The challenges of the humanitarian sector have been identified over and over again but some problems seem to be unsolvable. In this first episode Marc DuBois and Lars Peter Nissen discuss whether there is a need to disrupt the sector and how to “clear the forest” so new solutions can be grown.
Transcript
Disruption is not a word that humanitarians like to use. It's seen as undermining, counterproductive, and sometimes even dangerous. But as you'll hear in this conversation, Mark Dubois doesn't have that problem. He comes from a long career within MSF, and today works as an independent consultant and he's a senior fellow at SOAS University of London. Mark has a strong independent voice, which is highly critical of the current humanitarian business model. Relentlessly pointing out when we stray away from the principles that should inform our work. Our conversation is based on two premises: Firstly, as we both have worked within the existing systems for decades, our ability and, quite frankly, our credibility in terms of providing new answers is limited. So we don't really try to do that; But secondly, the issue is not just getting new, fresh ideas, it's also getting rid of the bad old ideas. And that's where we can be helpful. So we try to point out some of the main problems with the current humanitarian business model, cutting down some trees in the humanitarian forest, creating space for new ideas to grow. I hope you will enjoy the conversation, and that you in between the harsh criticism, also can hear the true passion, and the commitment that drives us.
So Mark Dubois, welcome to Trumanitarian.
Marc DuBois:Ah, I feel very welcome already. Thank you very much.
Lars Peter Nissen:We have decided that the overall topic for today's conversation is, How do we disrupt the humanitarian sector, the humanitarian business model. But before we dive into that really complex issue, it'd be great if you could just tell us a bit about yourself. How do we categorise you? How do we put you in a nice little manageable box, so we know who you are?
Marc DuBois:I suppose the easiest way to put me in a box is I'm a freelance consultant who spent 15 years with Medicines San Frontier and always likes to dabble a little bit in academic ideas, I don't really have any sort of methodological research approach to it. So it's more of a freewheeling presentation ideas. But I guess I just try and get the end think about what's what's underneath the surface of things and to look at that, because that's what really matters and that's what really, you know, the sort of the drivers and incentives and things like that. And that's what I like to think about.
Lars Peter Nissen:Great. And how do you see your role in the humanitarian sector? What what's your function?
Marc DuBois:Well, you know, it's funny, the other day, someone called me a thought leader, and I thought, Oh, I don't know if I want to be a thought leader in this sector, right? Look at where the sector is going. But I look at it as disruption to a certain extent, you know, my idea isn't necessarily to blueprint the next great humanitarian action, but our our sector, and I'm talking about that, you know, the formal humanitarian sector is quite powerful, and has quite a powerful grip on power, and on the status quo, and on the way it works. And I feel that, for others to come in and be able to make change, you need to shake up the power dynamics of the current sector. And that's what I mean by disruption.
Lars Peter Nissen 3:23
Yep, so create some oxygen so new things can grow in a sense.
Marc DuBois:Yep. Clear... I've said it before, clear the forest so that new trees can grow, but don't ask me to be the one to plant them. It's for the next generation, it's for the people that aren't a product of the sector, because I'm a product of the sector.
Lars Peter Nissen:Yeah, as I as am I, and I think that that's a really good thing to get on the table before we start talking. But let's start. Great. So the point of departure for our conversation is, is a HPG working paper you wrote called The the new humanitarian basics.
Marc DuBois:First, that title, I just gotta say. The whole point is, I don't want to say what the new humanitarian basics look like. What I want to say is what the old humanitarian basics look like, and how bad they are, to a certain extent. For me, I go back to a fairly, you know, old school, you might say, definition or way of conceptualising as humanitarian action, that's a response a human response to, you know, lead by compassion for others who suffer. Who? All human beings because we are all part of that human family. We use that principle of humanity. And that that response is a response to crisis. And I think of crisis as being something out of the ordinary something happens. And people need your help the local society, the local community, the local government, are overwhelmed and You know, can't respond and take care of those needs. But I look at that in a very sort of time sensitive way. You know that once it becomes something like protracted crisis, and this is a big part of that paper that what protracted crisis itself is an oxymoron, right? Once it becomes protracted, it's no longer really a crisis in that sense. It might have very high levels of immediate need that we would say our humanitarian needs, like high levels of mortality and malnutrition and things like that, or instability. But once they become structural, the tools that we're bringing in, you know, the short-termist approach are in opposite and inappropriate at that stage. So for me, it's much more about thinking of humanitarian and action in that in that short term approach, recognising that there are long term problems, structural problems, underlying problems, and those need to be dealt with by other actors, because I don't think humanitarians are the ones that should just stretch and cover all of these needs.
Lars Peter Nissen:Great, but then we do have a problem, don't we? Because I think 80% of humanitarian expenditure takes place in protracted crisis.
Marc DuBois:Yeah, it's a pretty big problem that. Look, some of it, some of it is Where does that spending come from? And where exactly are you operating? You know, a lot of... you know, a large percentage, like 75% of the spending, and you would know this statistic better than I do is conflict related. But often we aren't in the conflict country, we're in the neighboring countries where there's peace. But yeah, that we are in South Sudan, Central African Republic, Somalia, you know, Jordan, and Lebanon and, you know, if we're going to be in these places for a decade or two decades, what does that mean for humanitarian action. We just don't seem to ask that question seriously enough. It should mean that we're in the wrong place. Or, for me, what it should mean is that we take a back seat, because what I don't want is for the immediacy, or the urgency of that need to sort of trump or displace, in perpetuity, to eclipse in perpetuity, the important need, right? That peace, stability, development, livelihoods, rule of law, all of that stuff. Simply you stop seeing it if you're just looking at the surface of immediate needs of mortality today, of malnutrition and those things, and it's, I think we should just take a back seat and let those other actors be the ones, you know, sort of responding. And then we clean up, yeah, we clean up some of the immediate stuff, but that's not the important stuff when you're in that kind of a situation. It's the important stuff where, you know, in the aftermath of an earthquake.
Lars Peter Nissen:So basically what you're saying is, we are an ambulance, and we should not pretend to be social services.
Marc DuBois:I think to a certain extent, yeah, the ambulance analogy isn't always a great one, either. But yes, I think, you know, there's something about the rescuing of an ambulance, the saviourism of an ambulance that I don't really like, because often, we are actually acting as surrogates of a state, and providing what are essential state services for long periods of time. And that's not really what you think of as an ambulance service. That's more of the Ministry of Health Service. The the second, the second problem with the ambulance thing, I think is, you know, imagine you came to an island, 5 million people and no services, would you set up the ambulance service first? Would you set up the emergency room of a hospital before there were a hospital? And in some ways you would if you were only looking at saving some lives today or this week? But then you'd find yourself at the end of 20 years, and there's still no hospital. Right? And that's the problem with humanitarian action. We're not grasping that.
Lars Peter Nissen:Great. So that's sort of your first critique, that's the first part of the forest you want to clean. It's the mandate creep. It's extending beyond what we are actually suited to do.
Marc DuBois:Yes. And the fact that that is fulfilling a political role, right? The major donors don't give money into those contexts, because, you know, they're not development context, they're humanitarian contexts, they're crises. And some of that starting to change, but the fact that there's no development actors there is not an accident. And secondly, it allows the powers that be in the world, I don't want to get into defining that, but it allows a disengagement. You know, nothing is going on to resolve the problem. But you create the facade of it. The humanitarian alibis, as it's known, you know. That we send in the humanitarians and the public thinks, Ah, we're, you know, we're doing something about that problem over there. And in fact, we're not doing something about the problem. I don't mean to demean the idea of band aids. When you need a band aid when your child has malaria, a band aid or treatment for that malaria is a really good thing, but not in perpetuity and not as the only mode of intervention. And that's what it's become. It's become an excuse.
Lars Peter Nissen:So we do things we shouldn't do we let ourselves be instrumentalised for political purposes?
Marc DuBois:Yes.
Lars Peter Nissen:Are there other parts of the forest we need to clean?
Marc DuBois:I think in some ways, even a deeper part of the forest, you might say more of the bedrock, you know, gets down to some of the mentality that that that is, in some ways part of the the genetic or the DNA, the makeup of humanitarian action, and that, again, I'm going back to the formal sector, but I believe that to a certain extent, to a great extent, our recruitment and our funding is dependent on a hierarchy. A hierarchy of where we are certain nations are developed and we've resolved our problems, and we know how to do things, and we have all this expertise and we are going to save you, the people in nations that are led by incompetent or violent or malevolent leaders who don't care about you. You people are helpless, you're defined as victims as patients, as... you know, that that hierarchy, and I think it's a very, very fundamental one. I think it has a lot to do, as I said, with the recruitment, and the reason why people join, is to go save lives, whether they express it that way or not, but also the way in which our money that comes from a public and what it's based on, and the justification even where governments might very consciously, the politicians might very consciously, be engaged in soft power, and understand that they, they don't really care about what they're doing, the money is being... is to achieve a political purpose. But the reason the public allows that is this idea that, you know, we're wealthy, and we need to help these other countries, they're too poor to help themselves into too incompetent, too corrupt, too violent, all that stuff. And that is a very fundamental building block of the way in which it's that myth that is quite problematic, I think, and quite deep rooted.
Lars Peter Nissen:And so why did you join the sector?
Marc DuBois:Ha! I was naive. I actually, you know, if I were to trace back my history, I first I came out of the university, I did development work, I was a Peace Corps volunteer, United States Government Peace Corps, I worked in rural development chicken raising out in rural Burkina Faso. And what I saw then was, this is not about technical transfer, this is about political rights. And I studied the politics of humanitarian action, I'm sorry, the politics of development and then I went to law school. And that was with the idea of using rights to empower people. And development for me was horribly complicated. I wrote a paper back in nineteen ninety-one. It was published in 91. I wrote it in 88. And I'm literally coming around to it again, the idea back then, and it was a bit new back then now it will sound old. But just that development is a way of subjugating what we call the Third World, it was a way of saying we're developed, you have to catch up to us, and we're gonna, you're, we're gonna help you do that. And we're going to try and make you into our model. And of course, by the time you get to where we were, we'll be 20 more years ahead, and you'll be, you know, forever trying to catch up to us and inferior because of it. And I've actually come back to that, but I left that, that moral quandary of development work for what I consider to be beautifully simple. You save lives, and I really believe there's no politics around that you're just saving a life. And that's why I got into humanitarian work. And I thought, this is simple. If people are suffering, I have a moral obligation to help those people who are suffering as a fellow human being, and I help them and that's why I got into it. And I am now exiting that, and I don't know how to exit, uh, you know, these are life choices. But I look at it and I find it quite troublesome. You know, it, you know, and we're speaking now, you know, a couple of weeks after the absolutely brutal murder of George Floyd, which is put racism and, within the sector, that conversation we always avoid around, you know, decolonization, you know, the paternalism of the sector, things like that is now at the forefront again, and, you know, you finish 15 years at an organisation like MSF, and you start to think, Yeah, what was I a part of? Right? Of course, I'm proud of the work that that organisation is able to do, but is it humanitarian? Or is it just good relief work, good band aids? But is it really humanitarian if the principle of humanity gets trampled in the name of delivering the band aids because I don't think that you can be as paternalist and as neocolonial as our sector is, and call yourself humanitarian, given the meaning of humanity. Right? The principle, if people aren't being treated as human beings, you won't be able to do some good for them. If McDonald's came and distributed food to people, I'd say that might be a good thing. You know, depending on what you think about the quality of McDonald's food, but you know, if people need that food, okay, or blankets or whatever, but that's not quite the same thing as being humanitarian, right?
Lars Peter Nissen:No, I agree with that. I started my career back in 89 in El Salvador doing during the war there as... we call it Peace Guards, accompanying displaced people.
Marc DuBois:Oh yeah yeah yeah.
Lars Peter Nissen:And I remember my boss back then... we were having a conversation where I was sort of slightly mocking his planning ability and I found him to be a very sort of unstructured, borderline unprofessional Individual at times. And he looked at me and he said, You know what, we never pretended we knew what what we were doing, but we knew what we wanted. And that clear sense of purpose, and focus on the political or the disruptive nature of humanitarian aid, rather than the more technocratic version, and that very heavy at times administrative agenda we see today, I think, that has always stuck with me. That saying, we, you know... are we today in a situation where it's the other way around, where we know what we're doing, but we don't know why--we don't... we forgot the purpose. But we know how to write smart indicators, and an up front frame looks great, and the audit is clean.
Marc DuBois:Now, that's an interesting comment coming from the leader of a ACAPs. You know, an organisation that would, I would argue, is designed to provide information so you can do things--so you can do things the right way, so you can do things better. But of course, there's this whole thing of you know, there's a big difference between doing things the right way and doing the right things. And that's exactly what you're, you know, what you were talking about there, right? That when we get obsessed with doing things the right way. And the sector is obsessed with that and is completely lost track of the ethical question at the centre: Are we doing the right thing? And are we doing... You know, that ethics, trump's... you know, we treat them as sort of... where they counterbalance them, right? You can act paternalist and neocolonial if it's... if you're able to deliver a, like, enough benefit, and I just don't get that. And just to say, over a protracted term, right? If this house catches on fire right now, I do not care if I'm treated like a victim. I don't care if someone beats the door down, yells at me to shut up, throws me over shoulder, grabs me, my wife, my kid and drags us out of here, right? And I'm saying, save my passport, save my computer. You know? I don't care. You know, that's the way... but to do that for 20 years, right? They take me to a shelter, they give me some food that give me some blankets. I don't... that's fine. That counterbalance is not to be measured in an hour or in a week. But if 20 years later, I'm still in that shelter, and I have no choices over my life, and I'm still being delivered food and delivered blankets, then there's something fundamentally wrong and my life will have been degraded because of that. And that's what I'm getting at that what is the right thing to do gets displaced in perpetuity. You know, I've said that before.
Lars Peter Nissen:Yeah, I was just wondering whether you... You sort of made reference to, "That's an interesting comment coming from somebody who workes with ACAPS", but I mean
Marc DuBois:yeah, that's exactly...
Lars Peter Nissen:...like that debate coming from us, right? Because our if you think about our slogan, it's "See the crisis changed the outcome". Right? "See the crisis, change the outcome". So it's not just the technocratic bit about measuring the right indicators and finding that data and... What it's also about, having eyes on decision making. It's not about controlling that decision. But it's about constructing an environment from where the right solutions can emerge. Yeah, so for me, that is a very strong link. And I think, what has for me, what has what has been a very humbling experience, I think, is having worked with ACAPS for a decade now, I have had to really go back and revisit some of my previous professional experience in terms of thinking through whether I actually knew enough about what the heck I was doing, or whether I was on autopilot. And that has been at times painful journey. But a very healthy one.
Marc DuBois:Yeah. You know, autopilot's an interesting term, because one of the things I've been thinking about is less autopilot. But sheltered, right? You know, acting within an organisation where we have, you know, enormous differences of opinion and fights all the time and that creates the... an atmosphere in which you think you're being challenged and in which ideas are circulating, and they, they battle it out. And yet, when you take a step back from it, you start to see that that the diversity... there were differences of opinion, but there are very little in a way of diversity of opinion, right? And how do you start really getting voices and ideas into a sector that really challenged that sector, right? You know, from... because for me, they have to come from outside the sector within the sector. Even though there are lots of different ways of doing things, we still, you know, we still have a way of viewing things overall, and some very, you know, some assumptions about what's good, what's bad how we do things. I think it's kind of that same thing of being on autopilot, but it's just being inside a sector or an organisation, which is sort of like a subsection of a sector, where you aren't being challenged, right? And and some of the papers that I've written, you know, try and deal with that. How do you, how do you... that's what disruption is, right? Where ideas and... very hard for them to come from within a se... from within a sector.
Lars Peter Nissen:So Marc, I'd like to pick up on that point about being sheltered inside organisations. And because I've sometimes heard you make the point that we don't attract the best and the brightest in the sector.
Marc DuBois:Yeah, I guess I usually hold up myself as an example. You know, if I were in a law firm in the United States (I trained as a lawyer)... if I were in a law firm in the United States, would I have risen up to being a top partner? The answer is no. In one of the preeminent, you know, humanitarian organisations in the world, Medecins Sans Frontieres, I was able to make it to being a director. I wonder what that says about the organisation? And part of it is just simply that we are approaching levels of complexity that we tend not to be well placed to deal with. You know, the... it's very interesting the way in which the sector, you know... you come up through an organisation, and you're almost always managing something that is bigger than anything you've ever managed before. And it... I just find that, that we aren't able to compete with some of the more creative, you know, some of the tech industry now, but also the banking and the law firm industry, you know, that just that that's huge syphoning off of talent, and I think we need to figure out how to attract that talent. But it's not... talent isn't sufficient if talent is operating within a silo, right? And I think what you need, and what builds, you know, that that capacity to really think about the sector and the problems in front of us, is to have people from outside, you know, challenge that and to really have those engagements, and we just don't... we so rarely have that in humanitarian action. A good example is, I will be invited to an organisation to challenge their ideas, right? But I'm very much a product of the sector. And the fact that my ideas are challenging for the sector is sort of the first degree of challenge because it's just somebody's thinking differently within the box of the sector, right? People in the sector, look at it as out of the box thinking, but if you were out of the sector, you would very much look at it as in the box thinking. It's very much in the box thinking. And you know, and I, you know... I am a senior fellow over at SOAS in the Department of Development Studies, at the School of Oriental and African Studies at University of London, and, you know, the academics... the stuff I talked about now, academics talked about 20, 25 years ago, right, in terms of some of these challenges to the power dynamics and politics and things like that. And... what the problem is, though, they haven't translated their way of talking about them into anything that any humanitarian can understand. You know, you might, you know... in every in every agency, there's two or three people who read those reports from academics. And that's it. The operational team is not reading those, they're reading a ACAPS reports. They're reading, you know, the latest things out of WFP and OCHA and things like that. So I think it's that combination of sort of really needing to bring in diverse, top level talent, and then for that talent to be engaged regularly beyond the sector. And, you know, it's not just for an intellectual exercise, it's because in the problem, in the, in the countries where we work, and work for 20 years, the biggest problem is peace, the second biggest problem is development, rule of law, governance, you know? Immediate needs are like the 10th biggest problem. And yet we don't engage with the other people. It's not like engaging with, you know, chemists busy with, you know, some rare, you know, alloy in the outback of Australia. We're talking about engaging with the other people who are right there. I had a fantastic conversation with a... someone working for International Alert. You know, a community, a conflict... you know, a group focused on community conflict in Congo. And I thought, Wait a second. Humanitarians and this organisation have been overlapping for a decade here in Congo, we don't talk to each other. And they really saw the conflict at community level through a different lens than we did. And yet we didn't even have that level of contact. We don't talk to the Catholic Church, you know, in a place like, you know, where the Catholic Church is a huge actor. We, you know, we talked to OCHA, and you know, we talked to the sector, it's... we don't even talk to the for profit development and humanitarians working in a place like Pakistan with a $1.5 billion a year budget, right? And we don't know what they're doing. And they don't talk to us. But it's just... I just feel like it is... we need to get out of our box.
Lars Peter Nissen:Great. So let's just have a look at the at the forest.
Marc DuBois:Yeah.
Lars Peter Nissen:Right, we were cleaning a forest and so you're basically saying, We overstretch and get into business we have no business being in, we're letting ourselves be instrumentalized by political actors, rather than truly being humanitarian in what we do, we are essentially colonial in our mindsets, so a bunch of Western people running around telling the rest of the world how to suck eggs (and by the way, we are the mediocre ones from the west doing that not the best and the brightest) and finally, we seem to be stuck in an echo chamber, where we've been for for 20, 30 years. Is that a fair recap?
Marc DuBois:I think it is a fair recap in some ways. I would say, though, you know, it's a stereotype. There are so many exceptions. And there are new people coming into the sector. It's not all white, male and pale these days at that... even leadership levels, but still, by and large, it is a Western driven sector in terms of its its finances, in terms of a lot of its decision makers, and in terms of its, and I think most importantly, its underlying mentality. Yeah.
Lars Peter Nissen:Great, no, I just want to make sure that we have some space here in the forest, because we're now going to move on to head discussion, which is around disruption, which what we wanted to talk about. We've done a fairly brutal diagnosis of what some of the problems are. And what I find striking about us as an industry is that we we will happily sit and listen to this i... For me, I remember listening to to Mary B. Anderson with her fantastic work and have deep deep critique some really deep cuts, you can take your Alex De Waal criticism of undermining political accountability... I mean, it's not like we haven't heard troubling examples from people who really know what they're talking about. But we are we are unchangeable apparently.
Marc DuBois:That's where it gets interesting, isn't it?
Lars Peter Nissen:Right. I think so too. And I was really happy that you you agreed to having disruption as the top line for this discussion, because I think we sometimes shy away from from talking about disruption, because it's such a disruptive process.
Marc DuBois:Yeah.
Lars Peter Nissen:Right. So we are very soft. And I think we are soft because we are afraid of losing what we have. Not at a personal level, I think, but as the humanitarian sector--as a public good, as something that really makes a difference in some people's life. And I think that, that's why we sometimes hold back. But I think what you and I have agreed today is that we're not going to hold back. So let's blow up stuff.
Marc DuBois:That sounds good. Right.
Lars Peter Nissen:And so, one way I think we see this, this sorry, Marc, go ahead.
Marc DuBois:No, it just... I think also at an individual level. I think there are certain things that you see a certain constancy in the sector and you realise it might not be conscious decision making. But, you know, I think a lot about the sector... I think you can explain a lot about the sectors, in some ways, you would explain a lot about the banking sector by the incentive of an individual banker to make a lot of money by doing it certain things, and those are the things that end up being dominant right? In our sector, it's not necessarily about money, it's about the currency or the reward of feeling as if you you're making a difference. And that's why people join the sector. And they can... they have to have that little dose, it's like a drug, of I made a difference today, I helped save the world a little bit today. That's certainly not a bad thing, right? But what happens when it piles up as a sector? And that's where you get into these things where the entire sector agrees that it needs to be more accountable to people, it needs to let them be more in control. But if you do that... what's stunning about the sector is that we can all agree it's a good thing, and then not get there, right? And this is what you just talked about, about how we want to change, we have lots of reform and transformational processes, but we don't change. And one of the things that's very much the glue that holds it together is, I need to... I don't want to hold on to power because I want to be powerful, I want to hold on to power because I need that fix that dose of the drug called, I helped make a difference today. And that's why the underlying... that sort of paternalist mentality is so difficult to shake. And that's why even just giving up power is so difficult to shake, because it's, I need to have my say, I need to be able to do these things. So that's one of the things I try and get at when I think about this.
Lars Peter Nissen:I agree with that 50/50. I agree with you that one of our problems is that we think of ourselves as the good guys. And that's just not healthy. And and I think you're right in the way you talk about this need, the fix the need to feel useful, and how that piles up. Where I don't agree with you is on the, that that's why we won't let go of power. Nobody lets go of power. I think the fundamental problem is that we think we should let go of power... and a very good example of that is this report that ODI put out, which was called Time to Let Go. Nobody lets go. Nobody in the history of the world has abdicated and said, Oh, now I should be put out of business. That's not how the world works. And when... the reason I like to talk about disruption, in spite of that, also, it is painful to talk about disruption because it means thinking about, for example, if you look at what what just happened with Oxfam, where they had to let a huge number of peope go and shut down in a number of countries. None of us want to see that. That's a fantastic organisation doing great work. And that's really shitty.
Marc DuBois:Yeah.
Lars Peter Nissen:That so... disruption is also... it's not a pretty process. But the reason why I think we have to force ourselves into that space, is that that's the only thing... that's the only way things will change
Marc DuBois:Yeah, I agree.
Lars Peter Nissen:We will not let go a power.
Marc DuBois:Yeah, I agree.
Lars Peter Nissen:Nobody does. And so it is about constructing a game. It's about constructing a sector, where the outcome is that you break that power, that monopoly of power, that you break that colonial pattern that you just described. And so when I was reading through your report, The New Humanitarian Basics, some of the words you used, was that, for example, your your solution to, or your proposal to, getting rid of the mandate creep thing, the getting into business we shouldn't be in business with, is that the sector should be self limiting. No, I don't think that's how the world works. I don't think we self limit. And so I don't think we should have called that report, which was a great report, Time to Let Go, I think it should be called This Will Now be Taken Away From You. You Will Now Be Outcompeted or Disrupted by a More Efficient Way of Working. And so how do we do that, Mark? How do we how do we do that?
Marc DuBois:I... look, I think that's exactly the right question. And I'll answer it in a few ways. One, I've said this before, if you want to change the leopard spots, you don't do anything to the leopard, you change the trees, alright? The leopard is well adapted to being, you know... if you if you change the leopard spots to stripes and it's living in a forest with blotchy leaves, the leopard will simply starve to death because it won't have effective camouflage. So you need to change the trees. That's the point of that. You work on the external. Second, I think that most disruption will occur from outside and it... or it will be unseen. I think sometimes things surprise us. I think cash is kind of a disrupter that maybe we didn't understand the impact of it and how it might really be disruptive, you might say, but I do think that there are things things that we can do from the inside that might disrupt it. And one... going back to what you just said, because I think you're absolutely right. The power... we don't let go of power because we have a system that justifies our being in power. We believe that that is a benefit, that we are saving lives, that we are helping that we are... it is understood that we're good. And I think some of the things I've been trying to get at are that we aren't as good as we think we are. And that there should be challenges we should be, there are challenges to that, that should lead us into the direction of, for lack of a better term and one, I probably borrowed it from Hugo slim or somebody like that, and that is humility. Humility, right? A bit more humility. If we if we just, if we aren't world savers, then maybe we're not... I think you start to lose the power that that binds the binds us together, to a certain extent. So that's one thing. Another is, do we have the right people? And I don't mean in terms of talent, I mean, in terms of mindset, you know? I interviewed dozens of people, I hired dozens of people in MSF over the years. And I love that passion. I love people who came in and wanted to save the world. And I think now, Wait a second, maybe that's not right. You know, I've talked to some people about this, you can give people psychological tests that would basically show that that personality trait, right? And maybe the... maybe we've got, not all the people are the wrong people, but maybe just there's a balance of people we need in the sector who are not in the sector, because we don't bring them in and we don't make an effort to bring them in. Secondly, when we do bring them in... because remember what our advertising looks like, right? It's about saving the world. That's how we get our money and that's how we get our recruitment. But when we bring them in, do we educate that out of them? If you think about, for instance, the onboarding process, it's usually about building up the esprit de corps and pride in the organisation and here's some of our rules and ways of doing things. But you know, what about doing something different? You know, exactly right now, what the sector is doing with, for instance, with diversity and inclusion, right? It's having talks about unconscious bias. Why is it having talks about unconscious neocolonialism and unconscious paternalism? Those are, those are sessions you can run. Those are things that you can do to start making people more conscious about the problematic nature of humanitarian action, rather than... I understand why for for the donors, I don't agree with, but I understand why for the donors, you can't change the narrative. And that's a big problem for the organisation, right? We are saving the world, no one's gonna give us money if we start explaining just how, you know, God damn complicated it is and how full of failure it is. But internally, we need to get rid of that narrative. And we should be able to do it internally more easily than externally. And so I think that's starting to look for those ways of, you know, recruiting different types, bring in, you know... that kind of onboarding and training and keeping it going through an organisation. And, you know, being critical of people in the organisation who use those stereotypes, you know, somebody who says, you know, we don't have any doctors in that in that project. And what they mean is we don't have any international doctors in that project, even though the project has 15 local doctors. What's it mean to say, we don't have any doctors in that project, right? When it's just completely inaccurate. And we're... there's a... there's something going on there. And I think we can start to look at that language and be very serious about it.
Lars Peter Nissen:You know, I once pitched some concept for business intelligence to a group of humanitarians. And I was... unfortunately, Ben Parker, from The New Humanitarian was in the room. And I remember finishing my great pitch and Ben just looked at me and he goes, Oh, so really all you're doing is putting up window dressing in the echo chamber.
Marc DuBois:You know what? What I just said? You're absolutely right. But I'm finished talking about disruption. I'm talking about what I think we can do internally. I think we can do a better job internally. Is that disruptive? It might open up more space. If you bring in different people and you have people working on a different mindset, I think it's meaningful, because I think in some ways the sector is is a group of people.
Lars Peter Nissen:No, I agree with that. But they happen to work in institutions. And I think we have to address the issue of how those institutions are incentivized. So tell me, how do we change the incentives of the institutions, not how do we give a sensitivity class to a new staff member?
Marc DuBois:Oh, man, you really... that's not quite how I would characterise it. But I think I'll... you know what I'm going to double down on that I'm going to say the way you change the sensitivity of an institution is by having people in it who are sensitive. And you know, an institution doesn't exist, an institution doesn't create crime, an institution doesn't take a decision to be neocolonial and paternalistic, people do. So you have to change the people. I don't I don't think that answers your question. I think I just... I think it's important. You get the right people, you get the right leadership in particular, and institutions do change. I think that the other way, and it has to come, it will come from the outside. And how that comes, I think has to be almost multi prong multifaceted meaning, you know, and I think you and I have talked about this. In our own Western countries, here in the UK, accountability on organisations come through 10 different channels, at least, that are external to it, not from the inside. And how do you start building those, you know, elsewhere, you know, a media in an in an aid recipient country, journalists that know how to be critical, and understand enough about humanitarian action, how to read spreadsheets, and about... you know, all of that. They can be... that they can act. People's groups, civil society, rather than just saying, Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you humanitarians for saving us. You know, where do you get (and it's starting to build) you know, people that are a bit more critical of it. The academics in those countries, the politicians, and you know, the governments: all of it needs to be brought in, because the sector can't do it from within. For me, what I was trying to identify, the the other big idea to talk about rather, in addition to changing the people, I think we need to try and change the idea of humanitarian action a little bit and the COVID virus might help in that regard. You know, I have frequently (and you know, somewhat offensively, but the point is to be a little bit offensive to spark an idea) describe humanitarian action as like, you know, kind of a crisis that happens in a place where people's skin is brown. Because when a crisis happens in our own countries in the West, we don't call it a humanitarian crisis, It's something else. And we certainly, even when it is a humanitarian crisis, like Hurricane Katrina, that I talked about in the paper, we only go there for six months, we don't... nobody dealing with Hurricane Katrina, for instance, in New Orleans, a city where I lived for three and a half years, no one... none of the humanitarian response there, tried to social engineer... tried to engineer social and... tried to inflict social engineering from international staff, upon New Orleans, in fact... in spite of the fact that it, you know, racism, and violence and drug addiction, and health care, and education, all that stuff, of basically a fourth world standard. We just didn't see it as that role, right? You go in and you deal with the crisis, which was people didn't have shelter and access to certain things and blankets and you deal with it, then you go home. And leave New Orleans, you know, a terribly difficult place for a lot of people, where people die unnecessarily where there's crime that's off... where all those problems happen. And it is the problem for the people of New Orleans and Louisiana, the United States to deal with it. As opposed to feeling it is our international problem to go and deal with that. You look at things like that, I think there are many crises in our countries... you know, in certain countries in the West, the level of suicide among teenagers is astronomical. The way in which, just just recently, we allowed a whole bunch of old people to die because we stick them in boxes, and we let them rot there and now COVID virus came and wiped them out, because we don't give a damn about old people. Those are things that wouldn't happen in, you know, in rural Burkina Faso. You know, old people aren't shoved away to die somewhere. So, I think we've got our share of crises here but we don't get labelled humanitarian crisis, we all know what a humanitarian crisis is, and we feel that we have the right to intervene. So one of the things I thought about, let's start seeing south to north humanitarian action. Let's start seeing teams from the global south come up here and act the way that we act there. We don't talk to the people we just come in and we do stuff. They wouldn't last an hour for one, right? But for me, it's about the idea that challenge is that. You know, why wouldn't we have that? The, you know, 37,000 Americans shot themselves, I think, last year, no, died of opium... of opiate addiction, and another 45,000, I think, you know, these are rough numbers, but you know, killed themselves. Those are fairly horrific numbers. I mean, yeah, that kind of level of doing yourself in is far greater than the number of people who die in, you know, the war... a lot of the wars where we are. It's a violent death. And yet we don't look at it and we don't think about it. But let's... and the government isn't doing anything about that. These people are left. They are... you know. The idea that America is rich is not the excuse, right? And so for me, let's start changing that, from the outside disrupt the idea that humanitarian action is a paternalistic endeavour to failing countries, as opposed to a global movement to come to those people in crisis, right? And that's something different than to come help those that are too poor to help themselves.
Lars Peter Nissen:I think that brings us almost to the end of the conversation. But there's one thing I think we haven't spoken about that maybe we should have started with. And that is, in all this criticism that that we have talked about, does that also apply to the humanitarian principles? Are they outdated? Should we throw them out? Should that be part of the forest we chopped down also? Or are they actually the part of it that we keep?
Marc DuBois:I think the principles are different. And what I mean by that is that I think that the principles are a bit more like a forest itself, in terms of, they will adapt to the environment, they will change organically, they are not fixed in stone. And yet, I think their definition I... for one, to remind people, I'm a lawyer by background, and I'm an American, and United States Constitution is very short. It doesn't... it's not a list of rules. It's a list of principles. And a great example, for me is the principle, you know, the idea of democracy. We believed in democracy in the United States, 240 years ago, 250 years ago, whenever... that was a great idea of democracy. And yet at that time, democracy meant, you know, a very, very different thing. Women couldn't vote, nobody except for white landowners, right? You know, and we didn't change the meaning of democracy, we didn't change the definition of democracy, you don't need to rewrite the definition of the principles. What you need to do is allow those principles to be redefined through practice, and through through growth. So for me, that's where I'd come back to the principle of humanity, for instance, right? In, you know, Jean Pictet's and the ICRC's, you know, commentaries on what these principles mean, yeah, I think they're a bit dated. One of the interesting, you know, an interesting essay I saw in the New York Times, sorry, I'm blanking out on the name, but you know, she's a... she's basically... she's a black scholar, who talks about the fact that the civil rights movement in the United States actually gave democracy to the United States. What they had beforehand... if you don't have, you know, people able to vote on the basis of... a disenfranchisement of people's vote on the basis of their skin colour, you don't have democracy. And I think it's the same thing with humanity right now in the humanitarian sector. And we talked about that very early. We don't have a humanitarian sector until a new way of operationalizing and conceptualising humanity comes into place that is much more rec... gives much more recognition to the fullness and the agency of the people, right? And for me, that's the way the principles change, you don't need to rewrite the definitions of them, you don't need to add a principle of subsidiarity or solidarity or all of those things, you need to engage in practice that changes the way in which we reflect on those principles. And that principle, in particular, the principle of humanity, is the one that has the power, I think, to be quite disruptive of the way the sector works. Because if you go into a humanitarian organisation and say, This is a great relief agency, you know, go do your work a little bit better and be better at delivering relief, that's not quite the same thing as saying humanitarian. Humanitarian has the... it's a sector that, you know... we don't talk in ethical terms often and yet, it's a sector that is deeply embedded in moral intuition and in ethics, right? We... you know, there's a legitimacy and a moral authority of humanitarian action if you begin to challenge that. And if you begin to say to people, It's unethical what you're doing. That's not, It's a bad idea and it's ineffective but it's unethical because of the way in which you have operationalized humanity he insufficiency. We're not looking for perfection of humanity, but we are looking for a lot less insufficiency of your of your operationalization of it. Because you treat people like victims, you don't give them... no accountability to them, no agency. I think that humanitarian action is on thin grounds there and I think it is, for people, in the sector but you know, in communities, to take back that humanity, and to force it upon the sector the same way that democracy was changed, you know, by force. And that sounds like a good way to talk about the principles.
Lars Peter Nissen:Great. Mark, thank you so much for being so humanicontrarian.
Marc DuBois:I've enjoyed the conversation, if that wasn't obvious.