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Some people are attached to “Build Back Better”, and it bothers me. If we want to “build back” a country that was such a nightmare that most of the citizens basically wanted to get the hell out, build back better is the way to go; if we want to participate in a project that has clear ideological intent to sustain the status quo with marginal improvements in people’s lives, then build back better is the slogan to front it. I don’t want that; I want something new, something better than Build Back Better.

Architecture for Humanity volubly disagreed with me on Twitter, which is ironic, because they’re exactly the sort of organisation that I’d like to see get more play in the great game of aid – see their plan for reconstruction if you don’t believe me. I don’t have a coherent over-arching plan to fix Haiti, because coherent over-arching plans to fix Haiti will fail – that’s kind of the point when it comes to dealing with complex systems like countries, right? So perhaps I should clarify what I meant when I said Just Say No by providing a few examples:

• Reinvent Building. Shelter is critical to most service delivery in an emergency, but particularly after earthquakes when people have lost their housing. Now’s the time to introduce sustainable housing using techniques such as rammed earth construction, supported by a radical land rights regime based on the work of Hernando de Soto.
• Reinvent Sanitation. The industrialised model of sanitation simply doesn’t scale in rapidly-growing cities in developing countries, sometimes creating more problems than they solve. There are alternatives to the flush-and-forget toilet, so why not roll out composting toilets that enable more effective management of human waste as well as supporting urban agriculture?
• Reinvent Agriculture. It might seem strange to talk about farming in the middle of the city, but if it can work in Detroit, then why not Port-au-Prince? Permaculture projects hit several sweet spots all at once – not just food security but waste management, livelihoods and so on – and an alternative to the more destructive patterns that Haiti suffered before.
• Reinvent Power. Solar solar solar isn’t the answer to every question, particularly at large scale, but it hits a lot of household usage in poor countries (including the ubiquitous mobile phone). There are smart ideas like the FLAP bag floating around, but basic solar – solar cookers, for example – have been around for a while. Anything to shift away from wood.
• Reinvent Communications. Forget restoring any landlines that might have existed before the earthquake, because I bet that everybody was using mobile phones anyway. Roll out free wireless broadband across the city – maybe find a use for those OLPCs that are hanging around in warehouses (eventually), but more importantly create new business opportunities.
• Reinvent Transport. Segways! Not really. Roads are for the rich; why not think about the needs of the poor and simply make sure there are pavements? A simple but profound idea if you want to go for a walk without falling into a hole filled with dirty water and metal poles. In an ideal world, there’d be some integrated transport plan that looked at how to convert tap-taps to LPG, but even I’m not that silly.
• Reinvent Finance. Facilitate the free flow of remittances, even if they’re not the biggest link in the chain of solidarity… but it would be interesting to see what happened if, instead of channelling funding through big multilaterals and the Haitian “government”, cash grants were used to kickstart the economy through community finance mechanisms and plain old cash distributions.
• Reinvent Governance. We all love democracy, the worst form of government. Unfortunately we tend to forget that democracy comes in different flavours; it’s frustrating when the cloning attempts repeatedly fail and everybody acts surprised. So let’s be more inventive – community-level direct democracy, emergent rather than directed policy, referenda rather than elections, issue-based not party-based, and so on.

Am I naive to think that these things are possible? Well, no, because I don’t really believe these things are possible. To be clear – none of these things are part of the immediate humanitarian response, but we should be thinking about knitting together Haiti’s social fabric before it suffers permanent trauma through a range of small-scale exploratory projects, rather than calling for a Marshall Plan for Haiti.

Unfortunately that’s the way that the international community responds – too much planning and not enough searching. The tool kit available to the aid bureaucracy is almost comically limited; there are numerous small projects going on around the world that can make a difference in people’s lives, but the challenge is placing them in a long-term view of reinvention. We’re not very good at thinking in realistic timeframes for country-level development, forgetting exactly how long it took rich countries to get rich and how recently that wealth arrived.

There are two main obstacles: first, existing institutional structures will work very hard indeed to replicate themselves, and they have the leverage; second, scaling up is incredibly difficult to achieve past anything more than the level of an extended community. The institutional structures are the same ones that brought you – Afghanistan! Iraq! most of Africa! – i.e. structures that have repeatedly demonstrated that they’re most likely not fit for purpose.

And scaling up? That’s where the real work is – trying to rebuild from the inside these systems that have grown up over the years, using the same tools that built those systems in the first place. I’ve been trying to work this out for most of my working life, and I still don’t have many good solutions. So if anybody has any other ideas for reinventing Haiti, plug them into the comments below – and don’t come screaming with approaches that are so radical that nobody outside the US will ever use them, please….

In the meantime, there are lives to save, and I have to write an evaluation report on NGO co-ordination in Southern Sudan.