Tag Archives: Communications

Critique of Aid

Four Ideas that

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

  1. A confederacy of shitholes.

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

2. The Wrong Red-Line.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Bad apples vs good eggs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  1. Change the public narrative.

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

  1. Fight the entitlement.

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

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

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

 

 

Our Western Identity

Headlines of Harvey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critique of Aid, 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, Our Western Identity

Addendum: The Three NGOs We Need

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Addendum to the May 27 posting.

This blog adds detail to my post-WHS argument for three new INGOs, which should not be confused for either a general call for more INGOs or a lack of recognition that such NGOs may exist, though on a much smaller scale than necessary.

  1. Fundraising without Borders.

The mission of this FWB is to build the fundraising capacity of NGOs in the global south in order to safeguard their independence.  One target, the home markets. Many ‘poor’ crisis-affected nations hold wealth and cadres of wealthy citizens and a burgeoning middle class that could easily sustain local organizations and finance national humanitarian crisis response. (Combined, Africa’s very wealthy elite have a combined net worth over $660 billion).  Note that FWB does not provide a short-term fix. It must develop a long-range vision of nurturing a culture of local support to NGO activity, building national and global fundraising support services, ensuring robust finance mechanisms, etc. FWB will mechanize the implicit call of One Humanity, Shared responsibility to replace the ‘white man’s burden’ with an everyman’s compassion.

Second target, and perhaps initially of greater financial import, my neighbors. FWB would enable NGOs in the global south to fundraise directly in the markets of the global north. Following Typhoon Haiyan, the Philippines Red Cross advertised for donations in the UK media. The shock to fundraising departments might have been visible on British seismographs. Buying some advertising space, though, marks a crude beginning. Fundraising in Western markets constitutes a science, full stop.  On behalf of southern NGOs and based in each of the ‘fat’ markets, FWB would host highly developed skills and resources in terms of multimedia donation architecture (from an SMS to processing a check), media buying, messaging, financial management, database management and so forth.  The idea would be to take distinct advantage of being a non-Western NGO in the Western market – allowing donors to ‘bypass the middleman’, avoid expensive INGO costs like hotels and expat salaries, and to donate directly to those best situated to know the context and ‘solve’ local problems.

  1. Image Rescue Committee (IRC-II).

To raise money, Western NGOs deploy a range of techniques to ensure their prominence in media coverage of disaster response, displacing and disempowering local actors/efforts in the process.  The humanitarian sector’s distortion of the narrative impoverishes the global south, unsurprisingly reinforcing a picture of dysfunctional and/or primitive local societies being rescued by the international do-gooders.  And while the humanitarian sector has paid lip service to the enormous efforts of local actors, it has strenuously averted actually changing their dominant narrative. We should not wait for the Western humanitarian media machine to significantly improve the integrity of its messaging. Rather, this media bias needs to be challenged by the mainstreaming of alternative discourses. Enter, stage left, IRC-II.

The task is simple and rather straightforward. IRC-II should deploy teams on Crisis Day 1, delivering interviews, film footage and clever soundbites that profile (exclusively!) local actors and efforts.  One can imagine special reports that highlight the expertise and effort of local actors, complete with economic calculations of the value of the local effort – stats to rival those of the international community. Or maybe a TV montage of local authorities complaining that the Western intervention seems overly preoccupied with finding comfortable hotel space? Famous photographers documenting the goings on of the aid community at the local swim club or beachside restaurant?

Naturally, IRC-II would employ all of the same media tricks as the major INGOs, such as transporting journalists and film crews to their projects, lobbying news outlets for choice positioning, commissioning advocacy reports, or rolling in the celebrities, Hollywood megastars able to show their deep concern while strolling through an IDP camp in the logo-festooned shirt of a local NGO.  Put differently, the goal of IRC is to use international media to broadcast the truth in such a way as to crack the narrative divide.

  1. No-Mercy Corps.

Five decades of development work have yielded organizations specializing in empowerment against a wide array of oppressive and anti-democratic structures.  From the empowerment of labor against industry to the empowerment of women against the patriarchy and from empowerment of farm laborers against farm owners to the empowerment of people against despotic leaders, there is no shortage of NGO-led effort against the powerful.  Critically, nobody in this spectrum of work looks in the institutional mirror.  So there remains one glaring gap – empowerment of local communities against the Western NGOs and UN agencies.

Too often, the grand, noble aid agency remains largely untouchable to the marginalized, desperately grateful communities. No wonder the WHS consultations found that only 27% of aid recipients felt their needs were being met. Time to end the sector’s free pass and create No-Mercy Corps, to work locally on how people affected by crisis can better control the crisis response. Looked at functionally, the purpose of NMC would be to counter the powerless of people affected by crisis against one of the most powerful determinants of their lives by creating multiple points of accountability.

The problem is not a new one. Yet the good-intentioned though relatively ineffective ‘solutions’ have always sought to change the sector from within, to (grudgingly) bequeath some illusion of participation, as exemplified by its decades-slow and miserly (voluntary) bequeathing of downward accountability.  Control and power, of course, need to be taken. (The Core Humanitarian Standard? A first sectoral step in the right direction, but we should be wary when the foxes approve new controls on the henhouse.). Specific to each context, NMC’s aim is to build multi-pronged, independent/external control upon the humanitarian response.

  • Setting up and funding aid ombudsman or watchdog functions, either as organizations within the community or as part of local government capacity.
  • Enacting local legislation or standard technical agreements that incorporate Sphere standards and the guiding principles, or require greater foreign NGO transparency in terms of decision-making, performance and reporting (and ensuring translation/dissemination).
  • Creating and funding local organizations that are able to work with aid recipients to assess aid performance and rectify problems.
  • Ensuring local consultation, both individually and across communities, such as has been done through surveying by Ground Truth.
  • Training local media, community leaders and existing CBOs in the assessment of aid efforts, with attention for example to the humanitarian principles.
  • Monitoring and advocacy (in the West) on the work actually being done, aiming to change the behavior of the INGOs, such as reports delivered to donors and media in INGO home societies or lobbying INGO trustees/boards to improve performance.
Politics

Operation Fear, redux

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Who remembers Willie Horton? You could make an argument that without Willie Horton, George Bush the senior would not have been elected president, and hence his son would not have risen to power, and so no US attack of Iraq, and so on . . .

Horton

The successful centerpiece of a Bush campaign ad attacking Michael Dukakis (the Democratic candidate), Willie Horton embodied a wild, violent and very black criminality that scared the bejesus out of mainstream (i.e., White) American voters. A first, highly mediatized use of racial fears to win an election? I don’t know. But compare this to what is being termed the “opening salvoes in Operation Fear.” The latter day attack: David Cameron employing fear of migrants to spur opposition to Britain leaving the EU, threatening that France might no longer honor the agreement by which the UK operates its border controls on French territory (which is a key reason the squalid camp lies in France, not the south coast of the UK).

The politics of fear is but one aspect of the situation: the degree to which the fear of migrants, foreigners and refugees has eroded the ideals and principles behind safe refuge and the right to seek asylum. More importantly, the degree to which it has muted many of the voices one might expect to champion these very ideals, giving them loud voice in the public sphere (rather than a reticence in defense of institutional public image).

But the more insidious problem can be found in the mechanics underlying these tactics. Willie Horton was a violent, deranged killer. As an individual, he earned our fear. The secret of the ad’s success, though, traded on his face, an archetype of the guy hiding under your childhood bed. I wonder what it would have felt like to African-Americans, not simply to be feared on account of their skin, but to be feared so pervasively and effortlessly that it makes for a useful instrument.

What does it mean to the people in Calais (or those who are not, but might as well be), if they can so easily be used to evoke fears of invasion, of a swarming terror? Cameron’s underlying logic involves trading on the dehumanized foreigner, a meme for the modern bogeyman, usefully deployed to frighten not children but British voters into good behaviour. And so, the call to the humanitarian and human rights community is not simply to defend law and policies or to deliver assistance, but to counter (the principle of) humanity under attack and the equally powerful banalization of the attack. That is where it starts. That is where it always starts.

Politics

The Old Switcheroo

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It is difficult to issue a thoughtful mea culpa message and still manage to undermine your credibility. WHO just pulled off that rare double. In short, they posted their message and then replaced it with another, toned-down version. As if the world wouldn’t notice! Sarah Boseley’s blog captures the changes.

The contents should be well-received, in either version. Admitting that it has learned lessons of humility, fragility and (ironically) the need for clear communication – hard to disagree. And it is not the fact of the old switcheroo that bothers me; nor even the innocence in believing that one could slip this by without being caught. No, what I find so depressing is that in all the lessons forced onto the organization by its Ebola response, perhaps the most important has been missed.

I cannot be certain why WHO has toned-down its message, or felt so compelled to do so that it pulled the switcheroo. Somewhere, though, it seems likely that the problem was having rankled some feathers. Some people didn’t like the message, and they weren’t little people. So it had to unrankle them.

And that is the problem. That is precisely what was missing in WHO’s failure to sound the alarm, loudly and early, on this outbreak – the willingness to take the heat for making a call that would have been unpopular with those in power. Humility, fragility, capacity, solidarity… all worthy lessons. But if WHO is to become a force for global epidemic response, it must learn the lesson of rankling feathers. Take a lesson from MSF: It must learn to piss people off.

Health, Politics

“Pound of Cure” Politics

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Who hasn’t heard this one: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The old adage presents a truism well relevant to the world of international aid. Ebola comes quickly to mind as the latest in a long list of lessons not learned. To wit, at what point – March? May? – would a fairly modest ten million or so have staved off the need for the $1.3B intervention that has been launched to date?

But the proverbial equation generates a false comparison. The “pound of cure” logic dissimulates. That tail of the proverb represents the cost of an intervention at a later stage – the bill for the fix (i.e., action after the problem has materialized). The mistake is to confuse the cost of the fix with the value of the damage. Pound of cure thinking hides ten, twenty or maybe thousands of pounds of loss – 11,000 orphans, schools shuttered, crops unsown or harvests unharvested, businesses bankrupted, national economic growth about-faced. And over 9600 people who are no longer people.

Let’s not be too hard on the proverb. Let’s be hard on ourselves. In the deeply politicized world of international aid and emergency response, the availability of the proverbial ounce of prevention turns out to be part mirage, hence a solid track record of paying for pounds of cure. This study of the 2011 famine in Somalia seems clear enough: Famine early warning systems clearly identified the risk of famine in South Central Somalia in 2010–2011 but timely action to prevent the onset of famine was not taken.

It too often proves more difficult from a political perspective to prevent a problem from arising than to deal later with the consequences of the problem itself. That is because mobilizing preventative action often proves trickier than launching a curative response. Humans seem hardwired to contend with the urgent at the expense of the important. In proverbial terms, that is also because frogs don’t hop out of water brought slowly to boil. And because screeching wheels get the grease before those that merely squeak. Tired yet? How about this? In the aid world, few will pay the early bird to catch the worm.

Enough of the proverbs. Let’s try fairytales. Is it even fair to balance a pound of cure against one sole ounce of prevention? What does the story of the Boy who cried “Wolf!” tell us? If not a boy, then what about the Western NGO? We belong to a business that depends on the production of a veritable smorgasbord of impending disasters; of persistent, strident calls for action (read: squeaky wheels in search of grease). That makes for a fast drip of public alarm, elbow-steered lobbying, and celebrity-endorsed impending doom. Act now! (Or: Send cash!). How many cures – how many actual crises – have actually been averted? Perhaps this is not just a tale of a Boy. Perhaps this is also the work of Chicken Little.

If we flip this around: the emergency aid business is of necessity an industry of alarm. Is there today a cacophony of alarm and media hype that deadens the ear? Have we reached the point where it is actually more efficient and more financially prudent for key donor governments and international institutions to wait and pay for the cure?

And what about the lessons of those fairytales? Cries of “Wolf!” or “The sky is falling” became quite pertinent in the Ebola crisis, where MSF’s early alarm was derided or dismissed in some quarters as yet another NGO fundraising ploy. The NGO cried out that Ebola was real and nobody listened. Real it was. A ton of cure that could have been averted by an ounce of prevention? Seems so. And maybe also a ton of cure that was necessitated by the perception of too many false ounces?

 

Politics

Cyber Warfare: Think about who might be next

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International cyber warfare did not begin with somebody stealing the launch codes to the nuclear arsenal on a U.S. Navy Triton submarine. It did not begin with a cabal of MIT geeksquad eco-terrorists shutting down oil production in the Arctic Circle. No, those are Hollywood story lines. In the end, international cyber warfare began with the revelation that Angelina Jolie is a “spoiled brat.” It began, funnily enough, with Hollywood itself; with a powerful movie studio pulling the release of its $42 million movie, shamed by outings of internal secrets, hurt by stolen scripts, threatened with violence. So much for The Interview.

Have you followed this story (e.g., here, here or here)? Did you feel a bit catty early on, as I did, a little too elated to see Tinseltown’s top brass squirm as their personal emails became Gawker headlines? Be careful. Here’s a test. Aside from a Hollywood studio about to poke fun at the oddball ruler of a pariah country, can you think of another Western entity, or body of entities, who might occasionally humiliate the leaders of relatively powerless countries? Who might ritually indulge in the arrogance of airing someone else’s dirty underwear? Who might just irritate some nation enough, or threaten enough reputational damage, that the allure of socking one of these self-appointed voices of global conscience in the gut might appear both justified and quite delicious?

On the surface, the Sony saga has some appeal to those of us who root for the underdog: marginalized basketcase government jumps corporate behemoth and beats them into surrender. There is glory in that. And power. We NGOs in particular should understand the apparatus at play. The North Korean government (allegedly) has rode the vehicle of celebrity to guarantee viral coverage for its story, in the process shaming the would-be shamers. I can think of a few other governments who might be interested in that kind of power, and instead of a second rate comedy being canned it might be a documentary about rape in Darfur, or a report on the deliberate destruction of health facilities in Syria.

Let’s face it, in terms of our cyber security large Western NGOs have erected far less of a fortress than a company like Sony Pictures. We are exposed. Crucially, we are easily more vulnerable than the movie biz to blackmail when public perception and trust are at stake. It wasn’t pretty, but those Sony emails certainly didn’t say anything we didn’t already think about Scott Rudin, Amy Pascal or that entire industry. The public is titillated, not abhorred, by their sneering. In contrast, what do aid execs write when nobody is looking? I’m guessing that donors contributing a million a year would not appreciate email musings refering to them as, say, egomaniacal , dandruffy pains in the ass. Not to mention direct orders to strengthen the facade that the agency is working through local partners, or the truth about bloated HQ staff travel budgets and long-running projects with little impact.

Critique of Aid, Politics

Keep it Simple, Stupid

2 Comments

Poor George Clooney.  He’s such a busy guy.  What with making blockbusters, Nespresso ads and all those mystery women, it’s a wonder the actor has had time to throw himself into the quagmire of Sudan.

South Sudan isn’t doing too well these days.  Arguably, the mess is George’s fault. If we hadn’t all suffered the delusion of Sudan’s bright future, we might have been busier dealing with its complex faults.  That’s what Daniel Howden insinuates.  He takes Clooney (among others) to task now that the South Sudan house of statehood has collapsed faster than Anthony Weiner’s political career.  Howden writes that “actors were highly effective at communicating a narrative about the new country that borrowed from a simple script.” That narrative (i.e., all problems were caused by the Wicked Witch of the North) was, unfortunately, “part truth, part wilful misunderstanding” and “deeply flawed”.

Let’s give George some credit. He is not a phoney when it comes to playing savior.  He didn’t just show up at a fundraising dinner, or make one self-aggrandizing visit.  The man has invested something of himself.  He even got arrested for the cause.  But there are limits to that credit.

Howden is right to call out the overly simplistic narrative, but let’s not blame actors for the superficial script.  As I’ve blogged (e.g. cleansing conflict from the ‘perfect storm’ of factors causing famine in Somalia in 2011), the entire international community – politicians, aid NGO agencies, UN officials – seems dependent upon simple scripts.  The only time we embrace complexity is in explaining our failures.  (Of course, academics ply a healthy trade in the complexity of places like Sudan, but who really listens to academics besides other academics?).

You can’t sell complexity.  No funding, no donations, and no political support.  It’s even a hard sell within an agency.  Try getting MSF to add some nuance to its analysis of Syria!  And maybe that’s not such a bad thing, given the need for action rather than endless deliberation. Complexity is a cousin of perfection – it can be an enemy of the good.

As for Clooney and the celebrification of the aid business, maybe I’ve been wrong in the past. Maybe it’s wrong to begrudge him the attention he and other celebrities get.  Sure, NGOs across the spectrum have sold out to the celebrity culture in the hope of increasing attention to our causes. But maybe celebrities really do make more effective champions than we activists.  Maybe humans are hardwired to follow the opinions of celebrities. See this article.   Apparently, it has to do with something so academic sounding as the anthropology of prestige.

How about that! Evolution has left us biologically inclined to follow the political analysis of celebs, not to mention their fashion tastes, recipes and personal grooming tips. Can somebody please get Miley Cyrus to say something about CAR?