Category Archives: Politics

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

The Privilege of Control

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Anti-racism protests have prompted unprecedented conversations across many parts of the humanitarian sector.  Institutions and their leaders have raised their hands as witnesses and responders to the destructive practices of racism, and to being spreaders and perpetrators of it.  There is a flow of apology and commitment.  We see strong vows to change, to listen, to understand, to do better, to open up uncomfortable spaces, to rectify, and to eradicate.  An odd gap in this litany of promises?  Reckoning.  Justice.

Let us begin with the simple fact that various forms of racial discrimination – both individualized acts of racial discrimination and institutional racism – are not examples of bad behavior.  They are examples of wrong behavior.  They are deemed in much of the world to be an offense, usually a civil offense but in some states a criminal offense.  Legal codes attach this gravity to racism because racial discrimination and racism (just as sexism, etc.) constitutes an act of direct harm upon an individual, and it is a particularly insidious category of harm because it targets and violates that which is immutable about a human being.

In a textbook display of privilege, agencies within the sector have assumed the capacity to act as both defendant and judge or jury. Defining the boundaries of how they will talk about addressing their racism marks an appropriation, so for instance deciding to look forward but deflecting accountability for the present or the past.  Angela Bruce-Raeburn asks the question that is erased by these declarations:  “Can a chief executive ‘apologise’ for racism and stay?”

This is a particular exercise of privilege, because it both masks and is a product of our virtue. As I’ve written before, the legitimacy of the sector is challenged by its susceptibility to moral licensing, allowing its good works to facilitate or counterbalance bad stuff. We downplay the offense and then rationalize our actions.  Why such persistent difficulties with community engagement, localisation or ‘downward’ accountability? Because we justify our inaction and allow our racism to hide in the plain sight of “power over” policies or practices of knowing what is best for them.  Move fast fast fast and you do not notice.  Beware the strong resemblance to the original humanitarian sin of its colonial legacy, the enterprise of subjugation and resource extraction being justified by the civilizing mission.

Self-accountability

In the almost 25 years since the JEFAR first recommended that humanitarians needed to be held accountable by an independent body, the sector has devoted consistent, massive effort to producing codes of self-accountability, an ever-expanding lists of best practices, standards, targets and other technocratic non-fixes to the problem of the sector’s social injustice.[1] Complaint mechanisms, suggestion boxes, agency hotlines and help desks are emblematic of the twinned mindsets of privilege and of charity, a uniquely inebriating potion that mixes good intentions with an (un)conscious “it’s better than nothing” (“happy to get something”?) rationalisation of sectoral shortcomings.  In the end, the underlying distinction of humanitarian accountability is that it does not produce the state in which an agency must give and then be held to account for its decisions and actions. Aid requires a reckoning.  And when an offense is committed, it demands justice as well.

The starting point of the internal discussions to come should be letters of resignation. It is not for me to say if they should be accepted, but they should be sincere and on the table. Truth and reconciliation? Independent adjudicators? National inquiries in the countries where aid takes place? Grace? This is easier for me to write than to now predict if I would have had the integrity to submit my own back when I was director.  I made the choice to remain, a choice rationalized by the good being done and by my occasional and completely ineffective protestations. My decision marked the mistaken weighing of moral obligations against programmatic output.

Critical to change is recognition that weak sectoral and negligible external accountability do not give rise to or permit racism in humanitarian action.  The problem to be addressed is the reverse. Racism gives rise to the sector’s insufficient accountability. The solution is simple in theory.  As Themrise Khan astutely argues, “it is the aid ‘recipients’ who must push back against the white aid system”. Accountability is not an internal treasure for the dominant agencies of the Global North to bequeath, but rather a power, authority and even a vocabulary that will need to be taken and will need to be constructed. 

To do that, society must counter the sector having approached accountability as an internal or isolated exercise.  MEAL programs and internal reporting can and do contribute to accountability, but accountability requires a multiplicity of external prongs.  This is what you would find in the West, where accountability for the work in an NGO (or business) arises from the independent work of journalists, review-based websites (coming soon?), official ombudsmen, law enforcement, lawsuits, citizen watch-dog groups, government regulatory bodies, consumer groups, etc. The blindspot should now be apparent. Efforts to improve governance and strengthen civil society should be pushing for the requisite frameworks and skills to hold foreign aid agencies to account and protect people from harm.  The neo-colonial gaze means never seeing ourselves as the problem to fix, and yet we exert enormous power over the lives of people in crisis.

The external equivalent of Bruce-Raeburn’s taking issue with non-resignation resides in the governments and civil societies of the states and communities where humanitarians work.  How can an organisation that understands itself to have racism threading through its work and culture – driving the conceptualization of programs, framing the narrative and imagery of ‘heroic’ aid, suffusing the relationship with its employees – simply assume that it should or is able to remain engaged in said work? In other words, what is the significance of and process by which we construct ourselves as fit for the purpose of delivering assistance and protection to (predominantly) people of color? This is white privilege at work. Accountability for its racism requires resignation of the humanitarian project, to be accepted or rejected by the governments and communities that have suffered the offense. 

[21/July: I made two edits to this post — minor cosmetic changes in the first para and the insertion of a missing “not” in the fifth para.]

[1] While there is considerable external accountability to HQ or institutional donors, this relates more to responsible financial management and log-framed targets, and not to the character of the aid or to the relationship of the agency to the community.

Our Western Identity, Politics

The Test of the Times

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The Road to Recognition

Who or what has most triggered change in the humanitarian sector over the past five years?  Arguably, the answer to that question is either Harvey Weinstein or the ancient humans who invented cash.  If we ask ourselves that same question in 2025, the answer may prove similarly disturbing. It may be Derek Chauvin and George Floyd.  Of course, such a disturbance is to be applauded even as our dependence on such external triggers should raise searching questions. Phenomena like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter spotlight a moral and operational indolence and an active hypocrisy at the heart of our humanitarian action. A humanitarian sector should not require being pressed into these discussions (this evolution!) by threats to our income and image.

Like sexism, the racism and abusive power dynamics in the sector constitute in large part a category even Donald Rumsfeld failed to see – the “unknown known”.  This is a set of assumptions, beliefs and ideologies that remain invisible or inert within the central cultural power block of the sector, and yet perfectly obvious to those who suffer it every day. It takes powerful lenses to filter out such tragic disempowerment.  We see it and even denounce it elsewhere, but somehow not when we look at our organizations.  I see it, but somehow not when I look in the mirror.  Or even more accurately: somehow I do not see it enough to act.

[Digression warning] I am reminded of plastic-coated coffee cups.  For decades now I certainly understood the environmental cost of throwing out hundreds of cups each year.  Shazam!  One day I suddenly saw it in a way that mattered. I bought a reusable cup, along with tens of millions of other people.  A miraculously swift change. No campaign, no acronymed initiative, no tax incentive.  Can we bottle that? Deploy it elsewhere?  How do we understand that change of perspective; that noticing? And how do we avoid the infinitesimal sacrifice (the self-satisfaction?) of buying a reusable cup not later rationalizing, say, the decision to fly off on a weekend break? [Digression over]

Given the ‘revelations’ of the past months, humanitarians no longer have the option of avoiding the mirror, for historical and institutional racism is now visibly central to the humanitarian project and elemental to outing our deeply internalized paternalism (read: colonialism).  And shazam!, there now seems to be an internal momentum. The issues at stake – staying with them over time and not launching ourselves into the next crisis or exciting initiative – will test the sector and test humanitarians.  In a sector with a pronounced short-term gaze, endurance must be questioned.  Prolonged discomfort does not fit well with a sector designed in part to help its inhabitants feel good. White privilege is bad enough. White savior privilege might be its most toxic strain.

As many have said, the sector needs to listen (and here).  Further, we within the sector need to recognize.  Listening will help us recognize the pain as well as the opportunities.  But we also need to recognize the thing itself.  What do white privilege, discriminatory decisions, rasicst structures and interwoven coloniality actually look like in policy and practice (and let’s not forget the power dynamics of inequality or sexism)? Some instances are shockingly easy to spot.  Some not. We need to build awareness of the telltale signs, an Audubon catalogue of ‘invisible’ visibility and subterranean workings.  How has racism so successfully ‘hidden’ in plain sight, overlooked in our echo-chamberous institutions or casually justified by appeal to our ‘exceptional’ objectives?  Should we test sectoral decision-makers for this ability/sensitivity, just as we already test to ensure key qualities or certify expertise in other areas?  And should we as individuals test ourselves, to see if our awareness of (e.g.,) racism is improving?

A Simple Test

Talking on a news program about the COVID pandemic, a French doctor opined, “If I can be provocative, shouldn’t we be doing this study in Africa, where there are no masks, no treatments, no resuscitation?”  What do you think? Did this off-handed idea sound reasonable, a way of testing a potential vaccine in real-world conditions, and self-aware to being ‘provocative’?  Or did you find it revolting?  WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was swift and blunt in his denunciation: “Africa can’t and won’t be a testing ground for any vaccine.”  The story spread. Ivoirian footballer Didier Drogba called it ‘absolutely disgusting’. In today’s world, that’s actually a denunciation a billion or so people might hear about.

Contrast the French doctor’s provocation to the declaration of the “Inclusive Vaccine Alliance”, formed by the governments of France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands.  By working together as an alliance, they hope to reach a successful vaccine quicker, and then allow other EU members an opportunity to use it. In addition the Alliance “is also working to make a portion of vaccines available to low-income countries, including in Africa.”  [Add three clapping hands emojis here].

I now need to apologize for conducting an experiment of sorts.  Did you spot the problem with the statement of the four governments? I am indebted to the Open Society’s A. Kayum Ahmed for this example, and I would encourage all readers to go to his dissection of the Alliance’s statement, which he labels an act of “vaccine sovereignty” that portrays Africa as a “site of redemption.”.

Well, how did you fare? Did you recognize the flaws in the Alliance’s statement? Or did it slide by because it so resembles the dozens of ‘innocuous’ statements we read every day? My score? Maybe a D+.  I thought the word “portion” sounded measly, prompting an image of Oliver Twist begging for more porridge, and I sensed though did not identify the deeper issue raised by Ahmed.

What is the Target?

Which statement exemplifies the bigger problem for the sector, the necessary objective of our calls to address systemic racism?  Is it the doctor’s statement, because of the overt denigration and the hurt it caused millions of viewers? Easier to spot. Easier to reach agreement against.  Easier to address. Easier to make progress. But is it also easier to demonize, and does it thereby help mask the insidious, incremental ‘invisibility’ of the Alliance’s statement?

Like many have said, this is not going to be easy.

            *                                         *                                         *                                        

[Final Note: Even if you disagree with Ahmed or me about the racism in the Alliance’s statement, you still need to spot it as a potential issue.  Think security management.  The only way to identify signs of insecurity is to spot and then investigate potential signs of insecurity. The requirement, hence, is a quantum leap in our sensitivity to racism.]

Critique of Aid, Politics

Boarding the Climate Bandwagon

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Bandwagon

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

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

“But” #1. 

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

“But” #2

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

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

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

“And” #1

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

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

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

Critique of Aid, Politics

The ethics of turning bad money into good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critique of Aid, Politics

A new humanitarian ethics? Blog 1

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Politics

Just say No to the Status Quo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Our Western Identity, Politics

A dog’s life

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Consider this an addendum to my previous post.  There, I waded into the aid system’s #MeToo / #AidToo deliberations.  Across the aid system we see agencies dealing with ‘bad apples’, holding difficult conversations and exploring initiatives that promise improvement.  This recent IRIN panel discussion and accompanying articles explore a number of ‘solutions’.

A caution: we should heed the lessons of past experience and avoid false binaries.  Great that the system invests in pruning the bad apples and building better safeguarding or whistleblowing programs and procedures.  But it must equally maintain a healthy dissatisfaction with such an approach, understanding that such reforms mollify calls for deeper changes, and hold steep opportunity costs in a overstretched system.

Deep changes? Easier said than done, as illustrated by my previous blog’s three suggestions.  Nobody disagrees that the system also needs to address more fundamental causes.  The problem is the rarity of plausible suggestions. Can I defend my offering of ‘food for thought’ if the system cannot and could never swallow it?   Do we already know that my call for deep changes is a call for pigs to have wings? NRC’s Joel Charny responded to my blog with a tweet that’s hard to disagree with:

The problem is that messiah complex coupled with the marketing imperative to maintain or grow leads us down path of delusions of grandeur.

I have raised some of these concerns myself. What if we can’t dump the savior routine, because it runs through the heart of our authority to act, our model of recruitment, and our financial support from the public and donor agencies? In other words, what if we are addicted to being messiahs?

Until February 4th, I had no answer.  Now I have two, adapted from the WORLD CHAMPION PHILADELPHIA EAGLES.  That’s right, I’m from Philadelphia and the Eagles won the Super Bowl.

The first is the story of being an underdog. Jason Kelce’s profanity laced speech captures it perfectly. Nobody believed the Eagles were any good because, because, because. So even though they had the best record, earned the top seed in the playoffs and held home field advantage, few of the pundits or even the money guys (the Vegas betting houses) picked the Eagles to win its first playoff game, its second playoff game or the Super Bowl itself.  After their first playoff win against Atlanta, star players Chris Long and Lane Johnson wore dog masks. It built miraculously from there, solidifying and motivating a team, capturing a public. Underdogs. That was the story and that was the team’s fire.

For us humanitarians, the point is that as an underdog, as opposed to as a savior, we would be free to engage honestly with the public about aid’s complexities (read: snafus, failures, missed targets, bad behaviour, unintended consequences, etc.). We would be free to play the role of sidekick. We would be free to take risks and fail.  And the public would love us (read: fund us) because we are underdogs, trying our best against insurmountable odds.  As this Forbes article notes:  There’s something intrinsically human about the tale of an underdog, and it taps into our capacity to hope for the future and dream big.

The second is one of Eagles head coach Doug Pederson’s mantras: “An individual can make a difference, but a team can make a miracle.”  If I think about my own performance, I wonder if I was too often trying to make a difference rather than aiming for outcomes of more collective, outsized dimensions. An old story: Aid strategy, be it programmatic design or systemic transformation, needs to be steeped in (rather than selectively blind to) an analysis of aid’s political economy. I now think that we also need a parallel analysis, one that comes to understand aid through a political – psychological analysis of the humanitarian. Making a difference may sound good, but it doesn’t seem to be adding up.

Critique of Aid, Politics

The Advocacy Tax

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The Advocacy Tax

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critique of Aid, Politics

Let’s Ideate … Part II

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

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

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

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

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

So, are you now feeling ready to ideate?