Imagine you’re growing up in a poor, violent and badly governed country. You’re hungry, you’ve not had a good education and you’re at constant risk of being caught up in conflict or being abused or exploited. Your prospects look grim.
What would you most want? Immediate relief from your hunger? Decent schooling? Peace? A better government? A stronger economy?
At Save the Children, over the years we’ve asked thousands of children versions of this question. Unsurprisingly, their answers are, typically, that they would like a mixture of all of these.
Yes, they want immediate relief now. But they also want security. And importantly, they want hope for the future.
Yet the way international institutions have evolved over decades too often results in misalignment or even competition between these similar-but-different imperatives. We see different professional communities working in the same places as each other but on different projects with different goals, timeframes, analysis and budgets.
These include:
- The humanitarians – those of us who see our primary job as alleviating immediate suffering
- The development specialists – those of us who want to align states, civil society and markets to achieve sustainable prosperity for everyone
- The peacebuilders – those of us who want to help societies prevent and overcome conflict.
Of course, it’s both entirely possible and quite natural to feel committed to all three. The goals of inclusive peace, sustainable health, economic growth, universal and high-quality education, and emergency support when it is needed can and should be harmonious and mutually reinforcing.
But when these institutional factions pull in opposing directions, we don’t achieve all that we could for the poorest and most vulnerable people.
For example, many chronically poor countries experience endless cycles of short-term, humanitarian, ‘sticking plaster’-type projects, typically implemented through parallel international structures. When what they really need is a long-term plan to strengthen their national capacity and reduce their underlying vulnerability.
Sometimes it’s the other way round. As when long-term development programmes fail to take account of – or adapt to – the almost inevitable floods, droughts or outbreaks of violence that will predictably undermine their work. Or sometimes development programmes work so closely with governments that are persecuting their own people, they end up being complicit.
When it comes to peacebuilding there is often a great divergence in what sort of activity different actors think is needed. And while much of the work goes with the grain of humanitarian action or good development, sometimes the political compromises involved in trying to secure peace end up threatening the wider goals of dignity, development and freedom.
A New Vision for Aid
As our colleagues at Oxfam have pointed out, humanitarian relief, development programmes and peacebuilding are not serial processes: they are all needed at the same time. This is especially true in a world where environmental shocks are becoming more common and where a growing proportion of the world’s poor live in fragile or conflict-affected states.
Our task is to design approaches that accommodate all three worldviews without significantly compromising any of them. Bringing these groups together will take intelligent, flexible and clear-eyed leadership.
This is where the newly created Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) could become, to use one of the Prime Minister’s favourite phrases, genuinely “world-beating”. By combining specialists in humanitarian action and long-term development with experts in peacebuilding, politics and security, it should be possible to provide exactly the sort of leadership that could succeed in striking the artful balance needed between these different imperatives.
The FCDO has already made encouraging moves in this direction, appointing a Special Envoy for Famine Prevention and Humanitarian Affairs and committing itself to lead global action to protect the poorest people from coronavirus and famine. This will involve aligning short-term humanitarian relief with a long-term response to the growing challenge of malnutrition.
It’s an example of how balancing different imperatives requires leadership that asks – and keeps asking – three core questions:
- How is my work meeting immediate needs?
- How is it supporting longer-term aims?
- How is it helping to build peace?
There are four critical components to this vision:
- Explicitly put affected communities and individuals at the centre, not just listening to them and letting them participate but putting them in the lead. After all, if policy isn’t working for the people that it’s primarily intended to serve, it’s not working at all.
- Work towards shared goals – so that all the different tracks of work that need doing have a common direction.
- Adopt multi-year approaches, with flexibility built in from the get-go, so that plans can be changed as situations change – as they inevitably will.
- Seek to strengthen national and local systems wherever possible, including, for example, existing social protection systems. The situations where “localisation” is not appropriate should be exceptional.
To do this well also means protecting certain fundamentals. Like being bold and uncompromising in defending human rights: where human rights are not upheld, sustainable peace or prosperity will not be achieved. And it means defending the humanitarian principles of impartiality, independence and neutrality so that relief actors can meet urgent needs wherever they arise without being accused of serving political objectives.
There’s another threat to this vision – the stultifying creep of bureaucracy. Children’s lives won’t be transformed by paperwork and processes, but rather, through clarity of purpose and action.
Aligning the work of humanitarians, development specialists and peacebuilders will take vision and effort. So too will uniting the different communities that made up the now defunct Department for International Development and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. But getting them to work together towards a shared, reflexive, people-centred vision could make a huge difference for millions of people.
Local and global assistance that responds to emergency needs, builds peace, boosts public services, gets children into school and communities thriving is the prize on offer. And that is a prize worth striving for.
Read more from our blog series on The Future of British Aid.
