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Abstract
This paper critically examines the ‘humanitarian innovation’ movement, arguing that it represents a departure from classical principles and the entry of a distinctive new ideology into the sector. Labelling this ‘humanitarian neophilia’, the paper argues that it has resonances of Barbrook and Cameron’s ‘Californian Ideology’, with its merging of New Left and New Right within the environs of Silicon Valley. Humanitarian neophilia, similarly, comes from a diverse ideological heritage, combining an optimistic faith in the possibilities of technology with a commitment to the power of markets. It both ‘understates the state’ and ‘overstates the object’, promoting a vision of self-reliant subjects rather than strong nation-states realising substantive socioeconomic rights.
Notes
1. For a list of the innovations featured at the ALNAP fair, see http://www.alnap.org/ourwork/innovations/fair. Accessed September 8, 2015.
2. Ramalingam et al., “Innovations in International Humanitarian Action.”
3. For an overview of innovation initiatives, see Betts and Bloom, Humanitarian Innovation, 8–9.
4. “Initial Scoping Paper – WHS Theme 3: Transformation through Innovation,” https://www.worldhumanitariansummit.org/whs_Innovation. Accessed September 8, 2015.
5. http://www.oxhip.org. The technological work of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative in the USA also, to a certain extent, reflects the innovation trend. http://hhi.harvard.edu.
6. This paper considers humanitarianism as the act of providing basic needs in emergencies, rather than as a wider logic of government in the Foucauldian sense.
7. An early use of this term comes from Christopher Booker, one of the founders of Private Eye, in his 1969 book The Neophiliacs. It was popularised for the technologically savvy counter culture by Robert Shea and Robert Anson Wilson in The Illuminatus! Trilogy of 1975–84.
8. Barbrook and Cameron, “Californian Ideology.”
9. This article concerns recent policy developments in the humanitarian sector; similar trends have been forming in the development sector and have been the subject of recent issues of this journal. See Richey and Ponte, “New Actors and Alliances in Development.” An equivalent and recent volume for the humanitarian sector is Sezgin and Dijkzeul, The New Humanitarians in International Practice.
10. Betts and Bloom, Humanitarian Innovation, 5–6; and Ramalingam et al., “Innovations in International Humanitarian Action.” Although its parameters have become clearer over the past two years, with a succession of conferences, position papers and the World Humanitarian Summit, there remains a diverse range of activities under the label of innovation even today.
11. ‘Drones for Good’ has become a multi-million dollar competition encouraging innovators to develop new uses for UAVs. See https://www.dronesforgood.ae. For an example of media coverage, see A. Sniderman and M. Hanis, “Drones for Human Rights.” New York Times, January 30, 2012.
12. http://www.buylifestraw.com/en. For media coverage, see J. Hoffman, “LifeStraw saves those without Access to Clean Drinking Water.” New York Times, September 26, 2011.
13. http://www.nutriset.fr/index.php?id=92. See A. Rice, “The Peanut Solution.” New York Times, September 5, 2010; and M. Wines, “Hope for Hungry Children, arriving in a Foil Packet.” New York Times, August 8, 2005.
15. Symposium at the University of Edinburgh, ‘Humanitarian Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Things that Care’, June 4–5, 2015. For a useful summary of relevant literature, see http://humanitariangoods.com/resources.php. In 2012 the journal Public Culture 24, no. 1 had a theme on this topic, entitled “Poverty Markets: The New Politics of Development and Humanitarianism.”
16. Redfield, “Bioexpectations”; Scott-Smith, “The Fetishism of Humanitarian Objects”; Cross, “The 100th Object”; Sandvik and Lohne, “The Rise of the Humanitarian Drone”; Sandvik, “The Humanitarian Cyberspace”; Redfield, “Vital Mobility and the Humanitarian Kit”; and Street, “Food as Pharma.”
17. Richey and Ponte, “New Actors and Alliances in Development”; Banks and Hulme, “New Development Alternatives or Business as Usual?”; and Ponte and Richey, “Buying into Development?”
18. Ramalingam et al., “Innovations in International Humanitarian Action,” 3–4.
19. Betts et al., Humanitarian Innovation and Refugee Protection, 3–4.
20. IKEA was behind the design of the Better Shelter; DHL in a logistics partnership with OCHA; Deloitte funds a humanitarian innovation programme; Plumpy’nut and LifeStraw were developed through private enterprise; and a range of technology companies has been involved in bringing mobile telecommunications and ‘big data’ to the humanitarian field. Carbonnier and Lightfoot, “Business in Humanitarian Crises”; and Meier, Digital Humanitarians.
21. Betts and Bloom, Humanitarian Innovation, 6; Ramalingam et al., “Innovations in International Humanitarian Action,” 4, 60; and Rush et al., “Components of the Humanitarian Innovation Ecosystem.”
22. Bessant et al., Innovation Management, 1.
23. Francis and Bessant, “Targeting Innovation”; and Henry and Mayle, Managing Innovation and Change. Examples of these innovations in the private sector are offered in Ramalingam et al., “Innovations in International Humanitarian Action,” 15–16. Biros were an innovative product innovation made by BIC in the 1950s; internet banking was an innovative process development adopted by the high street banks in the 1990s; the rebranding of Levi jeans from work clothes to fashion items in the 1940s is an example of a positioning innovation; and the complete transformation of Nintendo playing card manufacturer to a computer manufacture is an example of a paradigm innovation.
24. Foster, Innovation.
25. Innovation is part of the dynamism and creativity of capitalism, which even Marxists are keen to acknowledge. See, for example, Berman, All that is Solid melts into Air.
26. “Approach paper, WHS Theme 3: Transformation through Innovation,” https://www.worldhumanitariansummit.org/whs_Innovation. Accessed September 8, 2015.
27. Ramalingam et al., “Innovations in International Humanitarian Action,” 3.
28. A number of scholars have expressed dissatisfaction with the label ‘neoliberalism’ to explain such a complex and equivocal movement. See, for example, Redfield, “Bioexpectations,” 159. It cuts both ways. Roy has described the relationship between capitalism and humanitarianism as the ‘ethicalization of market rule’. Roy, “Ethical Subjects,” 108.
29. Barbrook and Cameron, “Californian Ideology,” offered a relatively early interpretation of the emerging ideology of Silicon Valley in a paper published in the 1990s. There are now countless accounts of the Valley’s distinctive characteristics, including many that critique its vision of liberation and progress through technology. For a recent example, see Morozov, To save Everything, click Here.
30. Barbrook and Cameron, “Californian Ideology,” 364.
31. The Californian Ideologues were strongly influenced by the work of Ayn Rand.The basic outline of the Californian Ideology – the merging of counterculture and libertarianism – is also discussed in Frank, The Conquest of Cool; Streeter, “That Deep Romantic Chasm”; and other scholarly texts of the late 1990s.
32. Betts and Collier, “Help Refugees help Themselves.”
33. The language of the market and its role in humanitarian innovation will be more fully developed in the subsequent section, ‘New Language, New Markets’.
34. The role of technology in humanitarian innovation will be more fully developed in the subsequent section, ‘Understating the State, Overstating the Object’.
35. Sandvik, “Humanitarian Innovation, Humanitarian Renewal?”
36. Easton-Calabria, “From Bottom-up to Top-down.” See also Kibreab, “The Myth of Dependency,” an article from 1993 that covers many similar points to those in recent innovation literature on self-help. I am grateful to Jeff Crisp for drawing attention to this link.
37. Sandvik, “Humanitarian Innovation, Humanitarian Renewal?”
38. For a classic account, see Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of Humanitarian Sensibility”; and Fassin, Humanitarian Reason. Mark Duffield’s work also has a lot to say in this regard. For a more detailed exploration of neophilia in the 1960s and 1970s, see Scott-Smith, “How Projects Rise and Fall.”
39. Davey, Idealism beyond Borders; Chandler, “The Road to Military Humanitarianism”; and Barnett, Empire of Humanity, 132–158.
40. Redfield, Life in Crisis; Allen and Styan, “A Right to Interfere?”; Chandler, “The Road to Military Humanitarianism”; DeChaine, “Framing Humanitarian Action”; and Fox, “New Humanitarianism.”
41. Fox, “Medical Humanitarianism and Human Rights”; and Benthall, “Le Sans-frontiérisme.”
42. Berman, Power and the Idealists, 230. MSF was, as Berman pointed out, ‘one more 1968-style uprising against the hierarchies of command-and-obedience in a well-established institution’. For more on the changing political allegiances of MSF, see Weissman, “Silence Heals”; Davey, “Famine, Aid, and Ideology”; and Taithe, “Reinventing (French) Universalism.”
43. Berman’s book, for example, discusses in detail the political trajectory from Left to Right of Joschka Fischer as a paradigmatic example.
44. Berman, Power and the Idealists, 232; and Weissman, “Silence Heals.” The innovation movement is being driven as much at an international policy level as at a civil society level. The UN has been a strong driving force. The anti-étatisme of innovation, therefore, might be seen as much as a get-out clause for governments – seeking solutions in the market rather than through their own action – as it is for non-state actors. I am grateful to Louise Bloom for highlighting this point.
45. Betts and Collier, “Help Refugees help Themselves.”
46. Betts and Bloom, Humanitarian Innovation, 9–11; and Ramalingam et al., “Innovations in International Humanitarian Action,” 11–15.
47. Cornwall and Eade, Deconstructing Development Discourse.
48. Slim, “Not Philanthropy but Rights.”
49. Binder and Witte, Business Engagement in Humanitarian Relief, 6. Also quoted in Ramalingam et al., “Innovations in International Humanitarian Action.”
50. Mauss, The Gift; and Gregory, Gifts and Commodities. The various ways in which gift theory has been applied to humanitarianism and development is well summarised in Mawdsley, “The Changing Geographies of Foreign Aid”; and Bornstein, Disquieting Gifts. For some approaches to using the gift in the examination of international aid, see also Kidd, “Philanthropy and the ‘Social History Paradigm’,” 183–184; and Cross, “The Coming of the Corporate Gift”. Bornstein, Disquieting Gifts, has examined how local philanthropy can be seen in terms of its power relations through asymmetric gift giving. Hattori, “The Moral Politics of Foreign Aid,” has examined how Western aid can be interpreted as a form of ‘negative giving’ characterised by symbolic violence. And Mawdsley, “The Changing Geographies of Foreign Aid,” has shown how South–South humanitarianism can be presented in more egalitarian terms as fostering lasting relationships.
51. Bornstein, Disquieting Gifts.
52. Hattori, “The Moral Politics of Foreign Aid.”
53. Mawdsley, “The Changing Geographies of Foreign Aid.”
54. Betts and Bloom, Humanitarian Innovation, 10.
55. Hopgood, “Saying ‘No’ to Wal-mart?”
56. Ibid., 113–114.
57. Scott-Smith, “The Fetishism of Humanitarian Objects.”
58. So, too, is politics, although humanitarians are less keen to acknowledge that side of their work.
59. Warner, “Learning my Lesson.”
60. Ibid., 10
61. Barnett, Empire of Humanity, x–xi; and Redfield, Life in Crisis, 6.
62. Betts et al., Humanitarian Innovation and Refugee Protection, 5.
63. Betts et al., Humanitarian Innovation and Refugee Protection, 1–6.
64. Redfield, “Fluid Technologies.”
65. Cross, “The 100th Object.”
66. Redfield, “Bioexpectations,” 175–177. For a recent initiative seeking off-grid sanitation methods, see the ‘reinvent the toilet challenge’, promoted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Development/Reinvent-the-Toilet-Challenge
67. Scott-Smith, “The Fetishism of Humanitarian Objects,” 916–920; and Redfield, “Bioexpectations,” 166–170.
68. This effect is reminiscent of De Waal’s now classic argument that international aid undermines political institutions, threating state development and accountability. De Waal, Famine Crimes.
69. Duffield, “Challenging Environments”; and Duffield, “How did we become Unprepared?”
70. Duffield, “How did we become Unprepared?”
71. See also Klein, The Shock Doctrine; and Loewenstein, Disaster Capitalism.
72. O’Malley, “Resilient Subjects”; Walker and Cooper, “Genealogies of Resilience”; Chandler, Resilience; and Evans and Reid, Resilient Life.
73. For good examples, see Pilloton, Design Revolution; and Architecture for Humanity, Design like you give a Damn. For a robust response, see Johnson, “The Urban Precariat.”
74. For more on Plumpy’nut’s revolutionary design, see Scott-Smith, “The Fetishism of Humanitarian Objects”; and Redfield, “Bioexpectations.”
75. Seelos and Mair, Innovation is not the Holy Grail.
76. See http://www.literoflightswitzerland.org/ http://literoflight.org/; and http://sculptthefuturefoundation.org/portfolio/my-shelter-foundation-global-lighting-project/.
77. See http://www.literoflightusa.org; and the comments by Lea Truttmann, president of Liter of Light Switzerland, at http://blog.podio.com/2014/12/10/a-liter-of-light/.
78. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/liter-of-lights-solarpowered-diy-lamp-made-from-a-plastic-bottle-is-transforming-lives-9993728.html. See also http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23536914; and http://www.literoflightusa.org/about-us/awards-and-recognition/.
81. WHO, “Guideline”; World Food Programme, Hunger and Health, 10–13; S. Loewenberg, “Easier than taking Vitamins.” New York Times, September 5, 2012, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/05/easier-than-taking-vitamins/?_r=0; and http://www.heinz.com/data/pdf/foundation07.pdf.
82. For this reason, most nutritionists have been very careful when making recommendations to use this product.
83. It could also be argued that the ‘liter of light’ is not really a humanitarian intervention at all. It was designed for situations of persistent poverty rather than acute emergency, and is a relatively humble bottom-up solution that only later became accompanied by hyperbole when it was championed in the Global North. I am grateful to Louise Bloom for making this clarification
85. See “RCA Students design Wearable Dwelling for Syrian Refugees,” http://www.dezeen.com/2016/01/27/royal-college-of-art-students-wearable-coat-tent-dwelling-syrian-refugees; and “The ‘Wearable Dwelling’ – A Coat for Refugees that turns into a Tent,” http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2016/jan/21/wearable-dwelling-coat-tent-sleeping-bag-refugees-royal-college-art-london. Accessed March 19, 2016.
86. See AJ+, “Bags made of Boats and Life Jackets,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbIyB_SXtFY. Accessed March 19, 2016.
87. Sprinkles has been devised to solve a specific problem articulated by humanitarian nutritionists; it reflects a world-view in which food is reduced to nutrients, hungry people to bodies lacking nutrients and aid to an efficient matching process between the two. If micronutrient deficiencies are the problem, then Sprinkles is the answer. However, if the problem is reframed in its wider context – tied to politics, poverty and purchasing power – then it is a wholly inadequate answer. Moreover, most cultures do not see food as merely a vehicle for nutrients, but emphasise food as part of social life and cultural ritual, its role in expressing status or personal taste. For a fuller development of this point, see Scott-Smith, “Control and Biopower in Contemporary Humanitarian Aid.” For an overview of the multiple roles food can play in society, see Mintz and Du Bois, “The Anthropology of Food and Eating.”
88. Betts et al., “Refugee Innovation.”
89. This concept of ‘humanitarian neophilia’, in other words, not only describes the main characteristics of the innovation movement (its pursuit of new technology and new market opportunities); it also implies a critique: that humanitarian neophiliacs are so interested in novelty that they may lose sight of whether an innovation is genuinely game-changing or whether it fiddles around the edges. They miss when innovations might take place at the expense of more routine activities, which have a far bigger impact on the poor. For a historical example, see Scott-Smith, “How Projects Rise and Fall.”
90. This disconnect has generated enough concern among humanitarians for some to publically criticise their colleagues for being invisible. See, for example, Healy and Tiller, Where is Everyone?
91. Duffield, “Risk-management.”
92. Chandler, “The Road to Military Humanitarianism”; Vaux, The Selfish Altruist, 17–43; Fast, Aid in Danger; and Hammond, “The Power of Holding Humanitarianism Hostage.” The subsequent withdrawal of frontline aid workers has led to a backlash from some humanitarian agencies. See Healy and Tiller, Where is Everyone?
93. Sandvik, “The Humanitarian Cyberspace.”
94. Meier, Digital Humanitarians; and Duffield, “The Digital Development–Security Nexus.”
95. Innovation without representation is not universal; indeed, Alex Betts and Louise Bloom have emphasised that there are ‘two worlds’ of innovation, advocating a more a bottom-up approach in the sector. The Humanitarian Innovation Project at Oxford has been a leader in this regard, positioning itself against external ‘top-down’ solutions to ‘build directly on refugees’ own skills, talents and aspirations’. This is, of course, entirely consistent with the innovation agenda, and change is organised again around freedom and entrepreneurship.
96. The election of Jeremy Corbyn as the 18th leader of the UK Labour Party is the latest illustration of this trend.
97. Rieff, “Afterword”; and Vaux, The Selfish Altruist, 43–69.
98. Harroff-Tavel, “Neutrality and Impartiality?”; Minear, “The Theory and Practice of Neutrality”; Slim, “Relief Agencies and Moral Standing in War”; Redfield, Life in Crisis, 98–123, and Pictet, The Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross.
99. Principles like neutrality and independence, as many humanitarians know, are not absolute; they are tactics for achieving humanitarian goals – readily dismissed when the circumstances demand it. See Magone et al., Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed; Weiss, “Principles, Politics, and Humanitarian Action”; Rieff, “Humanitarianism in Crisis”; and Redfield, Life in Crisis, 98–123.
100. Vaux, The Selfish Altruist, 43–69.
101. Baughan and Fiori, “Towards a New Politics”; Gill, Drops in the Ocean; and Ticktin, “Medical Humanitarianism in and beyond France.”
102. The Communist Manifesto lambasted ‘philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, [and] hole-and-corner reformers of every kind’ for ‘redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society’. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 70. For more on the ‘social control’ critique of humanitarianism, see Kidd, “Philanthropy and the ‘Social History Paradigm’.”
103. Cross and Street, “Anthropology at the Bottom of the Pyramid”; Elyachar, “Next Practices”; Errington et al., “Instant Noodles as an Antifriction Device”; and Schwittay, “The Marketization of Poverty.”
104. Betts et al., Humanitarian Innovation, 4.