AidBlogs

Event & opportunity:

CFP: Irregular Migration and Southern Europe, Malmö, Sweden, 25-27 August 2013 [info]
- Abstract deadline is 31 May 2013.

Protection Interrupted: Dublin Regulation's Impact on Asylum Seekers' Protection, Brussels, 4 June 2013 [info]
- Registration is still open!

Publications:

Assisted Return of Rejected Asylum Seekers – How Can We Create Sustainability?, Policy Brief (DIIS, May 2013) [text]

"Asylum Seekers from Serbia and the Problems of Returnees: Why Serbia is among the World’s Leading Countries in Number of Asylum Seekers," Two Homelands, no. 37 (2013) [full-text]
- Scroll to p. 53.

The Second Phase of the Common European Asylum System: A Brave New World – or Lipstick on a Pig? (European Area of Freedom Security & Justice Blog, April 2013) [text]

UNHCR's Contribution to the European Commission's Consultation on Female Genital Mutilation in the EU (UNHCR, May 2013) [text]

Forthcoming resource:

Asylum Information Database [access]
- "The AIDA project is jointly coordinated by the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE), Forum Réfugiés-Cosi, Irish Refugee Council and the Hungarian Helsinki Committee. It aims to provide up-to date information on asylum practice in 14 EU Member States (AT, BE, BG, DE, FR, GR, HU, IE, IT, MT, NL, PL, SE, UK) which is easily accessible to the media, researchers, advocates, legal practitioners and the general public and includes the development of a dedicated website which will be launched in the second half of 2013. Furthermore the project seeks to promote the implementation and transposition of EU asylum legislation reflecting the highest possible standards of protection in line with international refugee and human rights law and based on best practice."  Note that national reports are already available for Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland and the UK.

Tagged Publications and Events & Opportunities. 

Excerpts from an article on the connection between religion and cars in Nigeria, by Ebenezer Obadare, a sociologist at University of Kansas: [hat tip to Cat]

In Lagos, Nigeria, though, the social and physical circumstances which enable communing while commuting seem radically different. When traffic grinds to a complete halt as is its wont in the city (a normal Lagos “go slow” can last between three and five hours), the commuter faces the severest test of all: what to do with the suddenly abundant time at his or her disposal. In-traffic communion often unfolds in this situation of baffled boredom; where an ordinarily desperate situation becomes a moment for sustained reflection, and anarchic time becomes an opportunity for “quiet time.”

[...]

As fatalities from car accidents have grown, prayers for protection from the dangers of the road have become louder and persistent. The prayer, “Ka ma rin ni ojo ti ebi n p’ona” (May we not travel on the very day that the road is famished) carries an added resonance against a backdrop of endemic auto-mortality. The unusually high frequency of road traffic accidents is attested to by the following anecdote from Kathryn Rhine in a presentation in 2011, who reports that “during a recent fieldwork among HIV-positive persons in Nigeria, patients would insist that their virus was not going to kill them; rather, they would likely die in a car accident.”

Speaking of Kathryn Rhine, an anthropologist at University of Kansas, she has a new blog with thoughts from her fieldwork, which is on how Nigerians understand car accidents. She calls her project “Cultures of Collision.”

I need to get some of this stuff out of my head to make some space in there for my actual day job. Since the clusterfuck David Goodhart book-copy-and-pastes op-eds started coming out a few weeks ago my head has been all fogged up with rage. Half of the frustration is simply how poorly he structures his arguments.

So here is some structure.

At the highest level there are two things to care about
1. The impact of policy (this is the utilitarian, consequentialist angle)
2. The Kantian ethics (what is a just process? we should care about the means as well as the ends)

Point 2, made repeatedly by Michael Clemens and others in the open borders camp, is that regardless of what the consequences of immigration are, individuals have rights, and states shouldn't be able to prevent people from leaving countries. As a Brit with some education, I have the right basically to live wherever I want. The same does not apply to smarter and harder working people than me who happen to be born in South Sudan, or most developing countries. In technical terms, this is called "fucked up."

Back to point 1 - there are three areas of concern
1.1 - The impact on the receiving community
1.2 - The impact on the migrant
1.3 - The impact on the sending community

Now, the strongest evidence is clearly on 1.2 - there are massive overwhelming positive impacts for the migrants themselves, who can increase incomes by orders of 1000% overnight.

The weakest evidence is on the other two points. There are reasons, theoretical and empirical, to think that immigration can have both positive and negative impacts on communities at large.

On 1.1 - perhaps the strongest evidence amongst the lot, is that the labour market impacts on receiving communities are not large (they did not took our job). There isn't a lot of evidence on the impact on public services and the like - though on average the foreign-born living in Britain are larger net contributors to public finances than the native born. So we are left with something vague about identity and community (more on this in another post).

On 1.3 - there is strong evidence of positive impact through remittances - remittances are substantially larger than foreign aid flows. There isn't much evidence of a brain drain, and actually evidence pointing the other way towards a "brain gain." Neither is there any evidence of a damaging impact on political reform. On the contrary, there are reasons to think that diaspora can help fund and influence reform movements more effectively from outside a country where they are not subject to political oppression. More from Claire Melamed here.

So to conclude, strong positive evidence of positive impacts for migrants and receivers of remittances, and then a bunch of weak vague stuff about community and governance. Add to that, the ethical or rights-based arguments.

And finally back to Goodhart, and his line that we should not care about people from Burundi more than people from Birmingham. But do we really need to care about them more to be in favour of immigration? From my reading of the evidence, I don't think that immigration does impose a net cost on Britain, but even being generous and assuming it did, I would weight that impact to be of the order of 1/10th of the positive impact to the migrant. Caring about people from Birmingham is fine, but the question is how much more should you care about them than someone from Burundi. I would image that there is some ratio at which Goodhart would support imposing a cost on a Brummie for a gain to a Burundian. What if we could make a Brummie worse off by £1 to increase the welfare of a Burundian by £10 billion? Or is it really never acceptable for British government policy to reduce the welfare of a British person by any amount, no matter how small, in order to increase a foreigner's welfare, no matter how large the gain? Not even for £10 billion? Martin Wolf does make the case for a zero weight, which is at least a coherent and explicit position on the issue, even if I do think it is abhorrent. Elsewhere, in a long and math-y blogpost YouNotSneaky estimated that for Mexican-US immigration, you have to value a Mexican at less than 1/20th of an American to be against immigration.

Do you care about foreigners less than locals? What's your number? Exactly how much less? Are foreigners half a local person? A tenth? A hundredth?

Some analysis from the Sudd Institute: (via John Ashworth)
Barely three months after the oil shutdown, the whole nation started to feel the resultant pinch of economic hardships. Salaries of civil servants were no longer coming regularly and the monthly allowances that used to cushion up the low salaries of the civil servants were discontinued. The dollar appreciated against the South Sudanese pounds and was in unprecedented shortage, forcing the market into an abrupt shock; prices rose; and the purchasing power weakened. As well, violent crimes increased, with armed robbery becoming the order of the day. News about common citizens and business people being shot dead injured, and/or robbed were making headlines on almost daily basis. In a sense, these consequences are attributable to the economic hardships facing the nation.

We were supposed to have our monthly health worker meeting today but two of the health workers couldn't make it so we postponed it until Thursday. While we were all sitting around chatting, the topic of typing came up because a new health worker needs to learn computer skills. I drew a diagram of a keyboard and he filled in the keys he could remember. He did well considering he's only on day 3. We then went on to discuss what QWERTY means and how cell phone dial pads differ. I thought this may help him a bit as he learns to type. Mostly, it's just kind of interesting to me.


From keyboard layouts, we went on to discuss dog bites (which we've seen recently), rabies and tetanus. Although we've all learned about these conditions, no one has ever actually seen someone with rabies or tetanus. There are only pictures or rough sketches in medical textbooks. So I had a novel idea...look up videos on youtube. There are a surprising number of videos of actual rabies cases, considerably fewer of tetanus cases, but still, enough to get a good visual so it would be recognized more quickly if ever witnessed. These aren't fun to watch, but the essential things in life aren't always fun. They do tend to be very useful, however.

My other task (while Bob and Dwight had a meeting, Kyra painted ox carts, Jackson worked on Joao's roof, and Sharon did laundry) was to figure out just how to merge a Word document with an Access database table. This is a huge learning curve for me, and oh how I dislike huge learning curves while I'm going through them! If I can't figure out the merge procedure, Kyra and I will be doing lots of hand printing of preschooler and Grade 1 kids' names on their artwork pages tomorrow before heading to the school to get them working on them! I'm thinking close to 100 names--that's lots of writing. So pray my mind can wrap its way around this learning curve real fast. Don't suppose QWERTY knowledge will help with this one.

A seemingly ordinary footnote, until one realizes that North is one of the paper’s authors.

Mancur Olson’s (1993) roving and stationary bandits and Douglass North’s (1981) revenue maximizing monarchs are at the center of the two most persuasive attempts to explain the interrelated behavior of economies and polities. With all due respect, we submit that modeling the state as a single actor is inherently flawed. Unless we understand the dynamics of relationships within the organization of the state, we can never understand the interrelationship of politics and economics.

We help Rita from Kyrgyzstan to expand her livestock

Nicaragua, Tanzania, Philippines, Georgia, Senegal, Congo, Rwanda, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Mali, Bolivia, Burundi, Cambodia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Ghana, Armenia, Peru, and Azerbaijan.

That’s 20 countries.

That’s how many countries our new Kiva loans went to, today. Most of the entrepreneurs we lend to, are women working in agriculture.

You might think I am a half-millionaire to allocate US$3,475 of new loans in one go. However, these were all repayments from previously allocated loans. Re-investing in people, to help themselves…

People like Rita from a village called “Semenovka”, in Kyrgyzstan. Rita is 44 years old and a widow, raising her daughter single-handedly.
She works as a cook at a boarding house, but also has her own livestock.
With her micro finance loan, she wants to buy more cows so she can sell the milk, providing her with extra income to further expand her business, and to refurbish her house.

Here are all the loans we allocated today:

• Myriam Esther in Nicaragua: $50.00
• Mt. Livingstone Group in Tanzania: $50.00
• Erlinda in Philippines: $50.00
• Eter in Georgia: $50.00
• Mame Bousso’s Group in Senegal: $25.00
• La Lumiere 1 Group in Congo: $25.00
• Nueva Esperanza Group in Nicaragua: $25.00
• Djison Couture Group in Senegal: $25.00
• El Triunfo Group in Nicaragua: $25.00
• Twibumbirehamwe Group in Rwanda: $25.00
• Hamidi in Lebanon: $50.00
• Odbayar in Mongolia: $50.00
• Aigul in Kyrgyzstan: $50.00
• Khursheedan in Pakistan: $50.00
• Gnesouma Group in Mali: $100.00
• Asha in Kenya: $50.00
• Faiza in Yemen: $50.00
• Kurmanbubu in Kyrgyzstan: $50.00
• Bunsat’s Group in Cambodia: $50.00
• Vilma Del Carmen in Nicaragua: $50.00
• Rosas Blancas Group in Bolivia: $100.00
• Kadiatou Alpha’s Group in Senegal: $100.00
• Sol Brillante Group in Bolivia: $100.00
• Natalya in Ukraine: $50.00
• Twizere Ii Group in Burundi: $100.00
• Sameur’s Group in Cambodia: $100.00
• Eustalia in Philippines: $50.00
• Rosalia in Peru: $50.00
• Beatriz in Mexico: $50.00
• Mayra in Costa Rica: $50.00
• Julia Sonia in Peru: $50.00
• Salama in Kenya: $50.00
• Iljas in Albania: $50.00
• Atyrbubu in Kyrgyzstan: $50.00
• Moy in Cambodia: $50.00
• Heang’s Group in Cambodia: $50.00
• Flor Naciente Group in Bolivia: $75.00
• Francisca in Philippines: $75.00
• Herriet’s Group in Ghana: $75.00
• Gohar in Armenia: $50.00
• Heghine in Armenia: $50.00
• Thang in Cambodia: $50.00
• Nune in Armenia: $50.00
• Rita in Kyrgyzstan: $50.00
• Ángel in Colombia: $50.00
• Sokheng’s Group in Cambodia: $100.00
• Sitha’s Group in Cambodia: $50.00
• Melodina in Philippines: $50.00
• Alita in Armenia: $50.00
• San Antonio De Jicamarca Group in Peru: $100.00
• Emma in Armenia: $50.00
• Huoch’s Group in Cambodia: $100.00
• Kanchaiym in Kyrgyzstan: $50.00
• Aijan in Kyrgyzstan: $50.00
• Bais in Kyrgyzstan: $50.00
• Thoeun’s Group in Cambodia: $100.00
• Jamila in Azerbaijan: $50.00
• Met’s Group in Cambodia: $50.00
• Sveta in Kyrgyzstan: $50.00
• Mtamakulanga Group in Tanzania: $100.00

Come and join our Kiva team!

Events & opportunities:

Saving the World: Does Faith-based Humanitarian Aid Deliver Relief or Redemption?, New York, 15 May 2013 [info]
- Free and open to the public.

FY 2013 Funding Opportunity Announcement for Research Projects to Strengthen Evidence-Based Humanitarian Decision Making by PRM and its Partners Worldwide [info]
- Proposal submission deadline is 30 May 2013.

Publications:

A Call for Evidence-based Decision-making in Humanitarian Response (ALNAP Forum, April 2013) [text]

Hugo Slim: Legal and Ethical to Pursue Cross-Border Humanitarian Aid (Global Observatory, April 2013) [access]

"Humanitarian Workers Unprepared for Decades of Conflict, Warns UNHCR," The Guardian, 30 April 2013 [text]

"Improving Humanitarian Coordination: Common Challenges and Lessons Learned from the Cluster Approach," Journal of Humanitarian Assistance (April 2013) [full-text]

*International Legal Frameworks for Humanitarian Action: Topic Guide (Governance and Social Development Resource Centre, March 2013) [text via ReliefWeb]

The Many Meanings of Humanitarianism (Debating Development, March 2013) [text]

*updated

Tagged Publications and Events & Opportunities. 

Event:

The Deportation of Unaccompanied Minors from the EU: Family-tracing and Government Accountability in the European Return Platform for Unaccompanied Minors (ERPUM) Project, Oxford, 3 May 2013 [info]
- Taking place today!  View the remainder of the workshop online through the livestream.

Publications:

Childhood under Fire: The Impact of Two Years of Conflict in Syria (Save the Children, March 2013) [text]

Children on the Move (IOM, April 2013) [text via ReliefWeb]

Fractured Childhoods: The Separation of Families by Immigration Detention (Bail for Immigration Detainees, April 2013) [text via Migrants' Rights Network]

"The Kids before Khadr: Haitian Refugee Children on Guantanamo [A Comment on Richard J. Wilson's Omar Khadr: Domestic and International Litigation Strategies for a Child in Armed Conflict Held at Guantanamo]," Santa Clara Journal of International Law, vol. 11, no. 1 (2012) [full-text]

Mortality among Populations of Southern and Central Somalia Affected by Severe Food Insecurity and Famine during 2010-2012 (FEWS Net, May 2013) [text via ReliefWeb]
- "Half of deaths were children under five."

World Report on Child Labour: Economic Vulnerability, Social Protection and the Fight against Child Labour (ILO, April 2013) [text via ReliefWeb]

Tagged Publications and Events & Opportunities. 

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We were sitting in a circle having a chat with some dear people the other night while a cute baby with beautiful, bright eyes played on the rug in front of us. He was wearing a bright red sleeper, the all-in-one neck-to-toe kind, but the sleeper was having a hard time keeping up with the busy little body within. It sort of stuck to the rug as the baby inched his way forward. The toe and foot compartments, left flat and empty by the baby's forward movement, followed along obediently. Whenever the baby lay down or roll over, the empty sleeper toes twisted and flopped nonsensically. This attracted the attention of a cute little puppy that was romping on the rug as well. At 6 weeks old, the puppy was cute as a button and small as a bug. He had been minding his own business until the jerking motion of the floppy red fabric caught his eye. That was about the point in time when we were called to prayer. As I closed my eyes, I noticed the baby headed my direction with the puppy in hot pursuit of the red cloth trailing behind him. I only closed my eyes momentarily in compliance with the group, but opened them again quickly in order to intervene in what was coming. 
The baby got to me quickly and I reached down to help him stand just as the puppy caught up. The baby turned and took a playful swipe at the puppy, and the movement made one of the empty sleeper toes flip tauntingly. This was too much for the puppy and as he poised to pounce on it, I hoisted the baby up.  I wasn't quick enough though and the puppy caught the tip of the empty sleeper toe firmly between his teeth. I didn't want a tug of war to ensue, so I lowered the baby and tried to "shoo" the puppy away from his new toy. He relaxed his grip a bit and I lifted the baby again. But that puppy was quick on the uptake and grabbed the sleeper tip before it got away. I decided to set the baby on my knee so I could free one hand for dealing with the persistent puppy.  But as I lifted the baby higher, the sleeper fabric stretched, and that stretching brought out the puppy's reflex to lock all 4's, pull backward with all his might, and swing his head from side to side like only a determined dog will do. The baby's mom, sitting next to me, stifled a snicker. Everyone else managed to ignore the circus and kept on praying. Thankfully I managed to lean over and pry the puppy's jaws open quickly and release the now fairly stretched empty sleeper toe. I pulled the sleeper toe and leg back into proper position on the baby and tried to bounce him quietly on my lap. But he was too far into the game by then and was reaching and kicking for the puppy on the floor--who by then had moved on to chewing on my purse's strap. Seeing the puppy was distracted, I decided to try and set the baby on the rug again to crawl. But as I did so, the puppy bounded toward the baby again and the baby's eyes sparkled with delight! I quickly pulled the baby back to myself and realized this wasn't going to be an easy game to quit. People were still praying (somehow) so I decided the best policy was to hand baby off to mommy.  Thankfully that settled things down for a while so I could put in at least a few moments of earnest prayer.
That's what life is like. Some moments don't have a "stop goofing off now--this is serious" button. And that is probably what saves our sanity. I'm sure glad God hears our hearts either way. 
Paul, we miss you. And these and many other fun and fond moments like them remind us of you. We will see you again one day.

Christina asked about the expression ‘I don’t want my children to walk in the dust’.
‘Dust’, as used in Dari can have simply the literal meaning – i.e., ‘I don’t want my children to live in this dustbowl, this poor man’s house’.

But it also has a meta-meaning – a common curse here, is ‘Khak dar sat-et!‘ ‘Dust on your head!’ – which means, ‘May you die’ – the expression deriving from, when a person is dead and being buried, dust is thrown into the grave, onto their heads  - Muslims being preferably buried standing, so they can properly greet Mohammed the Prophet when he comes summon them.

So, the other meaning would be, ‘I don’t want my children to walk in death’.

 

One of the small pleasures of Lagos was the free trial subscription I accepted from MTN for daily health tips via SMS. They were always about honey. Until they were always about lemon. Some highlights:

Honey is referred to as “Yogavahi” since it has a quality of penetrating the deepest tissues of the body when it is used with other herbal preparations.

All honey is antibacterial, because the bees add an enzyme that makes hydrogen peroxide.

[etc. etc. etc.]

There are many health benefits of lemons, known for centuries. The 2 biggest are lemons strong antibacterial, antiviral n immune-boosting properties.

Warning Sign #1: When government officials use the data to set targets like an increase in vaccination or a decrease in cancer numbers, they always use percentages, not absolute numbers. That’s a sign that people know the numbers are wrong and don’t want to rely on them. (Of course, sometimes it just means that the percentage is the right way to look at it. Increasing the number of people in the district with access to clean water by 20% conveys more information than saying you want to increase it by 330,000 people. You need to use your judgment. (as always)

Warning Sign #2: The disaggregation doesn’t make sense. This is a judgment call again – sometimes the data are weird because there is something weird going on (Such as India’s missing girls. We only wish that data was fake.) For example, pregnancy is a major risk factor for anemia. If your rates of anemia in pregnant women are lower than the rates in the general population, something is wonky.

Warning Sign #3: The math doesn’t work. If you know a few true numbers, you can use them to ground-truth the rest of your data. For example, if you know the perinatal mortality rate for the smallest babies, then you can use it to determine whether the reported infant mortality rate makes sense. (This slide deck has the detailed instructions, starting from slide #20.)

The post Three Ways to Spot Bad Data appeared first on Blood and Milk.

People who are raised in the industrial world and who get enthused about systems thinking are likely to make a terrible mistake. They are likely to assume that here, in systems analysis, in interconnection and complication, in the power of the computer, here at last, is the key to prediction and control. This mistake is likely because the mind-set of the industrial world assumes that there is a key to prediction and control.

- Donella H. Meadows (2008), Thinking in Systems: A Primer

Related posts:

1. I Dream of Security
2. In which I feel insecure about biometrics
3. Social media in disaster response: Dennis McDonald’s take

The humanitarian system will collapse; if that sounds catastrophic, then perhaps you’re looking at it the wrong way. Humanitarian organisations aren’t inherently worthy, any more than any type of organisation is inherently worthy. Organisations are only delivery mechanisms for goods, and it’s the goods themselves that have value, and the success of the organisation in delivering those goods determines their own value. This is true whether the goods in question are health services, power tools – or humanitarian principles.

“Humanitarianism” isn’t a good in the way that health services or power tools, however. It might be more useful to think of humanitarianism as a disease, one that we want to spread so that it infects all of human society. A lot of progress has been made in this way regarding (for example) human rights – think of the near-universal state-level condemnation of slavery or torture (although there are frequently exceptions to prove the rule). This progress is always contingent, since diseases can go into remission, and the factors which make their progress possible change over time.

Humanitarian organisations are valuable only in so far as they act as vectors for the transmission of humanitarian principles. The physical goods and services that humanitarian organisations provide can be and frequently are provided by other types of organisations. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, and that trend will continue to grow; and that’s one of the things that we need to take into account when we think about the future of humanitarianism (and think about it a lot more deeply than we do at present).

You could argue that humanitarian principles are how humanitarian organisations distinguish themselves in the marketplace; but that would be to accept the logic of late-stage capitalism, which I suggest you don’t. In fact, we might argue that late-stage capitalism is a rival infection, one which has been more successful than humanitarianism; successful enough that nobody now blinks an eyelid when Bill Gates declares that development “now is more like a business”.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The reason that argument fails is because it puts the cart before the horse. Humanitarian principles aren’t a product of humanitarian organisations; humanitarian organisations are the product of humanitarian principles. If the “goods” that humanitarian organisations were set up to deliver are humanitarian principles, and it seems likely that those organisations will wither and die over time, then what we need to develop is not are alternative delivery mechanisms, new vectors for the transmission of humanitarian principles.

This focus on principles is an old, old song – but this is a brand new tune. This isn’t about an MSF-style back-to-basics approach to humanitarian principles; I appreciate their focus, but it’s essentially backward-looking, and therefore doomed to failure given the changes in our external circumstances. This is about a wholly new approach to humanitarianism, one which does not locate its principles in the attitudes and actions of institutional stakeholders, but in the wider culture.

This has to be the future of humanitarianism: not a tower guarded jealously by a self-selected set of organisations, but a “people’s humanitarianism” that guards the world. This requires a massive shift not just in the way in which the existing humanitarian system organises itself, but a change in the way in which we think about humanitarianism. It also needs a massive communications effort to ensure that those principles survive in what is often rocky ground.

I don’t think the humanitarian community is capable of implementing these changes (for reasons outlined in this post), and the alternatives on offer are frankly limited. As a starting point, my prescription is to move from organisations to networks as the most effective vectors for those principles. Even if not all the nodes in those networks will themselves be humanitarian organisations, we need to ensure that humanitarian principles infect as many nodes as possible, creating a humanitarian pandemic. I think I’ve exhausted that metaphor, and so I’ll end this post here.

Related posts:

1. The Two Crises of Humanitarianism
2. The single biggest threat to the humanitarian system
3. Like Herding Groundhogs

In the view of the humanitarian community, what distinguishes our work from other actors providing similar goods and services (such as the military) is the basis on which it is provided. One way of framing this is the difference between humanitarian assistance from the provision of relief: the latter can be done by anybody for any reason, while the former can only be carried out by specific types of organisation based on clearly articulated principles.

Unfortunately the recipients of aid do not share this view. The available evidence suggests “that while in some settings local people differentiate among international actors, they are generally more concerned with what is being provided than who are the chosen agents of assistance and protection” (Donini et al. 2005, Mapping the Security Environment). This suggests that, regardless of whether aid recipients are justified in their views, humanitarian principles exist largely to provide a philosophical framework that enable traditional humanitarian actors to justify their actions.

Aid provided by avowedly non-humanitarian actors – such as the extensive social security provision by Hezbollah in Lebanon – causes great discomfort because it establishes an overtly clientilist relationship. Even with the best intentions, however, it is inevitable that some degree of clientilism is generated by such relationships. The Listening Project’s recent report “describe[s] how assistance begins as a boost to people’s spirits and energies, but over time, becomes entrenched as an increasingly complicated system of reciprocated dependence.” (Anderson et al. 2013, Time to Listen, p2)(PDF)

While agencies are not unaware of this, the standard response is that “there is a tendency to criticise relief for failing to improve the situation and enable a movement towards recovery or development, when humanitarian aid was never claiming to have that as an objective, or is a wholly inappropriate instrument for that purpose. The problem lies not with relief and its failings, but with the lack of other forms of international engagement.” (Harvey and Lind 2005, Dependency and humanitarian relief, p17)(PDF) This may well be the case, but it is largely irrelevant to the recipients of aid.

It is increasingly clear to humanitarian actors that the needs of those recipients are frequently not the same as those met by the supply-driven aid system. Affected communities frequently point out that amongst their most pressing requirements are employment opportunities or general security, neither of which humanitarian aid can deliver. More imaginative responses are now being implemented, such as cash transfers, but these have been held back by the humanitarian community’s limited understanding of the wider social, political and economic forces acting on affected communities.

The Listening Project report goes on to say that a number of aid recipients “say that they believe aid providers depend on the recipients’ “needs” because responding to these needs justifies the providers’ existence and work.” The point is not that aid generates clients, or that humanitarian principles have been undermined by western military policy, or that humanitarian organisations are viewed with ambivalence by other stakeholders; these are trivially true, and have been discussed at length elsewhere.

What is critical is that these developments demonstrate that the narrative which the humanitarian community has created for itself does not match the narrative created by those outside the community, particularly aid recipients. Increasingly the humanitarian community is not in control of the narrative around humanitarian action, specifically because of the advent of the information age, which gives rise to two related crises:

1. A crisis of legitimacy. We are trapped in responding to outside criticism which is not based on the reality of aid but on media perceptions of aid, and permanently stuck behind the curve in responding to that criticism, which is not helped by the persistence of poor management throughout the sector. The end result is that our self-justifications are no longer viable in the face of increasing evidence that those justifications are irrelevant to aid recipients.
2. A crisis of confidence, brought on by the crisis of legitimacy. The external narrative is so strong, and there is such a great disparity between these two narratives, that those working in the humanitarian sector are unable to reconcile them. In such a situation, the dominant narrative will slowly overwhelm other narratives, which is what is happening to the narrative around humanitarian principles: they are seen by external actors as at best peripheral to the provision of relief.

In the last decade, the competing narrative has been driven by the public in early-industrialised countries (facilitated by failure-focused media coverage): aid is ineffective, and the solution is mechanisms which improve effectiveness, e.g. managerialist projects such as the UN’s humanitarian reform efforts. In the next decade, however, that narrative will be overtaken by the voices of aid recipients. Thanks to the research cited above, we are beginning to have a better understanding of what those voices are saying; but the only thing we can be certain of is that they will tell a completely different story: “effectiveness” is not their god, but participation is.

Related posts:

1. Humanitarianism: its part in my downfall
2. Seminar on Remote Sensing, Satellite Imagery and Humanitarian Crises
3. Cutting the Cake with CDAC

The leading industrial nations are also oil states. Without the energy they derive from oil their current forms of political and economic life would not exist. Their citizens have developed ways of eating, travelling, housing themselves, and consuming other goods and services that require very large amounts of energy from oil and other fossil fuels. These ways of life are not sustainable, and they now face the twin crises that will end them…

- Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, in Economy and Society Volume 38, Issue 3, 2009

Mitchell’s article (later developed into an excellent and very readable book) makes a compelling argument about the role that fossil fuels  – and specifically oil – have played in creating and shaping our political, economic and social frameworks. You don’t have to buy into every aspect of that argument to recognise that broadly speaking it’s obviously true – all civilizations depend on their energy resources,  both in the more visible efforts to control those resources, but also in the more subtle ways in which those resources make all other achievements possible.

This recasts the huge progress that humanity has made in improving the quality and quantity of life as less impressive than it first appears. Without disparaging the efforts of the many millions of people who have improved their own lives and the lives of others, those improvements were possible only because of the massive energy windfall that fossil fuels represented. The Green Revolution was a tremendous achievement, but made possible partly because of fossil-fuel-based industrial services and goods such as synthetic fertilizers.

Carbon democracy suggests a deeper problem. If the political and economic wealth of industrialized nations – modern democracy and consumer culture – has been paid for by access to fossil fuels then, as fossil fuels dwindle, that political and economic wealth will dwindle also (although with a time lag similar to the initial lag between use of fossil fuels on a large scale and their impact on civilization). The frameworks that were built by and continue to rely on that wealth will change in response to this external pressure (amongst others) to take new forms that may or may not support the values that we currently believe to be important.

Humanitarian action is also reliant on those frameworks of wealth, both for the economic resources which are transferred from richer to poorer communities, and for the political and social mechanisms which facilitate that transferral. As that wealth starts to disappear – not just if industrialized nations become comparatively poorer, but also because the overall wealth of nations lessens – then inevitably the humanitarian system which it currently supports will also start to disappear.

If this is true, it is the single biggest long-term threat to the humanitarian system, since the institutions which we currently work through and the resources which they can deploy will no longer be available. In light of that, we should be exploring how to ensure the survival of core humanitarian principles past the death of those institutions. What might these new forms look like? I’d suggest that resilience might provide a useful approach, with a focus on building networks of mutual support that can deploy scarce resources more equitably while still maintaining humanitarian principles – but in truth we haven’t even begun to think about these issues yet, because we assume that our institutions are eternal.

They’re not.

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This may sound familiar:

Few of the modern professionals seem to be immune from the popular attack – whether they be social workers, educators, housers, public health officials, policemen, city planners, highway engineers or physicians. Our restive clients have been telling us that they don’t like the educational programs that schoolmen have been offering, the redevelopment projects urban renewal agencies have been proposing, the law enforcement styles of the police, the administrative behavior of the welfare agencies, the locations of the highways, and so on. In the courts, the streets, and the political campaigns, we’ve been hearing ever-louder public protests against the professions’ diagnoses of the clients’ problems, against professionally designed governmental programs, against professionally certified standards for the public services. It does seem odd that this attack should be coming just when professionals in the social services are beginning to acquire professional competencies. It might seem that our publics are being perverse, having condoned professionalism when it was really only dressed-up amateurism and condemning professionalism when we finally seem to be getting good at our jobs. Perverse though the laity may be, surely the professionals themselves have been behind this attack as well. [Emphasis mine.]

- Rittel and Webber (1973), Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning, p155-6

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After years of sniping from the sidelines, I have finally begun to write my critique of the humanitarian sector. Central to the critique is an idea that I haven’t seen discussed in the humanitarian sector – indeed, I haven’t seen it discussed anywhere, although I doubt that it’s a new idea. The idea is that all human-built systems – and some (but not all) natural systems – have failure built into them.

We build failure into systems when they are explicitly or implicitly designed for one thing but we expect them to do another. The reasons why we might do this are many and varied, but it need not be a conscious effort. Individual humans are perfectly capable of saying one thing but doing another; individual organisations are even more capable of this, especially when they grow sufficiently large and diverse; and in systems comprised of multiple organisations with diverse interests, it is almost inevitable.

This is particularly true as the external environment changes over time, since the growth of systems is essentially an evolutionary process. New approaches are tried, and if they succeed (and we need not strictly define what we mean by succeed) they are passed on to the next generation. Each new iteration builds on the changes in the previous iteration; as changes build and build on each other, they become locked in place, a process known as path dependency. Once you get far enough down a specific path, it is not possible to jump to another path, or even to retrace your steps and take another path.

What this means in practice is that the systems that we build for one purpose cannot be re-directed to another purpose easily – and it may not be possible to re-direct them at all. This does not mean that change is impossible: there can always be improvements within the system, but the system itself cannot be radically changed. In some ways, the fact that improvements are possible within the system is itself problematic, since they frequently lead people to believe that these incremental steps are inevitably leading towards the radical change that they really want. This is not necessarily the case.

We can see examples of this in other sectors. Western militaries that developed organically as part of the formation of the nation state were able to transition to the Cold War by pretending that the territorial conflict they were designed for had not been rendered irrelevant by nuclear weapons. With the end of the Cold War, their utility became questionable until the declaration of the “global war on terror”, once again cast as territorial conflict, when it was anything but.

The expansion of western militaries into humanitarian intervention and disaster relief should be seen in this light. Such expansion demonstrates that the military has developed; but even when given clear direction, however, the military cannot simply be re-purposed. They may be able to establish and maintain a field hospital which can provide medical care for large numbers of people, but they cannot turn themselves into a national health system. This seems very obvious, but wait:

The role of national health system is exactly the role that humanitarian NGOs have played in Afghanistan. If we do not believe military organisations can be re-purposed in this way, why should we believe that humanitarian organisations can? Have those agencies been able to fill that role successfully? The short answer is no. “An estimated 70% of medical programs in the country have been implemented by aid organizations” and “82% of the entire population lives in districts where primary care services are provided by NGOs under contracts with the Ministry of Public Health of Afghanistan or through grants” the Afghan health care system remains largely a shambles.

The managerialist response to this is threefold. First, we blame political processes: sclerotic, corrupt or otherwise, we can shift the blame to those making the decisions about how to set up and run the system. Second, we blame resource constraints: lack of funding, lack of staff, lack of equipment, some of the responsibility must surely go to the difficult operating environment. Third, we blame organisational capacity: if only we could invest in e.g. management skills, then the system would work much more effectively.

All of these things are true, but all of them mask the real truth: the humanitarian system simply cannot deliver what is asked of it. This goes beyond the criticism that health services are not “fit for purpose”, because that phrase suggests that they can be made fit with the right political decisions, sufficient resources and improved capacity. This is not an attack on those NGO and government staff providing health care in extremely difficult circumstances; it is an attack on we who expect them to fill a role that they cannot possibly fill.

The aid system was set up and subsequently developed (although mostly unplanned) to work in a particular way that did not include relatively new concerns such as coordination, accountability, transparency or even efficiency. Despite this, we persist in believing that a few key initiatives – training more humanitarian co-oordinators, for example, or establishing organisational certification – can transform the entire sector, making it possible to do things that it was never designed to do. This seems unlikely, to say the least.

That’s the diagnosis – what is the treatment? I believe that there are three specific requirements:

1. We need to become more aware of systemic constraints. In particular we need to have more reasonable expectations about what type and size of change is possible given those constraints.
2. We need to address the fact that the system itself is likely to collapse due to changes in the external environment, or shift to a new equilibrium that is not necessarily recognisable to us, and prepare for that contingency.
3. We need to recognise and restate that the critical factor that distinguishes the humanitarian system from other delivery channels (such as the military) is not its relative effectiveness, but the values that it embodies.

In practice we need to begin building alternative systems to a) fill in the gaps in capability based on those constraints, b) eventually replace the system and c) ensure that the values that the system was originally meant to deliver continue to be delivered, even if the current system does not survive. Unfortunately at present, all our efforts are focused on option a) because it is the most visible and most accessible; but investing only in this single option guarantees failure in the other two. We need to expand our conception of how the humanitarian system actually works, rather than how we would like it to work.

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