I am doing a series of articles on the book “Rethinking Canadian Aid” (University of Ottawa Press, 2015), and now it’s time for “CHAPTER 2: Refashioning Humane Internationalism in Twenty-First-Century Canada” by Adam Chapnick.
The opening of the chapter talks about the policy divergence between humanitarian assistance and development assistance and is more eloquently presented than my complaints in reviewing Chapter 1 (Critique of Rethinking Canadian Aid – Chapter 1 – Humane internationalism). But this next point could be even further emphasized.
Even the realists, then, embrace the spirit of altruism in times of crisis, although some might still emphasize the anticipated diplomatic benefits arising from so-called humanitarian initiatives.
Without getting into specifics, an emergency crisis in a country not on the recipient list prompted Ambassadors in DFAIT at the time to demand that CIDA hand over millions of dollars in unneeded assistance, with the caveat that the cheques could be handed out by the Ambassador in $15K increments, complete with photo ops. Even some of the hardened found the request a bit unethical, highly unprofessional, and well, downright distasteful.
…They condition the public to believe — incorrectly — that paying for a single child to eat a healthy breakfast and attend school will have a lasting impact on the overall ability of that child’s larger community to grow economically and provide a sustainable, prosperous environment for future generations.
Despite the various explanations offered by Chapnick as to the differences between support for humanitarian vs. development assistance, all of which are possible, I think there are slightly different forces at work that collapse the list to just two in practice.
First and foremost, there is the one above. The “save the children” campaigns, complete with pics of starving children, even better with flys buzzing around them, are effective in addressing the altruist’s support — the strong ethical pull matched with immediate need = support for humanitarian assistance. The quick need, the quick response, the quick result. Unfortunately, the need for gender equality might be acute, but there is no quick response or quick result. It isn’t any less “altruistic”, but the direct “logic chain” from input to result is less clear, and far less immediate. In some ways, it’s no different than the patient who wants a treatment for a health problem rather than advice for long-term health improvements. They believe in both, but the hook is less palpable for the second.
The second element that I find hidden is that not only are the “hooks” different, but the actions are fundamentally different. Health analysts frequently talk about the idea of downstream and upstream activities. Downstream ones are the ones that take place on the ground and save lives. Antibiotics, surgeries, blood transfusions, medicines. Upstream ones are the ones that take place in research labs, curriculum development to train doctors and nurses, networks to collect blood, safety guidelines, and food inspections. Handing out a blanket and some food is far different in action, expertise and function than having a governance discussion with the central government about the role of women in government or even society. Having expertise in one does not lend itself to expertise in the other, the practical realities of one don’t lend itself to supporting the other easily, even with Red Cross guidelines.
1. Rather than criticizing the international realists’ thought process, emphasize a shared desire for common outcomes.
2. Avoid reinforcing the common perception that development assistance is no different than common charity.
3. Build public support from the top down.
As three solutions go, these aren’t bad. The first seems to me to be a natural outcome of #2 and #3 however, but #2 and #3 continue to be a chicken-and-egg dilemma. Do you build awareness of the complexity of development to get leadership support from the top down or do you get support from the top down to build awareness?
Personally, I think awareness has to come first, and if the NGOs are all-fired sure of their altruistic pursuits, I’d suggest somewhat sarcastically and hopefully that they put their money where their mouth seems to be. I’ll give you two examples from the United Nations.
There’s a dam built in Africa, the location unimportant to the story. Generates power, drives industry, and while it’s being built, all the locals’ lives improve dramatically with the wages from working as labourers. Great. Case closed, definitely development progress. Yet, the dam is finished, the work disappears, and the area suffers economically. The men go off to the cities and find work, send home money, another mini-boom. Six to eighteen months later, the men stop sending money home as they become disconnected from their families, and the area suffers. Next, the women go off to the cities, sending money home, another mini-boom. But most of the women are working as prostitutes, many contract AIDS, and come back home to die.
A second story — building a road through the wilderness, aiming to connect two distant cities, including building a bridge across a hard-to-cross river. Wages pay for labourers, economic boom, more trade between cities, increased prosperity. Except for a small problem. While the men were working on the road, the prostitutes followed them, setting up shop in little shanty towns along the road. And spreading many diseases, including AIDS, all along the road route. Once the road is complete, the city that was remote on the other side sees its infection rates for all diseases rise dramatically to match the rest of the country.
Both the dam and the road are examples of infrastructure projects, and every development expert on the planet knows that a country cannot grow without infrastructure. And while there are ways to address some of the problems in the above models, it would be a rare NGO who could communicate any part of that complex story well to anyone in a soundbite, which is about all they get to say. Both of the stories above came from publications of the United Nations, and are buried deep within reports of the FAO and UNAIDS. Communicating any of it tends to have the opposite effect on people — once they see how large, complex and near-intractable development projects are, the less they support them and the more they want to do humanitarian aid only.
I agree that “education” and awareness is a key to better support, but to draw upon Chapnick’s concern — will an NGO risk going out of business and be unable to help anyone in order to tell a more ethically accurate story?
I am doing a series of articles on the book “Rethinking Canadian Aid” (University of Ottawa Press, 2015), and now it’s time for “CHAPTER I: Humane Internationalism and the Malaise of Canadian Aid Policy” written by one of the co-editors, David R. Black.
He takes Pratt’s analysis and identifies three conceptual constructs.
First, he argued that Canadian political culture incorporated a robust and persistent, though eroding, element of “humane internationalism” (HI), defined as “an acceptance by the citizens of the industrialized states that they have ethical obligations towards those beyond their borders and that these in turn impose obligations on their governments” (Pratt 1989, 13). This orientation was, he argued, understood by its adherents to be consistent with the “real long-term interests of the rich countries,” but remained at its core ethical and cosmopolitan in orientation (Pratt 1989, 14).
Put more simply, there is a role to be played if you’re an international actor. I think it would be good if Black went a little beyond aid though — there are ethical obligations for peace-keeping and entries into war, going back to the time of feudal kings. Even if you yourself were not threatened, you had an obligation to aid an ally under attack. In those times it was more self-interested (mutual protection), but it was also the basis for chivalry and knights. It certainly was part of the argument for getting involved in European wars that didn’t directly threaten non-European borders.
The idea of the counter-consensus was Pratt’s second main conceptual contribution to the framing of Canadian foreign policy. It foreshadowed the growing interest in the role and influence of “civil society” and the “democratization” of foreign policy that came to the fore in the 1990s. […] Given what he understood to be HI’s public resonance and firm societal roots, the puzzle was why it had not had greater influence on the policy and practice of Canadian aid, which virtually all scholarly commentators saw as bedevilled by “mixed motives,” among which ethical considerations were typically (though not unremittingly) subordinated to more narrowly self-interested priorities.
One complaint I have with the characterization of an NGO consensus is that it represents a consensus at all, particularly in Canada. Consultations have shown again and again that when NGOs et al are asked what the Canadian government should do about problem X or in country Y or in sector Z, those same NGOs who argue for humane ideals (on which they do agree) are the same ones submitting extremely self-serving and divergent solutions. That’s not completely surprising on one front — if an NGO is focused on famines, they are obviously going to suggest that the world needs to do more on food security. Those who focus on water are going to suggest more needs to be done on water issues. Yet in most cases, it isn’t that “more” needs to be done but rather that there is no consensus as to what the priorities should be. In fact, there is an old joke at CIDA that it should have been renamed ATTAP — all things to all people. No one wants to talk about the old saw that up until about 1992, 80+ percent of all “aid” money was actually spent in Canada on Canadian NGOs. We have a strong history of supply-driven aid, much of which belies a “consensus” on anything more than “help people”.
To explain this puzzle, Pratt elaborated a “dominant class” approach, combining an emphasis on the relative autonomy of permanent officials within the state with an understanding that their conception of the “national interest” showed a persistent bias towards the interests of “capitalism in Canada.” Influenced by structural Marxism, combined in a “non-doctrinaire” manner with international realism and, in later versions, a neo-Gramscian attention to the precepts of neoliberal globalization, Pratt’s emphasis on the enduring influence of dominant class interests provided a basis for understanding the policy choices that were made (e.g., regarding tied aid, the choice of recipients, and the use of aid funds to promote private sector activity in developing countries) under the ethical cover of the aid program.
Yesterday I mentioned one of my complaints (Critique of Rethinking Canadian Aid – Introduction) with academic analysis looking like intellectual masturbation, particularly when it comes to political economy, and this sort of sophistry is where it falls apart for me. The short short short version is that we have a liberal democracy with a capitalist economy. What a shock to say that many of the government policies of the day reinforce the dominant ideals in both domains and that they also influence aid policy. It’s hard to imagine a large-scale government policy that doesn’t reflect the dominant ideologies in most western-style democracies. That’s how they work. It doesn’t create a separate “class” (economic or political) nor is it doing it under “ethical cover”. It doesn’t NEED ethical cover as if it is hidden or subversive. We have identical influences in every department — why would aid be different? And why would the government “apologize” for it?
Not that Black is wholly embracing of the Pratt analysis, noting that
[…]such ideal-typical contrasts have important analytical utility. However, they also have certain risks and ramifications when applied to the “real world” of policy. First, the ethical clarity of purpose associated with the “pure” articulation of HI is virtually impossible to approach in practice.[…] On the other hand, a discussion of development that does not embed a forthright and sophisticated discussion of ethical purpose will be an impoverished one. A policy domain that is centrally preoccupied with addressing the causes and consequences of global poverty will be infused, inevitably, with conceptions of and arguments about obligation and justice. What is needed, therefore, is a discussion that better captures the dilemmas and ambiguities of ethical purpose, without (implicitly or explicitly) discounting it as somehow “too hard” or too naïve.
I agree with the intent but not the direction. Black wants to take the NGO claim to “true” ethical concerns while tossing out “wrong” concerns for Canadian interests — but there is no normative basis to say that a Canadian government official that is appointed to work “for Canada” is somehow morally corrupt because they are interested in Canadian interests. The pillar of self-righteousness assumes the moral high ground, but with no ethical basis to do so. Person A wants to help foreigners, Person B wants to help Canadians — that isn’t an ethical dilemma that can be solved through rhetoric or solved at all. In fact, there are a lot of people who think that Person A is actually “wrong” in their approach and that the “right” or “true approach” that will work is self-interest. With equally compelling “ethical” arguments going back to Kant and Rousseau. The fact that one is more “attractive” to the NGOs doesn’t make it “the one true way”, like a religion.
I’m going to digress here for a moment with more of a personal revelation. Despite the fact that I work for the government, and support its policies and programs in as non-partisan fashion as I can, I think the NGOs are correct that our aid policies and practices should be primarily if not exclusively based on altruism and serving developing country interests. However, having studied ethics, political economy, philosophy, human rights, and law, I also believe that there is a limit to normative views and that on some levels, when consensus is not “self-evident”, relativism has to invariably creep in. Person A may have an absolute belief in self-interest or at least “national self-interest” (to be more precise), but they have no greater or lesser claim to normative roles for government than the altruist unless one of those “beliefs” eventually rises to the level of a human right. Only at that point does it become normative; up until then, it’s all choices.
David Morrison, in his landmark 1998 history of CIDA, noted that “while polls have consistently shown humanitarian sentiment as the leading reason people give for supporting aid, they have also revealed scant general knowledge about the nature or extent of Canadian development assistance — and, except for a small minority, a low ranking in comparison with other public goods” (Morrison 1998, 440). Noël, Thérien, and Dallaire (2004) used publicly available polling data to elaborate on this point, and further noted that there was a deep divide between a soft majority of Canadians who were broadly supportive of aid and a substantial minority who were deeply sceptical or even hostile towards it.
I don’t think this type of analysis actually moves the yardstick forward. What is actually needed is a more nuanced survey that also asks what people (including Parliamentarians) think development actually IS. That sounds pedestrian, doesn’t it? Asking them what development means? Yet even the NGOs can’t agree. In OECD terms, there’s a division between humanitarian assistance, transition programming, and regular development. Yet when CIDA engages with the NGOs and more importantly the average Canadian, they ask about “development”, yet the support from Canadians is for humanitarian assistance. It’s why the average Canadian talks about earthquakes, and floods, and tsunamis, and does stupid things like shipping a box of used shoes around the world to “help”. The level of understanding and the broad support that NGOs claim exists is a very large but extremely shallow puddle.
Let’s take a practical example. If you ask most Canadians if food and shelter are development, they’ll say “of course”. (Note, it’s probably not, just humanitarian aid that acts as triage on a gaping wound – the patient stays alive, but they’re not living.) If you ask them if organizing a meeting of NGOs to talk about the country’s needs is “development”, about half say yes. The other half say no because they don’t see it as doing anything — just talk. Yet the governance people would cry “of course”!
Now, go one step further, and say the NGOs have got together and agreed that the people need a water irrigation system for their crops. And look, there’s a Canadian company with the technology and time and availability to do it. Can I hire them to do it, maybe even using local labour to install and run it? And is it development? The locals say of course; the Canadians would say about 80% yes; and the NGOs in Canada would scream “No, that’s self-interest, you can’t do it.”
While I hesitate to go Machiavellian and look more to the end than the means, the definition of development is fairly clear. A development activity that aids a developing country. It doesn’t care WHY we did the development activity, as long as there were benefits to the developing country. How and Who benefits, not an ethical debate of motive.
If one wants to go down that rabbit-hole, there is a much bigger and simpler ethical dilemma that the NGOs can`t answer. Is it better to do something that aids Canada and helps a developing country grow and survive, yet has a moral taint according to the NGOs, or to risk doing nothing for lack of domestic support and let them remain unaided in poverty, yet Canadian consciences can remain calm that doing nothing was for the right reasons? NGOs would argue that the question is a strawman that wrongly frames the question, and I don’t disagree. But if the NGOs want to stand on high ground and claim ethical normativism, then their position has to be able to answer these types of questions unequivocally, not just reframe them to make it an easier one.
I have to confess that Black loses me when talking about CIDA forming alliances with other departments.
It meant, as well, that development analysts and practitioners were less attentive than they might have been to opportunities for forging strategic relationships and alliances with people and branches in other government departments, so as to enlarge and strengthen the constituency for development assistance within government. It would be naïve to think that this could be easily or widely achieved, but it could potentially broaden the range of opportunities and support for development issues within the apparatus of the state.
So, going back to what I said above, I don’t think CIDA reflecting “government of Canada priorities” is any different from any other department. Yet, for some reason, it is assumed that forging alliances with those other departments (who by their nature are even more domestically and nationally oriented than DFAIT) would help entrench more human internationalism. Having worked in CIDA and DFAIT for 12 years, I cannot think of a single time when interacting with other government departments didn’t have the officials at CIDA arguing for more poverty reduction focus and less national interest focus demanded by the other partners.
Nevertheless, the increasingly pressing question for many aid sceptics, on both the right and the left, was whether aid was doing any good at all for those it ostensibly sought to assist. Would, for example, a more generous aid program translate into better life prospects for poor people and communities? Would the gains made be sustainable, or would they deepen distortions and dependencies? Would the good work undertaken by aid agencies be effectively undermined or even negated by macroeconomic policies or foreign investments (e.g., in the extractive sector) promoted by other arms of the Canadian state?
Ultimately, when you take out the normative claims, results are pretty much all you are left with, which still sounds quite Machiavellian, although the ethical argument is about motive, not actually the means. Which approach produces better results? Evidence is extremely mixed on a good day, and involve a lot of assumptions of relative value. Some who operate on purely capitalist ideology would argue that if the standard of living goes up, everything is good — they may not care about rule of law, gender equity, the environment, human rights, or social mobility. If a culture is destroyed but the patient lives, the operation was a success. Others obviously have different measuring sticks. Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen debated the proper “stick” at length when ul Haq was creating the UNDP Human Development Index, and even they couldn’t agree (including on what eventually became the Millennium Development Goals).
In doing so, however, Canadian development scholars and analysts arguably neglected a series of critical trends in migration, remittances, investment, ecology, and the like. To be sure, they (or rather we) did not ignore these important trends. Nevertheless, given the ongoing emphasis on the study of Canadian aid policy and the debate about its underlying motivations and purposes, less attention was given to the interconnections between development assistance and these broader trends than their importance warranted.
While I disagree with some of the conclusions and approaches of Black throughout the chapter, I love this last section. I’m hoping others pick this up in more detail in the rest of the book, but with not much foreshadowing here in his text, I have my doubts. Development includes many things, and aid is but one; even in considerations of development “flows”, and financing, there are some sources that eclipse aid dramatically. I have hopes that someday we will see a full framework enunciated by someone that talks about the various flows in a coherent fashion, including knowledge, people and resources, and stops assuming it is only about resources.
I can often be harsh when reading various academics’ take on the government and what it “ought” to do, or even sometimes what it “has” done. Rather than the longitudinal view inspired by political economy, most of the decisions made are more about short-term politics, operational and management issues, and, hiding in the background, a general belief as to “how government works or ought to work”. Sometimes it is in response to pressure, sometimes it is jumping in front of a parade. But rarely does it rise to the rhetoric or analysis that academics have the time and luxury to concoct to explain what should happen or has happened.
I’ll give you an example. There was an article I read some time ago about HRDC and the spending “scandal” that hit the papers in the late 90s. The article did this great longitudinal political economy analysis of how this was a result of Weberian bureaucracy interacting with Keynesian economics, and how there was this eternal disconnect, etc. There were a couple of other high-flying paradigms thrown in, and it was basically academic intellectual masturbation. By contrast, I read a decent public admin article (written by ex-public servants) talking about how there had been a strong pressure to disburse money quickly and efficiently, with no counterbalancing controls to focus on documenting transactions for audit purposes. Hence, when the audit came, tons of papers were “missing” (i.e. they hadn’t been printed, they were saved electronically but not in the files) and although the scandal said “millions missing”, the result after printing and tracking everything properly, there was a discrepancy approximating a rounding error. While an academic prof of mine explained the difference as “sometimes political economists ask questions where the public servants leave off”, I can guarantee not a single public servant could validate the political economy article as representing anything they had seen or experienced on the ground.
For me, it is the paradigm of the professional government manager and policy analyst that I use when reading these articles — do they accurately reflect what is happening on the ground, do their assumptions match with operations or are they assuming things that only them and other academics would find remotely true, and can their conclusions lead to anything practical for a government or is it just sophistry to justify publishing?
Stephen Brown, Molly den Heyer and David R. Black have edited a new doc called “Rethinking Canadian Aid” (University of Ottawa Press, 2015), and I confess that I’m of two minds in starting to read it.
First of all, one of the articles is written by a friend who knows what he’s talking about and whom I respect, which leaves me hopeful, and a number of the sections are written by ex-public servants who worked inside the government machinery and saw its workings. Second, by contrast, my general suspicion of academic papers regarding government is multiplied almost exponentially when they write about how governments do aid.
Nevertheless, I’m “in” for the long haul on this one and I hope to read each of the articles over the next six weeks or so.
The opening intro raises some fundamental questions, and I’m hoping their analysis goes to more than their initial assumptions. It starts by noting:
There has been no shortage of recent calls for “reinventing” or “reimagining” Canadian foreign aid to respond to the litany of problems that emerged over the forty-five-year lifespan of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), including excessive bureaucracy, slow delivery and frequently shifting priorities (Carin and Smith 2010; Gordon Foundation 2010). Yet there was general surprise in March 2013 when the Canadian government announced its institutional solution: merging CIDA with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, creating in June 2013 the new Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development (DFATD).
Everybody in the department will argue that there is excessive bureaucracy; those in the OAG would likely argue otherwise, as they have when they do audits and don’t find enough controls in place. Similarly in finance (not Finance with capital F, just finance people in general, i.e. the beancounters), enabling services in general, and even the OECD who likes to argue for streamlining and effective aid while ensuring performance measurement tracking and comparable statistics on spending. Even the Senate committees are in favour of reduced bureaucracy yet ask more and more detailed questions about metrics.
Slow delivery is probably a valid concern, but note that in most cases, the bureaucratic processes and slow delivery models are based in comparison on donors with completely different governance models (a valid criticism in its own right) or the private sector and NGO sectors that have none of those pesky constraints called the constitution or taxpayer reporting. Put differently, many of those complaints reduce to simply that CIDA is a part of a complex government structure that slows it down. Every department has programs with identical complaints, by the way. When I worked at CIDA, you could find a fairly large number of people working there who would actively argue very straight-faced that “CIDA isn’t really government, we’re separate”, and thus all the constraints grated even harder. Not sure if they ever looked at the logo on their paycheque, or were just simply in denial that they were now “the man” that they wanted to rage against.
However, the “problem of shifting priorities” issue is not as settled as the editors would have us think. Ministers haven’t seen it as a problem; Prime Ministers haven’t seen it as a problem either. In fact, they’re the ones who shifted them. More importantly, up until about 1999 or 2000, one could make a pretty good argument that the bureaucrats didn’t even see it as a problem because they were really good at ignoring the priorities of the day. The problem was that starting in 2000 and continuing through to 2008, the technical and administrative priorities for operations (aid effectiveness, country concentration, sectoral concentration) DIDN’T change, the pressure didn’t alleviate, and CIDA actually HAD to change, whereas in the previous 30+ years it just waited out a change in Minister or a change in government, while merrily doing exactly what it had been doing the year before.
But to argue that the decision to merge the two departments was an institutional solution to those problems is almost completely false. I don’t doubt there was some spin to take some of the credit against those reasons, but the Government decision-makers didn’t see those issues as actual problems, except in the general sense of CIDA priorities not adequately matching broader Government of Canada priorities. The solution to merge was really about three issues just as it has been about the same three issues in just about every donor that has done the same or any time it has even come up as an option in Canada — bolstering the weight of Foreign Affairs abroad (they now not only have a single “self-interested” voice, they have money to back up their presence); solving the supposed incoherence between narrow development policy and broader macro foreign policy; and achieving efficiencies of scale (many of those popular donors abroad that are integrated also have lower costs because they have 1 set of enabling service providers, not 2 or 3 or 4). The OECD used to publish a guide to “managing aid”, and it listed those as pros of the model adopted.
However, I do think the editors are absolutely right about their conclusions:
A more fundamental “rethinking” is required, linked to a national conversation on the topic. Why do Canadians provide foreign aid? What is its role in the international arena? How is Canadian aid delivered and who benefits from it? How does, and should, aid relate to other foreign, security, economic, and commercial policy priorities? Where and how has aid been successful in improving development prospects? Conversely, what persistent weaknesses are associated with aid policy and practice? To what extent can these weaknesses be identified, addressed, and corrected?
NGOs have said the same thing repeatedly, as have many activists on the social scene. The part that is lost in that “wish” is that once opened, that can may not contain the worms everyone expects.
For example, as I expect the subsequent articles will address, the link between altruism and aid is not as obvious a conclusion as one might think and I look forward to that section the most. Often the NGOs only preach to the converted and thus think there is widespread support for altruistic aid. Then when the rubber hits the road, such as a national consultation on aid effectiveness, they find that most of the people tell the Minister that “change is needed” as long as it doesn’t affect their specific funding. DFAIT and the broader government priorities for greater attention to commercial interests did not spring out of nowhere, there is a strong and vocal group, particularly out west, that supports that direction quite heavily. It is also more in line with some of our like-minded non-Nordic partners like the U.S., Britain or Australia.
At any rate, I’m hoping the individual analyses is more illuminating than the above sections quoted, but regardless, it will at least be interesting reading. I don’t have the luxury of the detailed research that they have, so my views are more potshots from the cheap seats, but at least I’ll be candid while giving an alternate perspective.
