disaster management

The role of the international humanitarian sector in disaster response

The aim of my thesis is to explore sustainable practice in international disaster response. As a result, I’ve recently been asking a number of my informants to share their opinions about what is or should be the role of the international humanitarian sector in disaster response. Some of the comments come from interviews previously published elsewhere on this blog.
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Dr Patrick Kilby, Coordinator, Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development (MAAPD) Program, Australian National University.

The role of the international humanitarian sector in disaster response is an important one and that is to support local initiatives. It is only in rare cases where local initiatives are overwhelmed or lack [usually political] capacity. This issue of local capacity is often overlooked and the international humanitarian organisations see themselves as both having the capacity and too some extent being ‘saviours’, which paradoxically weakens their effectiveness in the response.

Let’s take the example of the tsunami of 2004 and its impact on the South East Indian coastline. India was the third most devastated country after Indonesia and Sri Lanka. It did not ask for international help and would not accept any as it had a strong record and capacity itself. For the first week after the tsunami [and this was the case in other countries] local community do most of the work where they support each other provide food water etc. while waiting for the police and usually the army to bring in immediate relief. It is the strength of those local community structures which make the most difference rather than the international response. Too often though a view is taken that this level of local capacity does not exist.

Secondly, for the next phase which is the relief phase there is usually other local capacity in the form of local NGOs who may be doing education or development work in those communities, who can be tapped on to deliver the relief response. Now while they may not have the technical skills, they do know the local community and so can help gain the trust of the community and more easily identify the most in need.

So where does the international humanitarian agencies fit into this model? Their traditional role has been to literally fly in with their water systems, tents, food and the like, and in the process by-pass local NGOs, and local capacity. Another approach would be to tap into the local NGO and community capacity and support them. In India after the tsunami, the existing loose network of NGOs came together and within a matter of a couple of weeks were in a position to engage with the people who they have been working with for years and deliver necessary relief supplies. The role of the international humanitarian organisations was to mobilise resources and deliver them quickly ‘to the local NGO’ and also proved the necessary coordinating and accountability infrastructure. The model was one whereby the humanitarian organisations actually did not go in at village level. International humanitarian organisations are good at mobilising massive resource very quickly, but they are less good at local delivery simply because they do not have the local knowledge, or usually the local language, or know the local communities.
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Graeme MacRae, Social Anthropology Programme, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand.

In brief, Graeme believes that “the international humanitarian sector is always there - and it always does its best to help - but because of the way global (rather than local), industrial (rather than based in local resources), top-down (rather than bottom-up) approaches are built into it so deeply, it has certain inherent weaknesses that get repeated again and again. Also, its preoccupation (obsession?) with its own internal processes and co-ordination seems to me to be a poor substitute for the more challenging task of listening to the people/communities it is supposedly there to help”.

Here are some excerpts from a longer article by Graeme on the Jogyakarta earthquake response, blogged earlier here. The full article was published in Development in Practice, Volume 18, Issue 2, 2008, pages 190 - 200.

The international humanitarian response system (IHRS) consists of resources and expertise embodied in thousands of people in hundreds of organizations dispersed all over the world. They (collectively and to a large extent individually) see disasters as essentially similar sets of problems (shelter, health, water and sanitation, etc.) which can be analysed and addressed in essentially similar ways. In other words it is a global system based on a set of standard assumptions and universalised knowledge. All that needs to happen is for it to be mobilised, get to the scene fast, and move into action.

In fact, when the system arrives at the scene of a disaster the reality it encounters is very local and very specific – in terms of geography, environment, history, politics, culture, social organization, religion and language – not to mention people. One of the most extraordinary things about the system, is that this is not even seen as relevant, let alone a problem. Advertising for field staff for IHRS organizations rarely even mentions local experience, knowledge or language skills. Of the hundreds of international aid workers who arrived in Jogjakarta, very few had any of these. Consequently when the system arrives, with all its skill, experience and resources, the one thing it does not know is how to communicate with local people, communities, organisations or government, with the partial exception of those who happen to speak some English. But this is not seen as particularly important, because the real priorities seem to be setting up offices, data collection and analysis systems, logframes, maps and matrices – then meetings and systems of communication – between agencies – all in the city and all in English. If local organisations are involved, they usually have to fit into this system as best they can.

But what about the ruined villages just down the road – and the thousands of people huddled under their blue plastic tarpaulins? Many aid workers rarely if ever get to meet them. The interface between the system and the people it is supposed to serve is mediated by what are known as “partnerships” with local NGOs, who know the local scene and how to talk to people. This is in theory not a bad idea, adapted from current practice in the wider development industry. But even here it is not without its problems, because of the widely varying priorities, styles and capacities of local NGOs, and real cultural, social and often political gaps between them and on one hand the international organizations and on the other, local communities. Partnerships take time and hard work to build and maintain at the best of times. In the worst of times - the overheated, chaotic, time-scarce conditions of a disaster response, the chances of success, let alone instant success, are much less.

As a result, in Jogjakarta, weeks, even months after the earthquake, most IHRS staff knew little about the people they were there to help, and the people in the villages knew just as little about the IHRS. Some partnerships worked smoothly and efficiently – but many did not. This fundamental gap of different worlds, world-views and communication between them was a major obstacle to accurate understanding, and seriously delayed decision-making and hindered effective action. It also leads us directly to another weakness of the system - scale.

Concepts such as “participation” and “community-based development” are well established within the development industry, for the good reason that evidence tells us (like commonsense) that things work better when they happen at the level of real communities and people have a sense of knowledge and involvement in them. However, like “partnerships”, these do not happen automatically or quickly – they take time and local knowledge to build. The former is a scarce resource in post-disaster conditions and the latter is even scarcer in the IHRS. So, in practice, in Jogjakarta, resources for construction of both temporary and permanent shelter, were delivered mostly via impersonal, bureaucratic chains from donors to international NGOs, to local NGOs and/or local government to local leaders, to communities and eventually to households. Like the communication gaps, this too led to complication, high costs and ample opportunities for inefficiency, corruption and delays.

So, is there perhaps a gap between between the ideology and practice of the international relief/development system? Is the centralised, globalised, bureaucratic, top-down structure of the system, the way it actually works, out of step with its ideologies of community scaled participation? If there is, maybe its time to think about changing it. There are unlikely to be magic bullets, but if there is anything to be learnt from this story is that small can be beautiful, local knowledge is critical and that working relationships between real people who know and trust each other are what makes things happen.

© Kim Williamson 2008