Seeing Like an NGO

by Michael Bear

category: Humanitarian Relief

Published June 06, 2009 @ 10:22AM PT

There's a passage I love by James Scott, from his book Seeing Like A State:

"No administrative system is capable of representing any existing social community except through a heroic and greatly schematized process of abstraction and simplification...officials took exceptionally complex, illegible and local social practices, such as land tenure customs or naming customs, and created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored...

They did not successfully represent the actual activity of the society they depicted, nor were they intended to; they represented only that slice of it that interested the official observer...Categories that may have begun as artificial inventions of cadastral surveyors, census takers, or police officers can end by becoming categories that organize people's daily experience precisely because they are embedded in state-created institutions that structure that experience."

A description that equally applies to humanitarian - and to a lesser extent development - agencies as well, especially given the role that the UN and NGOs play in organizing the daily experience of people living in camps, or people who rely on such organizations to provide basic social services and economic assistance.

Further, programs designed to help women, or youth, or ex-combatants, etc etc. are by necessity based on a process of abstraction and simplification - individual identities and relationships are obviously far more complex.

Fine, well and good - it's impossible to operate aid programs without creating categories, even categories as basic as "those who need food now" and "those who don't".  This becomes problematic, tho, when we start to drink our own kool-aid - when we forget that these categories are inherently limited.  They never adequately describe an individual, much less a given situation; instead, they reflect our need to create a structure to determine who receives what assistance, and when.

We want to address root causes, underlying causes.  Yet the analytical tools that we use - our units of analysis - are based on the same brutal simplifications. When you think of conflict in terms of ex-combatants, you inevitably design DDR programs.  Then, when DDR programs fail, it's tempting to find a technical explanation.  There wasn't enough money.  There wasn't enough time.  The program was poorly designed.  UND-fucking-P.

We can feed the starving, or provide basic health services.  At least most of the time.  Yet I'm beginning to wonder if our ability to do anything more is fundamentally constrained.  What if the problem with DDR isn't technical, but conceptual?  What if we simply lack the understanding - logframes notwithstanding - to design interventions that address any kind of complex causality?

I definitely don't think we should walk away; at the same time, I think we need to be more honest about confronting our own limitations.  When's the last time we admitted that we didn't know how to do - how to solve - something?

[Sudanese refugees in Chad - AP photo taken in 2004]