Tales poses the question, what do you think? Most of the time I’m not exactly sure what I think, but these thoughts did occur to me as I was reading:
How much should be spent for the response to a large disaster by the six-month mark?
It’s the wrong metric, it puts us in the wrong frame of mind for measuring progress since money doesn’t tell you anything about impact. Whether it’s absolute or relative amounts, there are too many contingencies in play to make blank statements about expenditure useful. Expenditure isn’t very useful in the sense that I could have spent 100% of my funding within 6 months, but if I’m the size of Oxfam and I only had $28,000 to spend then that’s not much of an achievement. Of course monitoring expenditure is useful and has its part to play in measuring agencies delivering on their commitments, but for more useful analysis it needs to be placed in very specific context. For example, how much has been committed by donors and how much of those pledges have actually arrived in a timely manner?
How long should it take to get back to “normal”? And what is “normal”?
Again the framing is wrong on this question, because there is no “normal” to get back to and it’s not a useful term. Even the use of the word “normal” is loaded up with luggage, because I’m pretty sure that my definition of “normal” is different from a Haitian factory workers’. I don’t want this to descend into a purely definitional question, but we need to give up the idea of normal particularly in situations (like Haiti or NOLA) which weren’t sustainable to begin with – and the problem is that most situations aren’t sustainable if you take seriously issues such as climate change, peak oil, water scarcity and so forth. We need to get away from “normal” and start thinking “resilient” if we’re serious about disaster preparedness and recovery, and that’s what we should be aiming towards. Needless to say, the humanitarian community is woefully ill-equipped to do this right now.
What would you see as the minimums around transparency and accountability for aid agencies responding to disaster with public and private funding? What kinds of information should they be required to voluntarily share with the public? What kinds of information should they be required to share upon request? And what kinds of information, in your opinion, if any, should they be allowed to withold? Under what circumstances?
As public agencies spending public money for the public good, all of our information should be public unless there is a demonstrable privacy or security risk involved. I’d be interested to hear from people who don’t agree with me on this; unfortunately at the moment the exact opposite is true and I appear to be in a minority of one.
Related posts:
With you on the last one. The more I look at it, the more I see aid organisations obscuring information from donors. The more the aid money bag gets squeezed (nowadays), the more we also hide information amongst aid agencies.
Peter