I have avoided even thinking about Haiti for the last six months, for reasons which I explained previously. Sanjana just circulated a couple of articles, In Haiti, the Displaced Are Left Clinging To The Edge and Haiti At Six Months After Earthquake, both of which lament the lack of progress in Haiti after six months. I challenge anybody to find a large scale natural disaster which didn’t follow exactly the same pattern.
I find this pantomime of surprise astonishing, but for this we can largely blame the media, old and new. The old media has a narrative template which they apply as a way of avoiding having to think too hard, and the story of dashed hopes is a key part of that template. In this they are largely responding to the expectations of their audience, even if they played a large part in shaping those expectations.
New media has less of an excuse, which makes the breathless coverage of projects like Ushahidi all the more annoying. Let’s be clear – at this stage there is precisely no evidence that the benefits of these projects outweigh the costs of implementing them. I say this with love, having been involved with Sahana for many years; but one one of the reasons my involvement ended was the lack of interest in even defining impact, let alone measuring it.
Back to Haiti, and the title of this post. The lack of progress in Haiti is a feature of the international system, not a bug. All the “humanitarian reform” in the world will not fix this “problem”, because it isn’t a problem. I’d be going a little too far if I said that the system had been designed this way, because nobody designed the system – but it has clearly been guided by the interests of those governments who participate in it.
The system was built by governments nominally on behalf of the citizens of the countries they govern, but in fact to service the needs of governments themselves. (The most visible evidence of this is the continuing resistance to any attempt to erode the principle of state sovereignty.) This is compounded in a disaster by the vastly diminished accountability both of host governments, donor governments and their respective agents – government ministries and NGOs, with the UN agencies acting as intermediaries.
A newcomer to this game might prick up their ears at the word “accountability” and argue that if we increase accountability then we can diminish this effect. This is where the new media narrative comes in, because the new media claims to have elements which lend themselves to levelling out. This is true in some ways but not in others – a discussion which could fill a book rather than a blog post – but the important thing is that technology alone cannot increase accountability.
[T]he biggest problem in every disaster area I’ve ever worked in… It’s the housing issue… But it’s quite complex and it’s the one area that President [René] Préval has wanted to keep the Haitian government directly in charge of because of all of the legal issues involved.
Did you catch that? Clinton genuinely believes – or at least wants to maintain the fiction – that Préval wants to keep the Haitian government directly in charge because of “all of the legal issues involved”. It seems more likely that Préval wants to keep control because property ownership is the basis of power for the ruling elite – an elite that includes Préval and the entire government. If you don’t understand or won’t acknowledge that basic dynamic, then you are frankly part of the problem.
Even if you do understand and acknowledge, you may still be part of the problem. I include myself in this – one of the reasons that I withdrew from humanitarian work a couple of years ago (sort of) was because I couldn’t resolve this issue, and I still can’t. When I go to work, I am part of the international system that by its very nature will fail to address anything more than the most basic needs (and sometimes not even those) of the people of Haiti.
It is a feature of the system that people with the power to change the system achieve and maintain that power through the system itself, and so are disinclined to make changes. This is true of politics and business alike; I respect Bill Gates for committing to giving away his money1; while his astonishing wealth will help many of the poorest, he never publicly questions the system that enabled such massive disparity between his wealth and that of the poorest.
Back to Haiti one last time. To some extent the continued suffering of Haiti is inevitable because of the sheer scale of the disaster and the pre-existing situation in Haiti. As I said before, however, I don’t know of a major disaster where, six months later, commitments had been fulfilled and serious progress made. That alone should make it obvious that this is not a bug in the system, but a feature – and that feature is the persistent exclusion of affected communities even while the language of inclusion is spoken.
- As I respect Bill Clinton for committing to Haiti – although, 3 years? Yeah, that’ll fix it. [↩]
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Whilst here are many that support the exiting framework of disaster response (existing indigenous power structures, the power of corporations seeking to profit, the entrenched practices of donor governments, agencies and NGOs, the media, etc), the ultimate responsibility is ours, that is the citizens of the global north. It is our individual donations, our contributions through taxation and, above all, our complicity that permits this to happen.
We are content to let those who run the organisations to which we donate to carry on as they want, we do not hold our representatives to account for our governments’ response and we quietly absorb the messages that we are given. We accept that those best placed to understand the needs of the affected country and its citizens and to lead the relief and recovery efforts are from our own countries and that they are obviously better than indigenous leaders and governments.
Here is the crux of the issue. It is covert racism that enables us to tolerate this state of affairs, we intrinsically believe that our way is best, that ‘they’ are unable to govern themselves, to choose their own representatives, to run their own businesses, to know what is good for them. Until we recognise this and deal with it we will continue to be complicit in the failure to respond appropriately to disasters.
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Excellent post. I agree with all but one very small part:
“…I don’t know of a major disaster where, six months later, commitments had been fulfilled and serious progress made. That alone should make it obvious that this is not a bug in the system, but a feature…”
I think there’s an additional element as well: Over and above issues of power, inclusion (or not), incentive to “get it right”, we all, including professional aid-workers, continue to have basically unrealistic expectations about how long it actually takes and how hard it actually is to recover from a large disaster. There is a fiction out there – in large part perpetuated by the media, as you mention – that disaster response is simple and easy, and that six months later Haiti should be back to normal.
J – Thanks for the comment. I agree that there are unrealistic expectations, supported by the media but usually generated by the aid community as part of their public fundraising efforts.
I don’t share those expectations; by commitments I mean (for example) actual transfer of funds by donor countries as per their stated intentions, and by “serious progress” I mean a coherent long-term strategy devised by major organisations. At the 6-month point, neither of these are unrealistic goals.
I agree with you about how long it takes, and that’s clearly part of the problem. The aid community has is organised in a way which cannot manage “disasters over time” at a structural level, and the “myth of normal” undermines efforts to do so. I think my general critique is reasonable: that the aid community has been built so that it is by its very nature unable to fulfill its promises.
The question that follows from that one is simple: cui bono?
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