Big picture critique of the aid sector
“We are band-aids born of affluent guilt and survive almost entirely on the donated profits of unjust privilege and power.” “WTO, WB and IMF policies and corrupt/ignorant/criminal national elites matters million times more any humanitarian program implemented by NGOs.” Some thoughts as I continue reading, sorting and making sense of aid worker voices on the future of humanitarian aid [Note: I am working on a long post (chapter) on this topic, but I wanted to get this out separately.] So, I have been reading through -in many cases re-reading and re-reading…- the 311 narrative responses to the “future of humanitarian aid work” (Q60) on our aid worker survey and I am struck over and over again with the depth of thought put into some of the responses. Though there were many who responded from a short term or narrow view, many were clearly of the ‘35,000 foot’ and long term perspective….
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FollowCastles in the sand? Responding as we must, but…
“When you are 20, you want to change the world but you accept that it’s going to take maybe five years. When you are 25, you decide you just don’t want to make the world any worse through your profession, buying choices, politics etc. When you get to 30+, you realise ‘Fucking hell, it’s way more complicated than anyone can possibly get their head around’.” –30something female expat aid worker “I don’t think we can change the world – just make it a bit better for a few individuals.” –40something female HQ worker Castles in the sand? Responding as we must, but… Castles in the sand 1.0 This is not an easy post to write in large part because I am the director of a program the purpose of which is to work with cohorts of students as they learn how to make sustainable change around the world through meaningful global partnerships, i.e., development…
Read MoreCancer of corruption or the culture of corruption?
“One man’s corruption is another man’s wealth redistribution system. I find it hard to judge others on this.” –26-30yo female “Corruption is the biggest cause of poverty. If you are in aid, you deal with corruption.” –36-40yo male “Corruption is there throughout the developing world (and the developed world but on a less blatant scale). We are often asked or hinted to pay bribes lest our applications for import, registration, visas gets put to the bottom of the pile. We don’t because we have to account to our donors. But we did in one case buy drivers licenses as the ‘process’ was going to take about 6 months.” –female veteran aid worker Cancer of corruption or the culture of corruption? Difficult to define How can we define, discuss and analyze the endemic social phenomena of corruption? How do aid workers understand and deal with corruption? I will agree completely with…
Read MoreAid worker views regarding MONGOs (My Own NGO)
“I think that if every overly bright, well-dressed 20something would just get together and co-run the skinny jeans appreciation society in their respective countries, the rest of us could put all that money and press to actual use.” -20 something female, HQ aid worker w/5+ experience “Deep breaths. Too many.” -41-45 yo female HQ worker [extra spaces for emphasis in the original] “They are petty indulgences normally of middle class white people who want to help someone and feel better about their privilege.” Aid worker views regarding MONGOs (My Own NGO): mostly negative The 2014 kidnapping of two young Italian women in Syria (see here) underscores the fact that being an aid worker comes with risks. There may be something specifically about this particular episode that merits a deeper understanding, and a start might be to examine aid worker voices about the kind of organization to which these young women were associated, namely a…
Read MoreGetting our survey out: exploratory research
Getting our survey out: exploratory research Aid Worker Voices: Survey Results and Commentary I’ll start with some very deep and reflexive background. In 2000 I published a book that was used by colleagues here at my university in a required course by the same name, Understanding the Global Experience. When I was asked to teach one section of the pilot for this course in 1994 I used that moment to begin taking a deep interest in global affairs. I recall reading Benjamin Barber’s The Atlantic article Jihad vs McWorld and being immediately absorbed by the vague (or is that vacuous?) concept of global citizenship. My interest in all things global only accelerated from there. As past President of the Association for Humanist Sociology my attention regarding social justice issues was already advanced. In 2003 I founded a program at my university designed to offer a three year pathway for students who wanted to…
Read MoreRace, identity and branding
Race, identity and branding Some introductory thoughts Racism and sexism are, sadly, cultural universals. The recent evidence of human warfare going back at least 10,000 years points to how long we have found reasons to kill in large numbers. Evolutionary psychologists present data-backed arguments that we are ethnocentric by nature and some degree racism is inevitable. Just as gender differentiation easily can devolve into gender stratification [read: structural sexism], racial/ethnic differentiation perhaps as easily degenerates into racial/ethnic stratification [read: structural racism]. Though we cannot change human nature we can change human institutions, and though socially created institutions can and do increasingly mute and redirect this basic part of our nature (e.g., the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), we will have to be forever vigilant in efforts to control our darker angels. Expanding on that idea is beyond my present task, but those are my views as a sociologist. Both racism and sexism exist in…
Read MoreThe moral career of a humanitarian aid worker
The moral career of a humanitarian aid worker Sit back. This one may take a while. The goal of this post is to meaningfully apply the concepts of ‘moral career’ and ‘looking-glass self’ to better understand the lives of aid workers as they move through their professional lives. In this post I want to emphasize the overall journey of a career as opposed to a snapshot of single moment. This will make it possible to consider the evolution of self identity that occurs over the course of an aid worker’s career. Moral career and self identity I borrow the phrase ‘moral career’ from sociologist Erving Goffman. His classic book Asylums was published in 1961 as a “collection of essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates”. Goffman defines moral career as “…any social strand of any person’s course through life…the regular sequence of changes that career entails in the person’s self and in his imagery for…
Read MoreOf bureaucracies and aid organizations
Of bureaucracies and aid organizations The is a followup to my most recent post which focuses on the question “what is the ‘humanitarian aid system?”. Framing the discussion In his 2014 essay The Humanitarian Future Paul Currion points out that, “Of the Fortune 500 firms first listed in 1955, nearly 90 percent no longer exist in 2014, and this type of creative destruction is sorely lacking in the humanitarian sector.” This ‘lack of creative destruction’ is my point of departure for this second post focusing on the question “can the humanitarian aid system be fixed?”. Currion is spot on with his observation and below I discuss why this is such an important point from a sociological perspective. There are many typologies of bureaucracies, and here is a simple version in which includes (1) for profit entities like Apple, Halliburton or Barkleys, (2) governments or governing bodies like the United Nations, the Parliament of Italy or FIFA, and (3) not for profit organizations…
Read MoreWhat is the “humanitarian aid system”
What is the “humanitarian aid system” Context This note is in part prompted by an op-ed piece in The Guardian by J in which he asks, “Is humanitarian aid really broken? Or should we all just calm down?”. J points out that, “The answer to ‘What can we do to fix the aid system?’ depends on what exactly you think is broken and what you think it was meant to do in the first place.” Agreed. But I would like to ask an even more basic question, namely ‘what is the humanitarian aid system?’ This question became very germane to us as we imagined our survey of aid workers, the discussion of which is the purpose of this blog. As a sociologist, the first thing I was taught in my research methods class was that before you sample and survey a population you have to, well, define exactly what that population is. In…
Read MoreThe impact of gender on the lives of aid workers
“Being a guy is like playing the easy setting. Less harassment, more respect.” –31-35yo male expat aid worker “Being female and working in many male dominated cultures I have to be extra mindful about how my actions are perceived, especially in management positions. Also, safety.” –25-30yo female expat aid worker The impact of gender on the lives of aid workers One person’s view from 50,000 feet That one’s gender is a factor in daily life is a cultural universal. Gender differentiation has always existed among human cultures all over the planet and for our entire existence, starting in those caves hundreds of thousands of years ago in what is now South Africa. Humans, a species blessed -or cursed- with the ability to engage in complex thought and having the ability to possess and, more importantly, pass on cultural learning from one generation to the next, have made gender differentiation a major and…
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