Haiti: agency instrospection

An incisive and thought-provoking post from Tales from the Hood, operational in Haiti:

In the first two weeks it was about visibility while the cameras were rolling. Getting your agency’s sign or T-shirted horde of volunteers in the background or foreground was the media game. But now it’s about reeling in big chunks of the real funding from the real donors. The real feeding frenzy has begun.

...Several NGOs will get their foothold in Haiti and possibly the world by playing their cards right in this emergency response. Many will remember this earthquake response as a time of winning grants and thinking through Civ/Mil issues and handling large quantities of stuff.

Read more on the Tales from the Hood blog.

Haiti round up for Wednesday 27.01.10

• Barbara Stocking of OXFAM has an article in the Times urging the private sector to abide by three principles if they become involved in reconstruction in Haiti; using local human and building resources; integrating infrastructure and services with government services to avoid setting up parallel systems; and consulting effectively with central and local officials, and the population, to avoid worsening political uncertainty.
  
• OXFAM releases a policy paper on reconstruction in Haiti, as Duncan Green posts more mainstream reflections on Reuters
  
• FEWSNet releases a note on the impact of the earthquake on food security in Haiti
• The US and UN have released 'principles of coordination' pledging to coordinate their activities 'in support of the government of Haiti'.
• The Communicating with Disaster-Affected Communities (CDAC) initiative is operational in Haiti and coordinated by MINUSTAH - they have released up-to-date information on mechanisms and an ops update.
• The Guardian offers a gorgeous and fascinating visualisation of aid pledged for Haiti compared with other disasters, courtesy of InformationisBeautiful.net

Haiti analysis round-up for Monday 25th January

There is such a lot now coming out of blogs and commentators that I thought rounding them up would be more useful.

• One piece of news: a useful summary of today's meeting in Montreal of governments involved in the response.

Below are more technical pieces from the humanitarian blogosphere (and yes I did just use that phrase). Enjoy:

• Quite a bit of comment on the Lancet article condemning the aid effort as self-serving and uncoordinated. Michael Keizer agrees that some points have a grain of truth, albeit unsupported by evidence, (the comments repay the reading on this one); Alanna Shaikh (humanitarian uber-blogger with a big following) weighs in; Brendan Gormley is covered in a Guardian profile following the very strong DEC response to the article; and a frazzled response straight from Haiti here.
  
• Dan Smith of International Alert looks at what's next for Haiti, recovery and the humanitarian caseload and the IntLawGrrls look at future administration possibilities
  
• Paul Currion argues that reinventing Haiti really means reinventing the systems in which the country exists, as well as internal infrastructure
  
• Peter Daou asks why we can't mobilise the same outpouring of aid and compassion for comparable numbers of people affected by sexual violence in the Congo
• Newsweek gives a view on the historical background to the earthquake in Haiti
  
• An old hand expresses disappointment with the media coverage of the response
  
• And an absolutely fascinating bit of advice for the military supporting the operation from a retired Marine Corps officer - sample quote:
  

'Your job is to try to get Haiti back to something approaching the way it was seconds before the quake struck. If the President wants you to do nation-building, he’ll let you know.'

ODI: Alison Evans on long-term recovery in Haiti

As our colleagues at ALNAP have stressed in their report on lessons learned in earthquakes, it is never too soon to think about recovery. This should be part of the game plan from day one. Guided by the Haitians themselves, we now need a combined vision of what genuine recovery would look like. In addition to the obvious need for reconstruction of homes and businesses, a key priority is the rebuilding of Haitian state institutions and governance.

Read more on the ODI blog.

HPG policy brief: Untangling Early Recovery

The Overseas Development Institute's Humanitarian Policy Group has published a new Policy Brief: Untangling Early Recovery. This document provides an overview of early recovery, in preparation of up-coming HPG research on early recovery, stabilisation and transitions. Its main arguments are that:

• ‘Early recovery’ has functioned as a way to classify and conceive of a broad range of activities and strategies which seek to promote recovery in humanitarian and transitional settings. However, the added value of early recovery has yet to be consistently demonstrated.
• Attention to early recovery is part of a drive to better organise international responses to foster recovery from conflict. Policy-makers should understand the opportunities and tensions presented by different approaches, including humanitarian assistance, development, and stabilisation, peace-building and state-building.
• Policy-makers and practitioners must be specific in portraying problems and proposed solutions; early recovery has served as a catch-all term for very different issues related to recovery.

Disasters: New Theme Issue on Reconstruction

ODI has published a new Disasters theme issue, Emerging Perspectives on the Politicisation of Reconstructing Conflict-Affected Countries. This issue tries to bridge the gap between academic reconstruction theories and the local practices:

Studies of reconstruction have, despite being a critical issue for many years, long suffered from an acute disassociation between theory and practice on the one hand and academic and policy circles on the other. Recent events in Iraq and Afghanistan have exacerbated these problems, necessitating a thorough and, perhaps most pertinently, critical evaluation of both the state of the debate and the state of the art. This theme issue aims to contribute to such a process of reflection by drawing on evidence from reconstruction efforts undertaken in a wide range of local contexts.

The theme issue contains the following articles:
Emerging patterns in the reconstruction of conflict-affected countries
'Rule of Law' initiatives and the liberal peace: the impact of politicised reform in post-conflict states
Insurgency, militias and DDR as part of security sector reconstruction in Iraq: how not to do it
The gift of disaster: the commodification of good intentions in post-tsunami Sri Lanka
Who owns the peace? Aid, reconstruction, and peacebuilding in Afghanistan
A very political reconstruction: governance and reconstruction in Lebanon after the 2006 war

This and other editions of Disasters are available from the BRC library, or online by emailing library@redcross.org.uk.[...].

The first contribution, Emerging patterns in the reconstruction of conflict-affected countries, contextualises the five main contributions to this issue. The overall argument that Tim Jacoby and Eric James make is that the comination of three patterns, 'marketisation', 'politicisation', and 'securitisation', has narrowed the space in which humanitarian and reconstructive interventions into conflict-affected countries are organised and undertaken.

In the second article, 'Rule of Law' initiatives and the liberal peace: the impact of politicised reform in post-conflict states, Jenny H. Peterson talks about how the instrumental use of RoL programming provides further evidence of weaknesses and contradictions within the politicised liberal peacebuilding project (since it increases security in the short term, but threatens the sustainability of peacebuilding reforms in the long run, as seen in Kosovo), necessitating reconsideration of its role in post-conflict transformations.

In Insurgency, militias and DDR as part of security sector reconstruction in Iraq: how not to do it, Alpaslam Ozerdem discusses the dangers and pitfalls of DDR in a highly complex and insecure environment such as Iraq.

Benedikt Korf et al. analyse in The gift of disaster: the commodification of good intentions in post-tsunami Sri Lanka, the perpetuation of the political economy that has driven social conflict and discontent in the post-independence years in Sri Lanka.

The fourth article, Who owns the peace? Aid, reconstruction, and peacebuilding in Afghanistan, by Jonathan Goodhand and Mark Sedra, examines how aid policies and programmes have become part of a complex bargaining game involving international actors, domestic elites, and societal groups. It argues that international donors' failure to appreciate or engage sensitively and strategically with these bargaining processes, when combined with contradictory intervention objectives, has contributed to the steady unravelling of a fragile war-to-peace transition in Afghanistan.

In the last contribution, A very political reconstruction: governance and reconstruction in Lebanon after the 2006 war, Christine Sylva Hamieh and Roger Mac Ginty examine how in general many Western states and Western-backed international institutions favoured governance programming (software) while many Arab and Gulf State donors preferred physical reconstruction projects (hardware), often with an emphasis on large-scale, high-visibility infrastructure projects. They argue that the latter were able to connect more effectively with the political culture of Lebanon.

ALNAP: Responding to Urban Disasters: Learning from previous relief and recovery operations

The latest ALNAP/Provention lessons paper 'Responding to Urban Disasters: Learning from previous relief and recovery operations' is now available. Download the report as a pdf from the ALNAP website.

ALNAP say:

We have written this paper in response to a common perception in both the humanitarian and disaster risk communities that there is a lack of guidance on disaster response in urban environments - especially if compared with the experiences and materials available on response in rural settings. I hope this paper begins to help fill this gap.

NYT: A year after storm, subtle changes in Myanmar

The cyclone that struck on the night of May 2 last year was one of the deadliest storms in recorded history. It blew away 700,000 homes in the delta. It killed three-fourths of the livestock, sank half the fishing fleet and salted a million acres of rice paddies with its seawater surges.

In many ways, just a year beyond those horrors, life in the Irrawaddy Delta has settled back into some of its familiar rhythms, the push of the planting and the pull of the harvest. It is a manageable if hardscrabble life, one that the weather controls and the farmers expect.

But something unexpected has happened, too, say U.N. officials, aid workers and foreign diplomats in Myanmar. The storm — and a following surge of humanitarian aid — might have opened a breach in the political wall around Myanmar...

Read more on the New York Times website.

IASC Annual Report 2008

The first IASC report produced for the wider humanitarian sector, and includes items on:

• 'Humanitarian reform - no longer a trend, but the way we work'
• 'Discussions on humanitarian space with DPKO'
• the Early Recovery cluster

Download the report from Reliefweb.

British Red Cross podcast for World AIDS Day

In honour of World AIDS Day, a new podcast on the work of British Red Cross peer educators in Scotland and their link with peer educators in Nepal is up on our external website.

Other podcasts include episodes on the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, and child soldiers in Sierra Leone.

ODI Blog: What does 'early recovery' mean?

The international community has long been concerned with the need to strengthen the synergies between humanitarian and development assistance and improve the transition from relief to recovery and, ultimately, to longer-term development. Over the past decade, efforts to address the ‘gap’ between humanitarian and development, such as the ‘relief-development continuum’ and ‘linking relief, rehabilitation and development’, have resulted in significant discussion but little substantive impact.

The early recovery approach represents the latest expression of the ‘linking’ debates, but to move from decades-long debates to concrete solutions and actions in the field it is important that earlier mistakes are not repeated. This would mean that more significant efforts should be made to clarify this relatively new concept both at conceptual and programmatic levels.

Read more on the ODI blog.