Humanitarian aid: changing the paradigm and living with trouble

“Trouble  is  an  interesting  word.  It  derives  from  a  thirteenth-century  French verb meaning “to stir up,” “to make cloudy,” “to disturb.” We—all of us on Terra—live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid  times.  The  task  is  to  become  capable,  with  each  other  in  all  of  our bumptious kinds, of response. […] that  is,  we  require  each  other  in  unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles.” Donna Haraway[1]

In December 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, ten international aid organisations signed a letter[2] in which they made a commitment to regularly measure their environmental impacts, reduce their carbon footprint and implement projects with a positive impact. Despite the global climate crisis and the collapse of biodiversity, some argued that such a commitment should be less restrictive or even that it was inappropriate. It is interesting to look at the arguments that were put forward in this respect because they reveal tensions that are likely to emerge when this initiative is pushed further and when, eventually, there is a genuine transformation of the way international aid organisations operate and cooperate.

First of all, life-saving, which is at the very heart of the humanitarian mandate, is often weighed against the low impact that field activities have on climate change compared to the responsibility of polluting oil companies, the transport sector and industrial farming, to mention only a few. The urgent need, for humanitarian organisations in particular, is not to respond to the ecological crisis, but to mitigate its effects. Such a position is not consistent with the essential humanitarian principle of ‘do no harm’ or the crucial need for aid organisations’ activities to be coherent. Over and above the ethical issue of protection, this lack of coherence makes advocacy messages and the value of field activities unclear and raises questions about organisations’ legitimacy. To a great extent, their legitimacy is based on their ability to provide solutions and to act as a mouthpiece for independent and alternative voices in order to meet the current and future challenges facing the planet. What is more, waiting for donors and/or governments to impose ‘environmental norms’, when there is no guarantee that this will happen in the near future due to the many different interests who constantly oppose such a development, effectively amounts to losing control of what needs to be transformed, and how this should happen. It is a way of contributing to the status quo (of engaging in business as usual), which means that genuine measures to protect the environment are constantly put off to a later date.

The use of ready-to-use therapeutic foods to treat severe acute malnutrition among children is particularly enlightening in relation to these issues. These products contain ingredients that come from monocultures, such as palm oil, which reduces biodiversity. What is more, their packaging and transportation cause pollution and produce greenhouse gases. And yet, research[3] has shown that it is possible to reduce the doses used and still achieve a comparable therapeutic result, while being particularly careful to take into account socio-economic differences between children. In other terms, it would be possible not only to treat more children, but also to reduce the environmental impact of the treatment. As such, operational research should be focusing on ingredients that are locally- or regionally-produced, in accordance with agro-ecological principles, and varieties that are both able to adapt to climate change and effective on under-nutrition.

A second argument is that limiting the capacity of humanitarian organisations to take action via the reduction of ‘humanitarian space’ (less travel, fewer experts in the field, limited access), which has already been significantly undermined by the politicisation of aid and counter-terrorism measures, would be a major risk for NGO mandates. Here we need to distinguish between the imposed reduction of humanitarian space, which should be denounced, and the deployment of experts which is colonial in nature. On the contrary, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced aid organisations to promote local and regional expertise. In more general terms, the co-construction of platforms of local actors for humanitarian coordination can counter the dangerous confusion between the actions of aid organisations and the interests of the states who supply the funding.

Fears about limiting operational capacity are also based on the environmental cost of development that would accompany the implementation of technologies that would emit greenhouse gas emissions and reduce biodiversity[4]. In response to these fears, the ecological emergency can be seen as an opportunity to revise the sometimes ambiguous concepts of ‘intervention’, ‘localisation’ and ‘triple nexus’, which link humanitarian aid, development aid and peacebuilding. This change in paradigm is far removed from ‘technological solutionism’ or the idea that the game is over, that there is no longer any point trusting each other and that “only if what I and my  fellow  experts  do  works  to  fix  things  does  anything  matter.”[5] Rethinking the way we understand the ecological crisis contributes to ‘decolonial ecology’ which, as suggested by Malcolm Ferdinand[6], “is the key to living together and preserves ecosystems as well as dignities”.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the realisation that there is vulnerability both in countries who have traditionally provided humanitarian aid and those who have traditionally received it has revealed that, by taking societal and ecological issues into account more, other types of relations are possible in humanitarian operations.

When they became available, disposable, industrially-made, non-biodegradable ‘surgical’ masks, containing polypropylene, were adopted as one of the means of limiting the spread of the virus, based on the recommendations of the health authorities[7]. They were also chosen by international organisations who pre-positioned stocks in countries where they might be needed. It is worth noting that very few organisations looked into the responses and innovations that were implemented by partner countries who usually receive aid. At the same time, people were encouraged to make masks themselves. This raises the question of invisible care work during the epidemic which reproduces gender inequalities. An opposition was therefore established between, on the one hand, social distancing that helped people protect themselves and each other both in the public and private domains, and on the other, the risk of further polluting the planet and producing greenhouse gases. Over and above this opposition, two questions stand out: how can we move away from a throwaway culture in the health sector and how can each structure achieve a form of autonomy in producing non-polluting health products? As such, the new ‘One Health’ approach[8] needs to take these issues into account and must not focus exclusively on the environment as a dangerous source of diseases that can be transmitted from animals to humans.

The idea of ‘scalability’, based on reproducing performance[9], accumulation[10], knowledge as a commodity[11] and progress, needs to be revisited. These are all social representations that contribute to many of the current operational methods of the aid sector. There may be an urgent need to design new and more independent funding modalities, but it is just as urgent, if not more so, to promote different dreams and values, as has been done by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing[12] and Donna Haraway, in order to accompany new alliances. Based on their encounters with other humans and non-humans[13], they promote ‘indeterminacy’, ‘serendipity’[14], ‘latent commons’[15], ‘areas of freedom’ and ‘sympoiesis’ (worlds that are formed collectively and not alone), all of which are concepts that have the capacity to transform the conditions in which the current depredation is reproduced.

How should we take action amidst this trouble?

First of all, it will no longer be a question of ‘protecting the environment’, of ‘nature as a resource for human beings’, or of ‘ecosystem services’, but rather of collectives of the living, as defined by Philippe Descola[16], involving interdependent humans and non-humans, who, taken together, constitute the environment of partnerships to be reinvented. This will depend on a new awareness among all stakeholders, including a responsibility to create alliances with local actors, and therefore to recognise the alliances and interactions that local actors already have, in order to rethink social inequalities, including gender inequalities, and issues of climate justice.

To illustrate this interdependence, convincing arguments based on scientific studies show that changes in cultivation methods in Guinée Forestière helped to spread the 2013-2014 Ebola epidemic[17]. Large firms bought land from peasant farmers, and sometimes expropriated them, and then implemented an intense monoculture of oil palm. Though there was resistance, the landscape was durably modified due to the disappearance of a large part of the forest and alternative crops, which increased the rural exodus. The combined presence of fruit trees and the surviving trees from the forest around villages, subsequently increased contact between fruit-eating bats, who can transmit the Ebola virus, and humans. The new corridors that had been cut into the forest, and the destruction of the bats’ natural habitat brought them into closer proximity with humans, who were more at risk because of the new cultivation practices.

Even though the environmental crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic have revealed our collective ‘trouble’, they represent opportunities to reinvent solutions based on the recognition of shared challenges (as opposed to the dichotomy between victims and those who provide assistance). This will allow us to build ‘mutual aid’ via joint projects that are genuinely ecological and political, across national borders, rather than projects that are simply aimed at the environment and health.

[1] Staying with the trouble, Duke University Press, 2016.

[2] An initiative promoted by Groupe URD and Care France. Signatories also agree to communicate their results and to encourage other organisations to take action (https://www.reseauenvironnementhumanitaire.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/DeclarationEngagementONGClimat_2020.pdf). The signatory organisations are : Action contre la faim, ACTED, ALIMA, CARE France, Électriciens sans frontières, Groupe URD, Médecins du Monde, Première Urgence Internationale, Secours Islamique France and Solidarités International.

[3] Voir : https://www.clinicalnutritionjournal.com/article/S0261-5614(20)30102-3/fulltext

[4] À titre exemple, la mise en place de panneaux solaires sur un forage n’est pas neutre en termes de bilan carbone, alors qu’il apporte une amélioration des conditions de vie (irrigation, eau potable…).

[5] Donna Haraway, op. cit.

[6] Une écologie décoloniale. Penser le monde depuis le monde caribéen, Seuil, 2019.

[7] It is interesting to point out that in France, the Academy of Medecine opposed the view of the High Authority for Health in its communiqué :

https://www.academie-medecine.fr/faut-il-modifier-les-gestes-barriere-face-a-lirruption-de-variants-du-sars-cov-2/

[8] One health, une seule santé, J. Zinsstag et al., Quae, 2020.

[9] Process that accompanies the standardisation of activities, accumulating products, (e.g. monocultures), without being adapted to specific contexts.

[10] In addition to the local and global consequences in terms of the production of waste and greenhouse gases, which are not taken into account as is shown by the industrial production of polluting, non-recyclable masks, these products are a form of investment to allow organisations to grow.

[11] Apart from the fact that this knowledge is difficult to access because it is captured and misappropriated by experts, sometimes based on local know-how, it is no longer fully shared or collectively built, and becomes a commodity for donors, which is sometimes justified by a supposed lack of capacity in the field which means it cannot be used without assistance.

[12] The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton University Press, 2015.

[13] Like Anna Tsing’s matsutake mushroom or Donna Haraway’s companion species.

[14] The capacity or ability to make an unexpected discovery by chance and to grasp its utility (whether scientific or practical).

[15] Which aims to place the accent on relations of interdependence that are established between humans and non-humans.

[16] Par-delà nature et culture, Gallimard, 2005.

[17] Commentary. EPA-USA. Environnement planning. A 2014, volume 46, pages 2533-2542.