Tag Archives: Accountability

Our Western Identity

The Proportionality of Our Attention

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Depending on how you look at it, it was Day 4 or Year 8 of the war in Ukraine when I began drafting this blog.  It is now Day 145. I recall those early days, the emotions stirred as I saw my younger self in the wire-rimmed glasses and quilted winter coat of a young Kyiv professional, or my family in the hand of a child clutching his mother’s luggage strap as the throng surged for the door of a train. There was little in my head that could be labelled dispassionate. In other words, my head held little professional interest in the Ukraine news, even as my unease grew at the white-out erasing all line of sight to any other crisis.

It is OK to identify with people because we find something of ourselves in them.  These paths of affinity trace paths of identity such as race and gender as well as less obvious similarities.  In March 2002, in the back of an MSF Landcruiser, I sat opposite an Angolan man who had already lost four children, cradling a last, limp daughter on his lap. My next several nights brought terrible imagery, and in the mornings came panic attacks at the thought of going to work.  Weeks later, debriefing with a psycho-social care counsellor in Amsterdam, I came to understand why I’d experienced such a reaction on this occasion, and not on others.  I’d become a father in 1999 and was struggling with a new kind of performance anxiety. This man and his little girl were no longer ‘simply’ a pair of humans in extreme distress.  I saw a dad, unable to protect his child, and to this day it seems like the most terrifying feeling in the world. 

It is even OK for the countries of Europe to devote far more attention and aid to the crisis in their back yard, just as we would expect the African Union to be far more involved in a crisis in the Sahel than the OAS or ASEAN nations.  But…

It is not OK to ignore the structure of the aid system to the point that our affinities undermine our common humanity; to ignore the significantly skewed concentration of ‘certain’ affinities in the decision-making clubhouses across major donors, UN agencies, and the large INGOs. Voting on the Christmas dinner menu is not a problem until we in the clubhouses ‘discover’ that turkeys own the bulk of the votes. Neither human affinities nor the AU nor the OAS create a global distortion in aid resources.  The formal humanitarian sector does. Notably, in 2022 this distortion has been noted. Witness the mainstream critique being raised re the proportionality of aid going to the Ukraine versus other crises, such as Somalia, Yemen, or Ethiopia. (see here or here).  And yet our fixation on Ukraine has endured these past months, only beginning to wane in June and only fleetingly interrupted by an earthquake in Afghanistan.

Bias in the ignoring of bias.  Following the previous point, perhaps more revealing and yet less revealed is the double-standard; the non-response to partiality’s contamination of the principled ‘purity’ of aid.  For years now, ‘local’ actors have been forced to swallow the bitter pill that they cannot be neutral because of their local identity, and hence were disqualified from ascending to the penthouse suites in the global humanitarian club. Their ‘natural’ bias of being in their home context, full of affinities, has been judged as threat to principled aid. The system assigns consequences to such bias. So where was the call in the Ukraine crisis for humanitarian decision-makers to step aside given their bias; given their conflicted interest and powerful affinities?  Where was the challenge to the neutrality of their agencies and the appropriateness of having authority over their work given the undivided support for Ukraine among their home country governments and citizens?

Humanitarians need to be particularly mindful of impartiality in this regard, because this is the substantive ethical principle that operationalizes our affinity-laced humanity.  Impartiality instructs humanitarian aid be delivered on a non-discriminatory basis and therefore in proportion to the urgency of need.  We may forgive media corporations for following the cash and clicks even as we might hope for a more equitable distribution of news content.  If it bleeds, it leads – that is their credo?[1] But it is a problem for humanitarians when not all bleeding is of equal media value because humanitarians have a different obligation. Where is the assessment of the sector’s principled performance? As the Ukraine crisis produced and engulfed resources, how did impartiality fare at the global level of distribution?  Where is the concern over agencies pulling staff/resources away from other crises to manage the well-funded expansion of operations in the Ukraine war context? Tellingly, the Ukraine response suggests a pathogen in the system at the level of impartiality, which as an ethical rather than operational principle should raise far greater discussion than the neutrality of local organizations. 

Is institutional attention a critical resource, like healthcare, food, or cash? What does it mean when GD (General Director) after GD heads to Ukraine for a photo op and website home pages greet the visitor with the faces of Ukrainian children in March, April, May, and often still in June? Given the causal linkage of attention to the provision of assistance, asylum, refuge, and compassion, shouldn’t impartiality guide the institutional use of humanitarian media resources, such as an agency’s home pages or its Twitter feed? Perhaps this would have been the perfect time to counter the prominent bias in media attention by devoting prime website real estate to other crises, or sending GDs to other contexts, to interrupt the frozen gaze on Ukraine. To some extent this discussion is taking place. Good. But is the issue being framed as a matter of obligation and principle? Is this discussion alive in board rooms as an issue of accountability? Or are some humanitarians simply feeling uncomfortable with their in-house disproportions?

Privilege is the power of an agency to assume it can determine right from wrong for itself, especially in a system so weak in accountability. The entitlement of the formal Western sector is well illustrated in deciding for itself when it must play by its own rules, when compromising them is ok for itself or not OK for others.

Power is the privilege of not even being conscious of this assumption.

[1] Actually, when you think figuratively about it, If it bleeds, it leads wouldn’t be such a bad standard to guide impartiality.  Certain better than If they’re white, the aid shall take flight.

Critique of Aid

A new humanitarian Ethics? Blog 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

Critique of Aid, Politics

A new humanitarian ethics? Blog 1

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

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

Evidence vs Evidence

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critique of Aid, Politics

The Advocacy Tax

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The Advocacy Tax

Did you miss this excellent piece of journalism, exposing the oversimplified story of how conflict minerals are being stopped by international countermeasures such as the Dodd-Frank law (also see this INGO’s response)? My recent work touches upon the issue. A client’s project needs to be reshaped because its theory of change is based on a causal link between gold mining activities and conflict in DRC, a link that has grown questionable.

Underneath IRIN’s story of minerals, violent exploitation and INGO self-interest is a story to which we humanitarians might pay careful attention because it is a story of agility and adaptation. It is also a story of how institutions perpetuate themselves, and how this self-interest (unfortunately) helps militias to be better militias, but does not help advocacy teams to be better advocates.

The humanitarian sector has invested in a plethora of largely similar advocacy guidelines. (In itself, a small example of how self-interest – my wanting to feel that I am contributing to the good – produces extraordinary levels of duplication and churn).  Advocacy forms a core part of our oft forgotten and misunderstood protection work. We know how to develop strategic goals, core problems, SMART targets, stakeholder analysis, etc., etc., and then implement a plan of action.  Good advocacy can result in quite some achievement, with the enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act’s Section 1502 a prominent example.

But what happens when you tax people for turning left?  They turn in another direction.  The aid industry’s advocacy sector functions much like a tax on ‘bad’ behavior.  It imposes a cost. Noise, diplomatic pressure, public finger-pointing – if done well these can create a disincentive.  In Congo, did it make the bad guys go away? I’ll leave that question for the Congo experts. But the ‘tax’ on conflict gold does seem to have shifted militari-economic exploitation to other minerals/resources and/or regions (either that or it generated more sophisticated bribery and disguise).

The first mistake here is seeing gold mining as a monolithic cause or driver of the conflict, as opposed to an interchangeable one, easily replaced.  In fact, it is difficult to think of it as a driver at all – it operates more as a method of doing business for those with a gun. The second mistake is underestimating the bad guys and overestimating our importance. These are battle-hardened predators.  It’s not as if they lack talent when it comes to circumventing the law.

Partly, this reflects their skill.  Partly, this reflects our Achilles heel. The simplified narrative on which our advocacy industry is based (end exploitation of blood gold/diamonds = end massacres and conflict) is a donation-spinner, and maintains its narrative power long after it has lost its accuracy. We thus establish inadequate responses because we have not yet learned (not yet been taxed so as) to produce narratives that reflect the actual complexity.

Moreover, humanitarian advocacy structures rarely self-redeploy, as do the structures of exploitation and violence. The latter prove more agile and adaptive than us because they are products of the environment in which they act.  We are not.  We, as is has been so often discussed of late, are products of the environment in which we ‘sell’ our actions.

Such a political economy of aid work or advocacy explains much about the shape of our sector. When I look in the mirror, though, I see the other shaper. Not a political economy but a psychological and spiritual one. I see in the mirror my personal investment, my addiction to the humanitarian identity, my individual drip feed of self-esteem.  Advocacy campaigns run on passion, on a genuine immersion in the cause, in the righteousness of hurling even one small stone at the forces of unconscionable brutality. How do you tax that?  You don’t. Perhaps we should consider a healthy dose of blood-spilling greed?

Critique of Aid, Politics

Let’s Ideate … Part II

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This is Part II (apologies, but sequels never live up to the original thing). If you have no idea what I am talking about, please read the previous blog for an explanation. If after that you still have no idea, join the club.

  • Ask Angola. Repeat after me: You’re not poor, we’re not rich. You’re not poor, we’re not rich.  You’re not poor, we’re not rich.  What to do about the (self-fulfilling) belief that certain nations are rich and should therefore fund international aid while others are too poor to worry about crises beyond their borders?  Perhaps so-called poor nations should take note of poor people, who routinely prove themselves extraordinarily generous when crisis strikes. Leaving aside all the questions of economic self-interest and geo-political soft power, why did one group of nations evolve with the belief that it should take care of others who are far away? It is a good question, and I suspect the answers lie as wrapped up in our superiority complex, graduate student surplus, “white man’s burden” and (neo) colonial guilt as they do in generosity or compassion.  The better question is why places like Ireland or Portugal have foreign aid budgets while places like Angola and Uzbekistan do not.  I say, every time there is an emergency somewhere, let’s go to the Angolan government and ask them to fund humanitarian operations.  Let’s keep doing it until they take some of that oil money and put it into a foreign aid budget.
  • Yes/No vote. An NGO finishes a year of working in a community on a project.  The NGO writes a progress report to the donor. (See Translate It, in Part I). The donor offers another year of funding.  And then comes then comes the opening of the seventh seal. Not so fast!  Accountability (power) to the people. Not some complicated mechanism of consultation – who has time for that? How about a simple yes/no vote?  A bit brutal, but then referendums and self-determination do not have to be pretty.  Majority decision.  Yes and the NGO gets the money.  No, and another organization gets a chance to do a better job. (Or, better yet, the community gets the money and they can hire themselves an NGO, but that was somebody elses idea.).
  • The smiley face / frowny face vote button thingamajig. Want customer feedback? Are you ready to admit that placing suggestion boxes in an IDP camp full of peasant IDPs may not be the most effective way to seek out customer feedback (and, judging from the emptiness of those boxes, may actually be designed to fill a different box, the one you tick so your donor will be satisfied that feedback mechanisms have been put in place)? How about one of these?

And my best (a relative term, to be sure) idea? Perhaps it is this one:

  • Corruption-buster. At the Design Theory workshop, the facilitators covered the walls with the stories of actual aid recipients, prompting our empathy. I was struck by how many of these stories contained complaints of corruption. Poverty wears you down. Injustice eats you alive. The one that boiled my blood was this story of humiliation, as aid agency staff forced refugees to sign receipts for $20, when in fact they were given only $2. You see? So on my side I will be forced to accept. So you are ripped off in front of your eyes and there is nothing you can do about it. These are things that are happening. The aid workers forge numbers. I was not born a refugee, I have to come out of this kind of life.

Take a place like New Orleans, where nothing works.  Take any city where nothing works.  What is the one exception to this golden rule of incompetence and inefficiency? Ticketing for parking violations. That works. That always works. Spend two extra minutes in the shop and there it is, fluttering under your wiper blade. Those parking meter bastards work harder than any ten civil servants because they aren’t civil servants, they work for private companies that collect a percentage of the fines collected, and each of those bastards gets to smile at the ka-ching of personal gain every time he or she slips a ticket under the wiper.  So why not do the same in the aid world? Forget some sort of hyper-bureaucratized ombudsmanship. We need unannounced visits of a private firm that is paid nothing. They get a cut (20%?) of any corruption uncovered.  Ditto for fat rewards for any refugees whose tip leads to a bust.

So, are you now feeling ready to ideate?

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

Accountability Redux

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I feel bad for the concept of accountability.  Must be hard for such a serious concept to get so little respect. At ALNAP’s annual meeting last month – a 2-day discussion of how change works in the humanitarian ‘system’, and why it so often doesn’t – poor ol’ accountability was stuck in the role of sectoral punching bag.  Need an example of how the system overcomes agreement, well-funded initiatives and 20 years of effort in order to resist change?  Then accountability is your man.  We even have trouble even changing the way we think about accountability (see e.g., my last blog), with system-led development of a downward accountability mechanism more or less occupying the entire space.

My mother says I am always too negative, so I will stop right now and change hats.   As a humanitarian motivated solely by compassion for the suffering of the downtrodden (and certainly not even nudged by the Oedipal pleasure of critiquing the aid establishment), perhaps I can rally to the aid of that punching bag?  In the spirit of a few but not exactly earthshaking ideas:

  1. Think smaller. As I have written before, there “is a danger that we ask too much of accountability”; invest too much in the search for a magic bullet. Our internal efforts, long guilty of greater promise than reward, have nonetheless delivered improvements. To do it better requires framing these efforts within a more honest and explicit understanding of their limitations, diminishing their outsized sales claims reducing the risk that they pre-empt or displace other, dissimilar efforts. In particular, that they do not function to dissuade external efforts aimed not at bequeathing accountability to people, but empowering them to take it.
  1. Make existing accountability work better. Nobody ever talks about the demonstrated accountability most NGO executives show to their boards/trustees. We talk incessantly about accountability moving upwards to donors, but almost never mention boards. Why? Humanitarian NGO boards are filled with the great and the good, titans of the private sector, masters of communication, big shot directors of non-sector NGOs, noted academics and venerated politicians (or even royal family). What they are not filled with are titans, masters or even relatively knowledgeable persons when it comes to humanitarian action. Fiduciary responsibilities, market share, communications and duty of care receive dedicated, expert attention. Do operations comply with the dictates of impartiality? Independence? What about operations? Do boards ask hard questions as to their effectiveness or luxuriate in the sense that they are “great, really really super”.  Would it not be a relatively straightforward affair to insist that boards receive training in humanitarian action, and that Trusteeship more explicitly requires challenging the executive to deliver on downward accountability (not to mention the humanitarian imperative) rather than battle for higher fundraising results and profit efficiency? (Hint: I already have a day-long training mostly ready).
  1. Untick the box. Some donors now routinely require aid agencies to establish some form of accountability to local pops.   Donors have power and the system dances to their tune.  As with all such measures, though, certain features of accountability will soon become a tickbox exercise.  And there is a moral hazard here, as both donor and agency share an interest in having the project look good, a current weakness of upward accountability to donors (i.e., the fudge factor).  But we can still promote donor pressure as a good move. We should only require that we maintain clarity on one thing: This is not downward accountability to people, it is accountability to donors. Box not ticked.
  1. Paradigm shift. It is a mistake to ground downward accountability in the discourse of effectiveness. If accountability is justified because it will make aid more responsive to the needs of people and hence more effective, then avoidance of downward accountability can be justified on the same grounds. The sector has long reduced downward accountability to an option in service to effectiveness rather than allow it to function as a control borne in ethical obligation. Effectiveness allows avoidance via the domineering idea that taking time to involve people affected by crisis is outweighed by the humanitarian imperative to act now now now. Let’s be clear: some of these downward accountability measures appear awfully burdensome in terms of time and resources, especially at the early stage of a emergency response. They will slow humanitarians down. Loud voices will complain about bureaucracy killing people. Doors will be slammed. This is what the clash of paradigms will produce. Anger and self-righteous indignation. A new normative framework needs to be explicit: ethical obligation trumps effectiveness. So the response to complaints needs to be “So what!?” or “Don’t worry, we’re looking into that”, the same responses that the existing paradigm has produced in answering those who have been looking for greater ethical accountability. The trick is to dismantle this effectiveness-based critique prospectively, not wait for it to dismantle the momentum for change.

[Dear Reader: Please insert here a clever summation] [21 March: This post was updated (edits to mistakes and unclear phrasing)]