In my Network Humanitarianism paper I wrote that the current business model – which I labelled “Market Humanitarianism” – led to the creation of Mammoths. There are a small number of these large organisations which control the flow of resources, and through that financial control enjoy political dominance.
In the paper I emphasised the financial mechanisms which created and supported – and in fact, made inevitable – the emergence of Mammoths. Lost in the edit was an explanation of why the very existence of Mammoths is suboptimal for the humanitarian sector, and the reason why a more modular model would be an improvement.
If we look at the sector in network terms, the Mammoths are crucially important hubs because they sustain a large number of nodes to which they channel resources. However they are also potentially dangerous chokepoints, because if they fail for any reason those subsidiary nodes will suffer the impact.
If you are looking to ensure the network is resilient – that it can continue to function even when it suffers shocks – then you want to build in a certain amount of redundancy. Relying on a small number of Mammoths through which most resources must flow mean that the network overall is less resilient if you lose a Mammoth.
This year we are losing Mammoths. The UN operational agencies – our Mammoths – have been attacked by wild doges and huge chunks of their budgets have been torn out of their flanks. In the last few weeks Mammoths that thought that the good times would go on forever announced swingeing cuts to staff and offices.
This doesn’t mean that the operational agencies are going to disappear overnight, but even the UN Secretariat doesn’t think they necessarily have a future. At the end of last week Reuters carried a story that the UN “is considering a massive overhaul that would merge major departments and shift resources across the globe”.
The six-page document, marked “strictly confidential” and reviewed by Reuters, contains a list of what it terms “suggestions” that would consolidate dozens of U.N. agencies into four primary departments: peace and security, humanitarian affairs, sustainable development, and human rights. Under one option, for example, operational aspects of the World Food Programme, the U.N. children’s agency, the World Health Organization and the U.N. refugee agency would be merged into a single humanitarian entity, it said… In a series of observations, the memo refers to “overlapping mandates”, “inefficient use of resources”, “fragmentation and duplication” and notes a bloating of senior positions.
At last there’s some blue sky thinking happening in the aid industry, but unfortunately it goes in the wrong direction – as you would expect, given the incentives of Market Humanitarianism. Rather than consolidating Mammoths to create a singular Mammoth – a massive failure point – the UN should lead the way in building a modular response.
That means small and specialised units that can be deployed and configured as necessary for specific responses, operating out of small hubs which are closer to the response location, supported by shared services that operate on a subscription basis. If you need a Mammoth, you build it out of these units, then dismantle it when the job is done.
Is this easy to achieve, given the current configuration of the aid industry? Hell no. Donors prefer to fund a small number of Mammoths rather than a large number of small modules, since it seems more “efficient”.
But tat aid industry doesn’t exist any more. The management of these agencies – not just the UN, but the big NGOs – need to let go of the assumptions that their careers were based on, and see the new ground clearly. Only then can we start to build.