Effective Aid: the poetics of some aid workers' angles on how humanitarian aid ‘works'

Abstract

International aid workers are invisible in the absence of data as to who cleaves to what knowledges and practices about how aid works to be effective. When it is similar or different best practice positions that are taken is another unknown, despite what this could tell us about aid effectiveness. This paper identifies through their everyday poetics two of the angles on ‘how aid works’ that aid workers take. One angle displays a programmatic, or ‘like clockwork’ aesthetic about how aid is said to ‘work' through causal mechanisms, provided only that the right policy and ‘the tools we have' are put in place and implemented. The other, a ‘like an artwork’ aesthetic, puts constitutive institutions and new interpretative understandings to the fore. The aid effectiveness issues and reforms associated with the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and subsequent meetings, the latest in Busan in 2011, do not address many, if any, of the issues raised in this paper. They should.

Notes

My sincerest thanks to one anonymous reader, one non-anonymous anonymous reader (DM), two friends (DG and TJ), and of course above all the editor (A-MF) of this collection for great support, most helpful notes and queries, and extraordinarily kind accommodation of delay.

1 L Hudson, The Cult of the Fact, London: Jonathan Cape, 1972, p 13.

2 For some sociography of the pioneer type advocated here, see D Parkin, Middle Class Radicalism: The Social Bases of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1968.

3 As initiated, for example, in the eidos publication, M Hobart (ed), An Anthropological Critique of Development: The Growth of Ignorance, London: Routledge, 1993.

4 An early critique of r2p with particular reference to humanitarian assistance is R Apthorpe, ‘Humanitarian rescue and relief: towards a different future’, Canberra: Department of International Relations, Australian National University, Keynotes, 2009, pp 38–44.

5 oecd dac, Guidance for Evaluating Humanitarian Assistance in Complex Emergencies, Paris: oecd, 1999.

6 M Duffield, ‘Managing the external crisis’, Department of Humanitarian Affairs News (UN, Geneva), 14, May/June 1995.

7 In conversation at the conference, published as Hobart, An Anthropological Critique of Development.

8 Cf Parkin, Middle Class Radicalism, pp 34–35, in ‘Who? is international aid’, in A-M Fechter & H Hindman (eds), Inside the Everyday Lives of Development Workers: The Challenges and Futures of Aidland, Sterling, VT: Kumarian, 2011.

9 As became familiar, particularly in the UK in the 1970s, in social anthropological debates about comparison across cultures.

10 Cf F Terry, The Paradox of Humanitarian Action: Condemned to Repeat?, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002.

11 Cf R Apthorpe, ‘It's the [culture] stupid! Why adding culture to the pot is unlikely to make any real difference to international developmentalism’, Asia and Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 6(2), August 2005. See also Apthorpe, ‘Confessions of a consultant: some personal experience of the art’, in Apthorpe, Towards Humanitarian Aid Evaluation, Canberra: Australian National University/Asia Pacific Press, 1998.

12 For a set of sanctions studies, which (despite the title) arguably are mostly from the (uncritical mechanist ‘battering ram’) clockwork angle, see A Griffiths & C Barnes (eds), Powers of Persuasion: Incentives, Sanctions and Conditionality in Peacemaking,Accord Issue 19. London: Conciliation Resources, 2008.

13 On constitutive (as contrasted with ‘causative’) in academic international relations theory, a short introduction to Milja Kurki's work is her ‘Causes of a divided discipline: re-thinking the concept of cause in International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 32, 2006, pp 189–216. Thanks to Chris Hobson for this reference.

14 The other 90% is the notional, rule of thumb figure (to which Mark Bradbury kindly first drew my attention) that may characterise the survival rate in life-threatening emergencies people owe to their own capacities—not to international aid. Cited in R Apthorpe, ‘Humanitarian action and social learning: notes and surmises on ten consultative tools’, in M Ishii & J Siapno (eds), Between Knowledge and Commitment: Post-conflict Peace-building and Reconstruction in Regional Contexts, Japan Centre for Area Studies Symposium Series 21, Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 2004, pp 213–243.

15 Z Marriage, ‘The comfort of denial: external assistance in southern Sudan’, Development and Change, 37(3), 2006. See also her brilliantly insightful Not Breaking the Rules, not Playing the Game: International Assistance to Countries at War, London: Hurst, 2006.

16 Thanks to Tony Barnett for this image.

17 J Glennie & A Rogerson, ‘Global reach is the prize at Busan’, odi Opinion, 154, 2011, p 3.

18 S Harrigan with C Changath Chol, The Southern Sudan Vulnerability Study, Nairobi: Save the Children Fund, UK, 1998.

19 Three contributions to this major corpus of humanitarian aid evaluations are A Surkhe, M Burutciski, P Sanderison & R Garlock, The Kosovo Refugee Crisis: An Independent Evaluation of unhcr's Emergency Preparedness and Response, Geneva: unhcr, 2000; P Wiles, M Bradbury and colleagues, Independent Evaluation of Expenditures of dec Kosovo Appeal Funds, London: odi, 2000; and my synthesis and meta-evaluation of a very large selection, of which a published version is chapter 3 in Annual Review of Humanitarian Action, London: alnap, 2001, pp 65–107.

20 For the founding just war theory, see M Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, London: Penguin Books, 1984.

21 A major critical and constructive study is R Garfield, Common Needs Assessments and Humanitarian Action, Network Paper 69, Humanitarian Policy Group, London: odi, 2011.

22 See R Apthorpe, ‘Reading development policy and policy analysis: on framing, naming, numbering, and coding’, European Journal of Development Research, 8(1), 1996, pp 16–3.

23 Cause for Hope, hpg Briefing Note, London: odi, June 2011.

24 Cf R Apthorpe, ‘Mission possible: six years of wfp emergency food aid in West Africa’, in A Wood, R Apthorpe & J Borton (eds), Evaluating Humanitarian Action: Reflections from Practitioners, London: Zed Books/alnap, 2001.

25 A key approach and discussion is S Zizek, Violence, New York: Picador, 2008.

26 For examples, see Apthorpe, ‘Humanitarian action and social learning’, p 231.