Making Aid Agencies Work: Reconnecting INGOs With the People They Serve by Terry Gibson

Author:Terry Gibson [Gibson, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Advocacy, Organizational Behavior, Political Science, NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations), Political Process, Business & Economics, General
ISBN: 9781787695092
Google: y6adDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07K6LG1WZ
Goodreads: 49617069
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Published: 2019-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 7.INGO Roles Converging.

Why was it, then, that two years later in March 2018 the leaders of the Grand Bargain's tenth goal advised that it should be closed? Alongside other far-reaching ideas in the bargain, the goal of ‘enhancing engagement between humanitarian and development actors’, glued all the others together. Using industry jargon again, it was ‘cross-cutting’. It appears the problem was no one understood how to make it happen in practice.275 It collided with the realities of the international aid system, which looks at aid through the wrong end of the telescope, making it distant, remote and difficult to understand. From this end, it's big disasters that the system can respond to, raise finance, organise emergency legislation and response for. From this end disasters and development are compartmentalised and projectised, attracting public, media, government and agency attention, particularly if they're large scale, clear cut, and not political but clear-cut and short term.

The system is set up for events such as the 2010 Haiti Earthquake, 2013–2016 Ebola crisis in West Africa or Typhoon Haiyan striking the Philippines in 2013, but the protracted refugee crisis of Darfur or the grinding Syrian and Afghan wars are much more complex propositions, driven by underlying political power plays and dragging on year after year. There are echoes of that early Dunant and Nightingale debate – should aid remain studiously neutral or recognise an unavoidable social and political dimension? Humanitarian workers and INGOs see it as highly problematic to connect supposedly neutral crisis response with political complexities. Entangled in these structures and priorities, it's not surprising that the intellectual analysis of the Summit gave way to a resigned pragmatism. Attempting to draw together humanitarian and development action failed, at least to the extent of suggesting shutting down that work stream.

Things look very different through the close-up end of the telescope, whether encountering the bombed-out streets of Kabul, an urban slum, a rural village or many other cities, towns and village across the world, the ‘humanitarian development nexus’ is a ‘taken-for-granted’. Local populations don't separate things affecting their lives into departments, they simply experience threats and their consequences, figure out how to take action and recognise barriers to progress.276 Humanitarian crises they experience knock back their ability to progress towards the lives they want to lead. What's more, as both scientific studies and local consultations show, a substantial proportion of these crises are not large and intensive, but small-scale ‘everyday disasters’, under the radar of the international aid industry.277 Rather than struggling intellectually with the idea of the ‘nexus’, people live it out from day to day. NGOs working locally also know this. They too are at the ‘nexus’. For example, an NGO in Nepal, specialised in earthquake technology and equipped to respond to crises such as the 2015 Gorkha earthquake, learnt it had to understand how to work with communities, learning from them and supporting them in development activities ranging from community mobilisation to better urban housing development.278 Another NGO in central Pakistan responds to

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