Tag Archives: Humanitarian Principles

Critique of Aid

The Prosthetic Breast of Humanitarian Action

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SPARKED BY OUTSIDERS 1. Sometimes I am struck by artists and other creators who seemingly grasp humanitarian action better than I. This realization comes with a modicum of envy. They seem to breathe the human condition rather than analyze it. Humanitarian action is a silo, a sectoral silo that shapes and also stunts our perspectives as we engage with the external world.  It thus resembles other fields of action with the critical difference that humanitarianism relates to just about everything because its purpose is humanity, the whole enchilada. This blog is the first in a series where I hope to pass on some of that envy.

The Prosthetic Breast of Humanitarian Action

In 1999 I entered MSF as part of the “bearing witness” industrial complex, translating my civil rights and rural development experience into support of témoignage by MSF project teams. Twenty-five years later, tired of work-related reading, I picked Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals from the teetering pile on my wife’s desk.  Lorde’s experience with breast cancer in 1970s America, woven into her experience as a black lesbian feminist, accentuated the gap between bearing witness to the struggles of others and bearing witness to one’s own struggles; and how with a patient’s insight and a poet’s words she was able to produce a piece transcendent enough to offer this humanitarian a lesson or two or ten. Proof, if we needed more of it, of the value of lived experience.

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Choices and options

I’m going to have the mastectomy, knowing there are alternatives, some of which sound very possible in the sense of right thinking, but none of which that satisfy me enough. … Since it is my life that I am gambling with…[1]

There are choices, even if humanitarians feel that so much of their work is driven by a singularity of options, an imperative to move with urgence and exceptionalism’s license to do so. Erasing the choices open to Other societies and Other individuals – a reductionist view of crisis – from our internal narratives helps us to justify these decisions to ourselves. And as our explanations move upwards and outwards towards home society – misinformation in the form of fundraising campaigns[2] – we push responsibility away by foregrounding the necessity of our action, the unique effectiveness of our capacities, and the Other’sdependence upon us.

Lorde’s daring exemplifies how selecting among choices may often be calculated, but a quantitative reckoning replies to an institutional logic while defeating a human one. You can neither remove a breast nor identify the most urgent cases of distress via a process of counting, even if the sector dreams of a joint intersectoral global tool. Worse still, these quantitative reckonings come rooted in the biased mathematics of our capacities and their deficiencies. This is the culture of “needs assessment”, our scrutiny of the stuff that people do not have while remaining unaware of or undervaluing what they do have (their assets, capacities, and well-honed powers of survival). Even there, INGOs often assess the stuff that people don’t have based on the stuff which they possess – so the shelter agency with a warehouse full of tarpaulin, employing staff with heavy financial and emotional stakes in delivering tarpaulin to people in crisis, making an assessment of people’s need for shelter, which it and the institutional funders then redefine as people’s need for this shelter agency to deliver tarps, and completely ignoring the fact that people themselves might see their need differently, not for a tarp but for a job so that they could buy a tarp or rent a home, or for security so that they could return to the home that they own.  Lorde is clear: the mastectomy responds to her need.

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The articulation of the alibi

For as we open ourselves more and more to the genuine conditions of our lives, women become less and less willing to tolerate those conditions unaltered, or to passively accept external and destructive controls over our lives and our identities.  Any short-circuiting of this quest for self-definition and power, however well-meaning and under whatever guise, must been seen as damaging, for it keeps the post-mastectomy woman in a position of perpetual and secret insufficiency, infantilized and dependent for her identity upon an external definition by appearance. (Lorde, p. 50).

Lorde lowers the Boom!  That paragraph should hang as a reminder in the room of every strategic plan workshop, every project team weekly meeting, every community outreach worker morning briefing, and every government and UN office. As Global Truth Solutions summarizes this travesty: it “is indisputable that people should be ‘at the centre’ of humanitarian assistance. It is equally indisputable that they are not.”

Frequently critical in her thinking, Lorde seemingly saves a particular disdain for the ‘saviors’. Not the authors and friends in whom she found wisdom and solace, but in the energetic champion of a prosthetic breast that was so realistic Lorde would “never know the difference”.  Lorde’s rebuke thus fell upon a well-meaning woman from Reach for Recovery, who dispensed useful advice and the idea that through prosthesis, Lorde could be “just as good as [she] was before because [she could] look exactly the same.” (Lorde, p. 34).  This injurious comparison to the accepted standard, the unattainable perfection, pokes a particular spear in the ribs of international aid.  

Today, Lorde’s declaration of empowerment – Every woman has a militant responsibility to involve herself actively with her own health (Lorde, p. 65) – seems ever more distant in humanitarian contexts (and more globally?). Despite increased awareness of the sector’s inequitable power dynamics vis-à-vis people in crisis, the distance to a humanitarian emancipation grows because the root of this humanitarian power lies in its capacity to transform.

First, humanitarian action resembles a response to people’s problems yet more accurately constitutes an alleviation of symptoms (of deeper crisis), a shallowness that manages to elicit both hand-wringing and acceptance for decades on end, along with considerable financial backing. In Lorde’s cancer experience, this humanitarian power is mirrored in the sleight of hand effected by mastectomy as a cosmetic experience: “…the concentration upon breast cancer as a cosmetic problem, one which can be solved by a prosthetic pretense.” (Lorde, p. 47).  I have often talked about this in terms of the humanitarian alibi.  Like a prosthetic breast, humanitarian action forges a humanitarian pause, healing enough global anxiety and stopping enough bleeding for the world to look elsewhere. No breast cancer to see here.

Second, and far less visible in our self-criticism, much can be learned by a community sharing the experience of struggling to overcome the destruction and pain of crisis.  The alternative, to which we’ve born witness over the past five decades of humanitarian action, has helped instill reliance and dependency as a degradation that, once internalized, too often becomes self-perpetuating.  Speaking at the individual level, to these geo-political effects (e.g., the causes and politics of breast cancer) Lorde adds personal politics.

The emphasis upon wearing a prosthesis is a way of avoiding having women come to terms with their own pain and loss, and thereby, with their own strength. (Lorde, p. 41). 

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Little or no choice

I think now what was most important was not what I chose to do so much as that I was conscious of being able to choose, and having chosen, was empowered from having made a decision, done a strike for myself, moved. (Lorde, p. 25).

Even in a state of crisis and facing complexity beyond her training, Lorde insisted upon and exercised her agency. Of course, aid is often critical to the survival of people. In practice, we decision-makers, we in the agencies, we often decide for and gamble with the lives of others. We inherited such power, but who gives it to us today? And how is such a hierarchy maintained for years and then decades? We know the answers and yet we resist the solutions. The real task is to think hard about that resistance. How can we resist our institutional and personal resistance?  Can ethics help?

Medical ethical principles, for example, accord a remarkable value to autonomy, creating stringent safeguards that require consent except in very limited circumstances. Even if acting in the best interest of their patients, doctors cannot act without the various options being explained to the patient, who owns and takes the decision. The exception is when the patient is incapacitated (e.g., unconscious), and even there, ethical guidance requires scrutiny to be placed upon the necessity of immediate action and the potential for alternative courses of action. Stripped bare, the logic of charity pales in comparison: the choice – mastectomy or chemotherapy – is taken to be ours (and our donors).

In spite of high-level perennial commitments and policies for accountability to affected people (AAP), the sector remains “stuck in the weeds.” The way out of the weeds is not to create and impose more policies or launch new guidance and conferences. Our path out of the weeds is to recognize and operationalize our existing lodestar principle of humanity. We are stuck not in weeds but in a modern age transgression of that principle. That benefits are delivered does not elude this conclusion.  When necessary, accountable compromises to humanity – properly deliberated and reviewed – may be required in some situations. But pasting the excuse of “emergency” onto years of protracted crisis flunks the humanity test.

There is a progressive cost to ignoring this basic ethic of respect, our own principles, and the consequences of treating communities as societal equivalent to unconscious. A cost to ourselves, as we increasingly become accustomed to unnecessarily harmful ways of working, and they solidify in our processes and our norms. A cost to people, as stunting takes place when this disregard carries on for decades, sequentially divesting people of the opportunity to do “strikes” for themselves. Perhaps one answer to “how much divestment?” lies in the near absence of resistance. The lack of significant resistance from communities themselves suggests prolonged disempowerment; and the lack of resistance from local governments seems self-interested (a discharging or responsibilities).

The alternative is to operationalize faith in people having alternatives. We have alternatives.  This returns us to Lorde, who in the period after the surgery worried about the possibility of a recurrence and how she might deal with her life being shorter than she had expected.  “Would I be able to maintain the control over my life that I had always taken for granted.” (Lorde, p. 48). This control is part of the human experience, and should be part of the humanitarian principle of humanity.

[1] Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (1980) London: Sheba Feminist Publishers; p. 27.

[2] Or is it an acceptable form of disinformation, given the good intentions?  I worry that future societies will view it as a form of organized fraud — telling a false story in return for cash!

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, 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, Our Western Identity, Politics

The New Humanitarian Basics

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ODI/HPG’s 2017 Constructive Deconstruction efforts helped produce my think piece The New Humanitarian Basics – an alternative humanitarian action “that is responsive, ethical and attainable” and also “less paternalistic, bureaucratic and expansive in its ambitions.”  I’ll try blogging a few of the paper’s central themes, because it works better as a discussion piece than as a blueprint. In this blog I pick up the gauntlet thrown by one humanitarian who (managed to) read it. Here is what ‘Archie’ writes:

How does that work when the government is a belligerent with a legitimate interest in winning a war yet a less-than-moral (or worse) approach to the means necessary to attain that end which is an invariable / depressing reality of violent conflict.

He’s referring to two intertwined pillars of the vision: (1) an immediate shift to the primacy of the state (national authorities) in delivering/coordinating response to crisis (a rather simple and long-agreed concept); and (2) actual ‘localization’ (i.e., not the corrupted version that Christina Bennett concludes “reinforce[s] the very dynamics they are meant to be changing.”).

I see Archie’s question as two-fold: (a) an emerging world order’s challenge to hegemonic international humanitarian intervention, and (b) the challenge to the well-protected image of the organization (i.e., its projection of moral purity that is such a key to fundraising, public support and esprit de corps). This blog deals with the former.

A New World Order

Trending up: the primacy of the state, the longstanding call for national authorities to take up their responsibility, the imperative of localization.  This fast-evolving relationship of aid agencies to the national and local challenges power dynamics and challenges the effectiveness of current humanitarian praxis, especially in a conflict setting.  Partly this is a challenge to action – is the agency able to ensure that aid reaches those most in need (impartiality)?  Partly a challenge to perceptions, and hence to agency trust, access and local reputation.  And, as Archie writes, it is partly the challenge posed by a twisted world: by rooting the response in the national authorities the result (e.g., in South Sudan) might be “to put money into the hands of the 5th brigade in Western Upper Nile whose intent [is] to massacre and chase away the Dok Nuer”. Not pretty.

My instinct is to be evasive.  The problem is a thorny one, even if too narrowly framed.  But let’s not debate the framing of the question. In fact, let’s not debate.

Archie is right. I have spelled out a humanitarian action that is far less within the control of the international humanitarian system. That does not create a new problem. Humanitarian agencies work within the boundaries imposed by governments all the time.  This is where they most loudly decry the lack of ‘humanitarian space’ (even though they work in somebody else’s house). Still, humanitarian programs often deliver. By way of extreme example, look at the national Red Cross Societies, who comprise actual auxiliaries of the state.  So not new, but this ‘vision’ certainly exacerbates existing challenges.

Negotiated access will become more necessary and more difficult in a response governed by the host state, especially where that host acts with what humanitarians perceive as bad intent. Impartiality, independence and neutrality provide guidance, but actual control by national authorities will in some contexts alter the nature of assistance and protection. As the paper anticipates, perhaps there will be contexts where agencies provide relief tout court (much-valued relief!) because they are too compromised to be considered humanitarian in their actions (in that context). In other words, there will be places where aid agencies transparently choose not to act under the humanitarian label, in order to avoid further undermining the meaning of that specific designation (see here for more on this). (Hopefully, they will also be strategizing on how to better implement the principles and hence become humanitarian with time).  And perhaps there are places where agencies will have to say no, taking a principled stand in the face of unacceptable compromises. That is a freedom and a responsibility they possess (one not available to the RC Societies).

Unlike impartiality, I note that the principles of independence and neutrality are not absolutes but guideposts that are regularly (always?) forcibly compromised by the context of humanitarian action. They are also a means to the ends of access and impartiality, hence wrongly viewed in puritanical terms, where the perfection of the principle acts as a barrier to access and delivery. Don’t get me wrong, adherence to the principles “helps build the trust and acceptance that is critical to (though no guarantee of) access to people in crisis” (p. 12); but changing power dynamics necessitate rethinking how they are or are not operationalized.

Moreover, any apparent agreement with Archie is oversimplified. A call for more robust negotiated access leaves too much systemic baggage in place. Humanitarians must not simply and grudgingly accept that the ‘golden age’ of unfettered access to people in crisis is trending towards extinction, they must understand that this is a good thing, even though it will have negative consequences in certain contexts.  To begin with, the obvious: nowhere in the West can you find foreign powers with unfettered access, implementing locally unaccountable programming.

Hence, as the paper argues, humanitarians must interrogate and move beyond “the facile conclusion that the humanitarian principles are best preserved by state-avoiding methodologies.” (p. 27). Underpinning the sector’s state-avoidance lies a host of powerful assumptions, including a false binary between visions of a monolithic bad/evil/corrupt state and a saviorist/moral humanitarianism.  It would help to recognize that many elements within any state have an interest in responding to the needs of people in crisis.  Further, as Andrew Cunningham astutely concludes, INGOs should recognize the degree to which they need states.  In other words, humanitarians need to change the way they think.

More importantly, though, is the degree to which Archie’s challenge masks a sector that is full of itself, deeply presumptive of its moral authority and of the effectiveness of its actions. There is a fundamental flaw in this practice of a highly self-interested, Western, unaccountable sector passing judgment on a state’s right to govern.  This is not about principles. This is about power. That is for my next blog post.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Localization

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Localization — the agenda formerly intending a shift of humanitarian power?

The Good

The one year anniversary of the World Humanitarian Summit’s ‘Grand Bargain’ offers time to take stock of progress.    At a conceptual level, a key goal of the Grand Bargain is to drive the humanitarian sector towards the irrefutable good of contextualizing its work: re-imagining a humanitarian action that departs from top-down, cookie-cutter approaches and empowers programming that is borne in and is effective in meeting the needs of people within a specific context.  It will do so by shifting greater focus and cash to responders, a departure from a system based on the near monopoly of international aid conglomerates. We call this the localization agenda, even though a more neutral perspective would grasp the humanitarian system as already suffering from an over-localization (in the West).

The Bad

Let us imagine this contextualization in full bloom, a localization that moves beyond its current emphasis on the location of the funding recipient and beyond even the crucial focus on meaningful participation/involvement of local communities. To truly embody the shift in power first envisioned by the localization agenda, it should also comprise a locally-driven rethink of how to address people’s needs. How do we build the freedom for that rethink to occur? How do we avoid the seemingly unstoppable bulk transfer of managerial systems, best-practices and standardized (read: homogenized) methodologies that decontextualize humanitarian assistance in the first place?

This ongoing stampede of North-to-South ‘capacity building’ exercises risks producing globalization instead of localization, a kicking of the humanitarian can down bumpy local roads. [link] We already know the contents of this can — dozens of colourful guidelines on the same topic, neatly venned organizational processes and tick-box exercise after tick-box exercise to ensure quality control.  As the NEAR Network has declared: “Local actors have had more than 30 years of supposed capacity building and ‘partnership principles’ which has not resulted in any significant gains.”

This Trojan Horse of sectoral bureaucracy accompanies a more insidious globalization as local responders clamber for direct funding from Western donors. As I have written elsewhere, the prospect of local agencies tethering themselves to the soft power and avowedly self-interested geo-political ambitions of Western donor funding has already proven itself a debilitating experience for the Western INGO.  We must also guard against the globalizing effects of reducing localization to a donor-driven search for cheap labor, a rationale of efficiency gains by which localization reduces transaction costs by decreasing layers.

More deeply, localization must pierce the imposition of our (globalized) world view, and the universalist approach to exporting our truths, even where the underlying values may be universal in nature.  In other words, humanitarian ideals may be universal, but the architecture and processes designed to realize and defend those deals must be seen as a rather localized product of history and geography.  Let’s not confuse universal with sacred cow.

The Ugly

It has taken nine months of discussion to settle simple questions because they came burdened by complex institutional consequences: What is a local responder? What does ‘as directly as possible’ mean? To answer simply requires only an understanding of the catalyst for the localization push – the spectacular North-South power imbalance and inequitable distribution of resources within the humanitarian sector.  As it turns out, local responders were effectively shut out of owning the local response, even though often sub-contracted to deliver it. One stat summed up the embarrassing state of affairs: a mere 0.4% of international humanitarian assistance in 2015 went directly to national and local NGOs, a situation that makes global inequality look relatively tame.

The definitional debate, however, has compromised this clear intent. The accommodation of political and bureaucratic interests means that a local outpost of a billion-dollars-per-year INGO could be considered ‘local’, and that funding funnelled to local responders via the same old rent-extracting Western INGO intermediaries may count towards the Grand Bargain’s target of going 25 percent local (an issue still to be settled).

Proponents of localization take note.  Lesson 1: wealth and power are not so easily captured. Lesson 2: a logic of localization based on effectiveness and efficiency favors the status quo.

Lost in these debates over effectiveness and efficiency, lost in the scramble of trying to establish INGO standards of financial accounting in smaller, differently-developed local organizations, is any notion of localization as an ethical undertaking. The modern humanitarian sector is founded upon the principle of humanity, that a fundamental human dignity resides within each one of us.  There, we should house the right to self-determination and the ability to possess at least some degree of power over the forces affecting one’s life.

Enter the humanitarian machine at a time of crisis, wielding its monopoly power over decision-making as to who will live or die. That is an abusive power inhering in its unaccountable decisions as to who will and who will not receive aid.  That is a sovereign power being held by a non-sovereign body. It is time then for a realization that localization may or may not yield either effectiveness or efficiency, but those laudable goals should not be the standards by which it is ultimately judged. The ‘decolonization’ of humanitarian action constitutes an ethical mission, not simply a technocratic one; a transfer of power not merely from international to local agencies but from an alien civilization to a home society. Accepting such a meaningful transformation (read: loss) will not be easy for people like me. But our humanitarian action in their house? Time to admit that we haven’t exactly gotten it right, and the principle of humanity means that they should hold the power to get it wrong.

[7 July 2017.  In response to comments that the original blog misstated certain elements, changes were made to the second paragraph of The Ugly.]

Critique of Aid, Politics

Multilateralism and its Discontents

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1.  Did you miss Antonio Donini’s “The crisis of multilateralism and the future of humanitarian action,” on the IRIN website? Here it is. Donini smacks a lot of nails on the head. We live in an era of decline when it comes to the international agenda for a less violent and oppressive world. Global governance is heading the way of the polar bear, swaying in confusion on the lip of an isolated floe. Even Europe, typically much less unprincipled than my own USA, let alone Russia or South Sudan, has “become a flag-bearer for an untrammelled rollback of rights.” The article points the finger, and then examines how the retreat of multilateralism impacts upon humanitarian action. Finally, he asks, “what is the reflecting humanitarian to do?” I have the answer.

No I don’t.  I have one way of looking at it. This retreat of multilateralism rebalances the bargain between humanitarian aid agencies and their major Western donors. It rebalances our bargains with the corporate sector as well, because we humanitarians have long accepted to represent what Donini labels “the smiley face of globalisation.”  This sector we love needs to stop smiling about globalization and it needs to strike a new respect for the principles it enshrines.

On the government side and on the corporate side, some of this is aidwashing (see Point 2 below).  Some of this is soft power. Some of this is market entry.  Some of this is product placement. Some of this is guilt…  The sum of good impact far from counterbalances the sum of those somes, let alone the sum of drone warfare, hyper consumerism and political domination. Nor can it; nor should it. No government can place international interests above self interest as a matter of policy. No corporation can place do-gooderism above profit as a strategic objective.  And no humanitarian organization can afford to ignore these equations.

In other words, no humanitarian organization should continue with the delusion that this headlong rush into ever deeper partnerships with the private sector and dependence on Western donor governments will pave a virtuous path forward for humanitarians.  Of course corporations and entrepreneurs have much to offer. Of course they do good. Of course government aid agencies have much to offer. Of course they do good. But that should begin the discussion, not end it. Faust, at least, traded his soul for knowledge.  Budget relief seems somewhat less noble of a bargaining chip.

The point, as I concluded in a recently published report, is that humanitarian actors “need to decide how far they are willing to become coherent with the policies, players and multilateralism that help produce the crises of displacement, inequality and war in the first place.” Or 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. 

2.  Earlier this week I tweeted about Boris Johnson. On most days, an easy target. “You gotta love politics” I quipped, in reference to Johnson lambasting the Saudis for bombing Yemen while seemingly oblivious to the irony of the situation given Britain’s arms sales to the Saudis. That “paradox” has been noted before. And yet perhaps we aid industry vets do Yemen a disfavor with that label. Paradox? Perhaps that is only the way we choose to (mis)understand it, as a paradox between this delivering of bombs to the Saudis and relief aid to the bombed. Perhaps the paradox is more about how humanitarians can be so world weary and yet so naively full of our own wishful thinking.

There is no paradox whatsoever. There is enabling, causation and even a coherence of action, like arriving home with flowers on the day you will tell your wife what happened at Jonathan’s bachelor party. Are we really so convinced of our goodness as to ignore how the large humanitarian expenditure in Yemen pays for the arms sales to the Saudis? That is its purpose and that forms, hence, part of the impact that should be owned by us, regardless our less bellicose intentions.

Critique of Aid, Politics

The Complex Politics of Compassion

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The politics of compassion. That was the theme for this past weekend’s XVIII Humanitarian Congress Berlin.  An aptly complex topic for today’s aid workers because compassion may not always prove a force for humanitarian good.

Compassion lies at the heart of humanitarian action. Unoriginal pun intended. The principle of humanity, which sets the purpose of humanitarian action, functions as a two-sided coin, at once the family of all human beings as well as the sentiment we feel for fellow human beings in pain. That constitutes humanitarian action as a rather radical enterprise, whereby compassion calls us to respond to the suffering of humans simply because they are human, not because we share the bonds of family, clan, tribe or nation. And it is a response that comes from within, not from external interest or motivation (political gain, military advantage etc.).

So much for the theory. Mind you, I believe in the theory. Yet I am also concerned about the power of compassion to lead humanitarians astray. For instance, the label of compassion is too easily slapped on the sort of pity and paternalism that degrade humanity, reducing people to beneficiaries, patients, victims and generally helpless masses who lack any agency in their lives.

Or, as I last blogged (see October 10th), compassion drives our attention as individuals, societies and organizations. Compassion brings aid. Good. But responding to crisis thus entails a distribution of our attention and compassion. When our compassion draws us towards Syria, Hurricane Matthew and hopefully soon to Nigeria and the Lake Chad basin it betrays the Central African Republic (yet again invisible), Myanmar or, (thinking back) the people in the Lake Chad/Nigeria region these past two years. Put differently, compassion may comprise one element of the principle of humanity but it has consequences for the principle of impartiality.

In reverse, attention can spark our compassion. So the vagaries of media interest – the profitability of some victims – help determine where we respond, or don’t. Witness a speaker on Friday who noted that at least one government in Europe tried to block publication of images of child refugees.

A parallel thread ran through Friday’s panel debate of medical care under fire. There, the sensational shielded the everyday, as the discussion remained tied to the US military bombing of MSF’s Kunduz hospital and the deliberate destruction of healthcare in Syria. It is precisely the shocking quality of such carnage that draws our compassion and condemnation. But it is perhaps also true that our greater concern, attention and action should be devoted to the banality of violent attacks on medical care, to the attacks against healthcare workers and points of care across the world, in exotic locations as well as in our home communities. Perhaps the everyday poses a far greater threat than the spectacular; it certainly poses a different problem, and not one so beyond our control as the abuse of violence by world superpowers.

The point is not to question compassion as a key characteristic (the motivation) of humanitarian action. The point is to question blind faith in our compassion, in its authenticity as well as its impact. It means that we must follow our hearts and at the same time seek out the blind spots, the unseen or unattended crises and the deception of our emotions.

That said, we must not abandon compassion for the sterility of formulaic needs assessments or automated ‘humanitarian’ action. At a fundamental level, the politics of compassion is the antidote to our self-inflicted politics of humanitarian universalism. Compassion grounds our action in the human being, rather than in the framework of multilateral abstractions we have erected to define humanitarianism; a massified, globalized set of principles and legal obligations that are proving ever more ineffective in speaking to people, let alone to the governments and belligerents most responsible for crisis.

Politics

Open Letter to Ban Ki-moon

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Dear United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon,

Millions of people heard you. I heard you.

This is what you said before the World Humanitarian Summit.

Our global landscape is still blighted with the brazen and brutal erosion of respect for international human rights and humanitarian law. Every day, civilians are deliberately or indiscriminately injured and killed. Air strikes rip families apart. … The brutality of today’s armed conflicts and the utter lack of respect for the fundamental rules of international humanitarian law on care for the wounded and sick, humane treatment and the distinction between civilians and combatants threaten to unravel 150 years of achievements and cause a regression to an era of war without limits. (UNSG Summit Report ¶ 46)

Flouting the most basic rules governing the conduct of war has become contagious … We can, and we must, do better. (¶ 48). Remaining silent while serious violations of international law are unfolding is morally unacceptable […] Our common humanity demands that we do everything we can to prevent and end violations and hold perpetrators accountable. (¶ 59).

Whenever serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights law occur, Governments, global leaders and other relevant individuals must systematically condemn them. Even where we may not be able to stop violence and suffering immediately, we have a minimum responsibility to speak […] I have asked all United Nations senior officials to do so and I encourage all United Nations staff to act with moral courage in the face of early, serious and large-scale violations. I also exhort all relevant actors and stakeholders to end the double standard of condemning the violations of some but not of others. (¶ 62, emphasis added).

Let us make the Summit in Istanbul the turning point that the world sorely needs and the beginning of the change (¶ 180).

Wow.

This is what you said after the World Humanitarian Summit:

State, civil society and humanitarian leaders repeatedly stated that international humanitarian and human rights law is more relevant than ever: it is the last protection against barbarity. We therefore must not take the easy way out and declare all civilians collateral damage. (Chair’s Summary p. 3)

There was wide agreement that unless we hold perpetrators to account, there will be no stopping this downward spiral. (Chair’s Summary p. 4). The World Humanitarian Summit has been a wake-up call for action for humanity. It has generated global momentum and political will to move forward on the Agenda for Humanity and the five core responsibilities to deliver better for people across the globe. (p. 7).

The Summit is a point of departure to act, but there must also be a destination … Let us now turn the Agenda for Humanity into an instrument of global transformation. (p. 8)

This is what you did earlier this week. You succumbed to political pressure and erased Saudi Arabia from the UN’s blacklist of those violating the rights of children (due to their often indiscriminate bombing in Yemen).

Here is what others think you did earlier this week (click): Amnesty International, War Child, and Human Rights Watch (and 35 other organizations).  Here is what I think you did earlier this week: I think you gutted the World Humanitarian Summit.  Without a global recommitment to political responsibility, legal obligations and humanitarian ideals, the Summit births nothing more than a broad set of bureaucratic aid system reforms.

I have not yet understood why this move leaves me so sad and so angry. After all, as an example of politics and power trumping the norms and principles of humanity, it seems emblematic of the current state of affairs to the point of banality. It exemplifies well the shortcomings of the United Nations and, more generally, global leadership.  Could it be that your words pierced my cynicism?Touched my humanity?  Could it be that I felt hope? Yes.

If May’s Summit functioned as a “wake-up call” then your actions this week signaled a death knell, clear notice that the most fundamental commitments to humanity were not reaffirmed, nor a new moral courage discovered.  While I was never convinced the Summit was worth staging, I am certain it was not worth killing off so quickly.

Mr. Secretary General, this is the moment, a critical juncture for your World Humanitarian Summit and for your legacy. Stand up now. Put the Saudi-led coalition back on the list.

Yours sincerely.

PS: And Mr. Secretary General, if you happen to run into other world leaders, could you ask why they do not loudly insist you hold the Saudis accountable (even in this small way) for their actions? Sadly, I think we know the answer. Back to business as usual: shared inhumanity, many irresponsible.

Critique of Aid, Politics

Impartiality’s Forgotten Clause

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[The ICRC has launched a new blogsite: Humanitarian Law & Policy.  Very excited to have this opinion piece among their opening day blogs. Thanks to the team there for feedback. Good luck.]

In the words of the UN Secretary General, ‘Leaving no one behind’ “is a central aspiration of most political, ethical or religious codes and has always been at the heart of the humanitarian imperative” (¶ 72). In the world of humanitarian relief, we leave people behind every day. It isn’t pretty.

On my first mission, as project coordinator in Khartoum way back in 1999, I found myself informing about 250 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Omdurman el-Salaam camp that MSF would be closing its health centre. I explained how the situation in the camp had improved to some degree, that there were other parts of Sudan with greater needs, that MSF was bound by the principle of impartiality to leave, and that this was the same principle that had brought us to Omdurman el-Salaam in the first place.

Naïve, a bit smug in the correctness of my position, I expected some initial grumbling, to be followed by tributes, appreciation for the high-quality services provided and perhaps lunch. I departed about two hours later, frustrated, sad and brimming with self-righteous indignation after having been called a murderer many times over, and told that MSF would carry the blood of their children on its hands.

The World Humanitarian Summit’s Core Commitment to ‘Leave no one behind’ constitutes neither a humanitarian imperative nor an option. In the heart of crisis, needs almost always exceed response, essentially obligating aid agencies to implement painful choices – deciding where to deliver aid includes a decision where not to deliver aid. The principle of impartiality dictates that choice. It even tells us who to leave behind: as Jean Pictet put it, humanitarian action “makes no discrimination as to nationality, race, religious beliefs, class or political opinions. It endeavours to relieve the suffering of individuals, being guided solely by their needs, and to give priority to the most urgent cases of distress.”

Those most in need come first

For half of impartiality, there seems to be good news. Humanitarian agencies treat non-discrimination in aid as a red line at project level, ensuring that services or distributions reach individuals without regard to race, religion, ethnicity, etc. What about the definition’s second half? Impartiality prohibits discrimination and requires aid agencies to identify and prioritize those most in need. Is this impartiality’s forgotten clause – ‘forgotten’ in the sense of being voiced with little regard to its implications for operations?

Critics often call attention to the weakness of impartiality at a global level, highlighting the degree to which aid funding disproportionately follows the political and economic interest of the main donors. At the context level, though, impartiality seems challenged by the evolution of humanitarian practice itself. Too often, needs assessment slips into a logic of finding those with (some) identifiable needs, not those most in need, or finding those with needs corresponding to supply, to the stuff that the agency has to offer. Tellingly, the World Humanitarian Summit consultation process revealed widespread discontent among people affected by crisis – with surveys showing only 27% agreeing that aid received met their primary needs.

Similarly, a number of trends and factors within the humanitarian sector collide with impartiality in ways that raise important yet largely ignored questions. When crisis strikes, how does and how should impartiality relate to program choices for agencies already operating in the country (e.g. doing development work); who already have connections to a specific community or geographic location? If the needs are greater elsewhere, does impartiality not require the organization to shift its relief effort to that place? Or would it make more sense to remain in a location that is familiar, where the agency is trusted and has existing infrastructure? That seems logical from an operational standpoint, but arguably functions to create constituencies of preferred aid recipients, where distribution is not at all based on need alone but depends on a variation of ‘who you know’.

Thorny questions abound. How does agency specialization affect impartiality? As I have discussed before, do agencies looking for the needs of children even see the needs of the elderly? And yet, again, specialization brings with it considerable advantages. Further, as MSF has argued, does the pressure to be successful, whether imposed by donor contracting or simply internal agency dynamics, push the delivery of aid toward easier-to-reach populations, closer to central hubs, and away from the uncertainties inherent in trying to address the needs of the most vulnerable?

Even policies as commonsensical as ‘value for money’ may impact on impartiality, because reaching those with the greatest need will usually incur greater costs. A discussion at an MSF HIV/AIDS project in Zimbabwe illustrates this point. When asked, the team clearly explained that the most urgent cases had to be the HIV-positive street children, whose situation was truly shocking. But the resources necessary to reach them and maintain their participation in the treatment program were deemed prohibitive, because substantially higher numbers would have to be left out of the program. So the program focused elsewhere. A tough lesson: distributive justice does not necessarily align with impartiality.

Impartiality is an aspiration, not an operational principle

In practice, the principle of impartiality plays a dual role for humanitarians, at once a defining characteristic or ethic of the trade and an obligation that shapes crucial decisions. In practice, impartiality constrains the urge to help everyone because capacity constrains the ability to do so. Critically, impartiality is an ideal. Its perfect form exists in lectures and textbooks, not in the messy world of humanitarian crisis. Compromise is therefore unavoidable. To maintain the integrity of the principle, then, we should establish agreed standards or best practice guidelines. Perhaps we can define red lines that should not be crossed in terms of leaving the most urgent cases behind. The point is to ensure these compromises and trade-offs are recognized and deliberate, rather than the unseen by-product of humanitarian decision-making.

Compromise, though, implies acknowledging what is at stake to begin with. Yet far more discussion and analysis focuses on the independence and neutrality of the sector than on its impartiality. Always highly touted as an ethical foundation and inviolable principle, impartiality takes on even greater importance today as people affected by crisis progressively insist that aid should do a better job of meeting their needs. That mounting shift may prove to be one of the defining dynamics of the next decade of humanitarian aid. With that in mind, we need to ensure that Leave no on behind remains a moral principle, an aspiration, not an operational principle and certainly not an excuse to treat everyone’s needs as of equal urgency.

 

Critique of Aid

Blurring the humanitarian – development divide

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[This post can be found here, on The Guardian’s Global Development Professionals web pages. Thanks to the GDPN team for their work.]

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which announced last week it is pulling out of the upcoming World Humanitarian Summit (WHS), is not the only organisation to feel anxiety about the event. When the summit launched, it promised to transform humanitarian action. Now it seems more likely the summit will confuse it to death.

Number four of the five core responsibilities set out for WHS, in UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon’s report One Humanity: Shared Responsibility, was that we should tear down the divisions between humanitarian and development work. He proposes merging the two, aligning humanitarian action behind the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and shifting its objective from delivering aid to ending need.

To most ears, I imagine that sounds pretty good. Inspirational, even; as thoughtful and as grand a dream as one can have. To my humanitarian ears, well, I hear alarm bells going off. And so did MSF.

The WHS misjudges the extent to which the distinctions between ‘humanitarian’ and ‘development’ form the lifeblood of the humanitarian endeavour. Making the SDGs the common overall results and accountability framework amounts to making over the ultimate goal of humanitarian action. Would you want ambulance teams to aim at strengthening the hospital system or improving nutrition? No. Should humanitarians be held accountable for ending hunger? No. They should be held accountable for feeding people who are starving.

To be fair, the UN secretary general’s diagnosis of the problem strikes a depressingly accurate chord. The humanitarian/development divide imposes institutional divisions onto the real world of people in crisis. The urgency of food, water, healthcare or shelter needs in Syria or eastern DRC displaces but does not diminish the longer-term hopes and aspirations of people in terms of wanting economic progress, a functioning healthcare system or political empowerment. Short-term and long-term problems intermingle, perhaps especially in crisis situations and complex emergencies.

The aid system, for its part, functions in what research shows to be well-anchored structural, financial and cultural silos. Each are convinced of their own moral superiority and effectiveness, and the two sides do not talk to each other, often not even within the same organisation. Slap the label of “humanitarian crisis” on a situation and it becomes difficult to undertake development work. This has a particularly pernicious effect in protracted crises such as in South Sudan or eastern DRC, where humanitarian work resembles a 20-year series of one-year projects. The UN secretary general is right in thinking the system can and should do better. He is wrong in proposing convergence as the answer.

The humanitarian imperative is defined by the principle of humanity. In simple terms, its purpose is to fix the human being, not the system. Humanitarian action is thus defined as addressing the immediate needs of people caught up in crisis, by delivering relief aid and delivering it in accordance to the principles of impartiality, neutrality and independence. Ultimately, development and other long-term goods may be more important but to humanitarians they must remain goals of secondary value.

Why is this humanitarian specificity so important? Because the overwhelming majority of humanitarian needs are generated by war (the UN secretary general’s report puts the figure at over 80%) and war makes access tricky. To reach people in conflict, humanitarians have but one power, the power of trust. The people with the guns and bombs must be convinced that you seek to fix humans full stop. Distrust will flare if you come with an agenda to address the causes of their suffering, reinforce national authorities or stabilise fragile states. Building clinics for the Afghan government might support the SDGs, but the Taliban see it as part of a military and political strategy. That means not being able to reach millions of Afghans. Tragically, the perversity of war means that laudable goals on one side place humanitarians in the crosshairs on the other.

From dramatically different goals come dramatically different methods and approaches. In simple terms, maintaining neutrality and independence drives humanitarian actors towards “state avoidance” while development requires much more of a partnership approach.

Everyone should be frustrated with the travesty of humanitarian solutions being applied to protracted problems. A camp for displaced persons is a good place to find shelter, nutrition and (hopefully) safety; it is a terrible place to call home and raise your children. Similarly, it is unacceptable that in long-running crises like South Sudan or eastern DRC, decades of humanitarian response have left people no closer to functioning national services. But in the absence of those services, in the absence of development and peace and justice, humanitarian action is what keeps people alive.

The sensible solution is to let humanitarians deliver on the immediate needs, empower others to end those needs in the first place and ensure the two work better together. Folding humanitarian action into development, as WHS aims to do, is not the answer.