The time of reckoning has come
The “project approach” – which relies on temporary, discrete, linear initiatives to close gaps defined by technicians and politicians – of humanitarian interventions is not future-ready. Built on the economic and technological achievements of the 1950s that brought us the Marshall Plan and the Apollo Mission, it is more than likely that the “project approach” will not survive much longer. It is about time, I may add, as humanitarian needs and crisis drivers have outgrown the project outfit, especially since 2011.
Back then, the scale of humanitarian crises had seemed to subside, and the aid ecosystem reported a decrease in 12.5 million people targeted to receive humanitarian assistance by UN-led mechanisms from 2010. The total number of people in need by the beginning of 2012 was estimated at 62 million. Today (10 years later!), according to OCHA, the number of people in need is 274 million – the highest in history.
These appalling numbers are driven by ongoing war, famine, climate change and a global pandemic: perhaps for the first time since World War II, the Horsemen of the Apocalypse are at the gates of both the Global South and the Global North. However, they have already wreak havoc down South, decimating historically underserved, marginalized groups – such as women, children, the elderly, indigenous peoples, able-diverse people -, and undoing 30 years of neoliberal, trickle-down economic growth in regions like Latin America and the Caribbean.
Gloomy as it seems, the present might hold some valuable insights for the humanitarian system to update the ways it thinks and does. Already in 2018, 86% of development aid professionals surveyed by Devex, USAID and DAI, believed that the technology, skills and approaches used by aid workers by 2028 would be significantly different to those of today. Among the future approaches, paradigms and tools identified, the most recurrent were: Sustainability, Evidence-based Programming and Impact Evaluation, Capacity Building, Agile and Adaptive Program Management, Cross-Disciplinary and Cross-Sectoral Integrated Programming, and Community-Based Approaches.
I want to expand in three of these approaches, paradigms and tools – namely Capacity Building, Agile and Adaptive Program Management, and Community-Based Approaches. Then, based on these approaches, I propose a “discussion agenda” to continue exploring alternatives to the project outfit that would help drive the transition towards ways of doing and thinking that let go of the capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal paradigms that govern international aid today. Some of these questions, I hope, will help frame future posts.
Capacity Building
If, like me, you have spent time looking at online videos of/about people that have figured out how to complete mundane tasks in a simpler, smarter way, here is something for you: that curiosity and sense of awe can be used to chase for the creative spirits and innovators living in the margins. In resource- and power-deprived settings, a concept that encapsulates this is “positive deviance.”
Positive deviants – simply put, life-hackers – can be individuals, groups or entities that “see solutions where others don’t.” This concept acknowledges that, at local level, “there are a few individuals or groups who have overcome or prevented a pervading problem requiring behavior or social change.” Life-hackers are to be treasured and promoted, as evidence shows that innovators and influential early adopters (such is the power of the creative problem-solver) can encourage others to adopt new behaviours, tools, and technologies. This approach recognizes capacities as intrinsic to people, not something brought up by outsiders, and taught to locals via projects and interventions.
This understanding of ‘capacity building’ might seem counterintuitive to many: people living in the margins, with precarious access to social protection networks, healthcare and education, inhabit in a hostile setting for creativity to thrive. Crises, if anything, imply that people have lost – temporarily at best, permanently at worst – their capacity to go about their daily lives in a functional way.
Life-hackers are to be treasured and promoted, as evidence shows that innovators and influential early adopters (such is the power of the creative problem-solver) can encourage others to adopt new behaviours, tools, and technologies.
However, despite loss and grievance, creativity abounds in crisis contexts. Yet humanitarian and development NGOs only capture these “outliers” as success/inspirational stories of project beneficiaries thriving against all odds. I want to advocate for a better use of this untapped creativity: this means to actively acknowledge, embrace and legitimize locally produced knowledge, seeing people as partners (not as the objects of aid) and agents of change.
This acknowledgement and legitimization of local, artisanal knowledge is a critical first step in getting rid of the project outfit: its one-size-fits-all and scientific approach confounds technical issues (like report writing, budgeting, and running meetings) with political ones, where survival, social struggle and sustainability issues are at play. In sum, the project outfit denies agency to people by legitimizing only the type of technical knowledge that they do not have, and belittling the artisanal knowledge that they do possess.
Agile and Adaptive Program Management
Slow and quick onset crises are overlapping now. With more than a hundred years in the making, and close to thirty since humanity first got a glimpse of what the world might look like if left unattended, climate change is here to stay. Simultaneously, protracted crises continue to grow and new ones keep on emerging: for instance, of the total 32 conflicts reported by the Escola de Cultura de Pau in their last available Yearbook, 25 of them were over 10 years old in 2021. The other 7 appeared in the last decade. When compared to humanitarian projects and programs that end after one or two years, I wonder how effective the project outfit is in dealing with long-term events that profoundly disturb socioecological and political systems at different scales, from local to global.
With protracted crises as the new normal, a response in the form of social change is called for. Social change is a long-term process, and as such, it should be embraced by the humanitarian sector. I think the key is in the word “process:” it highlights the ongoing nature of change, and it acknowledges the historical and cultural contexts where it takes place. It also evokes a state of transition, where people are able to internalize, make sense and accept the new behaviors, attitudes and motivations required to deal with change. Transitions, unsurprisingly, will require agility and adaptiveness: for example, transitioning from war to peace is not an easy feat; however, it needs the commitment of the people that are going to have to live with its outcomes to be successful. This is something that no program or project can promise to deliver.
Community-Based Approaches
Intimately intertwined with Capacity Building, Community-Based Approaches are, to me, community-owned frameworks, where the role of “aid workers as experts” is flipped for that of “meaningful partners.”
I contend that the canonical approach to capacity development has created new dependencies in the crisis-ridden Global South on the knowledges and techniques produced in the Global North: it is expected of Global South individuals, groups and entities to adopt these knowledges, resources, skills and incentives brought to them from “up there” to sort out the problems “down here.” These knowledges include the tacit recognition that humanitarian, development and peacebuilding issues are somehow discrete issues that should be dealt with separately.
This assumption helps make the case for emergency humanitarian assistance as a sector that should remain dominated by international organizations and agencies, at the expense of local actors. Any effort to build capacity beyond the boundaries of humanitarian assistance risks getting lost in red tape. This means that there is very little space for participation, in terms of decision-making, ownership and appropriation of the knowledge produced and activities implemented by humanitarian projects, let alone for the implementation of autochthonous strategies and initiatives to respond to emergencies.
It might be argued that a critical consequence of protracted humanitarian crises is that resources, knowledge and incentives get quickly exhausted, and that, as a result, affected people adopt coping strategies that might hurt them even more, thus feeding a never-ending negative loop of vulnerability and dependence on external support.
Nonetheless, the focus of humanitarian aid on people’s needs seems to sideline their dignity and rights. In other words, it ends up denying “people in need” of their own agency. Remedial measures such as cross-cutting approaches (i.a. gender-and-age) fall short from restoring people’s capacity to fend for themselves. A focus on needs, in detriment of dignity and rights, helps in perpetuating the current power dynamics of dependence of people in crisis from aid organizations.
(…) the focus of humanitarian aid on people’s needs seems to sideline their dignity and rights. In other words, it ends up denying “people in need” of their own agency.
What to do, then? In my next blog entry, I aim at exploring some principles of conviviality, mutual aid, and common-pool resource management as alternatives to project-driven interventions and the capacity-building approach. Some key questions can be framed at this point: How might we design humanitarian and development initiatives that challenge outdated ways of doing? How might we design governance structures that transfer power and resources back to right-holders? How might we make use of – and set limits to – technologies while acknowledging entropic quality of social challenges?
