Why building ‘resilience’ matters, and needs to confront injustice and inequality

Debbie Hillier, Oxfam’s Humanitarian Policy Adviser (right), introduces ‘No Accident’, Oxfam’s new paper on resilience and inequality

Asking 50 Oxfam staff what they think of resilience will get 50 different responses. These will range all the way from the Sceptics (“just the latest buzzword, keep your head down and it’ll go away”), to the Deniers (“really nothing to do with me”) to the Pioneers (“it’s obvious, we’ve been doing this for years”).  But probably the biggest category would be the Unsure Interested – “well, I suspect it’s pretty important, but I’m really not clear what it means for me.”

Answering that last point is key, and at a recent Oxfam get together, a humanitarian colleague gave a wonderful example.  He spoke about a tropical storm which had devastated a rural area of Honduras; Oxfam humanitarian staff had responded quickly and effectively with water and sanitation, cash-for-work, and essential household items to help people get back on their feet. But when he visited the area, and talked to the community, he found that the problem was less about flooding, and more about agribusiness.

Local communities had been displaced by massive sugar and melon plantations, denuding the land of trees, diverting water sources and thus altering the local hydrology.  The companies had employed cheaper Guatemalan labourers from over the border, so people no longer had either land to farm or paid labour, leaving them without livelihoods and impoverished.

All the tropical storm did was to expose the deepening vulnerability of the community.  So while Oxfam’s humanitarian response helped the community to cope with the flood, it would leave them in no better position for when the next inevitable storm/flood came.

People in a waterside house raised on stilts in a slum in Manila. © Robin Hammond / Panos

A programme with ‘resilience’ as the desired outcome would look at the underlying factors for people’s vulnerability.  Critically, it would look at power dynamics and inequality (the latter extremely high in Honduras: for index geeks, a Gini coefficient of 55).  These are too often left out of the resilience debate, which so far has focused more on technical measures.  Yet Oxfam’s new report, No Accident, shows that countries with higher income inequality have populations which are more vulnerable to climate change, natural hazards and conflict.

The link between inequality and vulnerability is no doubt complex and defies simple correlation or causation.  But using language like ‘risk being dumped on the poor’ opens up a new way of looking at vulnerability.  At the international level it’s easy to see – rich countries reap the economic rewards of pumping carbon into the atmosphere, but poor countries bear the highest burden.  So whilst the impact of climate change by 2100 is estimated to cause GDP losses of 12-23% in poor countries, in the richest countries, the impact will be a range of 0.1% loss to a benefit of 0.9% of GDP.

Biofuel production and excessive speculation on food commodities is another way of exporting risk.  Food price spikes cause misery and hunger for poor people yet agribusiness firm Cargill’s profits surged during the global food crisis of 2007-8 and the US drought of 2012.

And at national level, big business and local elites can manipulate markets and governments to privatise the profits and socialise the risks. Clearly big business is not always bad but it can be.  In Peru, water supplies are dwindling as glaciers melt, but much is siphoned off or contaminated by mining companies, leaving local communities short of clean water.

The current response – at national and international level – is not good enough.  Climate change is picking up speed, food and commodity markets are more volatile than ever, environmental degradation is increasing, and more and more people are exposed to risk – either through population growth or migration. Whilst global poverty is declining, inequality is not.

States have the legal and political responsibility to reduce the risks faced by poor people, and ensure that they are borne more evenly across society.And note that equality is NOT about everyone having the same resources and support.  Disadvantaged people require more services and support simply to give them equal life chances (see pic, right).

Clearly targeted support, plus social protection, health, education – which one might call key building blocks of resilience – cost money.  Brazil is bringing down its (still high) inequality through concerted efforts by the government, including major increases in the minimum wage, and social protection schemes including a universal pension and the Bolsa Familia.  This is possible in part because there’s enough money – the tax-to-GDP ratio is approaching 35% in Brazil, compared to only 9-10% for Bangladesh and Pakistan.  Increasing tax revenues through progressive taxation has a key role to play in redistributing risk.

In terms of the aid sector – at the risk of oversimplifying, humanitarians are good at risk, and development experts are good at power.  But what we need is both.  Development thinking has often been blind to the shocks, changes and uncertainties that poor people face, and naïve in assuming that development takes place in largely stable environments.  Long term programmes need to internalise shocks and hazards (instead of sticking them in the risks/assumptions column of a logframe and then ignoring them) and then scale up and down as appropriate.

The newly fashionable focus on resilience can help communities not only to cope but to thrive despite the shocks and stresses, but only if the current resilience dialogue and practice is broadened out to tackle inequality, redistribute risk and stop risk dumping.

And here’s Debbie doing the increasingly obligatory video exec sum for wasters 3m piece to camera

The state of Africa – report from a 23 country road trip (and I’m in South Africa for a couple of weeks)

I’m in South Africa this week, speaking at various events, including a panel on the developmental state and inequality at Wits in Johannesburg (Tuesday 12^th), a book launch in Durban on Thursday 14^th, a panel on active citizenship and food justice at the Sustainability Institute in Cape Town on Monday 18^th and a lecture on ‘which matters more, poverty or inequality’ at the University of the Western Cape on Wednesday 20^th. In between, I’m definitely open to offers of beers, coffees etc in Joburg, Durban and Cape Town – often hard to fill the evenings on these trips, although I do have a box set of series 4 of The Wire…….

As I queued to get through immigration yesterday, I read the Economist’s recent special report on Africa by Oliver August. It’s a really nice piece of econo-wonk travel writing, travelling by land across 23 countries (see map) and mixing impressions with analysis. It’s very much an outsider looking in, but that can be interesting too.

It gets a bit close to a Panglossian ‘gee, look at the GDP, isn’t everything great’ tone at times, but overall, offers a readable, geographically-based commentary on some of the big issues – war and conflict (Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Sierra Leone); corruption and good governance (Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana and Nigeria); poverty and civil society activism (Niger, Algeria, Libya, Egypt and Sudan); state v market(Ethiopia and Kenya); managing mineral wealth (Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana) and a separate section on South Africa. Some random snippets to give you a taste:

‘At the end of the cold war only three African countries (out of 53 at the time) had democracies; since then the number has risen to 25, of varying shades, and many more countries hold imperfect but worthwhile elections (22 in 2012 alone). Only four out of now 55 countries—Eritrea, Swaziland, Libya and Somalia—lack a multi-party constitution, and the last two will get one soon.’

‘The journey covered some 15,800 miles (25,400km) on rivers, railways and roads, almost all of them paved and open for business. Not once was your correspondent asked for a bribe along the way, though a few drivers may have given small gratuities to policemen. The trip took 112 days, and on all but nine of them e-mail by smartphone was available.’

In Nigeria, ‘The transformation of Lagos is worth trumpeting. Its economy is now bigger than the whole of Kenya’s. Tax revenue has increased from $4m to $97m a month in little more than a decade. Tax rates have stayed the same but the amounts being collected have risen dramatically thanks to the deployment of private tax “farmers” who get a commission.‘

‘Climate change is a further worry. No inhabited continent will be more affected by it than Africa. Deadly droughts, flash floods and falling water tables are recurring themes in conversations across the continent. South Africans are especially worried. “In 20 years this will all be desert,” says the owner of a vineyard near the Cape, standing among verdant vines.’

And his conclusion?

‘Africans rightly worry about unemployment, inequality and a host of other problems. But over the past decade winners have outnumbered losers, and the view from the road suggests they will go on doing so. Your correspondent reaches Cape Town in a hired car on a rainy afternoon, finding the waterfront alive with once-rare tourists from other African countries. “Soon our home will look like this,” says an Angolan father of three, pointing out a cluster of high-rise buildings to his teenage children. “I brought them here to see their future.”’

So, who’s on for a beer then?

Bad Governance leads to bad land deals – the link between politics and land grabs

Ricardo Fuentes-Nieva (right) and Marloes Nicholls (left) crunch the numbers to find that big land investments sniff out countries with ‘weak governance’ – aka no accountability, no regulation, no rule of law, and a green light for corruption.

If you had bags full of money and wanted to buy land, where would you go for a good deal? If you’re only looking for ways to make a good profit and control your risk exposure, surely you would look for a place where you can influence the terms of the deal. This is the intuition behind the analysis published yesterday by Oxfam

The results of this analysis show that the global rush for land is mostly taking place in countries with weak governance.  We analysed the link between national governance and large scale agricultural land deals by combining information from two important databases – the Land Matrix[i] and the World Governance Indicator (WGI) Project. To do this, we cross referenced Information on over 200 countries and territories from the two databases. Using the Land Matrix we aggregated the total number of deals reported in each country and their average size; from the WGI, we used estimates of Voice and Accountability, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. Once the two databases were merged, we analysed the link between the countries where large-scale land deals were – or were not – taking place and the four governance indicators for the period 2000 – 2011.

The results reveal a strong and significant link between land deals and weak governance. The majority (78%) of the 56 countries where land deals are taking place have below average WGI, and on average the pool of countries where land deals take place have 30% lower indicators than those without. These results are consistent over time.

A quick comparison between two countries shows that the land availability does not appear to be a significant factor in investment decisions. Guatemala, which scores below average on all four World Bank Governance indicators, has seen an estimated 87,000 hectares of land under deals between 2000 and 2011 despite high levels of hunger and malnutrition in rural areas. This is in stark contrast with Botswana which has a similar area of arable land per person (.11 and .13 hectares per person in Guatemala and Botswana, respectively) but which scored well above the average on World Bank governance indicators and did not record a single large-scale land deal in this period.

These results are hardly surprising. Other studies have found similar results. Researchers at the IMF ( here and here), using a different database and methodology, have previously found that “countries with weak land sector governance are the ones most attractive to investors – at least as gauged by the number of land-related investments.” They suggest that investors might pick countries with weak governance because “it is easier to obtain land quickly and at low cost where the existing protection of land rights is weak, given that public protection may not matter to investors who can muster their own resources to defend their property rights.” Research by the World Bank found that deals were often formulated for the benefit of investors rather than the countries involved. They report that “in many cases the nature and location of lands transferred and the ways such transfers are implemented are rather ad hoc – based more on investor demands than on strategic considerations.”

Why Might Weak Governance be Good for Business?

The story behind land deals and weak governance is one of power imbalance and destitution. It’s a story where the interests of local communities are set aside to promote the interest of large investors.

There are usually three actors in any land deal – the investor, the local community who owns or uses the land and the government.  The national government often acts as the intermediary (in wonk parlance, the government is the agent for the local community or the citizens, who are the principals). Weak governance – which basically reflects a gap between the interest of citizens and governments – enables investors to sidestep costly and time consuming rules and regulations, which for example, might require them to consult with affected communities. In countries where people are denied voice, where business regulations are weak or non-existent, or where corruption is out of control it might be easier for investors to design the rules of the game to suit themselves.

This analysis is only the first step towards a more in depth research project. Next steps include a more in depth analysis on the determinants of the number and location of deals (a double-hurdle estimation? suggestions appreciated from econometricians out there). We will also look at the geographical distribution of deals within countries to see if there is a link between the location of land deals in countries and socioeconomic indicators in those areas.

Land is such an important element of millions of people around the world that any issue related to use, access and ownership of it should be carefully analyzed. Agricultural investment is sorely needed but it should not be at the expense of people’s rights and access to land. There are potentially catastrophic implications of bad land deals. Poor accountability and regulation only means that people affected by land deals have fewer tools to defend their livelihoods and rights.

And if this all sounds a bit abstract, here’s what we’re talking about

What have we learned about crisis/fragile states? Findings of a 5 year research programme.

Cards on the table, confronted with a closely argued 11 page exec sum, I am unlikely to then read the full report. But the short version of Meeting the Challenges of Crisis States, by James Putzel (LSE) and Jonathan Di John (SOAS), is a meal in itself. It summarizes 5 years of DFID-funded research by the Crisis States Research Centre, led by the London School of Economics, and is a great way to take the temperature of academic thinking on ‘states with adjectives’ – fragile, failing, crisis etc etc.

The key question it seeks to answer is why the daily and inevitable tensions of politics and ‘conflict as usual’, which exist in any society, tip some states over into a downward spiral of distintegration, grand theft and violence, while others, even poor ones, prove resilient. Key Findings?

Like most political scientists, Putzel and Di John believe that if you want to understand politics, you have to understand elites. And that means jettisoning preconceptions of ‘good governance’ (aka how much do the institutions resemble an idealized notion of American/European democracy) and thinking instead about the underlying political settlement. How do individuals and groups with different slices of power protect and negotiate over their pieces of the pie?

What leads to fragility? In the rather disturbing language of the report:

‘Factors that are most likely to provoke violence and lead towards state collapse [include] the lack of a basic legitimate monopoly over the means of large-scale violence, the absence of control over taxation, the failure of state organisations to operate in significant territories of the country and the existence of rival rule systems that take precedence over the state’s rules.’

And when we talk about ‘states’ we need to go well beyond presidential palaces and parliaments, especially in thinking about cities:

‘Analysis and policy discussion around fragile states has concentrated almost entirely on the “central state”, failing to see the particular place of cities in state formation historically and the contemporary importance of growing cities as key sites of state building and state erosion. The concentration of high-value economic activity within the cities of fragile states renders them central to state-building processes. Elites capable of challenging the bargains on which political settlements rest are often located in cities, and growing civic conflict and violence threatens to undermine state consolidation.’

There’s a good focus on taxation (as you’d expect from anything authored by Jonathan Di John, who was analyzing taxation long before it became the latest development fad:

‘Taxation is a key indicator for measuring state performance and assessing the extent of fragility or resilience of a state. A state’s taxation capacity can provide an objective means to assess the power, authority and legitimacy the state possesses to mobilise resources and the degree to which it monopolises tax collection. The level, diversity and manner of collection of taxes all provide indications of a state’s position on the fragility to resilience spectrum.’

What drives transitions from fragility towards more resilient states?

‘Possibilities exist for transformative political coalitions to emerge committed to establishing security, particularly in urban environments where a diversity of relatively well organised interest groups can challenge reigning political practices. Reformist politics are most likely to emerge when it is in the collective interests of newly emergent elites who do not have the means enjoyed by traditional elites to finance their security privately.‘

Which sounds to me like polisci speak for ‘it’s the new middle classes, stupid.’

The research has bad news for promoters of the more militarist reading of ‘Responsibility to Protect’. Military intervention seems to resemble chemotherapy in that it destroys existing anti-conflict mechanisms:

‘There is a strong, negative and significant association between military interventions and democracy. Military interventions have tended to destroy a state’s conflict-resolution mechanisms, often unleashed forms of politics incompatible with democracy, upset political settlements and critically weakened state systems in general.’

Rather than direct intervention, outside powers should be trying to ‘go with the grain’ of cycles of war and peace, pitching mediation at the right moment when the incentives of warring parties are aligned.

There are stern words for the deregulatory assault on the state undertaken by Washington Consensus policies over recent decades. Whatever the merits or otherwise of the economic arguments, undermining the state has been disastrous in terms of politics and fragility:

‘Policy makers need to consider the extent to which deregulating an economy across the board will be politically destabilising and actually undermine economic reforms….. policies that contribute to state withdrawal are often evaluated on grounds of efficiency and equity, but almost never for their impact on the institutional resilience of the state. This is a major blind spot which has far-reaching consequences for the ability of states to embark upon or return to a path of institutional consolidation.’

The report is vehement about the need for donors to help build strong states:

‘Aid needs to be channelled through the agencies of the state and it should give due priority to developing the core capacities of the state to govern economic development. Donors need to give due consideration to mechanisms that increase the capacity of states to raise their own finances.’

The case for an ‘activist state’ is particularly strong in regards to natural resource extraction, and here the report’s message is interesting – donors and others need to get in before a country discovers natural resources and ‘consolidate a national development coalition before the exploitation of resources begins.’ (this ought to be known as ‘doing a Botswana’ – Botswana nationalised subsoil mineral rights before it discovered diamonds, and has used the wealth spectacularly well ever since).

This is all targeted at aid’s big hitters – DFID, World Bank etc, and their relationships with governments. But NGOs should pay attention too. Putzel and Di John argue that funding civil society protest when the state is fragile or non-existent can be disastrous:

‘Programmes designed to promote participation and tap the resources of non-state organisations must be cognisant of this dimension of state fragility or they may potentially contribute to provoking or aggravating violent conflict.’

Which leads in practice to the kind of convening and brokering approach I’ve talked about on this blog ad nauseam.

Overall, there’s something offputting about the fixation on political elites, almost revelling in an apparently amoral approach of thepolitical sciences – ‘we are trying to understand power and politics, not pass judgement’. I’ve felt the same sense of academic machismo emananating from the ‘decent chap-ists’ of the Africa Power and Politics Programme over at ODI. I suspect there are other things going on behind it – the frustration of disillusioned lefties who feel let down by the past failures of popular movements, or the natural tendency when trying to understand a complex system to steer towards the simplest and most brutal concentration of power. But that’s enough amateur psychotherapy: the research is solid, and the findings fascinating, so I’m afraid you’ll just have to swallow the occasional jarring tone.

Arab Spring v Muslim Tigers: what’s the connection between human development and revolution?

Just before the Arab Spring kicked off in early 2011, I was happily linking to some really interesting work by Dani Rodrik (one of my development heroes) on ‘muslim tigers’, pointing out that in terms of human development, the top 10 performers since 1970 were not the usual suspects (East Asia, Nordics) but Muslim countries – Oman, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria all featured.

So did the Arab Spring happen in spite of or because of such amazing progress? A new paper from Randall Kuhn of the University of Denver (right, without the hat) explores just that question and comes up with some intriguing hypotheses. Tigerishness in these countries is largely confined to childhood, which then gives way to:

‘“waithood” – the long and precarious path to adulthood facing Arab youth. Potential consequences of youth exclusion include lost productivity, social anomie, atrophying skills, and of course civil unrest. But these particular crises did not occur in a vacuum. While the Arab States experienced the same global economic recession as other nations, the specific crises were conditioned by decades of progress in basic human development.’

The most interesting aspect of this ‘waithood’ is the interaction between the labour market and the ‘marriage market’, which partly as a result of improved education has seen a ‘rapid transformation towards delayed marriage and high marriage costs.’ Female age at first marriage rose from 20.8 in 1966 to 29.2 in 2001 for Tunisia, and from 18.7 in 1973 to 31 in 2007 for Libya, and the changes have been similar for all women (rural and urban, more and less educated). In Egypt, the cost of marriage in 2005 was close to $7,000, or about 11 times annual household expenditure. As a result ‘an increasing number of women were accepting long engagements or delaying marriage in order to earn money to pay for the marriage or to wait for a better match.’ Oh, and by the way, ‘Unlike western countries, premarital sex does not have wide social acceptance.’

The result is a pressure cooker of expectations and frustrations. Young educated people unable to find jobs, seeing the status and fulfilment of marriage and parenthood receding into the far horizons the other side of ‘waithood’. And sex, drugs and rock and roll, which at least provide a temporary outlet for my kids’ generation in the UK, were not really on the menu.

Final word to Randall Kuhn:

‘No developing region had seen such improvements in multiple indicators of human development, reflected in declining child mortality, increased schooling, and increased stature of women. This progress permeated widely throughout most populations and sub-populations. Advances in human development contributed to a fundamental reordering of the relationship between citizen and state. Human development fostered a set of higher expectations, both physiologically and socially determined, that placed considerable pressure on governments, particularly in the context of extended adolescence. As the bond between citizen and state frayed, a new generation of political protest movement emerged, facilitated by the rise of information technologies. In addition to material grievances, the wave of protest reflected a collective sense, emerging throughout the Arab world, that citizens could expect more from their governments, including a right to self-determination. If human development does indeed shape the path to revolution, we may hope that it will also determine the ultimate success of the Arab Spring, which remains a work in progress.’

I’m told that Oxfam’s Middle East and North Africa team are heartily sick of reading what they call ‘Western narratives’ about the Arab Spring. Is this just another one of those or something more interesting? For the moment (until someone puts me straight), I go with ‘interesting’.

‘Resource Futures’: good new report on how to confront resource scarcity and conflict

Looks like this is going to be crystal ball week on the blog – must be the time of year. Just read Resource Futures from Chatham House (inventors of the ubiquitous Chatham House Rule). The analysis is pretty good, but it really raises the bar on communication, with great interactive infographics and killer facts. Advocacy wonks everywhere, take note.

The paper summarizes the key trends and flashpoints in global resource use, including:

• Resource trade has grown nearly 50% from a decade ago in weight terms owing to expanding trade in oil, iron and steel, coal, oilseeds and cereals
• Large-scale resource extraction remains concentrated in a handful of countries (China, the United States, Australia, the European Union, Brazil, Russia, India and Indonesia)

And then boils it all down into 5 ‘key findings’:

Volatility is the new normal

Volatility (see graph), driven by shrinking ‘buffers’ (eg reserve stockpiles) is spurring resource nationalism and needs to bedampened down by government and international action. The report has some clever ideas on how to design price smoothing mechanisms for oil, food and metals.

Environmental change and degradation are challenging traditional approaches

Environmental boundaries are starting to bite, notably climate change and water scarcity. Not much new in the way of ideas here (remove fossil fuel subsidies, improve water-sharing agreements etc), more ‘just do it’.

Trade as a frontline for resource conflicts

‘Trade is becoming a frontline for conflicts over resources’. Interesting – trade wars on the way back, eg over unilateral export bans by food producers, but in a different guise from the old WTO style struggle over import liberalization

Resource politics matter

‘Resource politics, not environmental preservation or sound economics, are set to dominate the global agenda and are already playing themselves out through trade disputes, climate negotiations, market manipulation strategies, aggressive industrial policies and the scramble to control frontier areas.’

Likely flashpoints that will need international action include resource production in highly eco-sensitive areas like the Arctic and ‘extreme engineering’ such as weather modification. The report picks up Alex Evans’ suggestion for a high profile annual ‘State of the World’s Resources’ report.

Collaborative governance is the only option

The report’s main big idea, in terms of policy proposals, is to set up a ‘new club of the world’s principal resource-producing and -consuming countries to fill existing governance gaps on resource and scarcities governance. This ‘Resources 30’ or R30 grouping, conceived as a ‘coalition of the committed’, would comprise leaders and officials from thirty countries of systemic significance as resource producers, consumers, importers or exporters.’

And here’s report co-author Bernice Lee introducing the findings

Global Trends 2030: top report from US intelligence

My inbox regularly receives the latest ‘global trends 20XX’ reports from thinktanks and futurologists, and a lot of them are pretty bland, and the scenarios they describe threadbare and unconvincing. The new ‘Global Trends 2030’ report from the US National Intelligence Council shares the usual flaws on its scenarios, and is understandably US-centric (the NIC is a US government body), but its description of trends feels spot on, albeit a bit cursory on climate change. In Rumsfeldian terms, it summarizes the known knowns – ‘megatrends’, reflecting underlying ‘tectonic shifts’, but adds in a discussion of known unknowns, both long-term processes  - ‘game changers’,  and (mainly negative) discrete events – ‘black swans’. But you can be pretty sure that Rumsfeld’s final category, unknown unknowns, will mess up this nice arrangement. Here are some of its summary tables:

Megatrends and Game Changers

Tectonic Shifts

Black Swans

The most novel aspect for me was the focus on the political implications of demographic transitions – NIC reckons aging populations will encourage liberalization and democracy, and reduce levels of conflict. Plausible given the age range of most fighters, but a bit reductionist?

Natural Disasters and Humanitarian Crises in 2012: how did we do?

Ed Cairns, an Oxfam senior policy adviser, looks back on a very mixed year in the response to humanitarian crises.

You might not have noticed it from the headlines, but this year Oxfam has responded to more crises than ever before. Not megadisasters like Haiti’s earthquake in 2010, but the daily struggle for survival that has just got worse in places like the West African countries of the Sahel. The dearth of headlines may of course also be because much of the world has been preoccupied with its own problems – the Eurozone in crisis, China slowing down, and the US teetering on its fiscal cliff. Perhaps that is why the UN expects this year’s humanitarian appeals to end 2012 around 63% filled. That’s $3 billion of aid to save lives not given – no worse than last year, but significantly down from the pre-recession days of 2007, ’08 and ’09 when such appeals reached more than 70% of their targets.

This year, one crisis came on top of another – sometimes literally. Like northern Mali’s rebellion in April which has forced some 360,000 from their homes, including 160,000 seeking refuge in Mali’s impoverished neighbours. For – without even mentioning Syria – 2012 has not really been a good year for peace. Last week, the UN launched a review of its peacekeeping in Congo after its mission let rebels force 140.000 people from the city of Goma. According to Tariq Rieb, an Oxfam colleague in Congo, the UN’s performance fell ‘way short of what anyone would expect.’ And this only a month after another UN review slammed the UN role in Sri Lanka, where UN and other aid workers failed to do what they could to protect civilians in 2009.

Too many aid workers still think their responsibility ends with providing material necessities, while in many crises what people ask for, even more, is safety. Twenty years after we searched our souls in Bosnia for sending aid to the ‘well-fed dead’ – who nobody was protecting from murder and rape – we still have a long way to go. Although humanitarian aid has come on by leaps and bounds in quality and professionalism, the dilemmas of working in conflicts are proving more stubborn. While what has come to light in Sri Lanka and Congo should prompt a profound look at why the UN, including peacekeeping, is not better at protecting people from, to quote its founders in 1945, the ‘scourge of war’.

Not everything of course is so bleak. Gaza at least got a ceasefire. And in other humanitarian crises, there is a real sense that governments and organisations on the ground are getting better at coping with disasters. Tragically, this month hundreds were killed by Typhoon Bopha in the southern Philippines, but the local Humanitarian Response Consortium went immediately into action to get safe water to the stricken areas, and launch cash-for-work programmes so that families could buy food, clothing and shelter. The local authorities too were well prepared,

tangible proof of how the Philippines has built its national capacity to handle disasters since 2009.

Just as well actually, because the Philippines, like so much of the world, is likely to see more such weather-related disasters in future. So it was not good that, a few thousand miles away in Doha, the world failed to agree much of anything at the latest talks on climate change. There was no big new commitment to cut emissions, while the earth continues, on its current trends, towards the 2C temperature rise that most scientists warn us about. If those trends continue, we can expect more climate-related disasters, and a lot more humanitarian need. And perhaps most worrying of all, coastal areas, like parts of Bangladesh, going under water – despite the progress that has been done to make them less vulnerable to disaster. In one part of south west Bangladesh, Oxfam is leading a consortium building 11,000 shelters, homes and latrines on plinths above flood levels. But if the world fails to tackle climate change, will that really help? We don’t honestly know. And because of that, this year’s greatest humanitarian disaster was probably in… Doha.

Will this time be different? What hope for Gaza?

Ed Cairns (right), Oxfam’s senior policy adviser on humanitarian advocacy, on the prospects for peace and progress in Gaza

Two weeks after the ceasefire. One week after Palestine became a UN ‘non-member observer state’. Where are we now? As Jabr Qudeih, a local aid worker in Gaza says: There’s a truce, but all the key issues, the crossings, fishing, farmland, are still to be negotiated. Unless there’s a fundamental political solution, everything is liable to collapse again.

The UN vote provided a symbol of hope for Palestinians. More importantly, the ceasefire created an opportunity for Israel, Hamas and the international community to potentially do what they dismally failed to do in 2009, after the last spike in conflict: to lift Gaza’s blockade for good, and somehow use that to restart a meaningful process towards peace.

Till that happens, people like Jabr will stay trapped in the pressure cooker that is Gaza. As one of Oxfam’s Gaza staff, Abdelrahman Elasssouli, said a few days ago: I want to feel free to travel, to visit my relatives outside Gaza and invite them here. This is like a dream for Palestinians living in Gaza.

The deaths and injuries on both sides have been shocking and a high cost for both communities to bear. And as a new Oxfam paper, Beyond ceasefire: Ending the blockade of Gaza, points out today, behind them lies the protracted impact of Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Even before November’s surge in violence, 80 % of Palestinians in Gaza relied on humanitarian aid, and almost 50 % of youth were unemployed. Since the blockade began in 2007, nearly 60 % of businesses had closed, and another 25 % had laid-off 80 % of their staff. And Israel’s ‘buffer zone’ inside Gaza has severely restricted access to farming land and fishing grounds alike.

None of this has been a recipe for peace. Like the fear and insecurity that grip Israeli civilians as a result of the rockets fired into southern Israel, Gaza’s economic decline and poverty is extraordinarily corrosive of any realistic prospect of peace. To many, Israel’s occupation is the fundamental cause of the problem; and of course that is true. But after decades of conflict, it is also the vicious cycle of violence feeding fear and hostility on both sides. And Gaza’s seemingly endless suffering is at its heart.

The walkway from Gaza to Israel at the Erez crossing

So where is there hope? Well, it potentially lies in the ceasefire and the continuing negotiations, brokered by Egypt, between Hamas and Israel to build on it. In Palestinians demanding that their leaders settle their differences, as well as demanding freedom from Israel’s occupation, and a permanent end to the blockade .

And in the fact that Israel, like Palestine, is anything but monolithic. Its politicians and people have diverse views on everything from Iran to the national budget. Some are convinced that the blockade is necessary for Israel’s security. Others argue that it damages Israel’s international reputation, while failing to stop weapons being smuggled into Gaza. Indeed, with the blockade in place Palestinians have resorted to using tunnels to get products in and out to Egypt, a strong economic incentive to maintain the tunnels that are also used to smuggle arms.

In the ceasefire negotiations, the government of Israel agreed to consider ‘opening the crossings and facilitating the movement of people and transfer of goods’. Despite no clear agreement between the two sides, according to reports on the ground some farmers have already begun returning to their fields even quite near the Israeli security fence. And the post ceasefire agreement may allow Palestinians in Gaza to reclaim almost one third of their agricultural land

No-one should expect Israel’s policy to change overnight. But there do seem to be signs from Israel’s leaders of some potentially important shifts. And that means the international community has more opportunity to help than it did in 2009.

So what can outsiders do? Well, they can press all sides to live up to their agreements, the new post-ceasefire one, and build on the 2005 Agreement on Movement and Access, which actually worked for more than a year up to 2007. And they can provide international resources for effective monitoring that could give both Israelis and Palestinians the confidence to make (and keep) a deal. For instance, they could offer more of the sophisticated x-ray technology that the US and the Netherlands have already provided, to reassure Israel that all crossings, not just some, really can be open and secure at the same time. Those and other practical ideas are in today’s new Oxfam paper.

A few days ago, another colleague in Gaza, Ghada Snunu, said: Since the ceasefire I really hope that the future of Gaza will be different. I hope we can visit Palestinians in the West Bank and they can come here. I want Palestinians in Gaza to feel strong enough to follow their dreams.

Will that be a more realistic prospect in 2013 than it has been? Let’s hope so. Now is certainly the time to try.

Love, death and violence against women in the DRC (and elsewhere): what are we missing?

Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, so expect a rash of stories about sexual violence in the DRC’s current conflict. Here Rachel Hastie, Oxfam’s protection adviser,  cautions against a simplistic ‘heart of darkness’ narrative, and argues for a more nuanced and human understanding of the phenomenon.

There’s a lovely photograph in the atrium of the Oxfam office. It shows Masumbuko, a 36 year old man, draping his arms around his wife, Grace’s, neck as she shyly looks to the camera. It was taken by fashion photographer Rankin for the exhibition ‘From Congo with Love’. Masumbuko says “I fell in love with my wife the first time I saw her. There was something about her – the way she was talking, the way she was walking, her nose, her ears…. I can’t go a day without looking at her.”

It’s sweet and lovely, and all the more so because they live in eastern Congo, which has been described as ‘the rape capital of the world’ – Rankin’s photo gives me a glance into the lives of these two people that jars with the protection reports and field assessments sitting on my desk just a few metres away.

Whether it be Bosnia, Liberia, Darfur, or DRC, sexual violence has been an aspect of many of the conflicts and humanitarian responses I’ve been involved in during my time with Oxfam. Rape and other forms of sexual violence are an appalling violation, devastating in their immediate and long term consequences for individuals and their families and communities.

In recent years there have been some significant gains in getting sexual violence in conflict onto the international agenda, largely won by the many women’s groups, organisation and individuals who have campaigned tirelessly in the face of hostility, indifference and derision. There is still a long way to go, as news reports from Syria, eastern DRC, and Mali illustrate, but who would have thought just 10 years ago that we would now have a Special Representative to the UN Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict – the formidable Zainab Hawa Bangura, a security council resolution with a ‘naming and shaming’ mechanism, and a sitting Head of State indicted by the ICC for rape as crime against humanity?

There has been a huge amount of public campaigning to make the extent of rape in war and its consequences more visible, to galvanize more concerted action from donors, policy makers, the international community and Governments around the world. Yet there is something that makes me very uneasy about the way the issue is being raised and what the long-term consequences of that might be.

Masumbuko and Grace

Just a couple of weeks ago The Guardian ran a story that one-third of Congolese men admit committing sexual violence. Can this be true? In a country of with an estimated population of more than 20 million men and boys aged 15+ are there really almost 7 million who admit to being rapists? Well, no it’s not true of course, of the 708 men interviewed in and around Goma, including in a military base in the conflict-affected east of the country, a third admitted to committing acts of sexual violence. This in itself is shocking, the levels of disclosure give an indication of the extent of acts of sexual violence, and how little sanction these men expect from their peers and community, but it does not equate to a third of all Congolese men being rapists. Similar headlines periodically appear from conflict zones around the world, and the aid agency assessment reports all too frequently portray conflict zones as populated by violent male rapists where women only exist as passive victims.

This news coverage has not done justice to the report of the International Men and Gender Equality Survey (IMAGES), from which the statistic was sourced. IMAGES has produced a very intelligent, and thoughtful report that deserves much more careful consideration. The researchers themselves highlight that sexual violence is a commonplace occurence and 9% of men and 22% of women they interviewed had experienced it during the conflict. Sexual violence isn’t experienced in isolation – killings, torture, lost homes, livelihoods and the death of family members are all part of people’s experience of conflict. Rigid gender roles create vulnerabilities for women and for men, and the report’s authors call for greater focus on the impact of disempowerment of men and how gender relations are affected by conflict in order that the root causes and drivers of such violence are addressed.  Three quarters of the men they spoke to said they felt ashamed to face their families because they can’t provide for their basic financial means.

There’s no shortage of similar analysis: a fascinating and comprehensive report from The Nordic Africa Institute provides a compelling study on how an aggressively militarised masculinity is promoted during times of conflict and of its impact on gender relations and violence against women, as well as against men who do not conform to that ideal. HEAL Africa’s research highlights the disparity between idealised masculinity and the reality of men’s lives, again making the link to male violence in conflict and the community.

The study’s author calls on humanitarians to recognise the interdependent and interactive nature of gender, but we do seem to prefer it simplistic: men as the perpetrators of evil, women as the pathetic victims, without looking at the root causes of violence and how we need to address them in order to have any positive impact. There’s also little space for the men and boys who are themselves victims of (largely) male violence, and those men who are working to promote greater gender equity and to care for and support women and girl survivors of violence. There’s something quite alarming about how comfortable we are in portraying African men and women in this way – reminiscent of a ‘heart of darkness’ narrative of African men as barbaric savages incapable of loving and caring for their wives, daughters and mothers.

All these reports give us a good insight into gender relations in conflict, the impact of militarised masculinity, the economic stresses that prevent men providing for their families, the underlying cultural and social relations, beliefs and assumptions that create startling gender inequalities and the link to violence against women and girls. So why don’t we use this knowledge to develop better understanding, cleverer programmes, and campaigning on the issue? In asking that question, I’ve encountered resistance and occasional hostility and aggression that has left me with some difficult questions to ponder.

Are the gains that have been made in women’s rights and on sexual violence in particular still so tenuous that we have to keep using shock statistics to get attention and action? Can we keep negating and colluding in the invisibility of the sexual and other violence targeted at men and boys in places like the DRC in order to make the violence against women and girls more visible?  And how does that impact on our understanding of gender relations and the root causes of such violence which lies at the heart of any effective work to tackle gender-based violence?

I’d like to take a more sophisticated approach to the understanding of gender in conflict, to really start taking on board some of the excellent research carried out in recent years. For all the horror stories, the rapists and the murderers, whose acts of violence are depicted in horrifying detail in the growing stack of reports on my desk, there are also thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people like Masumbuko and Grace, who fall in love with each other, marry, have children, care for and love each other, and they need a place in this narrative too.