International non-governmental organizations (INGOs) today are losing sight of their raison d’etre of humanitarian assistance. Captive to the donor community and to the global media that shapes public perception of their success, charities are driven by a set of targets that include the necessary but unfortunately insufficient condition of victim relief. Their intervention, if irresponsible, can dramatically alter the developmental trajectory of the recipient community, with grave implications. This essay will analyze the damaging effects of relief efforts by INGOs in humanitarian crises on host communities and propose recommendations. The focus is on the Sri Lankan post-tsunami environment.
The tsunami of Dec 26th, 2004 generated a torrent of global aid unprecedented in its size, heterogeneity and global media coverage received. Overnight INGOs grew to twice or thrice their previous magnitude. Expansion plans were drawn up in a week, staff hired the next week, and flown out to the disaster area the week after. The ensuing contingent of INGOs that invaded Sri Lanka was frequently inexperienced, subject to an extraordinary proliferation of mandates and under the spotlight of the attention-deficit driven Western media.
In addition, the political situation was tenuous. Prior to the tsunami, the country was teetering on the brink of a total breakdown of the ceasefire agreement. The relief agenda soon became hostage to election-year rhetoric and exploitation of the recovery efforts for political and monetary gain was rampant. Moreover, institutionalized corruption inherent in the government, its partisan approach to aid distribution and the lack of political will to create a viable independent institution with appropriate jurisdiction to oversee the recovery meant that public confidence in the government inexorably declined while ethnic tensions, already high, festered.
In such anarchic circumstances, instituting rapid high-profile action without the attendant political analysis, meaningful engagement of local capacities or refined understanding of the local culture is hazardous. Yet this is precisely what happened. Rigid budget schedules, initial media spotlights, and competition amongst INGOs prompted a rushed intervention on the basis of isolated diagnoses. Decision-making was entrusted to expatriate staff flown in with a superficial understanding of local politics and with a standard blueprint for relief and development. Massive construction was assumed hastily; schools, hospitals, housing and roads were commissioned without an accurate identification of beneficiaries and duplication was rife. More importantly, the political ramifications of the economic disparities caused by capitalizing certain ethnic communities at the expense of others was not acknowledged or ameliorated, causing further ethnic tensions manifested in violent assassinations and riots in the Northern and Eastern provinces.
The consequences were tragic but avoidable. The absence of a clear framework for recovery, the lack of an independent coordination mechanism for NGOs and the deficiency of government integrity and efficiency led to a dismal regulation of the quality, volume and distribution of aid.
Building a coalition of committed local civil society actors in program implementation can bring expertise and innovation to standard relief models as well as facilitate a mutually transformative dialogue and a refined understanding of situational politics. Another recommendation is to challenge communities to provide some resources of their own (e.g. land or labor in construction or relief delivery), thereby compelling local capacity building, community ownership, continuity of projects, and ultimately sustainable development. Educating donors on the complexity and necessarily longer time schedules of delivering efficient, empowering contextually appropriate relief is also essential, as is the realization that INGO accountability is to both donors and beneficiaries. However ultimately these are medium-term solutions that a) take time and thought, both elements denied to charities in crises facing a complex web of pressurizing operational and funding realities and b) do not answer the larger calamity of development and human security in Sri Lanka or other conflict-affected Third World nations.
If the local media could be strengthened to be nonpartisan, unfettered and intrepid, like its Indian counterpart, it could demand accountability and deter abuse. If the Aegean stables of the government bureaucracy could be rid of corruption and streamlined to focus on cost and time efficiency, overnight governmental revenues would grow, national productivity boosted, FDI attracted, infrastructure developed and a class of risk-taking entrepreneurs created. Higher living standards and an exposure to substantive democratic debate might also generate a trans-ethnic civil society with the critical mass to catalyze a peaceful, acceptable resolution to the current violent ethno-political problem. The road to sustainable, self-sufficient development would coalesce. Yet these are the thorny dilemmas that INGOs steer clear of, afraid of overstepping their mandates and wearing out their welcome.
The willful myopia, the inability to tell truth to power and the reluctance to engage with difficult questions of mandates and the limits of sovereignty must -- and can – change. What is in the balance is worth saving, an empowered local civil society supported by its global brothers and sisters, that can hold governments and populations accountable for their destructive practices, and that can bring capitalism and democracy to a developing country and generate political, economic and human security for all. It requires a revolution in current thinking but it is certainly not impossible.
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