63. Spelunking

[Lars Peter Nissen] (0:54 - 2:03)

This week's guest on Trumanitarian is Raphael Gorgeu from the Geneva-based think tank Here-Geneva. Raphael must have been really bored during the pandemic because he spent the past couple of years going through every single document he could find from the Interagency Standing Committee, the IASC, over the past 30 years. We are talking about more than 8,000 documents. A colossal task. Based on this research, Raphael has written a report called Thinking about the Evolution of the Humanitarian Sector and Exploration within the World of Ideas. It's a long and interesting report, and I really admire Raphael's tenacity and grit. He describes the project as a cave exploration in the underground of the humanitarian sector, and it was a real pleasure spelunking with him. Before we jump in, as always, don't forget to share the show with colleagues and friends who may be interested. Review us, like us, let us know what you think. But most importantly, enjoy the conversation. Raphael Gorgeu, welcome to Trumanitarian.

[Raphael Gorgeu] (2:03 - 2:05)

Thank you for having me today.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (2:05 - 2:16)

You have written a report called Thinking about the Evolution of the Humanitarian Sector and Exploration within the World of Ideas. Why did you decide to write this report?

[Raphael Gorgeu] (2:16 - 3:19)

The first reason is a personal interest in digging this issue. I've been working in the humanitarian sector for the last 20 years, many different positions at the field level, at the HQ level, and I've been always obviously interested in trying to understand a little bit more how this sector has been changing over the last decade. And aside of it, I have as well a keen personal interest in social science, especially in philosophy and sociology and international relations. And step by step, naturally, this idea of a research project that could help a little bit unpack how the humanitarian sector has evolved over the last decades came up and some kind of territorial framework that I might explain in a moment developed. And I said, OK, this actually could be of interest to me, obviously, but eventually to others in the sector.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (3:19 - 3:33)

Now, it's no secret that there have been a lot of reports about the state of the humanitarian sector, about what it should be and what it is. Why do we need another report? What is your specific contribution to the discussion?

[Raphael Gorgeu] (3:34 - 4:06)

What I've tried is to bring, I would say, alternative perspective on how to look at change and to mobilize, especially what I call here the world of ideas, and to understand that if we want to understand a little bit more how the sector has evolved, we need to look at how the idea of humanitarian aid has changed as well. And I haven't seen a lot of work taking this specific approach. So that's why I thought actually it would be interesting to do so.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (4:06 - 4:10)

Tell us about your theoretical and your methodological approach.

[Raphael Gorgeu] (4:10 - 7:39)

So the overall approach I've used for this research is based on a few points. The first one and the central one is to recognize the importance of ideas on the way we read reality and we act within this reality. To make it very simple here, the way you will read a reality, the way you will think about reality will make you behave in a certain way, will orientate your action. So if you go very concrete to the humanitarian sector, I will give two examples. One, if you consider a crisis as an emergency crisis, you will orientate your action in a specific way, maybe short term, maybe focus on lifesaving. But if you see this crisis as a protracted crisis, then you're going to mobilize all the way to actually do humanitarian aid. We can take the other example as well of the negatory situation in Europe, for instance. Some organizations see that through purely a humanitarian perspective, and then your work is mainly providing assistance, providing protection to those people. Or they might see that as well as a political crisis. And then you consider your action, not only through the humanitarian perspective, but as well having a political engagement here. So this is the first point, is really to consider that the way you do things, the way you act are influenced by the way you think about the reality. So that's the first point. The second element of my overall approach is to acknowledge that each organization, so let's say each organization involved in the humanitarian sector, mobilize specific way of thinking about humanitarian action. And the specific way of thinking about humanitarian action, orientate the way they do humanitarian action. We can take many different examples. The way MSF, for instance, Dr. Woodward Brothers, think about humanitarian aid is completely different from the way UNDP, for instance, consider humanitarian action. There might be some similarity, obviously, but there are different ways of considering what humanitarian action is. So in the end, humanitarian action is a diverse concept. It's not only one thing that everybody agrees on. It's different. So this is the second element. The third element is to consider that within the humanitarian sector, each organization will bring its specific way of thinking about humanitarian aid. So it's a space where different way of reading humanitarian action confront each other. And if you step back, you can actually identify some dominant way of thinking. So this is the third element. So the idea then is to try to grasp those dominant way of thinking to understand, to give some kind of partial explanation on how the humanitarian sector have changed. And then the fourth element is to try to understand how, why those dominant way of thinking have evolved over the last decades. So that's a bit the overall approach that I've used to anchor my project, my research.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (7:39 - 7:52)

So that's very clear to me. We tell stories and those stories shape the way we see the world. Each of us tell different stories. And then we find about whose stories is the right one or the best one when we sit around the campfire.

[Raphael Gorgeu] (7:53 - 7:56)

And those stories orientate the way you act in this world.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (7:57 - 8:00)

And then some stories win over other stories and come to dominate the sector.

[Raphael Gorgeu] (8:00 - 9:47)

[Lars Peter Nissen] (9:47 - 9:53)

So not just the IASC itself, but also the agencies that comprise the IASC.

Raphael, we need to give you a medal.

Thank you.

When reading all those documents, what did you find?

So you see an expansion of the scope in humanitarian action, the broadening of the mandate. What else did you find?

So this is one example of the expansion of the scope. Another, I think, example, which is quite interesting is the evolution of the connection between humanitarian and development. Beginning of the 90s, actually, when you look at the ICRC document, there is very little discussion about the connection between humanitarian and development. The discussions are more on the link between humanitarian and peace. So let's put it that way, two separated sectors. Mid-90s, the discussions really come up on the table, maybe as well due to the evolution of the type of crisis, where there is a recognition that, OK, humanitarian action needs as well to be considered in the time that will last, in crisis that will last. We're not talking about looking at long-term humanitarian action, but considering that, OK, it will last. So how do we manage with that? And step by step, what we see is a way of, a linear way of thinking about this link between humanitarian and development.

So these ideas that humanitarian action is an object in itself, a sector in itself, is something that over the last 30 years has not changed. And we see it has some impact on how to understand how this evolution takes place.

The story you tell makes sense to me, Raphael. The shifts you describe tally with my own understanding of how the sector has evolved. But can you also tell me why this has happened? What drives the change you see?

So this, maybe I've been the part that's motivating the most in trying to understand why this evolution takes place. It's a tricky exercise. What I've tried here was not to look at each idea, each way of thinking, each context, each crisis to try to unpack the specific situation, but more to look at, can I identify trends in this evolution over the last 30 years? And to explain a bit the approach I took, you imagine that all this way of thinking and acting, you represent them as a play-doh. This play-doh, according to this way of thinking and acting, has a specific shape, specific color, specific texture. And over the last, over 30 years, this play-doh changes shape, changes color, changes texture. And to try to understand what are the forces and mechanisms that will make these play-doh changes. And what is very interesting here is that we can actually identify some forces, some mechanisms, which I consider are, to some degree, autonomous to the actor that compose the humanitarian sector. Basically, forces that are not controlled voluntarily by those actors. So I would like to give a few examples, eventually, that we understand a bit that. If you look at the composition of the humanitarian sector, so you have this dominant group, and then other actors will come in this sector. And this is two forces of opposite nature. One is that when an actor comes in a social group, this actor will be encouraged to behave more or less the same way in the social group, to think more or less the same way. So to some extent, the more actors come in, the more it's going to stabilize this way of thinking and acting. But in the same time, if there are many actors coming in, and if those actors are more diverse, it impacts as well this play-doh.

It impacts as well this way of thinking and doing. And basically, it tends to explode, to some extent, this way of thinking and doing, this play-doh. And this is, I think, what we can see a lot over the last few years, with an explosion in terms of the number of actors in the humanitarian sector, coming from very different perspectives, from very different countries, cultures, and so on. That's maybe one reason that can explain that sometimes we may not recognize what is humanitarian action anymore, because it goes a bit everywhere.

That's really interesting. Try to make that concrete. Who are the new kids on the block? And what do they want?

Well, the new kids on the block are obviously organizations, what we call the Global South. I will insist a lot about players in Asia. I will insist a lot as well on some national governments.

Asia is, again, I think, a very good laboratory of what could be the humanitarian action in the future. Look at the BRIC countries, to some extent. China, eventually. We've been talking about China for quite some time. Do we see them more? A little bit more. Maybe we're going to see them more in the future. We speak now about the private sector as well. And those players were not so much part of the discussion 20 years ago, at least part of the international humanitarian system. Now they are. Maybe not enough for some. But in comparison to 20 years ago, yes.

And what is the different story they're telling us? What is it they want?

So your main message is actually fairly conservative. We have some anchors. We are a sector organized around principles. You didn't say that, but that's what I was thinking. We have decided to split our world up into domains, and we have our careers around those domains. So we're not going to touch that either. So we are fairly change-resistant system is what I hear you saying. Do you think that's right?

You're right on the fact that changes over the last 30 years have never been radical. That has never happened over one night. It takes time. Some ideas are more difficult to challenge than others because they are so internalized. But nevertheless, there is an evolution over the last 30 years. So change did happen. Yes, slowly, but not radically, not from one day to another. Absolutely.

So after all this work, after going through all of these documents, where do you land? What was your main conclusion?

So some of the thinking I'm proposing at the end of this paper, one of them concerned the room for man-up, the possibility for actors to actually drive change. If we assume that there are actually forces and mechanics which are autonomous to actors. When I say autonomous, I'm not independent in the sense that they are produced by the relationship, by the interaction that actors have amongst themselves. I mean, you're in a group, the group itself creates some rules. But if we do assume, or at least for the purpose of the reflection here, that those forces and mechanisms autonomous to actors actually exist, then you can actually question, but what is left to actors to actually drive change in a voluntary manner? And this is a question that I leave open. I don't want to say that there is absolutely no margin for actors to drive change. We have many examples of organizations bringing up new ideas, the question of localization, the question of protection. You need some people, some organizations to push the debate. So yes, actors do have influence, but how much in return they are as well impacted by those forces and mechanisms? We can question that. And the fact is, if you look at all ISE documents, I've never seen one discussion about how to drive change. I don't see that those discussions did not exist. Maybe they do, but at least I haven't seen that through those papers, which make me think that maybe we're not aware of those kinds of forces and mechanisms, maybe not.

Well, I can mention three documents, the humanitarian reform, the transformative agenda and the grand bargain. Those were all reform attempts, weren't they?

Maybe two points to react to that. If you look at the cluster reform, I don't think the cluster reform was, but the paper of the cluster reform was a theory of change as such. I think this was a process of internalizing the idea that the humanitarian sector needs to be coordinated between the UN, between the NGO, between the donors, keeping in mind that the ones in charge are the UN, which is something that has never changed over the last 30 years. This is a kind of very, very stable. But regardless of that, yes, you see some documents that try to, or initiatives that try to bring changes. But I've never seen in those documents or in those discussions the consideration that there might be some forces and mechanisms that we should take into consideration to drive this change, to ensure that this change will actually take place the way we want.

What I hear you're saying is that we tell a story about change, but it's not really about change. It's just another story about us.

At least we have a partial picture of how change takes place. And we play with this partial picture. And with the work I propose, it's maybe to complete a bit this partial picture. I don't think we'll ever end up to something exhaustive, obviously, but it brings additional elements to try to think on how change could happen in the future. Even though, again, I think I left open my personal feeling that our margin for manoeuvre as an actor for driving change exists. But what is interesting is to look at how those dominant social groups will evolve. So basically, today we have the international humanitarian system under the coordination of the UN, still mainly Western, even though it starts to expand a little bit more. But maybe in the future, there are other scenarios that could happen. Maybe in the future, the humanitarian sector, there won't be any more dominant social groups. You will have just social groups mobilising different ways of approaching humanitarian action and humanitarian aid. So the humanitarian sector will be completely extended. But maybe due to geopolitical change, you will see new social groups coming up that will bring their own way of looking at humanitarian action. And eventually, the last thing I would like to mention, I think this is more for own, eventually, personal benefit. Earlier, I showed the example of this play-doh that represents this idea to think about humanitarian aid and to do humanitarian action. And I think if we want to be a little bit more open, we may try as a kind of thought experiment to play with this play-doh. So we all have our own play-doh and how we think about humanitarian action. Let's try to do this exercise where we take this play-doh with our hands and we give him another shape. We give him another colour. We give it another texture and we see where it brings us. My point here being to actually challenge our own perspective on what humanitarian action is to just open the field of possibilities for what it could be in the future.

But at the same time, after having read the report, I was left wondering, what happens when you don't take money and power into account but only look at the stories we tell? Specifically, we all know there's an issue around accountability to affected population versus accountability to donors. So what happens when you only look at what the big organizations are saying about themselves? And is it possible that maybe they're telling a story designed to impress the donors rather to solve the problem of accountability to affected populations? What is the implication of this potential bias for your research?

On the first point, on the question of power, the evolution of this dominant way of thinking and acting are no stranger to power dynamics. I mean, obviously, all this is a product of interaction amongst actors. So if you want to understand how this evolution takes place, you need to dig into those interactions, which I tried to do in one part of the research. I think what is important to highlight here is that regardless of your positioning within the sector, each actor can have a role, a function in influencing those narratives. Obviously, to different degrees. That what we can call, for instance, norm entrepreneur, the one that brings a new idea to the table. Lately on the localization agenda, we can mention the Nia Network, for instance, who are really pushing for that. So they do have an influence here. But if you look at this relationship amongst actors, that is true that two are coming out very strongly. And I guess this won't be a surprise to anyone. One is the IASC as a collective, and more specifically, the core group of the IASC. So to make it short, the main UN agency. But what we can see that most of the time, they actually don't play this role of norm entrepreneur. They don't bring new ideas on the table as a collective. I want to insist on that. Their role is more the one of what I can call a critical agent, which means that if you want this idea to become dominant, you need to have them on board. Without them, the chance for a new idea to become dominant is much more difficult. So you see this key role that they play as a critical agent. And the other actor that comes up very strongly is, I call it here, the UN secretariat. So basically, the vision that is inspired by the Secretary General of the UN. When you see some kind of major push on some thematic over the last 30 years, I'm talking about human rights. I'm talking about peace. I'm talking about development. All this come, actually, mainly, or is pushed by the UN Secretary General. So their impact is actually huge. So I think it can reflect the power dynamic that exists currently in the sector. But we should not rule out the influence that other actors can have on that.

So it's not a level playing field. It's hard for new ideas to survive. And probably the ones that it's hardest for are the ones that run contrary to the institutional interest of the large organizations.

So I don't know how much it is, again, their interest, because I don't know how much they think that way. They always think that way. But in the end, yes, if you have a new idea, which is not taking getting traction from the IASC, which is, by the way, a radical idea. So coming back to this progressive approach, and if this idea challenges some more internalized way of thinking about human interaction, like the fact that the humanitarian sector is a sector in itself. Yes, good luck to have this new idea becoming dominant indeed.

Yeah, I think you see that exactly with the NIA network, for example, who broke through during the World Humanitarian Summit, did a great job in terms of extracting a promise of 25% of funding going to local organizations. And they really bullied their way in to get that out of the summit. I thought it was great. But then look at practice today. We are redefining what local means. We are finding creative ways of calculating. We are tying ourselves into prinkle-shaped knots just to keep control.

I really like your analysis, and I like the purity of your approach and so on. But if you would hand me the Play-Doh for two seconds, I'd like to reshape it. Not as a criticism, but more as a complementary way to look at the problem you're tackling so that we can learn new things. And so now that I have this Play-Doh, what I want to do with it is, I want to forget everything about ideas. I want to do away with all the little stories we tell ourselves. I want to look at a marketplace where you have five customers, the five major donors, and three providers of services. And they all begin with you and then end with something else. And then I want to analyze the market dynamics when you have a combination of what is called an oligopoly, so an extreme concentration of power on the supply side of things with only a few actors, and an oligosopony, so an extreme concentration of power on the demand side of things. And I want to forget everything about what these actors say, but just look at money and what they actually do. How does the money flow? And what are the shifts in the dynamics? I think that would be a really interesting complement to your analysis.

So I think you have a very good point on the fact that this research, which I assume like any other one, brings some elements to try to impact a situation, an issue, a reality. It's like you put glasses on the reality, and according to the glasses you use, the methodology you use, the approach you use, you will see differences. So I'm proposing one specific approach that brings specific elements. But yes, there are many others to consider. But you can take your chance and try to put these glasses through the market lens, more on eventually a liberal economy approach. I don't know what will come up out of it. But you should try. But maybe this leads to the question of accountability. You mentioned a bit earlier whether this sector is actually accountable to people who are supposed to support. It's difficult for me to answer, but the only element of answer I can give you is that the question of accountability to affected populations is a concept which is new, absolutely new in terms of policy, in terms of action, and so on. So we see more exercise now trying to get the perspective of affected population. But again, it's new to a limited level. So maybe this might answer part of your question.

The fact that we're only talking about this now is a problem in itself. But I think the deepest problem is that we actually have to define a project in order to become accountable to the people we say we serve. That should be automatically generated by the way we do business. And it should be so that if you're not accountable to the people you serve, you go out of business because you don't have any customers.

So this is where I'm always in between with this kind of answer. Because when I do this kind of research, I on purpose try not to get to have any opinion about what humanitarian action is or should be. So if not an evaluation, I try to avoid judgment. I just try to take the reality like it appears. I would not say like it appears, but as it appears to me through my research. So therefore, I haven't tried to question whether the way it has evolved is actually positive or negative because it would have, I think, impacted the quality of my work. But let's assume it is a problem. I think we can fairly say that, yes, more accountability, particularly speaking, will actually be useful. I mean, what is interesting is to try to understand why it did not happen before, what could make this happen better or bigger in the future. So to try to understand how things move on, which I try to bring some element of answers, of course, in this project.

Maybe not. But some ideas are coming up. Thank you so much, Lars Peter.

Thank you.