Humanitarian Action and Ethics by Ayesha Ahmad James Smith

Author:Ayesha Ahmad,James Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786992703
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)
Published: 2018-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

10 | THE EMERGENCE OF HUMANITARIAN FAILURE: THE CASE OF HAITI

Jan Wörlein

Introduction

The aftermath of the fatal 2010 Haiti earthquake disaster has been described as a period of the largest and most dense deployment of humanitarian relief since the emergence of the international humanitarian system (Verlin, 2014). The January 2010 7.0-magnitude earthquake, followed by a multiplicity of crises including the cholera epidemic, Hurricanes Sandy and Matthew, two electoral crises, and widespread drought, has resulted in an unprecedented influx of humanitarian actors to the country. The Haitian case is also seen as the archetype of what has been called ‘humanitarian failure’: the narrative of a humanitarian system failing to deliver aid in an efficient way (Karunakara, 2010; Farmer et al., 2012; Katz, 2013; Thomas, 2013; Biquet, 2014). This narrative of failure was not exclusively an external criticism, but was also widespread among humanitarian workers themselves (Binder, 2013). Even though the criticisms of inefficient aid are legitimate some of the underlying ethical challenges to the idea of humanitarian failure are rarely put forward. As Binder (2013) points out the idea of a humanitarian failure tells us more about failed expectations of a humanitarian system, than about its actual performance. This chapter offers for that reason an analysis of the conditions under which those expectations appear, to contextualise ethical debates about aid failure.

The ‘humanitarian world’ (Revet, 2011) became increasingly professionalised and institutionalised during the 1980s and 1990s, with growing ‘competition and division of labor’ (Dauvin & Siméant, 2002). This ‘world’ is today repeatedly confronted by the phenomena that the Haitian case crystallises: a great fluidity of actors in the ‘field’ as a result of short-term contracts; rapid turnover between headquarters and the ‘field’; varying affiliations between different types of organisations as a result of consultancy contracts; and insecure working conditions (Schneiker, 2015).

For this reason, this chapter proposes to analyse the professional practice of humanitarian response in Haiti between 2010 and 2015 with the assumption that the fluidity of aid to Haiti is as much an obstacle as a resource for local agents. My focus is specifically the way in which crisis management actors in Haiti (re)produce the conditions of their actions using elements of their fragmented and changing environment. This will show how actors cope with the ethical dilemma of engaging in a system which they partially perceive as immoral.

For an Open Definition of Aid Actors and Aid

In contrast with functionalist and normative approaches that focus on failure, I seek to study the reasons why aid actors perceive themselves as part of the failure of the humanitarian system in Haiti. For this reason, I will refrain from proposing an external definition of such a humanitarian system in disarray, because those definitions tend to narrow the debate to efficient aid rather than open it to a historical but local perspective. I will rather conceptualise the humanitarian space in Haiti as defined and structured by its actors, and thus draw on Atlani-Duault and Dozon’s (2011) anthropological perspective:

humanitarian aid now simply defines activities which groups claim as

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