‘Grasping the failures of revolutionary marxism’

I was speaking with a UN protection specialist this evening over drinks in Sudan’s Western Darfur, where I have just arrived for a short assignment. We got to talking about (what else) work. And talking shop in Darfur, I am rapidly learning, involves a lot of sighing and disgusted hand gestures.

The Darfur region is in an awkward position by humanitarian relief standards. Funds from the normal international donors are drying up and conflict in the region, while certainly down from five years ago, is by no means absent. The number of internally displaced people still living in IDP camps is pushing a million and a half, grouped together for over ten years, caught in (and sometimes party to) a series of power struggles- national (tensions between Khartoum and periphery states such as North Darfur), administrative (States keep getting divided in Sudan, not unrelated to Khartoum’s desire to keep things quiet), local (the Shiekh leaders of IDP populations have their own agendas, which often clash, so a series of mediations is always necessary to keep tenuous peace and order).

But the money is drying up, and humanitarian organizations don’t really know what to do about that. Aid allocations to Darfur are falling, and have to compete in space now taken up by an unprecedented number of crises in the world: Ebola in West Africa, unrest in the Central African Republic, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan…

So the UN agencies and their partners (to say nothing of the government) find themselves with all these displaced people, who have been living in a sort of protracted emergency situation in camps for many years, for whom there will soon be very little assistance (money) left. And all of a sudden these agencies are realizing that they should probably not have kept treating so many people as freshly arrived IDPs for so long. People in the camps are now used to receiving their monthly allowances of food and other items for their household. Thinking on how to avoid creating these protracted emergency situations is happening, for example by changing approaches, working on recovery and resilience from day one, using market interventions such as cash transfers and vouchers to support people- Syria and Lebanon are a good example of the beginnings of this change.

But in Sudan, the fundamental issue is not a technical one.

Back to my conversation with my colleague in West Darfur. While agonizing over the absence of any long-term vision for transitioning out of the untenable IDP situation in Darfur, she told me that for her, the issue was that the government had little interest in sustainable solutions in the region at all: “That’s the problem: they don’t care about developing Darfur”.

The charges are serious. New funds for Darfur coming from Qatar and administered through the Darfur Regional Authority are creating extra confusion when agencies working on the ground try to choose which areas to intervene in. Some police and intelligence services, especially those who take orders directly from Khartoum, are more interested in keeping a certain degree of tension in the region than in protecting the population. Humanitarian assistance, especially in the still insecure areas of the region, have to pass through the filters of sometimes armed groups, who will arrange to take their share of goods first…

What can international agencies do in this situation? A few things, certainly. Taking the example of protection issues, my colleague talked about how women’s centres were paired with work being done by UNDP on rule of law within IDP camps, to create a safe space for women and link them up with viable livelihoods. Okay.

But I am convinced that in so many cases, particularly where there is conflict, humanitarian assistance has all too easily labeled itself as a technical solution to a technical problem, when the reality is that the problem is fundamentally more political than technical. That is to say, without rethinking the approach of Humanitarian agencies sitting in the capital city who are more interested in preserving the space that they currently have to operate (Sudan is wont to throw you out of the country at times) than in challenging the overall approach to delivering assistance and ensuring a solid transition out of conflict– without rethinking the assumption in the UN that the government should always be in the driver’s seat– then there is de-facto no longterm plan, no recovery, no return to normalcy possible.

And this is not just UNDP’s job either. Each agency, country and partner has their own role to play in changing the approach to countries where the priority is calm over peace, status quo over improvement and tension and fear over partnership. The risk in doing this is being expelled from the country, or forced to leave or otherwise not be able to help those who could be helped. The danger in not doing it, besides compromising the very raison d’etre of humanitarian work, is in knowingly being a party to a power game where the winner is decided in advance. And it’s not the people you are working for.

A great peek at the economic and social systems sides of the current Ebola outbreak

I am not making this up.

Djibouti’s Vision 2035 is some sort of long-term development strategy, which I’m sure incorporates a lot of analysis (well, whatever you can get with the data available over there), squeaky clean charts and glossy hard-copies. But it also has this gem, front and center (I added the red):

Djibouti Vision 2035

Aim of the vision

Djibouti aims to become the largest logistic hub in Africa, using 100% green energy. Also the country hopes to become the number two destination in the world for scuba diving after Sharm-el-Sheik.

Objectives of the vision

• To address different challenges ahead and risks on the way within the country.
• To fulfil aspirations of the President and his government.
• To encourage Djiboutian citizens to take ownership of this vision themselves
• Encouraging Djiboutians to achieve their own success
• To join fast-paced and very competitive new world

OK now, a couple of questions/observations…

1. Why stop at number two in the world? You have until 2035 to pull this off you know

2. The president of Djibouti will certainly be a man, at least up through 2035

3. What happened to the aspirations of the people again? How hard is it to replace “the president and his cabinet” with “the people”?

…

Still not as bad as considering spending 10 billion to redesign all your cities to take the shape of animals.

Another reminder of how much we don’t know about African countries for lack of proper data.

The challenges are fourfold: (1) national statistics offices have limited independence and unstable budgets, (2) misaligned incentives encourage the production of inaccurate data, (3) donor priorities dominate national priorities, and (4) access to and usability of data are limited. The Data for African Development Working Group’s recommendations for reaping the benefits of a data revolution in Africa fall into three categories: (1) fund more and fund differently, (2) build institutions that can produce accurate, unbiased data, and (3) prioritize the core attributes of data building blocks.

Here is an excerpt from an article that I wrote a while back on knowledge sharing in Korea:

Korea’s knowledge sharing initiatives are bearing the ill effects of the monopoly that the Korean state holds over interpreting and re-producing the Korean development experience. Given the continued political significance of certain historical policies and given the serious fragmentation problem of Korean aid, this means that not only is serious doubt placed on the idea of a single unified ‘Korean model’ or a single ‘Korean experience’, but formulating development policy based on aspects of Korean development can be highly politicized, and may in turn suppress any new innovative interpretations of how Korea developed.

For me that is the crux of the issue. International development has this way of warping common sense sometimes- why would knowledge pass through so many channels in any other case (business, civil society, libraries, groups of people, various associations, particular genders, generations, regions, etc.), but when it comes to development policy, the state and a select group of closely related academics get the monopoly?

Yes, the labor code existed. But does that mean that it was enforced, or that the labor movement did not have to fight tooth and nail to get where they are today?

Policy formulation is one thing; sure, you need technical experts to formulate policies, to make sure that they are complementary to one another, that they tie into global norms and regulations, and to a certain extent that they fall flush with other engagements that the country in question is making abroad (read: that it complements their diplomatic, get-the-copper-out-of-Africa strategies) .

But actually deciding what falls into the pan of ‘development history’, and how that history is interpreted and identifying what worked, what did not, who benefited and who did not, is something that is too contentious to leave to the state.

And the result is this: where is the voice on urbanization and the bad effects of eminent domain in the Korean development experience? The Korean government is fond of talking about how it built is social protection on private firms in the 1960s and 1970s before moving it to the public realm; but where is the story on the labor movement, and where are the denunciations of the growth policies that abused so many workers during the country’s industrialization? You can’t find stories like this (not proper ones at any rate) when the state is in full control of both the discourse of the country’s history and the lessons that are to be take therefrom.

It would be great to do an ‘anti-history’ of the Korean development experience, or a ‘People’s History’ Howard Zinn style, and see what development policies could come out of that…