Aid Workers Worse than Colonialists?

by Brooks Keene

category: Humanitarian Relief

Published December 12, 2008 @ 04:00AM PT

Photo by Aaron Huey from National Geographic.

Rory Stewart, who I blame for making me feel like I'm wasting my life whenever I read about him, wrote an outstanding book about his walk across Afghanistan in 2002 (see New York Times review).  The book is so amazing that a very substantial footnote--yes, a footnote--from the book has been stuck in my head for over a year now.  In the footnote, he describes the kind of international policymakers who inevitably end up in international projects (in this case, post-Taliban Afghanistan):

"Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neocolonialism. But in fact their approach is not that of a nineteenth-century colonial officer. Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing. They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single alien nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers the local language. They established effective departments of state, trained a local elite, and continued the countless academic studies of their subjects through institutes and museums, royal geographical societies, and royal botanical gardens. They balanced the local budget and generated fiscal revenue because if they didn't their home government would rarely bail them out. If they failed to govern fairly, the population would mutiny.

"Postconflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperialism. Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices. There are no credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual officers are never in any one place and rarely in any one organization long enough to be adequately assessed. The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neocolonialists have no such performance criteria. In fact their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action or judgment they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation and oppression.

"Perhaps it is because no one requires more than a charming illusion of action in the developing world. If the policy makers know little about the Afghans, the public knows even less, and few care about policy failure when the effects are felt only in Afghanistan." (p. 247-248)

Everything Stewart says could probably apply to most humanitarian/development workers, so that's how I'll discuss it.  I approach this footnote with mixed emotions.  Part of me screams in protest at the depiction of aid workers as unaccountable, lazy nomads floating from place to place.  We put in an enormous amount of hard work.  Also, who wants to be compared to the likes of Captain Kurtz?

Still, something rings true in Stewart's depiction.  With some notable exceptions like the Peace Corps (which has its own issues) most development workers really don't put in half as much time getting to know cultures as colonialists did.  We're separated from people in areas where we work by all sorts of barriers.  These can be economic, spatial, cultural or mental.  In Nairobi, a regional development hub for East Africa, expatriates tend to live in neighborhoods where none but super-wealthy Kenyans can afford a house.  It's also just not comfortable after an exhausting day of work to try and make small talk with people who really don't identify with your life and vice versa.

If I look at the circle of expat development workers around me in Kisumu, the one who's planning on staying longest is here for five years, and most of us are just here for six months to two years.  It's the rare individual who truly devotes herself to a specific culture and location.  In this sense, Stewart is dead on.  Responsibility for results rarely if ever rests on expat development workers.  If something fails, it was the macro-level forces that were responsible and not us.

Development organizations have tried to get around this by relying more and more on "national staff" from the country where they're working.  This is less true in emergency humanitarian work where many temporary expats are hired, particularly in early days.  Expats are then increasingly relegated to senior jobs where they write reports in English for donors or others who need such things (see blog by Alanna Shaikh on what expats tend to do).  Still, it is inescapable that the senior levels of the large development organizations are run by often Ivy League-educated people from developed countries or, a step closer in understanding, by the educated elite (often also with Ivy League educations) from developing countries.  These people tend to have similar lifestyles and practices to their compatriots from the developed world.

And so, I ultimately find myself thinking that Mr. Stewart has a point.  Would it be better if development and aid workers committed themselves to specific places for a significant portion of their lives?  I tend to think so, but if that's going to happen, then donors need to look critically at funding models and how we judge performance.  If you want to measure real impact on things like health or educational outcomes, that costs real money.  If you want to measure sustainability, then require evaluations five years after projects are done by universities or other objective researchers.

Better yet, if you want people to really understand the problem, then cut the idea of two-year projects out altogether.  It's a ridiculous time frame to know anything about anything.  Development is not like manufacturing computers.  We don't really know how to do it well yet, so we need time to learn.  If people need to live in a village for two years to figure out what's really going on, then fund them to do it.  Don't be afraid to fund a 20 year project.  Instead, let's be afraid of the short term gain that we put so much money and effort into but that fades away two years after we're gone.

If you want to hear Mr. Stewart's criticism from his own mouth, forward this video to 6:16: