humanitarian.info

No matter how critical of the humanitarian community I am, this reminds me of why I chose the path I did.

Remember the dead. Celebrate the successes. Learn from failures. Embrace the world.

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.

Patrick has replied to my initial post, but unfortunately has decided to continue his hilarious Harry Potter analogy. So he depicts me as the “Muggle Master”, which I assume is an attempt to dismiss my concerns about crowdsourcing as being based on ignorant and/or reactionary attitudes on my part. As we shall see in the course of this post, however, I’m far from being a Muggle (and I’m not anybody’s Master, either). This is a boringly long post so you may want to make yourself a hot drink before you read it.

WHAT A MUGGLE KNOW

1. the traditional mindset here is that unless you have field personnel (your own people) in charge, then there is no way to get accurate information. This implies that the disaster affected populations are all liars, which is clearly untrue.

Of course they’re not all liars, and nobody has implied that they are. What they are is people who may have lost most of their livelihoods; people whose village/neighbourhood may have been destroyed; people who may be severely traumatized. You need to listen to what they have to say – but you also have to verify it, which means physically checking what you are told, which requires somebody on the ground, which will usually be an employee of your organisation.

2. So it boils down to this: is having information that is not immediately verified better than having no information at all? If your answer is yes or “it depends”, then you’re probably a Crowd Sorcerer.

In 2006 I published “Better the Devil we Know: Obstacles and Opportunities in Humanitarian GIS”, in which I specifically said that we should “accept imperfection”. My belief that perfect is the enemy of good enough was based on six years working in the field, and was shared by nearly all of the people that I’d worked with. So I guess I was a crowd-sorcerer about ten years before Patrick coined the term – who knew?

3. How can anyone innovate in a space riddled with a “No We Can’t, No We Won’t” mindset?

Patrick wants you to think that this is my mindset – the “Muggle Master” mindset – when in fact the opposite is true. If you’d like to know more, I’d refer you to a series of blog posts that I wrote on innovation in the sector or to the ALNAP Review of Humanitarian Action 2009. Patrick makes the mistake of thinking that just because people think one particular idea is a bad one, those people must therefore think that all new ideas are bad. This is false.

4. Incidentally, the majority of development, humanitarian, aid, etc., projects are never evaluated in any rigorous or meaningful way (if at all, even). But that’s ok because these are double (Muggle) standards.

Then I guess I’m not a Muggle, since I’ve always been a strong advocate of better evaluation, have been an observer member of ALNAP for ten years, have always tried to ensure that the projects that I’ve managed have been evaluated, and have carried out two evaluations so far this year – one of which used the utilization focused approach that he likes so much.

5. Concerns over security need not always be used as an excuse for not communicating with local communities.

In April 2006 I wrote “In the interests of accountability, all information that we gather in the course of our work should also be public… Our failure to share information with beneficiaries exposes our humanitarian principles as worth much less than we claim.” No muggling there, then.

6. This would provide a mechanism to allow Haitians to report problems (or complaints for that matter) via SMS, phone, etc. Imogen Wall and other experienced humanitarians have long called for this to change.

That’s right, experienced humanitarians have. I’m one of them, and have been at least since Kosovo in 1999, where we made sure that the HCIC was open to all Kosovars looking for assistance of any kind.

7. This just reinforces what I’ve already observed, many in the humanitarian space are still confused about crowdsourcing. The crowd is always there. Haitians were always there. And crowdsourcing is not about volunteering.

In the post “Haiti and the Power of Crowdsourcing”, Patrick wrote that he “wanted to share an astounding example of crowdsourcing” and then proceeded to describe the volunteer effort he was part of. In this response he wrote about the problems of “managing hundreds of unpaid volunteers” so clearly he does think that crowd-sourcing has quite a lot to do with volunteering – and this is the crowd that I was referring to. I would suggest that any confusion in the humanitarian space merely reflects the confusion of crowdsourcing’s proponents.

FOR THE DEFENCE

To be fair, Patrick does attempt a defense of his position which is reasonable on its own terms but unfortunately doesn’t fit with the reality of disaster response.

Incidentally, no one I know has advocated for the use of crowdsourced data at the expense of any other information. Crowd Sorcerers and (many humanitarians) are simply suggesting that it be considered one of multiple feeds… Humanitarians working with Crowd Sorcerers could use SMS to crowdsource reports, triangulate as best as possible using manual means combined with Swift River, cross-reference with official information feeds and investigate reports that appear the most clustered and critical.

Yes, they could, but they could do a lot of different things, and unfortunately since time tends to be quite tight in a major disaster, they will have to choose some of those things rather than having all of them, and the opportunity costs of pursuing crowdsourced data mean that other information flows are very likely to suffer from lack of attention. Based on reviewing the entire Haiti dataset downloaded from the Ushahidi website, I’m suggesting that the value of the data may not be worth the amount of effort required to make that dataset usable for the purposes of humanitarian response.

THE BIG FINISH

In the Harry Potter books, Muggles are “often portrayed as foolish, sometimes befuddled characters who are completely ignorant of the Wizarding world that exists in their midst” (thanks, Wikipedia), and Patrick wants you to think that I’m the Muggle Master – all in “good fun”, of course. Unfortunately for his argument I’m basically the opposite: I’m on record as repudiating most of the attitudes that Patrick claims characterise muggles’ opposition to crowdsourcing, often years before crowdsourcing even existed.

However it’s important to emphasise that I’m not trying to claim that my experience in this sector makes me automatically right. Instead I’m asking you to recognise that I am clearly not a Muggle, yet I still have serious concerns about the use of crowdsourcing in disaster response. I’ve raised those concerns in public for the first time here, but Patrick’s response seems to be addressing an imaginary opponent. So I look forward to Patrick addressing those concerns, as per my request on his blog:

A worked example of how the actual outputs from Ushahidi can be used to support (for example) the WASH Cluster over (for example) the next three months of the mission to meet basic co-ordination requirements.¹

1. Note: not “the outputs that we’d like to have” or “the outputs that we would have if everybody used Ushahidi”, but either the web-based interface or the actual dataset that you can download. [↩]

Some people working on information management in Haiti have concerns about the role of crowdsourcing in humanitarian response, which is something I’ve written about previously. If you don’t want to read that whole blog post, the short version is this: I don’t think that crowdsourcing and humanitarian response are a good fit, for a number of reasons, some of which I will explain below.

Unfortunately Patrick Meier’s efforts to defend crowdsourcing are more likely to persuade people that crowdsourcing is yet another technology project that is going to eat their time and fail to deliver. It may be worth treating the views of other professionals – communicated in what appear to be private emails – with a little bit more respect if you want to persuade them of your case.

It would be fair to say that I disagree with pretty much everything that Patrick has written, so there’s little point in trying a point-by-point rebuttal. However many people – including Patrick – appear to mistake the extensive media coverage of Ushahidi (and therefore “crowdsourcing”) for meaningful impact¹ and this needs to be corrected. Since Patrick has set the ball rolling, I’ll use his arguments as my starting point.

Not sure how you’d interpret these words but what they say to me is this: unless information comes from official field personnel, i.e., Muggles, it’s absolutely useless and should be dumped in the trash. I personally find that somewhat… is colonial too provocative?

Not provocative, but deliberately misrepresentative. In the literal sense humanitarian agencies aren’t colonial – check a dictionary if you don’t believe me – but “colonial” (or rather “imperial”) is an easy term to throw around if you want to disparage somebody. It’s a bit like calling somebody a fascist – unless they are actually a fascist, it’s just lazy grandstanding. In this instance it feeds into Patrick’s conception of the aid sector as elitist, which we’ll come to later.

And of course the way in which Patrick interprets those words bears little relation to what those words actually said, which is this: “Unless there are field personnel providing “ground truth” data, consumers will never have reliable information upon which to build decision support products.” This is trivially true, even for crowdsourcing initiatives – why do you think Wikipedia requires all its facts to be externally referenced? It’s their equivalent of ground truthing.

In the actual quote that Patrick supplies us with, his humanitarian critics are quite clearly not saying that crowdsourced data is absolutely useless, only that verifying that data is essential. The really strange thing is that Patrick agrees with this, since later he points out that this verification is “the whole point behind Swift River, to provide a free and open source platform that can help validate large quantities of information in near real time.”

So Patrick does think that verification is important, which leads us to the next strange argument that he presents, one which he’s presented before:

Crisis information that was crowdsourced using the distributed short code 4636 in Haiti helped save hundreds of lives according to the Marine Corps.

Given Patrick’s agreement on the importance of validating data, there seems to have been very little validation of this claim. The claim itself first appeared in this blog post and was expanded on in this blog post. Read both those blog posts first, especially the first one, and especially the correspondence from an unnamed military source, who makes two claims:

1. That Ushahidi saved the lives of three women who were evacuated. The problem with this claim is that those women do not appear to have been in the Ushahidi data – the expeditionary unit happened to be in Grand Goave verifying more general data² when they encountered them by chance. From my perspective, this is an extremely weak claim to success: given the situation in Port-au-Prince in the last week of January, the unit could have been anywhere in the city and would probably have found somebody who required medical evacuation.
2. That there are “100s of these kind of stories” of Ushahidi having an impact. Only one such story is described by this single unnamed source, the one referenced above, and if we assume that this is the strongest example, then the case looks extremely weak indeed. However the lack of further cases makes it impossible to draw a reasonable conclusion about this claim – but that in itself is a problem, since it’s impossible for anybody to say one way or another whether Ushahidi has any impact at all.

It’s worth emphasizing the second point, because it’s true for (as far as I know) all Ushahidi deployments so far: there is no evidence at all for their impact. On the first blog post referenced above, there is a list demonstrating how the feedback loop was closed – but if you read the detail, Ushahidi was not instrumental in the actual delivery of aid, merely in the reporting of aid. Contrary to Patrick’s claims, this is not “disrupting” the humanitarian system.³

The same goes for claims about Mission 4636, which I agree was as extraordinary as the Ushahidi effort from the supply side but for which there is little evidence of success from the demand side. I look forward to seeing the results of the impact assessment being carried out⁴, but it would be useful to see the TORs, because as anybody in M&E knows, the scope of an evaluation determines the findings of that evaluation.

A forthcoming USIP report that reviews the deployment of the Ushahidi platform found that Haitian NGO’s and local civil society groups were physically barred from entering LogBase—the humanitarian community’s compound near the airport in Port-au-Prince. One Haitian NGO rep who was interviewed said he felt like a foreigner in his own country when he wasn’t allowed to enter LogBase and attend meetings where he could share vital information on urgent needs.

I’m sorry that a Haitian NGO rep felt like a foreigner in his own country but I’m pretty sure that even before the earthquake there were many places in Haiti where he couldn’t just walk in whenever he wanted to. In the UK, I can’t just walk into Oxfam’s  offices on a good day, and if an earthquake had just destroyed half of Oxford I imagine that they’d be a bit too busy to have a meeting with everybody who walked in off the street. Simply put: no time to deal and filters apply.⁵

Now tell me, how is trashing Haitian text messages any different than  physically excluding Haitians from having a voice at LogBase? Because the so-called “unwashed masses” don’t have the “right” credentials as defined by the Muggles? Either way, they are excluded from having a stake in the hierarchical system that is supposed help them.

There are two responses to this. First, nobody in his correspondence referred to Haitians as “unwashed masses” – those are words which he’s putting into their mouths. This is offensive, since those entrance policies are based on security rather than snobbery and, while I may disagree with those policies on occasion, they’re in place because people can die if they’re not.

Second, nobody in the correspondence appears to be “trashing” Haitian text messages, and it’s inaccurate to say that “Haitians” were physically excluded from having a voice at LogBase, since Haitians were in fact present at LogBase – they just weren’t the Haitians that Patrick wanted to have a voice. At this stage it’s difficult to explain Patrick’s persistent misrepresentation of his opponents.

Writing that “crowdsourcing is a technology” reveals how out of touch Muggles are. Crowdsourcing is a methodology, not a technology. Worse, to write that crowdsourcing should be used to disseminate information shows just how much confusion exists in the humanitarian space.

I don’t doubt that there is much confusion in the humanitarian space. However, it’s fair to assume that for most if not all aid workers in Haiti crowdsourcing was a novel idea and Ushahidi was their first exposure to it. So any confusion regarding what constitutes crowdsourcing must rest largely with those people who were introducing crowdsourcing – and surely that means the Ushahidi team?

Confession: I shudder when reading language like “according to recognized/accepted standards.” Not because standards are not important, but just because I’m weary of the exclusive and at times elitist attitude that tends to come with this language.

I said I’d return to Patrick’s accusations of elitism, but he presents no actual examples of elitism, unless having a discussion via email (on which Patrick was copied) is somehow elitist. What worries me is that the accusation of elitism seems to be cover for an argument that aid work shouldn’t be a field of professional endeavour⁶ but that anybody can try their hand at. Needless to say, this is misguided.

Despite what some Muggles may think, crowdsourcing is not actually magic. It’s just a methodology like any other, with advantages and disadvantages.

That’s exactly what “Muggles” think. If they’re like me, they think that the disadvantages may outweigh the advantages, and that crowdsourcing and disaster response are not a good fit. Even the fiercest advocates of crowdsourcing don’t claim that crowdsourcing is good for everything, and I think that humanitarian response is one of those things that it isn’t good for. There are a couple of reasons for this, but the main one is this:

Crowdsourcing should not form part of our disaster response plans because there are no guarantees that a crowd is going to show up. Crowdsourcing is no different from any other form of volunteer effort, and the reason why we have professional aid workers now is because, while volunteers are important, you can’t afford to make them the backbone of the operation. The technology is there and the support is welcome, but this is not the future of aid work.

I’m sorry to put it in these terms but if we listened to (and waited for) Muggles all the time, then perhaps several hundred more people would have needlessly lost their lives in Haiti.

Stay classy.

1. Which explains why so many media types have been contacting me about it recently. [↩]
2. It appears that the military also believe that Ushahidi data needs to be ground truthed by field personnel, but for some reason Patrick doesn’t attack them for this in the way that he attacks civilians – possibly because the military gave them all medals. [↩]
3. Ushahidi is exciting for people working in HQ rather than people on the ground because internal reporting mechanisms are so thin – but this is a one-way street since information from HQ seldom goes back down the chain in any organisation. [↩]
4. Apparently “by a team of three accomplished experts” – one wonders why they didn’t crowdsource the evaluation? [↩]
5. Having said that, this is a perennial problem for which there is no good answer. We need more accessibility for local organisations, but not at the expense of security and effectivenesss. The solution is to create more neutral spaces and honest brokers who can mediate between the international and the national, and that’s where coordination bodies should play a critical role, but often fail to. [↩]
6. This would not be surprising, since this argument underlies a lot of the discourse about crowdsourcing in general – as per the title of Andrew Keen’s book, the Cult of the Amateur. [↩]

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.

1. As I respect Bill Clinton for committing to Haiti – although, 3 years? Yeah, that’ll fix it. [↩]

I find it hard to believe that there’s anybody that can can seriously ask:

Are aid donors now running Haiti?

Were you expecting anything else? If you were, you are frankly deluded. This is the Political Economy of Aid 101, and if you didn’t pick that up within the first 3 months of working in development, then – wow.

What I said before, I’ll say again:

My thoughts go out to the people of Haiti; first suffering the earthquake, and now the international community.

Perhaps I wasn’t explicit enough – snarky enough? – the first time around. This is simultaneously how aid works and why aid doesn’t work. Everything else is just detail.

Amazing how working eats into your blogging time. Off the top of my head:

1. Articulate user requirements to focus on the necessary.
2. Consider individual and organisational incentives for (not) sharing.
3. Map information flows within and between individuals/organisations.
4. Where possible, bind to existing processes as a starting point.
5. Keep tools simple, usability the focus and end users the goal.

I would say that following these would give anybody a good chance of success. Any others?

Wading through all this Web 2.0 stuff, it’s easy to forget that this is what information management is fundamentally about. I produced this adapted flowchart soon after I started working in humanitarian info management (10 years ago, and that ain’t funny), and it’s still being used today.

Oh, you’ll see versions with more stages in the cycle and more words than strictly necessary, but this is what it boils down to. If you’re designing an information system, there is no better guide to make sure you get it right. I would say that – I’m biased – but here we go: back to the old school.

I’ll begin by saying that I like ICG, that I think their analysis is more often right than wrong, and that even when it’s wrong it’s useful. However this podcast makes it clear that they – like everybody else – are stuck in a certain way of thinking. On violence in Southern Sudan:

While it’s important to understand that these conflicts between tribes in Southern Sudan are not new – they’ve been going on for generations – the fact that 2500 people have been killed in South Sudan in 2009 alone and 350,000 displaced means the nature of that violence has changed and to a certain degree become politicised. This is of particular concern given what is at stake in the coming year. If the government can’t get a handle on the violence, extend state authority, prove itself a credible provider of security, the forthcoming elections could be disrupted and this could also become an obstacle on the road to the all-important self-determination referendum in 2011.

First, while I totally accept that ICG has a more thorough analysis of the violence than I do, it’s difficult to see how, if these conflicts have been going on for generations, that their continuation demonstrates that the nature of the violence has changed. These conflicts were always political, unless you think that inter-tribal relations have no political content – in which case you probably haven’t read enough history books – and an increase in death and displacement might not demonstrate politicisation per se but simply improvements in tactics, new supply of weapons or just a new assymetry in the conflict (for example, if one tribe loses cattle to a drought). My worry is that if – as I suspect – ritualised violence (particularly in the form of cattle raids) is an integral part of Sudanese tribal politics and culture (and possibly entertainment as well) then any solutions that you might derive from this reading of that violence are likely to have failure built in.

Second, notice what ICG thinks the effects of the violence might be – to undermine state authority and threaten the 2010 elections and the 2011 referendum. What these two things have in common is that they are state projects. While local communities might take a passing interest in those projects, they’re not things that are core to their existence. This is partly because ICG is interested in political development rather than humanitarian assistance, but it’s also because we – as people coming from established functioning states – tend to see politics in terms of the state, or – taking this violence as an example – in terms of how it relates to the state. This is the second part of building in failure – a state-centric diagnosis of Sudan’s problems and the consequent prescription of “Please sir, can I have some more state?” are unlikely to resonate with people for whom the state is not a player.

Skipping lightly on, we find the UK Defence Academy has published From General to Strategic Corporal: Complexity, Adaptation and Influence. In some ways this paper is little more than a breeze through some of the key buzzwords of the last 10 years – Black Swans? Check. Bottom Billion? Check. Behavioural economics? Check.¹ Although it’s nice to see the military taking these concepts on board, they don’t really cohere, but there is a point relevant to the violence in Southern Sudan about halfway through:

In Afghanistan we believe the coalition has struggled to frame the choices we are asking a war-torn nation to consider. The simplest example would be the offer of democracy. Whilst well understood in liberal western countries it requires far greater explanation and framing in low income, conflict ridden countries when the decision to vote or who to vote for is largely irrelevant when compared with choices presented by the Taliban, or just by social circumstance, of life and death. We would contend that, to date in Afghanistan, we have paid little attention to how choices might be appropriately framed to change individual and collective behaviour. Many of the choices that are currently presented are too stark: poppy bad/wheat good; Taliban evil/ISAF good and so on. The reality is that we have consistently failed to understand that what seems to us as irrational behaviour is entirely rational to the individual facing tough choices.

Ignore the Afghanocentric example – it’s tough to find anything published by the UK military these days that doesn’t think Afghanistan is the be-all and end-all – and look at the forest rather than the trees. These guys have realised that the choices we present to people might not always be the choices that they’re actually facing. In the Sudanese example, tribal violence bad / state violence good (in the Weberian sense) is unlikely to play well in Jonglei, which should make us ask not if we’re offering the right solution but if we’ve even identified the right problem.

1. A note to the authors: best not to refer to Kipling‘s “savage wars of peace” in this context, since Kipling was talking (essentially) about colonial wars of oppression, which is why Alistair Horne used it for the title for his excellent book about the brutal Algerian war for independence, and it’s probably a good idea to keep Afghanistan well away from that kind of language. Somebody might get hurt. [↩]

One of the strangest things about southern Sudan is how weak the local NGO community is. It’s five years after the end of the war, with five years of focused attention from the international community, and five years with an increasing presence of international organisations looking for partners. Yet everybody agrees – particularly the local NGOs themselves – that capacity is as low as ever, and there is still no coherent approach to building that capacity in the near term. There’s an outdated website dedicated to the issue, and an interesting (although slightly opaque) report from May 2009 that comprehensively maps the landscape of organisations, but nothing appears to have been done with any of that information.

This is a similar situation to that in other countries but in a more intense form. It’s taken me a while to come up with any halfway coherent idea as to what’s going on here, but my conclusion is that international NGOs are killing civil society. Here’s a few reasons why this happens and how:

1. International NGOs present the only visible models for nationals who want to form an organisation, while the conspicuous wealth of international NGOs creates a strong incentive to emulate them. What is invisible to local people is the range of collective activities -formal and informal – that are present in the home countries of those international NGOs, and the truth that the way in which international NGOs operate in the field would not be seen positively in those home countries.
2. The presence of international NGOs forces national governments to adopt legislative frameworks that are far more about controlling NGOs than regulating them – usually with the complicity or active participation of those NGOs (or their enablers in the United Nations). The result is a legislative framework in which international NGOs and the government collaborate in encouraging a public conception of civil society made in their own image.
3. International NGOs present themselves as non-profit service providers rather than as the organised expression of a collective will. WorldVision didn’t just spring out of the ground fully formed; it’s a million church groups putting their faith (and money) into the organisation to enact their (admittedly vague) goals, which WorldVision is then supposed to implement. National NGOs usually can’t rely on this base for legitimacy – and so miss the whole “civil society” bit.
4. By participating in funding systems and regulatory regimes which emphasises legally-recognised NGOs as the sole vehicle for funding activities in relief and rehabilitation scenarios, we incentivize the registration of local NGOs – frequently as income generation schemes for sole traders – rather than the creation of a range of different organisations that may be more effective in meeting the needs of local people than a formal NGO.
5. International NGOs frequently either deny or co-opt faith groups, the most viable non-NGO civil society groups. Sensivity about faith by secular NGOs – particularly in areas where it is a contentious issue, if not a source of conflict – can undermine what is sometimes the only expression of community action. (On the other hand, NGOs with a religious background can also create problems for civil society by attempting to co-opt local faith groups into their own religious community.)

In summary: the presence of international NGOs undermines the development of civil society as we unwittingly remake it in our own image, enabled both by national governments and international donors. We need to break this cycle by recognising the diversity of collective action, revising our engagement strategies to reflect that, and reversing legal and economic frameworks that perpetuate the cycle of NGO creation that leads to bloated and ineffective local NGO communities.