Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Community Engagement — Problems Less Discussed

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Expanding the Rules of Engagement

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

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

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

A collision between communities

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cultural insensitivity of an aid response based on individuals

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

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

Ethics as a way forward?

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

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

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

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

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

Uncategorized

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.

Critique of Aid, Politics

Boarding the Climate Bandwagon

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Bandwagon

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

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

“But” #1. 

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

“But” #2

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

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

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

“And” #1

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

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

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

Critique of Aid, Politics

The ethics of turning bad money into good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

Uncategorized

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.

Politics

Just say No to the Status Quo

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Cameroon is burning. As this BBC story shows, this is what a future L3 crisis looks like in its infancy (that’s anticipation, not prediction). Now is the time for the United Nations to choose: an ounce of prevention or pounds upon pounds of protracted ‘cure’ while a country annihilates a generation of national endeavor.

Here is how the system works. There will be statements of concern and warnings of dire consequences. There will be several high-level visits to underscore the gravity of the situation. There will be steady economic decline, sporadic destruction and a deepening insecuritization of Cameroun until it becomes a full-blown high-intensity conflict and an enduring ‘complex emergency.

Here is how the system says it wants to work.’ It wants to stop the cancer of man-driven destruction when the first cells are detected, not after it metastasizes across the country and across a generation or two of its people. The “answer ultimately lies in far greater global leadership to find political solutions, along with a cultural, operational and financial reprioritization towards prevention.” (One Humanity, UNSG report  to the World Humanitarian Summit, ¶27).  Put differently, let’s throw resources into engineering peace long before it becomes ineffective or impossible to engineer peace (but at least creates the perception of action).

Here is what such a reprioritization should mean. Make Cameroon a top-3 international peace issue. Make that happen yesterday. Launch a major intervention the day after yesterday. Make Cameroon a higher priority than full-blown L3 crises such as Syria, CAR, South Sudan or Yemen because it is more important to stop this one rather than service existing crises (read: reprioritization either has consequences or it is lip service). Pull budget from those crises. How about 25% from each of those four? Pull top negotiators from those crises. Pull peacekeepers or others from those crises. Again, 25% and 25 %. Push a multi-pronged intervention. Push for UN Security Council resolutions that impose peace.  (To be clear, this reprioritization of crisis response should not override the humanitarian imperative, which should remain primarily a response to present, not future crisis.).

Overkill? Yes. What does political prevention look like if not overkill, because that is one way of understanding the definition of prevention (and perhaps the only way of stopping a war)?

Here is one problem (and a ‘solution’). The system is designed to produce pounds of cure rather than ounces of prevention.  The system is designed to ignore Cameroon until it cannot ignore Cameroon, just as it has waited for famine (Somalia 2011) or for Ebola to break containment and then respond, rather than take decisive earlier action. To change its ways, to effectuate this prioritization, the system needs to define a new mindset by using Cameroon as a test case. It needs to pre-empt years of moral high horse-ism and political paralysis. Just try something different. Learn from this test case and then adjust (iterative crisis prevention). In other words, don’t debate this, just do it and see what happens. Maybe it proves a bad idea. Blame me.

Here is another problem (and a ‘solution’). The system must avoid creating a new mindset that is simply an ‘act earlier’ version of the old mindset. As this review of DFID’s (earlier) response to the 2017 crisis in Somalia concluded [I’m a co-author], there is a danger in a system that seems obsessed with issues such as whether it averted a famine. “The review team is unequivocal as well – this is the wrong question. Beyond the difficulty of proving a negative, we see a risk in setting the bar too high, leaving a system unable to respond in timely fashion unless one can establish a looming crisis of unprecedented proportions or ‘perfect storms’ of disaster.” (p. 9). The effectiveness of crisis prevention, in other words, requires the routine acceptance of having perhaps prevented nothing. Cameroon may stop burning on its own.  Let’s not wait and see.

This blog is supposed to spark critical discussion around current issues affecting humanitarian action. And have some fun. (For more, click on the ABOUT button).