of national/local personnel (secondments) into the emergency response of the humanitarians. This should happen systematically, over years, and build capacity in all areas of intervention, from medical doctors to supply officers and registration desk staff. The development team might also have to bridge between the various government departments that must agree (inter alia) to the division of responsibilities and provision of resources. It probably also needs to broker financial support to the ministry, and work to develop the administrative capacity to manage and report on the funding.

Under various names, the aid community has been talking for decades about improved resilience in the form of improved national operational responsiveness. There have been successes. As well, grand plans have fallen flat. In my years with MSF, there were often requests for training, but I don’t ever remember anyone asking us to engage in the sort of transformational work described above. Nor would we have been wise to say yes – wrong people and bad timing. Being used as a school is different from having to organize oneself into one.

Effective strengthening national and local response capacity requires the particular skillset of the development community. So forget the details of the example above – another humanitarian’s misguided imagination of how a development NGO would do it. What is not imagined is the opportunity for development NGOs to get resilience right by catching humanitarians in the act, and taking the national authorities from understudy to lead.

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Making development work for humanitarian response–and vice versa

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[This is the first of a series of posts aimed at the World Humanitarian Summit.  More generally, this post and the next one offer ideas on how development and humanitarian organizations can work better together. Many thanks to WhyDev for their encouragement, editorial help and posting of this blog. Check out their excellent site if you don’t know it. – MD]

How many times have we seen this: a complex emergency with a decade or two of heavy humanitarian intervention (maybe some development organisations and peacekeeping forces as well), scores or even hundreds of millions of dollars spent by aid agencies, legions of expats trafficked through–and yet close to zero planned impact on local economic development or resilience? Sound like Eastern DRC? Haiti? South Sudan?

Foreign aid policy and practice have failed to view humanitarian crisis as an opportunity for development. This gap highlights a missed potential to capitalise on the presence of such a well-resourced foreign enterprise as humanitarian intervention.

A house divided

The aid community has improved its performance these past years by learning that, particularly in complex emergencies, contexts cannot be shoehorned into one end or the other of a false continuum, designated as either “humanitarian” or “development”, with one-size-fits-all implications for the aid response. Nonetheless, this divide is deeply ingrained, reinforced by the two-pronged architecture of the aid system, from funding streams to academic departments to organigrams of agencies and governmental ministries.

This divide has given rise to a fair amount of acrimony, and to a blind spot when it comes to opportunity. It is good–but not good enough–to comprehend that humanitarian crisis and developmental needs lie side by side. We must take the next step and see long-term development opportunities as residing within crisis. It’s time for development agencies to seize the presence of the humanitarian machine, by exploiting its potential as a source for financially sustainable (small) businesses. It’s time to make friends with the enemy.

Mind the gap

We understand almost intuitively how humanitarian crisis, whether conflict, flows of refugees or natural disaster, generates destruction, including damage to the local economy. Yet crisis often means that business is booming for the humanitarian endeavour. Viewed through an entrepreneurial lens, humanitarian response, particularly those stereotypical Western-led interventions in long-standing emergencies, resembles a pretty fat cash cow.

In crisis contexts, INGOs possess relatively massive resources, and they often represent the biggest fish in the pond. In line with these resources, humanitarian NGOs also have needs–many of which could be met locally. Why is it, then, that an organisation like MSF/Doctors without Borders works in Goma for decades, and still expends resources on importing and servicing its own vehicles? Or why in Nyala were there so few restaurants where an expat could go out to eat, even at the height of the Darfur response?

With a large, wealthy and needy humanitarian community present for decades, why do we still find development NGOs teaching women to make soap? Okay, that’s an exaggeration. There is nothing wrong with soap. The point is that many income-generating efforts are not successful, in part because of the lack of people willing or able to buy. But the humanitarian industry and the expats it employs are willing and able – so why aren’t development NGOs helping local people meet this demand?

In places like Port-au-Prince and Goma and Nyala, there are, of course, some local businesses and people who take advantage of the presence of foreign NGOs and expats alike, such as landlords, nightclubs and security services. Typically, though, the untapped demand is much larger, particularly for in-house service at NGOs; and, these businesses are either ad-hoc or pre-existing (especially in the early stages of a humanitarian response). Importantly, they are not the result of development agencies capitalising on opportunity, and so do not by design benefit the community, contribute to self-reliance or help establish an entrepreneurial culture.

The major humanitarian NGOs (and the UN) continue to be the managers and providers of an internal set of non-humanitarian services, which is inefficient. Here, one could talk of NGOs that hire and manage staff to clean their offices or residences, rather than having a development NGO work with a local group to create a cleaning service business. Ditto for vehicle maintenance, transport, catering, many aspects of supply and other functions that typically remain in-house to the INGO. And what of demand for highly-skilled counselling or consulting services (why do Westerners get so many of those contracts?), outsourced not necessarily due to a lack of local expertise, but because the local expertise lacks the know-how to package and market itself effectively?

Closing the gap

There needs to be a convergence of policy and practice aimed at the progressive outsourcing of services from within the foreign humanitarian community to local NGOs and businesses. The first step requires a teaming of development NGOs with their humanitarian cousins to delineate the concept. What services already exist? What services and businesses might comprise “easy wins”? What are the no-go areas (where humanitarian NGOs should retain direct control)? In what contexts would outsourcing be most likely to work? How can the development actors reduce the risks of negative impact when the humanitarians go home?

Next, the development agency must negotiate with national and local authorities, humanitarian NGOs and institutional donors to establish coordinated action and goals. NGOs will need to progressively cede control over important components of their activities. Donors may need to nudge them towards compliance, and national governments may be able to encourage change through regulation.

Most importantly, NGOs will have to work in the local community to build the actual businesses and services. This requires working in tandem with humanitarian organisations to ensure that needs are met and the quality of services is sufficient. The point is to create sustainable local capacity–businesses, services, NGOs, etc.–that can fill gaps or replace existing services that are owned or managed by humanitarians themselves.

Even to the extent that the activities proposed here already exist, they remain exceptions, haphazard in their genesis and limited in their impact. They do not reflect policy choices aimed at exploiting large-scale, protracted humanitarian interventions for the benefit of local development. Can we not imagine increasing local businesses’ support and service to the humanitarian community, to the point where it becomes a successful core component of development aid?

This opportunity may prove infeasible in some contexts, or it may be counter-productive to become dependent on cash cows whose presence is temporary. But, there is significant potentially successful development work in transforming existing functions into sound, income-generating local businesses.

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The Case Against Idiots

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Check out the new web page over at MSF UK’s website.  The Name? Opinion and Debate.  The Idea?  Put an end to corridor and lunchroom pontificators actually defining MSF policy and practice. Let’s see these ideas. And let’s debate them.

Michiel Hofman makes a great case for thinking of us expats as “useful idiots”.  The basic idea, especially relevant in conflict settings, is that expats are largely immune to the sort of local pressures that divert aid according to a personal, political or military interest.

Michiel’s piece, though, is exactly right in using the term “useful idiots”. It’s just that he draws the wrong conclusion. Of course there are pressures placed on decision-makers, and of course the safeguarding of aid’s impartiality (not to mention neutrality and independence) is vital. But what about the idiot part?

Even if we agree that they are able to pack up and go home, do expats really make a good decision-makers. Here’s a few of their common traits: (a) can’t speak the local language; (b) can’t read a local newspaper (ditto for radio, TV, etc); (c) don’t know much more about the history, culture, peoples or politics of a given context than you could find out by reading the background section of a Lonely Planet Guide; (d) don’t have an established relationship (let alone hundreds of them) with a single local person; (e) have phone contact lists full of other foreigners and aren’t trusted (nor, perhaps, distrusted) by people in power etc etc. In the end, let’s admit that a relatively high level of ignorance and blindness are at least just as inimical to objectivity and sound decision-making as are pressure and bias.

Michiel makes a great argument for expats as people who can open doors. But idiots don’t build effective houses. Worse still, they have trouble even noticing if they didn’t. In the end, rather than making a case for being useful, I’d suggest a better solution would be to get rid of the idiot. The model there? Locally empowered NGO hires a few powerless, foreign front men who provide the “protection” Michiel seeks but aren’t allowed to interfere in the development and implementation of contextually effective programming.

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Holiday Jeer

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Painlessly short ideas for your holiday pleasure…

1. Development aid is like a kid getting a pair of goldfish for her birthday. In those first days, you can spend hours looking at the tank, watching the fish go about their business. Not much happens.  You can even talk to them, or tap on the glass.  Still, not much happens. Take a pinch of food flakes and toss it onto the surface of the water.  The fish dart to the surface and begin inhaling the flakes from underneath.  Press your forehead against the glass.  That’s better than Jacques Cousteau.

The next day your mother catches you feeding the fish again.  She warns against over feeding. But you can’t quite hold back.  You wait for your mother to disappear and then show friends how it works.  This is the thrill of your hand at work.  This is the reward and psychological satisfaction of causation.  And pretty soon your fish are belly up.

2. Good to see more awareness of the alarming persecution of homosexuality in places like Uganda, South Africa and Jamaica (e.g., here or here).  Typical reaction here is to think of that anti-gay violence as barbaric, as inherent in “their” lack of civilization.  Well, it is barbaric.  But is it something so comfortably foreign? On the news today I learned that the Queen used the Royal Prerogative of Mercy to issue a posthumous pardon for a 1952 conviction for homosexuality. British war hero (codebreaking) and mathematician Alan Turing was punished by chemical castration. Why does such a pardon require an act of mercy?  There is nothing merciful about it.  And why does it require 51 years?  As human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell opines: “I do think it’s very wrong that other men convicted of exactly the same offence are not even being given an apology, let alone a royal pardon.”

3.  Nice piece of journalism in yesterday’s Guardian (some interesting comments as well). Title: The State that Fell Apart in a Week.  Plenty of chatter in the twittersphere on the suddenness of the collapse. My own rather sarky take on it:  If it falls apart in a week, it wasn’t a state.  I’m not sure how to build a state, but you can cross ethically [oops, I meant “ethnically”] fuelled civil war off the list.  Ditto for destroying your oil industry and an outbreak of atrocities.

Without trying to sound either uncaring or self-absorbed, there is something quite telling and terrible about the impact of this emerging catastrophe on the international community.  Lots of international blood, sweat and tears, not to mention dollars, have poured into South Sudan.  It is fine to expect that the humanitarian community must once again muster a Herculean effort to feed the hungry, shelter the displaced, and set up a healthcare system; or that international militaries must enforce peace between the warring parties.  But let’s not begin with the World-has-failed-the-people-of-SouthSudan line of self-flagellation. The South Sudanese have failed themselves. And they’ve laid to waste an awful lot of hard work.

4. And because self-flagellation (or, at least, self-reflection) is often a valuable commodity … The international community constructed South Sudan’s house of cards nationhood through an almost comprehensive “partnership”.  Many will opine that the fickle finger of fault should be pointed in the direction of everyone from the UN to the US Government to all the big NGOs to George Clooney.  Many will opine that we must draw lessons and do it better in the future.  But I would go back to the goldfish story above before jumping onto the bandwagon of building a better South Sudanese state (or Somali, or Afghan, etc).

Happy Holidays

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Lt. Col. Florence Nightengale

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Riddle me this: What’s not funny about the following infographics?  Anyone feeling queasy?  I’m not talking about the fact that OCHA so hilariously set out to use images of aircraft carriers, cruisers and destroyers that look completely harmless.  Can anyone imagine the MOD using a war deployment graphic with images of fishing charter vessels?  Those little boats aren’t going to scare bad guys.  Where is the fierce show of killing hardware; the projection of might? They look like the Minnow! Designed to cause no more harm than strand seven castaways on an uncharted desert isle.

So what is this response to the Philippines typhoon?  Branding exercise of a new world order in humanitarian action. That’s what.

If you don’t see an OCHA infographic immediately below, click here to go it.

https://www.humanicontrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Haiyan-Snapshot-OCHA2.pdf2.pdf

FYI, that third graphic isn’t the Philippines, it’s Libya.

[Thanks S for the help]

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Viewpoints

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1. Check out TLQ, the digital magazine for thought leaders.  They asked my alter ego to produce a reflection piece on some of my earlier blog posts (Model Business, Battle of the Models, The Narrative Divide, etc).  I took my views to their logical conclusion — a look at our Achilles Heel.

Here is a link to the pdf, but their version has all the links… TLQ June 2013 Hope you enjoy it.  Pls no comments about the photo.

2. I used to think that humanitarian NGOs were like the proverbial emporor with no clothes.  You know: big talk and no action; glossy reports that do not reflect the reality of our work.  Then I realized that the problem was slightly more complicated.  In the end, the emporor is in fact an emporor.  He may not have any clothes on, but that doesn’t alter his identity.  What we have in humanitarianism is not a delusion in the nature of our clothes, but the false belief in being an emporor in the first place.  Yikes.

3. Has anybody watched the TED talk by Dan Pallotta that claims our thinking about charity is “dead wrong”?  Acknowledging that he says some interesting things, I still can’t help feeling squeamish about every facet of his talk.  Really, every single thing he says seems slickly evangelical, even by the typical standards of the temple of philanthropic elitism. Or, if not evangelical, at least infomercialesque.  Aid as a business that produces goodness the way Toyota produces cars.  More stuff in one end equals more cars out the other.  And what is his solution; his stuff to put in at the NGO end?  Money, money and more money because with more money we can do more good.  Anyone else out there frightened by the guy?  I also don’t like his shirt.

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The Race to the Bottom

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At the risk of diminishing the heroic status of all those who work in humanitarian organizations – of all those who toil hour upon hour in an effort to save every last life possible on this Kurtz-ridden planet – let me confess that on occasion, right in the middle of the work day even, my computer screen begins to show articles about the Philadelphia Eagles football team.  Once in a while, articles about the fascinating life of celebrities also pop up.  My computer tends to do this more often during the football season, but also during the approach to the NFL draft, training camp, and, well, on just about every day I’m in the office and hence tiring myself to the bone to save the world or, on days when that seems too tall an order, reading over the 12th draft of the office annual plan, sorting the pens in my desk drawer by color, etc.

For those who regularly read humanitarian agency reports, you probably understand.  The brain needs a break.  It needs regular refuge from the horror.  I unwind with dose of the Eagles, the greatest team never to win a SuperBowl.  Since about two weeks ago, though, my respite has been effectively cancelled by Amina and her nameless invaders.  Surrounding an article about the contract extension of a promising young running back, peeking from the banner, the blitzkrieg begins.  Starving babies.  Grotesquely contorted, ribcage-clad babies.  The enlarged skulls of the emaciated.  Faces in pain, eyes set right on mine.

This isn’t just disaster porn twanging my heartstrings. This is disaster porn combined with new technology, meaning I can’t just turn the page because some big aid agency, let’s call them HAL, has its hooks into my cookies.  Click to a new story.  There’s Amina. Click again.  Here’s that misery-distended face and the floating caption: “No child should be this hungry.” Click again, and one of these kids rolls up from below my screen, like horror-movie fog seeping under a door, asking for £10 now.

Such is the brave new world of Google.  I must have looked at HAL’s website recently, and they know it, so now they are hitting me up with a retargeting campaign.  Where are the ethical limits on exploiting the privacy of web users?  I don’t know.  All major agencies use this technology to enhance fundraising results.  It’s called prospecting.   And like prospecting, one tries to pick a spot that looks good.

In other words, it makes sense to show your appeals to somebody who has recently read stories about aid, or articles about the places we work, or visited our websites.  Note that the NGO also purchases the target audience and the frequency with which its ads appear.  Once per week?  Every two days?  Fairly often?  Where does one draw the line?  Again, I can’t say exactly where the line should be, but surely it should be drawn before creating the appearance of stalking me, and long before any sane person would prefer to set fire to his cash, stocks and bonds rather than allowing even once cent to end up in HAL’s pocket.

Of course, this isn’t just about new technology.  It’s an old one as well.  There are standards.  There have been papers and conferences and workshops and all manner of effort to ensure that photographs and imagery used by humanitarian agencies is respectful of our beneficiaries.  There’s even a code of conduct that is designed to eliminate the merchandizing of starving babies.

I can hear one potential response:  Mind your own business.  Nobody elected you the moral police of UK’s humanitarian aid community.   Is it good enough to leave this up to the market?  Do we leave it up to the public?  Is stalking and exploitation OK because it has proven results?  The cash flows (even if I doubt HAL ever bothers to calculate the cost of pissing so many people off).

But what about my God given right to self-righteous moralizing?  After all, one might expect humanitarians to be slightly less mercenary than bloodsucking automated telephone sales companies.  [Insert fist thumping].  One might expect them not to exploit children!  [Insert more strident fist thumping]. And this campaign might poison the well of public generosity for all of us.    No wait, it’s worse than that. [Insert preachy voice].  This cynically mawkish and manipulative appeal might spark the end of humanitarian assistance as we know it.

Or, it may also be true that none of us are any better; that we simply cling to our own set of arbitrary distinctions that allow us to feel that we’re different.