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Network Humanitarianism HPG Working Paper Network humanitarianism Paul Currion May 2018 HPG Humanitarian Policy Group About the author Paul Currion is a humanitarian consultant focused on system change in the humanitarian sector, with particular interest in technology. Over the past 20 years he has worked for UN agencies, NGOs, donors and private companies in a range of countries including Afghanistan, Iraq and Liberia, and in the Indian Ocean tsunami response. This Working Paper is part of the HPG series ‘Constructive Deconstruction: Imagining Alternative Humanitarian Action’. Humanitarian Policy Group Overseas Development Institute 203 Blackfriars Road London SE1 8NJ United Kingdom Tel. +44 (0) 20 7922 0300 Fax. +44 (0) 20 7922 0399 Email: [email protected] Website: http://www.odi.org/hpg © Overseas Development Institute, 2018 Readers are encouraged to quote or reproduce materials from this publication but, as copyright holders, ODI requests due acknowledgement and a copy of the publication. This and other HPG Reports are available from www.odi.org.uk/hpg. Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 The nature of the humanitarian system 3 2.1 Hierarchy 4 2.2 Market 5 2.3 Network 6 3 Describing Network Humanitarianism 7 3.1 Modular not mammoth 7 3.2 Distributed not decentralised 8 3.3 Collaboration not communication 10 3.4 Platform not pedestal 11 3.5 Relational not transactional 13 4 The trouble with networks 15 4.1 Finance 15 4.2 Access 15 4.3 Accountability 16 5 Conclusion: a way forward 17 Bibliography 19 Humanitarian Policy Group i ii Network humanitarianism 1 Introduction We are all aware of how much the world has changed by 2020, with nearly 75% of those connections having since the advent of the Internet, and most of us have mobile broadband access.1 This is communication experienced that singular moment of recognition when at a scale, density and speed that we have never seen we suddenly realise that the assumptions that we before, and it is changing everything. previously relied on in our personal and professional lives no longer hold. For me that moment was 26 July Building on earlier work on the impact of new 2007, when I read an article in The Economist entitled information and communication technologies on ‘Flood, famine and mobile phones’. The article opened society, the sociologist Manuel Castells has written with a startling message from a refugee: extensively about the rise of the Network Society, in which ‘the Internet is the technological basis for My name is Mohammed Sokor, writing to you the organizational form of the Information Age: the from Dagahaley refugee camp in Dadaab. Dear network’ (Castells, 2001). In this thesis, networked Sir, there is an alarming issue here. People are technologies drive a structural transformation given too few kilograms of food. You must help of global society, away from the assumptions of (The Economist, 2007). the industrial era and towards the patterns of the information age, a transformation in which networks What made this message startling was not its emerge as a significant (if not the predominant) form content, but the fact that it had been sent via SMS of collective action. directly to the mobile phones of two UN officials, whose numbers Sokor had found by searching The Economist never reported if Sokor received the web at an Internet cafe in Dagahaley. At that a reply, and at the time it was clear that the time I’d been working on technology projects in individual capacity to send text messages would the humanitarian sector for about ten years, and I not by itself shift power in the system. However, thought I understood the possibilities of these new for some of us his text was a sign that a new tools. Yet when I read that article, I realised that mode of networked humanitarian action would something was happening that was going to change, inevitably emerge. This paper refers to that mode not just humanitarian action, but the fundamental as Network Humanitarianism, and attempts to idea of humanitarianism. describe its key characteristics, illustrated by real-life examples. Network Humanitarianism is the future of In 2013, six years after Sokor sent his text message, humanitarianism, but not necessarily the future of the an estimated 6.5 trillion text messages were sent. This humanitarian community; this paper is a contribution was also the year that messaging apps overtook text to the emerging discussion about what that means. messages in volume, and by 2017 a popular app such as WeChat could expect to process 38 billion messages a day. These apps were being used by over 5bn unique 1 Sources: http://www.analysysmason.com/About-Us/News/ Insight/OTT-messaging-volumes-Jan2014-RDMV0/; mobile phone subscribers – around two-thirds of the http://www.businessinsider.com/tencent-wechat-q3- world’s population – a figure forecast to rise to 5.7bn earnings-2017-11; GSMA (2017a). Humanitarian Policy Group 1 2 Network humanitarianism 2 The nature of the humanitarian system It is easy to become entangled in complicated these principles;2 and a range of alternative channels for discussions about what exactly constitutes the life-saving assistance, such as remittances from diaspora humanitarian community, but for the purposes of this communities, which the humanitarian community fails paper the ‘humanitarian community’ is simply the core to consider (Donini, 2010). As a result of these blind group of institutions that refer to themselves using spots, the community is ill-equipped to identify, let alone that term. This includes key institutional donors, UN respond to, potential disruption emerging from outside agencies, the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement its (admittedly contested) boundaries. and national and international NGOs. This does not mean that the humanitarian community Not included in this definition are the private sector, is complacent; on the contrary, there is a long-running military actors or civil society groups, even though these sense that humanitarianism is in crisis. In a footnote latter organisations may partner with humanitarian Barnett (2011) lists 18 publications discussing this crisis, organisations, and sometimes support or initiate relief and that list of publications has only grown longer work themselves. Yet civil society groups are frequently since. Such discussions increasingly focus not on the the first to respond to an emergency, long before the challenges of the present, but of the future; a number humanitarian community arrives; military actors are of reports explore a range of ‘megatrends’ facing the technically humanitarian actors, since they are the main world, usually including topics such as climate change, subject of international humanitarian law; and the demographic transition, increasing inequality and the private sector has always been critical to the logistics of weakening of the nation-state. Technological progress humanitarian action. is always discussed, but usually in terms of how technology might affect the operational environment of The explanation for this given by the humanitarian humanitarian action, rather than how it might render community rests on the belief that the difference the humanitarian community itself obsolete. between the two groups is not the type of work that they do, but the principles that underpin that work: ‘to The humanitarian community does not stand apart from be classified as humanitarian, aid should be consistent the world, but is a system interacting with many other with the humanitarian principles of humanity, systems at global and local levels. Despite this, we often impartiality, neutrality and independence’ (OECD, refer to the humanitarian system without really thinking 2007). Any actor whose work is not consistent with through what the word system implies: ‘a set of things those principles – however well-intentioned – is not – people, cells, molecules, or whatever – interconnected a humanitarian actor, while any actor whose work in such a way that they produce their own pattern of is consistent with them – however incompetent – is behavior over time’ (Meadows, 2008). The critical insight considered a humanitarian actor. is that it is impossible to understand how a system works without recognising the relationships between the This is of course not an accurate account of structure of the system and its behaviour. humanitarianism. The humanitarian identity is a tribal one – self-identification as an individual and acceptance We therefore need to define the current structure of the by the collective make you a member of that community, humanitarian system before we can understand why and adherence to these principles is not its defining characteristic. There are divisions within the community, such as the distinction between Dunanist and Wilsonian 2 HPG’s project on the ‘Global History of Humanitarian Action’ has published a series of reports describing a range of these traditions; multiple humanitarianisms, some coming non-Western traditions. See https://www.odi.org/projects/2547- from other traditions, not all of which claim to adhere to global-history-modern-humanitarian-action-moving-forward-hpg. Humanitarian Policy Group 3 Network Humanitarianism is different. Coase (1937) was (Walkup, 1997). From an internal perspective, the the first to describe the nature of organisations in terms humanitarian community may appear very diverse of governance, rather than in terms of production; his (Collinson, 2016); Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) does distinction between the two forms of hierarchy or market not look much like the World Health Organisation. In was expanded by Powell (1990) to include a third, the terms of their fundamental structures, however, they are network. The trichotomy of hierarchies, markets and the same type of organisation. networks is of limited use in describing organisational structures, but it is extremely useful in understanding how Since the humanitarian system itself lacks a central modes of governance differ (Podolny and Page, 1998). authority, how can it be considered a hierarchy? Once again, we must differentiate between the structure of the system and its governance.
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