"If You Want To Go Fast, Go Alone. If You Want To Go Far, Go Together.": Outsiders Learning From Insiders in a Humanitarian Context

Abstract

A healthy global humanitarian system depends on effective partnerships. Donors, implementing actors, local organizations, and individual experts are all presented with the opportunity to partner with local actors in a beneficial manner, with the goal of best serving disaster- and/or conflict affected populations. This paper argues that lost in the current process is the mutual respect, compassion, and humility needed to establish such meaningful partnerships between the mobilizing team, or outsiders, and the local organizations and affected population, or insiders. Even with the recent emphasis on promoting the localization of aid delivery, the system has missed the mark by using semantics such as “developing local capacity,” which subtly labels the insiders as not equal to, and therefore lesser than, the outsiders. Such a relationship fails to allow those whose lives have been directly affected by disaster and conflict to have an active role in re-shaping the world around them. By relating the impact of a personal experience in Western Darfur, Sudan, and examining the experience within the partnership system approach, the author shows that outsiders who do not build adequate partnerships fail to respect the affected population, and thus fail to learn from them. What needs to be understood about such partnerships is that the affected population, used interchangeably with insiders throughout this discussion, continue to live their lives both through and beyond the crisis, while the international humanitarian actors, outsiders, come and go as is convenient for themselves and/or their organizations. While the insiders inherently live as the experts of their own lives, the outsiders continuously fail to apply the humility and mutual respect needed to partner with these experts.

“We Need Other Human Beings in Order to be Human”: Examining the Indigenous Philosophy of Umunthu and Strengthening Mental Health Interventions

“…From a political ecology perspective, Macaulay's statement explains the way that the colonial project shatters the relationships between social, political, cultural and economic structures and the environment of the colonies (Castro- Gomez 2003;Said 1994;Mudimbe 1988). Similarly, the biomedical approach to health facilitates a strong disconnection between the human systems and the environment (McLeod 2000;Brown 1985;Illich 1976), instead installing a particular epistemology and frame.…”

Localisation Across the Humanitarian-Development-Peace Nexus

“…First, a common criticism is that local humanitarian actors simply do not have the capacity to deal with such a rapid resource transfer, largely from the Global North to the South. Whilst depictions of a capacity gap in the Global South have been critiqued as self-serving, paternalistic and colonial framings pushed by a Northern-dominated humanitarian system (Jayawickrama, 2018), often there is inadequate pre-crisis capacity, and “local organisations have enormous burdens placed on them to respond, but often do not have the skills and experience required to conduct technically difficult interventions” (Healy & Tiller, 2014, p. 4). Whilst the goal of transferring power and resources is laudable, “it is arrogant to assume that national NGOs can handle 25% of funds.” 1 If sufficient capacities already existed to cope with a societal crisis then the situation cannot be truly defined as a disaster—which is a shock event leading to losses “that exceed the community’s or society’s ability to cope using its own resources” (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, 2012, p. 9).…”

The Politics of the Multi-Local in Disaster Governance

“…This also relates to how international actors are viewed by locals in a particular locale. Some external actors have had a long-term engagement in the local and have become 'behavioural insiders' (Visoka, 2018) who work closely with insider actors, whereas others, particularly in the humanitarian sector, continue to be perceived as outsiders (Jayawickrama, 2018).…”