Along with other organisations in the formal humanitarian aid sector(1), the way in which large INGOS operate has been under challenge for some time. They have been legitimately criticised for holding nearly all decision-making in programme design and financial power at international level in their “Global North”(2) headquarters, while engaging with national and local partners in the “Global South” in sub-contracting relationships. The need for reform or even transformation is broadly defined as “localisation” – the shifting of power to the “South” and the “local.” Recently, the issue has taken on a new urgency due to practical challenges to traditional operating models posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, and moral-ethical challenges posed by a renewed focus on racial discrimination and injustices, alongside continued concerns about gender equity in the sector.
However, the dichotomous framing of the problem may in itself hinder progress. By reducing it to international versus local and North versus South, elements of what needs resolving and potential solutions are missed. Moreover, open and constructive dialogue risks being overshadowed by polemics and defensiveness, and this is unlikely to result in either a practical or a moral sense of an inclusive community. It is this concept of community that may hold the key for INGOs to lead the way in genuinely diversifying power and helping to build inclusive models both internally and with their external partners, rather than trying to work out how to shift power to a vaguely defined alternative. In looking outside of the formal humanitarian sector, and even outside of traditionally defined humanitarian aid altogether, the work of community organisers worldwide points to an alternative and purposively inclusive concept of community – a concept without borders and one which is designed to be continually built upon.
Four Keys from Community Organising
Community organising has a long history and many different variations, but it is fundamentally about building networks from the bottom-up to take action for socio-economic and political change(3). These approaches may hold the key to changes in mindset and practical ideas for restructuring organisations and operations. Based on an initial exploration, four broad pointers emerge that could assist INGOs in envisaging a future of diversified power.
A Global Practice – Beyond North and South
If 2020 has taught the sector anything, it is that crises are globalising. Confronting an immediate crisis severely impacting both the “Global North” and the “Global South” has been a sudden shock in a way that the ostensibly slower onset of the global climate crisis may not have been. It was a year when received wisdom about Europe and North America being equipped to avoid mass death and suffering was turned on its head, where we watched hi-tech hospitals run out of ventilators, and whole economies shut down. Alongside this sudden shock, the killing of George Floyd focused renewed attention on stark inequalities in the “Global North.” This atmosphere led to the questioning of whether humanitarian crises were not an exclusively “Global South” problem after all(4). At the same time, and perhaps for the first time, there was recognition that some “Global South” countries were managing a crisis more effectively(5). This is not to say that the legacies of colonialism and the resulting power imbalances no longer exist. The inequitable access to Covid-19 vaccines starkly illustrates the lack of change. However, it does suggest a continuing, and even increasing need, for international involvement in globalising crises – one in which international actors will sometimes be well placed to help in providing aid or in driving advocacy(6).
Community organising has the potential to encourage INGOs to draw their learnings more widely, and to defuse any defensiveness they may have about their role, preparing the way for a more complex, non-dichotomous future. Community organising occurs in the countries of their headquarters and thus there is learning to be gained on their own doorsteps. Even on their home turf, many INGOs may exist in a silo, forming their own networks and perhaps never engaging with the NGO sector where they are based. Meanwhile, INGOs and NGOs in the “Global South” form separate networks. In contrast, community organising is about building ever-growing networks, and though it comes in many forms, the building of ‘organisations of organisations’ is key(7). It would be innovative and likely valuable if INGOs played a role in connecting organisations in the “Global North” with their “Southern” counterparts, using their international scope and resources to transfer learning in both directions.
Networks and Hubs
INGOs worldwide are increasingly forming and joining networks, but the most innovative among them are building relationships across any artificial dichotomies. A particularly promising development is the Start Network’s plans for a series of hubs, which aims to create a ‘neutral space in which humanitarians can work together across traditional organisational boundaries to achieve common goals’, developing into self-financing bodies with their own cultures and activities, networked together through a small central secretariat(8).
The Start Network’s vision could draw on many similar models from the world of community organising. For an international example, Slum Dwellers International (SDI) functions as an ‘organic collaboration between national and local organisations with complementary skills and resources’, committed to learning from each other, while using their global platform to engage at international level(9). The emphasis is on horizontal international learning exchanges, rather than top-down technical or capacity transfer. Meanwhile in the UK, the back yard of many powerful INGOs, Community Organisers Ltd works through local NGOs and community groups, which join its network of Social Action Hubs and train people in their own neighbourhoods to take on issues that concern them(10). If INGOs seek models beyond simply creating national southern branches of their northern headquarters or relocating their headquarters to African and Asian capitals, community organising models could provide more diversified and democratic structures.
Internal Challenges – Finding the Fault Lines
INGOs face internal dichotomies too, with some stark geography-based differences in recruitment, pay, training, and progression. Many INGOs, like UN bodies and other international organisations, use dual salary scales differentiating between northern expatriate staff and those employed locally in field programmes. Differences in basic pay are further increased when other benefits are added, such as free housing and per diems, as described in a recent journal article exploring the issue in the Haitian context(11). At the same time, an emerging practice that may cause some similar concerns among both northern and southern INGO employees is the rise of gig work in the sector, a form of work which increase across the board(12). While this type of work can provide new entry points for those aspiring to aid work, there are likely to be concerns in both north and south about security of pay and employment, and opportunities for career advancement. Such potentially shared concerns could provide a point on which employees could begin dialogues across the dichotomies.
Conversations on differences in employment terms and conditions can become ‘defensive and antagonistic’, as Degan Ali points out in a 2019 interview on the issue(13). Even where changes are occurring, there often appears to be a siloed approach, with leadership and mentoring initiatives tacked onto existing models. This may result in some fresh leaders from under-represented groups, but as discussed in a recent podcast from The New Humanitarian on decolonising aid, the newly included still tend to be the well-off and Western-educated – the main difference being their passports(14). Where community organising could help is in its approaches to finding and training new non-traditional leaders and in recognising that sustained investment is needed to make this happen(15). Those new leaders hold real power and they can pass on their skills by training others, with the aim of an organisation becoming increasingly horizontal in its relationships over time. INGOs need such approaches to find the deeper fault lines in power imbalances, beyond international-local and north-south, recognising the central place of socio-economic circumstances and intersectional inequalities in exacerbating these.
The inequalities in salaries and employment conditions are, like all employment issues, deeply personal for those involved in making changes(16). Easy fixes are unlikely, especially with complexities such as concerns over poaching of expertise from small southern NGOs and “brain drain”. The article referred to above on the Haitian context explores these complexities, suggesting that reform of international rather than local salary scales may be the fairest and most sustainable solution. While further exploration of such a solution cannot be undertaken in this short blog, it is worth noting that the authors refer to other studies showing that differential salary scales can be demotivating for the expatriate staff who benefit from them, not only for the local staff who do not. Perhaps this is because such inequalities tend to lead to workplace tensions and place limits on the development of positive working relationships for everyone. It is interesting when considering this from a community organising perspective as it demonstrates that removing a real dichotomy in pay between northern and southern employees may also help in removing perceived or assumed differences between them, thus creating a stronger sense of a community with shared interests.
A possible starting point on this challenging and sensitive issue would be organisation-wide audits to find the first small steps that could be made. Here, community organising could provide a guide to conducting organisation-wide listening exercises as unstructured, open conversations(17), rather than as tick-box surveys which often reveal issues but leave little scope to explore the complexities or how the people experiencing these issues might resolve them.
Fluid Boundaries and Including Those Affected by Crises
The fourth major area where both real and artificial dichotomies need to be addressed concerns inclusion of those affected by crises. Many of those affected by crises are involved in aid work and volunteering, but they are still not sufficiently recognised as holders of power in how the INGOs involved in their crises are structured and run. There is a growing wealth of ideas and research in this area, and some INGOs have already looked beyond their fields, finding overlaps with community development, such as Action Aid’s use of reflection-action approaches with their roots in community-based participatory rural appraisal (PRA) and Freirean views of education and participation(18). There are also many untapped approaches of community organisers both north and south, and thinking beyond international-local and north-south dichotomies would enable their discovery.
A Genuine International Community?
There is much to do for INGOs in bridging both real and perceived dichotomies between the local and the international, and the “Global North” and “Global South”. The current circumstances we all find ourselves in demonstrate a growing need for genuine international cooperation, and they call for a humanitarian future where networks are fluid, boundaries are broken, and learning is shared wherever it is needed both north and south. To achieve such a future, INGOs could look to building communities beyond dichotomies and learning from community organising to take the first steps.
Footnotes and References
1. The formal humanitarian aid sector has been widely described as comprising UN agencies, major international NGOs, and the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement (for example, see ODI (April 2016). Time to let go: Remaking humanitarian action for the modern era, p.12). Traditional donor governments in the “Global North” may also be included (see IARAN (2017). The future of aid INGOs in 2030, p.6).
2. I am using the terms “Global North” and “Global South” only as a rough approximation of the issue of power imbalance in international politics and economics, while recognising that these terms are highly debatable. I am still searching for a more satisfactory alternative, and one which also recognises inequalities within states and societies.
3. Saul Alinsky was one of the founders of modern concepts of community organising and his 1972 book Rules for Radicals is well worth reading for a basic understanding of the concept. For an international perspective, Dave Beck and Rod Purcell’s 2013 book International Community Organising: Taking Power, Making Change is a useful introduction.
4. For a particularly interesting discussion of this, I recommend The New Humanitarian’s June 2020 webinar When the West falls into crisis.
5. Though it is now clear that Africa has definitely not been spared from Covid-19, early successes in avoiding the scale seen in Europe and the USA were widely reported, such as in this Financial Times article from October 2020 - How Africa fought the pandemic - and what coronavirus has taught the world.
6. ODI (April 2016). Time to let go: Remaking humanitarian action for the modern era, p. 69.
7. Dave Beck and Rod Purcell (2013). International Community Organising: Taking Power, Making Change (Bristol: Polity Press), p. 1.
8. The Start Network is made of 50 INGOs and NGOs from across the world, aiming to transform humanitarian action. Its December 2017 report sets out its vision for a hub-based model - The future of the Start Network.
9. Dave Beck and Rod Purcell (2013). International Community Organising: Taking Power, Making Change (Bristol: Polity Press), p.112.
10. Community Organisers’ website provides details of its Social Action Hubs here.
11. Lemay-Hébert, N et al (2019). The internal brain drain: foreign aid, hiring practices, and international migration. Disasters (44:4). https://doi.org/10.1111/disa.12382.
12. A particularly interesting article on this type of work focuses on technology and communications contractors recruited in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines (Ong, J and Combinido, P (2017). Local aid workers in the digital humanitarian project: between“second class citizens” and “entrepreneurial survivors”. Critical Asian Studies (50:2). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14672715.2017.1401937). A more generalised prediction of gig work in the aid sector can be found in a 2019 Humanitarian Leadership Academy report, The Future of Skills in the Humanitarian Sector.
13. Cornish, L (20 June 0219). Q&A: Degan Ali on the systemic racism impacting humanitarian responses.
14. The New Humanitarian (6 January 2021). Rethinking Humanitarianism podcast: Decolonising aid. This discussion with Tammam Aloudat, strategic adviser to MSF’s Access Campaign and founder of an initiative aiming to decolonise health is a wide-ranging discussion of many of these internal INGO issues.
15. Saul Alinksy commented that the education of an organiser required Alinsky refers to the education of an organiser as requiring ‘frequent long conferences … dealing with quite a range of issues” (Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (1972). New York: Vintage Random House, p. 64).
16. IARAN Fellow Michel Maietta’s December 2017 blog refers to these “painful” issues - Shifting the Power: A Few Hard Truths on Localisation.
17. In the UK, community Organisers Ltd place this model of open-ended listening as the first step in their neighbourhood organising.
18. Reflection-action approaches are a rich body of work with a long history. This website provides an introduction.