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Abstract
International Non-governmental Organizations (INGOs) face difficult choices when choosing to allocate resources. Given that the resources made available to INGOs fall far short of what is needed to reduce massive human rights deficits, any chosen scheme of resource allocation requires failing to reach other individuals in great need. Facing these moral opportunity costs, what moral reasons should guide INGO resource allocation? Two reasons that clearly matter, and are recognized by philosophers and development practitioners, are the consequences (or benefit or harm reduction) of any given resource allocation and the need (or priority) of individual beneficiaries. If accepted, these reasons should lead INGOs to allocate resources to a limited number of countries where the most prioritarian weighted harm reduction will be achieved. I make three critiques against this view. First, on grounds the consequentialist accepts, I argue that INGOs ought to maintain a reasonably wide distribution of resources. Second, I argue that even if one is a consequentialist, consequentialism ought not act as an action guiding principle for INGOs. Third, I argue that additional moral reasons should influence decision making about INGO resource allocation. Namely, INGO decision making should attend to relational reasons, desert, respect for agency, concern for equity, and the importance of expressing a view of moral wrongs.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful for critical comments from Holly Lawford-Smith, Christian Barry, Thomas Pogge, Luke Ebbs, and Alejandra Mancilla, a productive audience at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Australian National University, and two terrific anonymous reviewers. All mistakes remain my own.
Notes
1. Danshen You, Gareth Jones, and Tessa Wardlaw. ‘Levels and Trends in Child Mortality: Report 2010’ (New York: UNICEF, 2010); Food and Agriculture Organization, The State of Food Insecurity in the World: Addressing Food Insecurity in Protracted Crises (Rome: Food and Agricultural Association, 2010); UNICEF, Progress on Sanitation and Drinking Water: 2010 Update (Geneva: UNICEF, 2010);World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security, and Development (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011); World Health Organization, WHO Multi-country Study on Women's Health and Domestic Violence against Women (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2005).
2. Hudson Institute, The Index of Global Philanthropy and Remittances, 2010., p. 7. This is a small minority of the total $290 billion given each year in total philanthropic giving by Americans. See Giving USA 2011, ‘Executive Summary’, The Annual Report on Giving for Year 2010, p. 4.
3. There is an important question that is best set aside for the purposes of this article. To what extent must an NGO undertake to fulfill the wishes of its donors? I assume that an NGO and its agents act wrongly if they misallocate resources to serve ends that are not consistent with the organization's mandate, even if it is toward a morally good, or even much morally better, cause. If the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria was secretly allocating their resources to reducing violence against women, that would be morally wrong, even if doing so would bring about more harm reduction.
4. Peter Singer seems to hold a similar view. Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save (New York: Random House, 2009), 105–25.
5. It of course bears noting, as most readers are well aware, that Pogge is not generally a consequentialist. Rather, he argues for global justice reform from a very ecumenical, minimalist position that emphasizes deontological obligations to stop harming the global poor through our actions. However, once one has established moral obligations to rectify or mitigate global injustice, agents ought to select among the range of feasible alternatives that are available for discharging their duties which brings about the most harm reduction. His broad prioritarian consequentialism regarding INGO resource allocation presents no inconsistency with his broader project: in fact, it is entirely consistent with his two step process of (a) minimalist deontological justification followed by (b) pragmatist consequential reform of which the Health Impact Fund is but one example.
6. Thomas Pogge, ‘Moral Priorities for International Human Rights NGOs’, in Ethics in Action. The Ethical challenges of International Human Rights Nongovernmental Organizations, eds. Bell D. and Coicaud J. M. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 228.
7. Ibid., 241.
8. Ibid., 224–25.
9. Ibid., 238.
10. Ibid., 247–48.
11. ‘Given the current mismatch between total INGO resources and the vast scale of severe deprivations, INGOs face vital choices about where to operate. This kind of primary decision cannot be made in consultation with local partners and the deprived themselves because their identities cannot be known in advance of the decisions. Furthermore, it is simply infeasible to involve potential partners and potential beneficiaries from all poor regions in such primary decisions making.’ Ibid., 248.
12. More on this reason below.
13. Ibid., 231–32.
14. Ibid., 231. See the text for Pogge's critique of the Collier and Dollar paper, and thus his qualified use of it. Also see Paul Collier and David Dollar, ‘Aid Allocation and Poverty Reduction’, European Economic Review 46 (2002): 1475–500.
15. See the excellent new website by the Overseas Development Institute, available online at www.developmentprogress.org (accessed October 31, 2011).
16. For the classic statement of this view, see Robert Chambers, Whose Reality Counts: Putting the First Last (London: Intermediate Technology Publications, 1997).
17. At the micro level, there is a very high turnover rate of families both into and out of poverty. Anirudh Krishna's work on the Stages of Progress method has shown that even within communities in which the poverty rate is static from year to year, some families will have moved out of poverty, whereas others will have moved into poverty. See Anirudh Krishna, ‘Studying Poverty in Dynamic Contexts: The Need of New Methods’, in Poverty Dynamics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, eds. Tony Addision, David Hulme, and Ravi Kanbur (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 183–201 and ‘The Stages-of-Progress Methodology and Results from Five Countries’, in Reducing Global Poverty: The Case for Asset Accumulation, ed. Moser C. O. (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2007), 62–83. This can also be seen at the country level as well. Compare, for example, Russia in 1988 and Russia in 1993, or Rwanda in 1992 and Rwanda in 1995.
18. Failure to sufficiently intervene in the years preceding the Rwandan genocide, which might have appeared as a relatively small conflict, made 1994 much more violent than it otherwise would have been, and the subsequent years much more violent for the broader the Great Lakes region. ‘The slide from what had been a nationally focused genocide into a global war had one basic cause: there was no political treatment of the genocide in Rwanda by the international community. No efforts were made to prevent it, no efforts were made to stop it, and not efforts were made to remonstrate with those who spoke in the name of the victims when they started to abuse their role. Mature political treatment was replaced by humanitarian condescension and diplomatic bickering.’ Gerard Prunier, Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 47.
19. See, for example, Duncan Green, From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States Can Change the World (Oxford: Oxfam International, 2008).
20. ‘The cult of “results-based management” imposed by government funders can bias the activity of INGOs and their local partners toward short-term, measureable results and away from efforts to promote longer term change and respect for rights. It is easier to measure how many clinics or school places have been created than the extent to which attitudes to women's rights have changed’. Ibid., 373–74. Andrew Natsios, former administrator of USAID, in a scathing critique of the development ‘counter-bureaucracy’ argues that ‘those development programs that are most precisely and easily measured are the least transformational, and those programs that are most transformational are the least measurable.’ Andrew Natsios, ‘The Clash of the Counter-Bureaucracy and Development.’ Center for Global Development Essay (Washington, DC: Center for Global Development, 2010), p. 4.
21. Rosalind Eyebend, of the Institute for Development Studies, has recently promoted a big push back against the paradigm that privileges measureable, actionable results. She writes, ‘In my book Relationships for Aid, I wrote about the international aid culture that ignores power, relations, the partiality of knowledge and complexity, and pretends there are no surprises and unplanned consequences. In the last couple of years, it has only got worse. British government aid (DFID) is now imposing extraordinary demands in terms of reporting against indicators of achievement that bear little relation to the manner and possibilities donor-funded activities have for supporting social transformation. Researchers and NGOs in other European countries report a similar phenomenon. And because the pressure is coming from international donors, we know that the same trend is being experienced all over Aidland. Theoretical and contested concepts such as civil society, capacity or policy become reified and then numbers assigned to the reification e.g. “state the number of policies influenced.” Answers are required to absurd value-for-money questions in which institutions are considered as if they were motor cars.Last year a government donor organization asked me “what evidence exists of the relative cost, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and quality demonstrated by civil society organisations, in comparison to the UN or profit-making organisations?” That was the moment when I decided it was time for a big push back.’ Rosalind Eyeben, ‘The Big Push Back!’, Hauser Center Blog, available online at http://hausercenter.org/iha/2010/10/11/the-big-push-back/ (accessed October 11, 2010).
22. Death Penalty Information Center, ‘Facts about the Death Penalty’, available online at http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/FactSheet.pdf (accessed November 2010).
23. See Aryeh Neier, ‘The Attach on Human Rights Watch’, New York Review of Books 53, (2006).
24. Widney Brown, ‘Amnesty International, Moazzamm Begg and Gita Sahgal’,, available online at http://www.amnesty.org.au/news/comments/22645/ (accessed March 3, 2010).
25. Pogge ‘Moral Priorities’, 232–33.
26. There arguably would be no antigenocide movement if we followed consequentialist principles, as the costs of preventing conflict and providing aid in conflict are quite high, and the chances of success are much lower than in many other areas of harm reduction. Certainly these students should have been reflective of their choices—does our activism on this issue produce good outcomes? Are they evading more difficult tasks for problematic reasons? But we must distinguish between that which we have caused, that for which we are nonetheless responsible even if we did not cause it, and that which we have merely failed to prevent. It may be that the failure to prevent bad things from happening creates some obligation on wealthy westerners. But when individuals are doing quite a bit to discharge their duties regarding prevention, well beyond their fair share, it seems plausible to me that they do not owe justification to those who are not aided.
27. I suspect this is only true in a broad sense. For example, if an INGO does not operate in Peru, I doubt they have to provide justification to Peruvians. However, when the implications of INGO operations will have political ramifications, for example working in one part of a slum rather than another, then they surely must justify that decision to the non-beneficiaries because of the potential political ramifications that could result from such a decision.
28. The question of what will count as a morally adequate procedure, and who the participants should be in such a procedure, is an important one, but I cannot take it up here. Potentially, INGO board members and staff, donors, and actual or potential beneficiaries are all candidate participants in such a procedure, and potentially all of their interests should have some bearing on the outcome. For one internal procedural mechanism, see Samia Hurst, Nathalie Mezger, and Alex Mauron. ‘Allocating Resources in Humanitarian Medicine’ Public Health Ethics 2, no. 1 (2009): 89–99.
29. Pogge, ‘Moral Priorities’, 236.
30. There may be two issues at play here. The first is the apparent inequality of distributing resources so that no individual women are recipients. The second is a distinct but related point about the unit of analysis we should use in making assessments of social justice. One view, argued by Iris Marion Young, is that we must identify structural inequalities by reference to groups such as gender, class, race, and age. If correct, and there are justice claims to be made in the distribution of INGO resources, then it may support arguments against strictly individualistic, consequentialist distribution of resources. Iris Marion Young, ‘Equality of Whom? Social Groups and Judgments of Injustice’, Journal of Political Philosophy 9, (2001): 1–18. Similar work on the importance of addressing group-based inequalities has recently gained considerable support in development studies. See Naila Kabeer, ‘Can the MDGs provide a pathway to social justice?’, (New York: United Nations Development Program, 2010); United Nations Research Institution for Social Development, Combating Poverty and Inequality: Structural Change, Social Policy, and Politics (Geneva: UNRISD, 2010); F. Stewart, ‘Horizontal inequalities: A neglected dimension of development’, QEH Working Paper No. 81 (Oxford: Department of International Development, University of Oxford, 2000).
31. For a useful account of how INGOs actually do claim to distribute their resources, see Jennifer C. Rubenstein, ‘The Distributive Commitments of International NGOs’, in Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power, Ethics, eds. Barnett M. and Weiss M. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 215–34.
32. See Pogge ‘Moral Priorities’, 249–54. Of course, there may be other reasons for INGOs to reject such a role in ameliorating state harm, particularly if they viewed such action as implicitly condoning or encouraging future state harm.
33. This view is broadly shared by Lisa Fuller, who argues that INGOs are ‘organizations of principle’ and thus have the latitude to act to uphold certain values, within some limited constraints. See her article ‘Priority-setting in international non-governmental organizations: its not as easy as ABCD’ forthcoming in Journal of Global Ethics. Fortunately for readers interested in this subject, Fuller also has a forthcoming book on the topic of allocating aid. Carens also suggests conceiving of INGOs as independent agents who can act from a diverse set of viewpoints. See Joseph Carens, ‘The Problem of Doing Good in a World that Isn't: Reflections on the Ethical Challenges Facing INGOs’, in Ethics in Action: The Ethical challenges of International Human Rights Nongovernmental Organizations, eds. Bell D. and Coicaud J. M. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 257–72.
34. There is a second class of context-related reasons that deserve consideration, although I cannot give them full treatment here. First, the political and practical feasibility of a particular project or program matters. Second, concern with institutional displacement or corrosion of state institutions (the only institutions that can properly guarantee rights) might deter any particular INGO resource allocation. Third, INGOs ought not work in certain areas if it brings too much risk of serious harm to either their employees or local communities.