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Don’t Just Do It

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The leader of the UK’s Labour Party just took action. “I would, of course, do the right thing and step down.”  This is, of course, politics. Kier Starmer’s catchy response to accusations he broke Covid lockdown rules was delivered in order to contrast his integrity with the Prime Minister’s refusal to hold himself to account. 

Forget about the recent plan to send single male migrants to Rwanda, or even Brexit, the British government’s most dangerous manoeuvring comes in the form of a single, innocuous word: “job”.  As in “But I think the best thing I can do now is, having settled the fine, is focus on the job in hand.” Faced with a police fine for having broken Covid rules (see “Partygate” for those lucky enough not to follow British politics), the party line was clear: the Prime Minister wanted to “deliver on the priorities of the British people”, he was “keen to get back to the job”, and the British people wanted to see the Tory party “getting on with the job”. 

This line of argument recalls the well-worn path of politicians, corporations, the Catholic church and, sometimes, just about all of us:  the good I do buys me some space for the bad.  It’s like carbon offsetting for sins.

Let’s skip back five years.  Not long after the World Humanitarian Summit, I was talking to a leader in our sector, a vocal proponent of transferring power to local non-governmental organizations (LNGOs).  “Kevin” was an enthusiastic supporter of the Grand Bargain, especially the commitment to deliver a fat chunk of funding directly to local organizations.  Turns out, Kevin’s commitment involved a commitment to the idea of localization rather than to an actual substantial shift of responsibility and financial resources.  Turns out, his views spoke for much of the sector.  Turns out, there was a caveat.  The sector’s inequitably powerful and overly Western contingent can bask in the noble glow of being champions of localization while effectively blocking it.

The INGO Kevin worked for – a major player – was committed to the Grand Bargain. Yet, its uppermost commitment is understood as being to people, not the Bargain.  Fair enough. But this ‘higher’ commitment has been interpreted to mean that Kevin’s INGO should operationalize localization only if it did not diminish the quality or quantity of aid, and that Kevin’s INGO should be the judge of this potential diminishment. 

This was the Grand Bargain’s ideological equivalent of fine print. So much for the slogan says humanitarian work should be “as local as possible and as international as necessary”. There’s a lot of ‘devil’ in the detail of that last bit.” But let’s not enter the “INGO vs LNGO: who can do it better?” debate. The more critical issue is that the arguments of both sides – the pros and cons of local action – share the same underlying logic. This is the logic of effectiveness. Is aid really only about who can do the job better?

Back to the British PM. The danger in Boris Johnson’s declaration recalls the danger we as leaders perpetrate and perpetuate upon our own humanitarian sector.  We remove annoying obstacles to our business by rendering ethical principles invisible.  The Kevins of our sector can talk endlessly about doing things the right way, about one day doing things in a ‘righter’ way (new evidence-based guidelines are being developed by our global task force!), and about doing things in a ‘righter’ way than local organizations (after all, we must build their capacity on the new evidence-based guidelines).

What the Kevins do not want to talk about is doing the right thing.

Johnson’s apology for transgressions effectively shreds the uppermost responsibility of leadership – to champion the ideals, aspirations, and ethical principles which guide actions, and which unite societies even where there are strong disagreements on the ‘how’ level. Neither British politics nor humanitarian action would be well-served by moral purity, yet the power of both are gutted by excluding ethics from deliberation and decision. We need to think about the politics that has girded decades of constant, directive paternalism; and the presumption this status quo can be justified on the basis of effectiveness and actions.  The ethical cost is too high, for instance to the principle of humanity.

People matter because they are not static vessels of need to be filled by our action. Human solidarity is impossible without recognition of the other’s human sovereignty. Being more capable than local NGOs sounds like a logic we tossed out 60 years ago (and it’s an assumption of dubious accuracy as well).  Would it have been OK for Britain to maintain rule over Kenya or Sierra Leone on the basis of Her Majesty’s greater technical and economic capacity?  That sounds offensive. Why?  Because there are principles more important than doing a good job.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Community Engagement — Problems Less Discussed

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Expanding the Rules of Engagement

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

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

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

A collision between communities

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cultural insensitivity of an aid response based on individuals

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

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

Ethics as a way forward?

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

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

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

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

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

Our Western Identity

The New Humanitarian Basics (blog 2)

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At the core of the humanitarian enterprise lie the twinned tendencies of being highly self-centred and poorly self-aware.  Add to that mix the power of the core aid sector to shape the humanitarian narrative and what you have is the systemic equivalent of nationalism – the difficulty to see the world in any other way.

My paper is one attempt to provoke a degree of self-awareness. However, as my friend ‘Archie’ argues, this proposal for a future humanitarianism looks ugly in places (see my previous blog). Actually, he suggests, it doesn’t even look like humanitarianism, as it would seem to increase the number of people who are suffering.  To some extent, this might be true, especially if measured through the humanitarian lens.

The answer? The sector must learn to embrace certain types of ugly. Why? Because the humanitarian lens is fine for humanitarians, but not for a society that is so much more than the location of a crisis.

DRC provides an example. The UN has declared/signed/affirmed time and again the primacy of the home state in crisis response (see, e.g., the Sendai Framework or conclusions of the World Humanitarian Summit).  The sector has seemingly signed up to that pledge. Until it hasn’t. What happened when the government of DRC boycotted the UN’s major aid conference, upset with the portrayal of its country as a humanitarian basket case? The UN agencies and the INGOs quickly asserted their collective paternalistic right to know better. (And trust me, I see DRC the way the sector sees it). But ‘time to let go’ means time to embrace (in some places) the ugly.  Localization means localization, not localization but only until you disagree with its outcomes or judge yourself better able to do it. In my vision, listening to the Congolese government is not ideal, but it is a less worse option than international governance. Just like accepting the US government’s refusal to accept aid from Cuba in response to Hurricane Katrina.

What is missing from the humanitarian lens? First and foremost is the ethical component of humanitarian action, and the way the humanitarian sector’s framing fails to place value on people struggling to overcome their own problems (i.e., self-determination).  In this regard, the paper points to “a ‘decolonisation’ – a transfer of power not merely from international to local agencies, but also from a ‘global’ to a home society.” (p. 28). Should last century’s political decolonization have been blocked in anticipation of states whose homegrown leaders proved even more brutal or greedily indifferent than the colonial powers? Of course not.  And neither should the presence of bad or incompetent states impede the decolonization of humanitarian action.

Second, humanitarians must stop hiding behind their self-serving conceptualization of effectiveness; removing their blinders to the fact that their effectiveness is just that, a self-serving construct.  As Jeremy Konyndyk describes in his recent analysis of the humanitarian business model, the humanitarian system “shapes interventions to conform to agencies’ mandates regardless of the priorities of crisis-affected populations”. A hammer sees a world of nails, and hence success equals having driven X number of nails into Y pieces of wood.  In short, the metric of humanitarian intentions and success – the moral crusade by which it usurps the power of the state – isn’t just a foreign metric, it is a skewed metric.

Even worse than the slanted view of its own effectiveness is the failure of humanitarian action to calculate the impact of its occupation of the crisis response space.  The humanitarian system does not simply respond, it aggressively preserves its market and the predominance of an emergency response that cannot alleviate structural problems or satisfy the full range of human aspiration.  So, for example, the power of the sector’s advocacy, amplified by a mass communication capacity often greater than the entirety of local civil society, means that “the urgent displaces the important (the systemic or structural) in perpetuity.” (p. 6).

As the sector clamors for the urgent, is there room for a state or a community to say no, to conclude that it might be better to invest in the long-term, not the immediate? Are we willing to allow a state to let children fall ill today because it wants to prioritize building the school system of the future?  Are we at least willing to admit that this is not our decision, given that we do not have skin in the game, except for the powerful skin of self-interest in preserving the supremacy of humanitarian action and our personal sense of contribution?

Lastly, where in our calculations of effectiveness do we consider the opportunity costs? With regard to occupation, if the sector were to stand back, what might evolve in the same space?  Would states step up and take more direct responsibility? As research into the West Africa Ebola outbreak concluded, the “state’s capacity to deal with needs and crises is partly a function of how socially embedded it is in the first place.” Do states in the global south have the same freedom enjoyed by Western nations – the freedom to struggle without being subjected to foreign intervention?

This cost undermines the development of the social contract, a lengthy process necessarily full of blunders, as was evidenced by the early months of Liberian or Sierra Leonean Ebola response.  But those governments learned and grew enormously over the course of the epidemic, in part because the humanitarian community lacked the power/willingness to take command.  Ebola is not a lone example. As the Economist recently reported, the response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake marked a critical juncture in the development of the trust between the government and civil society with regard to crisis response, a reversal (though as yet incomplete) of the Communist Party’s deep suspicions.

The point is not that humanitarians are wrong to intervene.  It is that humanitarians are wrong to assess their interventions through such narrow framing, one that produces projects which hit targets but ignores too many other benefits and costs.  Of even greater concern is that humanitarians ignore the real challenges, like stopping war or ending severe poverty. “The best thing the aid system can do is step aside and stop confusing the issue with projects that help small groups and divert attention from the central issue.” – Tony Vaux, Trumped-up Aid and the Challenge of Global Poverty.

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

If you’re happy and you know it…

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I am not the first humanitarian to owe an apology to the people of Somalia.  Somalia is one of my go-to catastrophes.  Have an audience and need an example? The all-purpose Somalia does the trick: starvation, war, GWOT, counter-terrorism legislation, diversion of aid, refugees, ethnic conflict, climate change, cholera, co-opted aid agencies, murder/kidnapping of  aid workers, displacement etc etc.

Somalia is no longer a nation but an archetype of a certain kind of nation, joining (depending on the day) South Sudan, DRC or CAR in a string cite of intractable, unfathomable brutality, drought, destitution and conflict.  These are the contexts that substantiate the humanitarian case for why delivering compassionate aid to others is a necessary part of our world.  They nourish our system just as we feed theirs. (And by way of confession, I talk about Somalia though I’ve never been there.  Again, I’m not the first humanitarian to take that license.)

I recently did work that involved taking a closer – though geographically removed (Nairobi) – look at the situation in Somalia, now mired in the yet another staggering drought, only five years removed from the 2011/12 crisis (drought, conflict…) that killed upwards of 250,000 Somalis. At first, nothing I saw or heard challenged my narrative of Somalia the profoundly a tragic context. In blunt terms: one of the worst places on Earth.  Think about that: me declaring it one of the worst places on Earth.

In the course of those interviews, though, I began to notice another story – Western aid workers recounting how the ‘mood’ of the people – seems quite different.  Experienced humanitarian hands used the term ‘optimistic’ to describe how many Somalis felt.  Not what I was expecting, and sufficiently weighty to pierce my own confirmation bias.

Further reinforcement?  A recently published set of surveys from (the excellent) Ground Truth shows a full  35 percent of Somali respondents felt that life is improving ‘very much’ for people in Somalia, while another 41 percent said it was ‘mostly’ improving. In fact, only 6 percent answered that it wasn’t.

Not convinced? Back home, I stumbled across the recent National Geographic issue (November 2017) on happiness, including findings from the World Happiness Report.  This scientific study ranks Somalia in 5th place in Africa, quite distant from the other members of my string cite of misery. South Sudan placed 37th, and CAR was 44th – dead last. Here’s a stunner of a finding: Somalia yielded a higher ‘daily happiness’ rating than either the UK or USA. Most of Eastern Europe wasn’t even close.

We need to let that sink in.  We really need to think hard about the looping narratives by which we define Somalia, yet another narrative divide between a the perceptions of an international aid community looking down and a people looking up. For me, our unchallenged authority to problematize Somalia needs to be at the center of the localization agenda (displacing the turf war over funding?).  Note: it is a power that fits well with our proverbial humanitarian hammer’s bias in seeing a world of nails.

Conclusion?  The redistribution of power within the humanitarian system should be judged by percentages of funding flows and by the inability of the external system to reduce a country such as Somalia to conflict, corruption, drought, crisis and death. Absent that shift, we will continue to miss the opportunity to tap into the optimism felt by so many of Somalis, to explore with them more inspired options for international action in times of crisis. And in this, Somalia is not alone.

[This post was updated (a number of small edits) on December 23rd]

Addendum December 27th.   I came across this as I rushed to the supermarket on Christmas Eve, a few recipe-saving purchases for the next day’s big dinner.

Some messages are universal, meaning they resonate at the level of the nation or society and for each and every individual. As the localization agenda evolves, I look forward to the ‘local’ finding different ways to say Here we are!

 

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

Be Careful What You Ask For

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The discussion of localization is beginning to deepen. Here (summarized) is an opening salvo from Charles Lwanga-Ntale, director of the Kenya Academy Centre:  localization often seems to resemble ‘deconcentration’, a process whereby the systems and structures of the existing humanitarian sector are exported downwards.  Certainly an interesting reflection to lead off a conference entitled “Localization and Contextualization of Disaster Risk Reduction and Management (DRRM) in East Africa”. Hosted by the Humanitarian Leadership Academy and the (Kenyan) National Drought Management Authority, the conference mixed government, NGO and academic communities, and placed a particular focus on regional examples of DRRM at the sub-national level, where counties and districts struggle directly with fires, landslides, refugees and drought.

True enough – localization can be many things to many people. Yet the warning on replication was eclipsed as quickly as it was issued. Localization has momentum and it has an engine – from diverse voices a rather uniform set of calls for more capacity building. A palpable hunger for knowledge and learning peppered our two days of discussions. A desire not only for the processes, tools and know-how of the humanitarian sector but also a deep conviction in the power of capacity building to change the behaviour of communities and people.  Have the past five decades of capacity building not curbed our appetite?

I’m not advocating that the global south build a wall (although that argument holds surprising merit), but something needs to keep all these consultants, UN careerists and INGOs busy.  The call seems to aim at training from the very INGOs and agencies that shaped local NGOs into mere implementing partners, and undermined their capacity as autonomous civil society actors. Beyond that, the headlong rush into capacity building raises Trojan Horse concerns. What comes with the sector rebuilding its systems, as Lwanga-Ntale phrased it, “further down the road”?

This much is true. The core of the humanitarian sector – the UN agencies and INGOs elsewhere referred to by many (e.g., me) as an “oligopoly” or “cartel” – has developed an immense amount of experience, know-how and (sadly less publicised) comprehension of what doesn’t work. At the same time, my less optimistic appraisal is that very little about humanitarian action warrants the dash towards replication. It’s not like we are passing on a bandolier full of silver bullets. And that is the good stuff.  What about the bad stuff, which often comes along with the good stuff? Or the bad stuff that we mistakenly think is good stuff?

Take for example the seemingly innocuous technology of the logical framework.  Or the constitution of a humanitarian action upon the foundation of projects. These are exactly the sort of capacity building initiatives the system loves to export. Yet aside from their bureaucratic appeal, they come riddled with proven deficiencies: reducing humanitarian work to tick-box processes and quantifiable targets, output without outcome, short-termism, top-downism, risk aversion, fear of failure, etc.  In the end, a sector full of successful’ projects that leave behind such staggering unmet needs that we needed a Grand Bargain full of transformative ambitions.  Local actors using contextualized logframes? Is that really as far as our ambition travels?

I note that those at the forefront of development thinking (and even a few donors) have embraced the need for Doing Development Differently, exactly by unlogframing it. As agencies scramble to maintain relevance and contracts by delivering capacity building, are we replicating an obsolete and ineffective technology simply because it is so ingrained in our thinking; in how we practice aid?  Isn’t that one of the problems we hope localization and contextualization will solve?

Even beyond the issue of effectiveness, here’s question getting too much focus: What value do does the system want or expect the north to transfer to the south?  Opportunity cost asks a second question: Does that value outweigh a flood of workshops and ‘best practices’ that will bury the south’s opportunity and right to author value for itself? To author a new rather than receiving an old value?

Capacity building strikes me as expedient, but not particularly ambitious. I would think development requires more of localization and contextualization. First and foremost, the space for local actors to respond to problems in their way, and to struggle in the creative process at the same time.  This involves going through frustrations and failures in proximity to communities, to arrive at successes through effort, invention and ownership, not effort, mimicry and dependence. This also involves less of an employment scheme for the existing aristocracy.

Crucially, it is through this struggle that NGOs in the north have built not only their practices, but their institutions as well.  It may be a crap slogan for fast food, but Burger King gets it right, as does Zen Buddhism.  Be your way. Endpoints are less important than pathways. For example, what is the cost of local institutions not developing organically but instead having their financial plumbing supercharged by the global north just so that they can be declared eligible to receive direct grants? Why not change those eligibility standards? This is exactly the sort of mimicry that we should block; a mimicry whereby we reproduce a humanitarian system in which subservience to its business objectives evolved as the dominant structure of the agency, while the operational response to the needs of people became at best secondary, at worst a simple input to a financial transaction.

This call is not for reinventing the wheel. This call is for reinventing the imperfect devices of humanitarian action, because local organizations with a relationship to the community and deep knowledge of the context might just invent something entirely glorious.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

The Localization Surge

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MSF used to run an ad: “The world is our emergency room.”  Snappy, no?  Raises an eyebrow or two if wiped over a photograph, say, of dusty civilians shouldering a wounded neighbour, or starving children swallowed by their swaddling.   It also raises an important challenge to the implementation of the “localization” agenda.  By definition, responding to crisis – to extraordinary levels of need – requires some form of surge, a capacity to scale up aid operations in response to crisis.  The UN- and Western NGO-led humanitarian system already struggles in this regard (see, e.g., MSF’s “Where is Everyone”). Local organizations might struggle further. In how many nations could even the combined NGO community open and maintain 19 surgical theatres, as MSF did within weeks of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, or mount 53 million Euros of operations in about 4.5 months?

The general view seems to be that local organizations can surge, but to a lesser degree.  As Schenkenberg’s study explains, local NGOs often have a very limited ability to scale up. He goes on to describe the causes, such as difficulties in attracting/receiving funds or the unhelpful reality that in an emergency, newly arriving international agencies will often Hoover up staff from the local NGOs. Management capacity for rapid growth poses another stumbling block. While the World Humanitarian Summit’s Grand Bargain and the general strengthening of local NGOs may address some of these issues, they do little to address constraints in the model itself.

Within most Western societies the response to crisis rests upon our fortune, upon the wealth necessary to pay armies of soldiers or battalions of firefighters to sit on their ass – dead capacity that comes to life when the siren sounds. The aid sector can ill afford this model (although they increasingly pay armies of people to do little more than sit on their asses, that is a different blog).  Essentially, surge capacity in the major international NGOs exists because the world is their emergency room, meaning they are able to maintain surge capacity by distributing it globally, and then redistributing it when an emergency arises.

I suppose this marks an economy of scale. That same model works poorly on a national or provincial scale. There may be exceptions – Eastern DRC? South Sudan? – that could support such excess resources, but it is difficult to imagine many.  Note that this economy of the global scale plays a similar role when it comes to expertise.  Major international agencies can maintain in-house expertise along a wide variety of themes – nutrition, shelter, water, sanitation, etc. – because at the global level, there will always be enough business somewhere to keep such expertise busy (to justify the expenditure). Again, national NGOs do not have this economy of scale (or simultaneous diversity of crisis types/themes).

The point is that local NGOs cannot be expected to become local versions of the large international NGOs. No duh, right? And yet the bigger point is that they will nonetheless be judged for it. Rather mercilessly, I fear. They will be judged as deficient because they cannot surge. Deficient because they lack sufficient in-house expertise.  Let’s be clear. These are exactly the sort of weaknesses that the existing system will capitalize upon to claw back its pre-Grand Bargain dominion. Beyond the issue of power and control, these perceived deficiencies generate a truth in which local responders remain dependent on the existing international system for surge, one more nail in the coffin of second-class citizenship.

If we start now, can we work our way out of this?  Can we can imagine some form of standing capacity at the national level? Perhaps we should be investing now in developing/testing a number of approaches to national-level rapid response mobilization. Let’s embrace strategies based on dispersed teams/networks rather than centralized agencies. Perhaps we can imagine local chapters of an organization such as Human Surge? Or maybe we can just begin a conversation, and see where it leads.