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?

“…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.

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.