This article was reposted by the International Humanitarian Studies Association

This morning I spoke with an evidently motivated and capable, but thoroughly disheartened foreigner working on Somalia for an international agency. She had made great plans for the development of the sector she was entrusted with, but these had mostly come to nothing because of the non-cooperation of local authorities. Her activities were blocked by the national counterpart of her agency, which was a domestic institution which she herself had helped set up and fund. Protocol within her own organization made it mandatory for her to work through that agency which was blocking any chance for her to reach out to other prominent actors that she found worthy of support.

I’m currently staying in Mogadishu, Somalia, outside the heavily fortified airport – known as ‘MIA’ for Mogadishu International Airport by foreigners, and ‘Halane’ by Somalis – where foreigners invariably remain cloistered. I’m having conversations with artists, youth, cultural producers, local and national authorities and visiting the cultural sites of the capital. This is a particularly nice consultancy: a scoping study for a small European donor intent on spending its money smartly. Mogadishu is bursting with energy and full of promise. Because few foreigners leave MIA, and donors generally don’t place much confidence in what Somalis tell them, I’m enjoying being an observer with privileged access to my field of study, which is the same as that of the disillusioned international agency worker, whose access is barred by mostly bureaucratic reasons (no, it is not so unsafe in Mogadishu today). Here I will try to elucidate the nature of the problem she faces, which is encountered today by many aid workers; the roots of the problem lie in what I call an expectations gap.

I recognized her frustration and was thankful that I no longer work for these big aid organizations that seem incapable of doing any good, constrained by a byzantine maze of protocols, regulations and security rules, and entirely bound up in a formal approach to aid which consists of producing a flurry of strategies, proposals, log-frames, budgets and the like, and then using these to shape reality in the country of intervention by mobilizing other actors, either involved in the planning process or not, to accomplish this. Since most of the international agencies are committed to strengthening local governance capacity, they work through government agencies, and as in the case above, those rarely cooperate as planned. Why not?

The expectation of local counterparts is that they will be paid to implement these plans. In contrast, the donors and international agencies expect that, under the principle of ownership and thinking that these activities will benefit the host country and allow the implementing institutions to fulfil their mandate, local counterparts should perform at least part of the work without extra payment. They reason that staff of the national institutions already receive salaries from their government (often also funded by the international community) and that the project expenses are covered; but local counterparts still expect stipends or other fees above their salaries, and if they do not receive them, they tend to block donor programs.

An example is provided by the refusal of some Somali government authorities to hold meetings on internet, nearly mandatory for internationals in these Coronavirus times. The government counterparts insist that donors should come to Mogadishu or invite them abroad. A program where the disbursement deadline is approaching soon may thus have to be entirely cancelled because of the refusal to meet online. Most likely this refusal stems from an unwillingness to give up the advantages of travel and face-to-face meetings, including lavish stipends, luxurious accommodation and the chance to go shopping abroad. National authorities expect that once they cave-in to online meetings, they will forever lose these perks.

A neo-colonial relationship

This prioritization scandalizes international partners, but it actually reflects what may be termed a neo-colonial relationship, cast along patron-client lines by the recipients, if not by the donors. Consider this: when local counterparts advance along a self-determined path they are very rarely (in principle not) supported by external parties. Somaliland provides a macro-level example of this, a country which without external support has set up a peaceful, relatively stable and democratic state; after thirty years it is still not recognized by the international community, although it has ticked almost all the imaginable boxes of ‘responsible statehood’. The international community only recognizes states it has created itself, e.g. through decolonization or as the result of a peace settlement.

As the early African post-independence leaders learnt, following one’s own path leads to dead ends in almost all cases – literally dead when the former metropolitan power would assassinate the leader (Lumumba) who believed he could lead his society in a new direction. The only way forward is the one stipulated by the international state order. In addition, the donor wants the recipient to freely agree by recognizing that the donor’s path to progress is the only one possible. This is not cynical, this is a matter of sincere conviction of the international partner. The consensus on how to shape state-society relations has become unshakable since the end of the Cold War. The only alternative today is the Islamic state, which is cast in such repellent terms that it can only strengthen our belief in Western liberal democracy.

The example of cultural heritage policies

To illustrate this ‘only way forward; we may take the field of cultural heritage. Since colonial times, external observers have identified and documented key pieces of cultural heritage, often with very little input by Somalis. Now the preservation of this heritage becomes a priority for some powerful donors and international organizations. Of course some (mostly Western-educated) Somalis will agree on this priority, but if the initiative comes from their side there is little chance they will be heard; they will then be told that their country has other priorities, e.g. combating poverty. The initiative must come from the external parties, at best with a coincidence of interests with local parties, but also without such local support.

Now the fledgling Somali government is told that to preserve their heritage they must ratify the relevant international treaties and prepare cultural heritage preservation laws and policies. If they drag their feet because they’re not interested, or enthusiastically prepare laws and policies which the donors consider substandard, the donors will eventually lose patience and either pay or otherwise convince national authorities or do it themselves by appointing an expert who writes the law or policy. That expert, in the case of Somalia, may not be able to meet key players or visit institutions because of security restrictions and will generally write the laws or policies remotely, using other countries’ laws (often his/her own) as a template, adapting them to current ‘best practice’.

At long last comes the moment when the laws and policies are passed, and the government must now implement; now the money should start rolling. But there’s a considerable chance that key players in the cultural heritage institutions have not read the law or strategy written by the foreign consultant, as they have not been consulted or the document hasn’t been translated into Somali. They have been appointed to these positions (or have paid to secure them) in the expectation that they will be able to extract rent from that position, after having cooperated all along the preparatory phase. The external parties, in the meanwhile, sincerely believe that they have simply helped the country adopt ‘best practice’ and assisted them in building institutions that are necessary for modern governance. The notion that there are several possible ‘best practices’ or institutional models has become, today, almost heretic to members of the international community; but this belief is not generally shared by people outside the system, such as ordinary Somalis or their traditional authorities. There is thus an expectations gap.

The role of the diaspora

Diaspora members are often split. Mostly educated in the West, they believe that there is no alternative, no other way forward then the one prescribed by the international community; but they also understand their compatriots who do not share that belief. This puts them in a good position to bridge the expectations gap, and they are often favoured by the international community to lead the new institutions which are to give shape to the domestic society, its economics, politics and ultimately culture, in a process which we can still call modernization. But here there are two problems: when the local population sees that most positions of power are filled by diaspora, they feel alienated from the government, become convinced that there is injustice and may become ‘spoilers’. (This is the usual term for people in the recipient country who take an open stance against the modernization agenda). The other problem is that the way that a diaspora member will bridge the gap is not predetermined. Although Western expectations will be that this person fulfils the official function in a Western way (impersonal, and with rational-legal behaviour) the local community will expect the contrary, namely that he (it could also be a ‘she’, but in Somalia rarely, so I will use the ‘he’ form below) uses his position to capture rent and distribute it among his kin, family and friends.

This is simply termed ‘corruption’ in the West and seen as immoral and illegal. But in a society that is based on network solidarity (and most poor societies are) this is seen as a social obligation. Some level of personal enrichment (a big house, an expensive car, clothes and mobile phone) are acceptable, because such a person also becomes a representative of the community he supports, but not at the expense of fulfilling his social obligations. Since diaspora members often leave their families at home and have to provide for them, their position may become untenable and they may leave after a few years of self-enrichment, rejected by their local kin. Therefore, diaspora members may be unable to bridge the expectations gap unless they manage to extract sufficient rent to keep their local kin and their eventual families abroad happy while not shocking international parties by being too overtly ‘corrupt’. It is still possible for such a diaspora member to resist all temptation to fulfil what are seen as his local social obligations, and stick to the Western legal-rational-bureaucratic mode, but this will imperil his/her position in domestic society and ultimately make it difficult or impossible to bridge the gap and secure the cooperation of members of that domestic society.

It is therefore the norm that much (or most) of the international funding to accomplish the given policy goals will be spent instead on maintaining social networks and personal enrichment; little will go toward the stated objectives. The international community, in practice, condones this behaviour. Consequently, the same program or objective can be repeated again and again, the failure of previous programs explained away by the difficult environment; this is convenient for not only the domestic, but also external parties. Increased financial scrutiny by donors or by the parliaments supervising them has led to increased layers of management and accounting (in itself an opportunity for obtaining lucrative positions or syphoning off funds), and more sophisticated mechanisms of obfuscation. Stringent security rules which increasingly apply also to journalists and academic researchers (see my recent post on this subject) keep prying eyes away. In truth, donors, implementing agencies and recipients have a shared interest in maintaining this system; the introduction of new parties such as independent ‘third party monitoring’ organizations has only added new players to the fold, and is incapable of reforming this systematic diversion of international funding.

Seen from a Western taxpayers’ perspective, this system is reproachable, probably even immoral; but from the recipient societies’ perspective, it could be justified as a legitimate survival strategy. However, over time the international funding strengthens only a few players in domestic society (members of the government, of the contracting economy, local NGOs and security actors) creating or buttressing a local elite which is unaccountable to the domestic population and which monopolizes the extraction of resources from the international community. Elections change little, though they allow the population, at best, to replace one part of the elites (the political actors) with another group; elections still constitute a popular mechanism to punish or renew the political class. In short, international aid shifts from feeding into network survival strategies to one of the main factors allowing elites to consolidate their power; this generates feelings of injustice and social conflict. Altogether, aid may cause more conflict than it solves.

A hegemonic ideology

It is difficult to address this negative impact of aid because of the commonly held belief, among people who work in the international community, that there is only one correct model for state-society relations: the Western liberal democratic state, with an ever-expanding and ever more complex set of regulatory regimes and internationally decided objectives that enmesh states in a global web of obligations. This belief presents itself as an evident fact to most people, which makes it difficult to address. But it can be easily understood as the manifestation of an ideology which maintains the global hegemony of Western ruling elites. This explains why the international community spends billions upon billions in faltering state-building and development projects, such as in Somalia, even tacitly condoning what itself terms corruption. Because the systemic objective is to ‘modernize’ local societies. Indeed, local political, economic and social elites that profit from aid increasingly identify with the international values underpinning Western hegemony (of which the core element is the modern state); they identify with them because they benefit from them. From the top of domestic societies, these values spread slowly downward, as citizens become aware that to be successful in national, and eventually international society, they must adopt these values. For example, they must accept the principle of representative democracy and the mechanism of multiparty elections as the only way of choosing political representatives, even though for many centuries they have used less expensive and conflictive ways of choosing their leaders, and even though the experience of elections is destabilizing and altogether unsatisfactory.

We may note that the principle of democracy, i.e. that people participate in decisions that shape their collective life, is heavily constrained by this ‘one system’. Any choice to create different forms of democratic self-governance and community are not only met by indifference or ostracism from the one world system, but can also be declared illegal (as in tax evasion) and combated. The notion of democracy has been replaced by a system which calls itself democratic but that is structured top-down by an ideology, which makes it inherently undemocratic. This system maintains its hegemony as a belief system, counting on voluntary compliance to the ‘rule of law’ (which really is not much more than the law of the strongest, and increasingly divorced from notions of justice) and which is backed up by a rapidly increasing ‘monopoly of violence’ with an amazing proliferation of police and other security forces over the past decades. We could mention the role of Hollywood and the global media in shaping the narrative that sustains this system, and the role of the education system in propagating it among young minds all over the world. Some scope for popular participation remains – notably, the chance every few years to replace one set of elites by another – but that scope has been determined by the ruling ideology, not by the citizens. The term ‘democratic’ has itself become so emasculated that it seems another term must be sought to cover its original meaning.

It is still possible to ‘do good’

Put like this, a person who wants to ‘do good’ by helping others in more unfortunate contexts faces what seems like an invincible constellation of forces, presented here as ‘a system’ ruling the world and based on an undeclared or hidden ideology. But luckily, this ‘system’ is itself a matter of belief. Seeing through it means dispelling it, clearing the way for meaningful engagements. It really boils down to seeing oneself as an equal with others. Yes, we want to assist them because we feel we must do something about the injustice or the hardship they face, but we are also amongst them to learn and to grow, for reasons we can probably not fathom. We can ‘do good’ by employing skills they do not have, maybe teaching them those skills and learning something back in exchange. We can even do such things embedded in an aid agency, paying lip service to its systems and ideology without getting overly upset about them.

The aid agency independent of ruling ideologies, the one that sustains itself with small donations by private individuals who trust it, or by its own income, has become a rare if not extinct form of organization. But it could be revived or reinvented in a different form. The humanitarian spirit is a beautiful and worthy motivation in life, and it should be rescued from working for interests it would rather not serve. In the meanwhile, independent minds that have seen through the murky aspects of the aid industry will probably mostly remain at its edges, but that’s not such a bad place to be.