A version of this post can be listened to in the video below:
Allow me to hone into the three issues I proposed in my previous post: those of outdated ways of doing aid, reforming/dismantling existing power structures, and the limits to techno-optimism. These issues have spun off from a world view that privileges scientific knowledge, utilitarianism, and linear ideas of progress, aiming for the modern promise of singularity: a standardised, ordered world that upholds the banners of liberal individualism.
Two recent events support the claim I make above. I’ll attempt to connect these events to argue for doing away with an aid system that seems to be there to whitewash, greenwash, pinkwash, rainbow-wash, etc., the blunders of Northern power institutions wherever they attempt to bring ‘modernity’ into existence.
This botched aid system, which takes the form of military intervention, extractivism disguised as “free-trade”, and land grabs for environmental conservation, is used to appease the conscience of Northern public opinion by throwing some coins to the hands of the displaced and dispossessed through the machinery for the advancement of their “mission civilisatrice”, commonly known as the development aid apparatus.
Anyways… here it goes.
Exhibit One
On October 13, 2022, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Mr. Josep Borrell, delivered a speech to the inaugural cohort of EU diplomats at the European Diplomatic Academy. Out off the bat, Borrell made this statement:
“(…) Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that the humankind (sic) has been able to build – the three things together. (…) The rest of the world (…) is not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden. The gardeners should take care of it, but they will not protect the garden by building walls. A nice small garden surrounded by high walls in order to prevent the jungle from coming in is not going to be a solution. Because the jungle has a strong growth capacity, and the wall will never be high enough in order to protect the garden.
The gardeners have to go to the jungle. Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, by different ways and means.”
In a not-so-subtle way, Mr. Borrell has captured the essence of the aid system: its values, power structures, and how the non-European ‘other’ is constructed. The assumptions under which the aid system is built shape its character as a totalizing political project that advances through the occupation, appropriation, and displacement of knowledge, as well as the imposition of a universal worldview, bounded by binary categories, such as Garden/Jungle and Developed/Under-developed. This is what Enrique Dussel calls the “fallacy of developmentalism”, namely “thinking that the path of Europe’s modern development must be followed unilaterally by every other culture”.
Exhibit Two
Having identified the beliefs, values, and attitudes of Euro-modernity thanks (?) to Mr. Borrell, allow me to explore how these mental models have translated into practice. A good example at hand is the contemporary humanitarian system. In early September 2022, ALNAP, a global network of traditional humanitarian donor, practitioner and academic organisations – all of which are from the Global North –, launched their fifth-ever “State of the Humanitarian System” (SOHS) Report. This report assesses “the size, shape and performance of the humanitarian system against key criteria over time”. The findings are, to put it mildly, deeply concerning.
In terms of the global humanitarian context, when compared to the previous round of reporting in 2018, the humanitarian system has witnessed:
- A global increase of over 87% in the number of people, recognized by the UN’s Global Humanitarian Overview, in need of humanitarian assistance
- 97 million people pushed into extreme poverty due to the social and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic
- A raise in autocracy and the closure of civic space globally, which translated into the rejection of humanitarian norms and human rights
Similarly, the structures in place to deliver humanitarian aid have failed to:
- Deconcentrate power: COVID-19 forced humanitarian organisations to rely more on local capacity. However, the opportunity to shift power dynamics was missed.
- Deconcentrate funding: Funding for humanitarian assistance has almost doubled in the last decade, but it remains highly concentrated. At least half of the funds go to three (!) UN Agencies (WFP, UNHCR, UNICEF), and almost half of the funds come from just five donor countries.
- Appropriately engage with aid recipients. Of the aid recipients interviewed:
- Only 39% said they were satisfied with the aid received.
- Only 36% thought that aid went to those who needed it most
Lack of consultation, lack of participation in defining recipient selection criteria, lack of accountability to recipients, and the divisive nature of targeting practices employed by humanitarian organisations were equally highlighted as crucial barriers for aid effectiveness by aid recipients. As diagnosed by Kennedy and Maietta (2022:8), the humanitarian system suffers from sclerosis, and the only way to fight it is “to incept change from the outside, namely from non-formal actors in the ecosystem.” This change comes in the form of radical ownership and participation at community level, guided by beliefs, values and attitudes that transcend the ‘white modern gaze’.
Gardening is violent
Exhibits One and Two provide two clear examples of what needs to change in humanitarian and development aid: mental models and power structures. Crucially, mental models provide the normative foundation that sustain power structures. These mindsets – call them modernity or developmentalism – determine the development, use and evaluation of approaches, paradigms and tools, such as Capacity Building, Agile and Adaptive Program Management, and Community-Based Approaches.
Developmentalism is the application of managerial technologies in non-European societies to discipline them under a standardised way of being, thinking and doing that is defined by Global North societies. It is the application of the gardener’s logic, that of standardised and mechanical order, to the ‘jungle’. The fact that the ‘jungle’ does not fit into the cookie-cutter of Europeans should not be used as an excuse to bulldoze it to replace it.
