ALNAP | Blogs

Crisis leadership or leadership crisis?

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 18:03:28 GMT

Posted on 31 March at 18:03 by Kim Scriven.

The devastating Earthquake that struck Haiti in January sparked huge generosity and inevitably led to intense media interest. But almost as inevitable were the subsequent claims of a slow, badly coordinated response. These criticisms varied in their targets and validity, but many related in one way or another to the issue of leadership, and the influence that it (or the lack of it) was having on the coordination of the response (see for example here or here).

As the Haiti Learning Portal on the ALNAP website catalogues, there are a number of initiatives under way to ensure that the performance of the humanitarian system in Haiti is evaluated and the appropriate lessons are gathered, and hopefully learnt. Furthermore, it is unwise to draw conclusions from afar, especially considering that the leadership of the UN Mission in Haiti were themselves among the earthquakes victims.

However, it is within this context that initial research by ALNAP has uncovered a growing sense of unease from within the sector at what is perceived as the contracting of space for leadership in operational settings. This is coupled with a sense that bureaucratic practices and so-called ‘modern management’ principles have led to effective leadership increasingly becoming a matter of good fortune and chance, rather than organisational intent.
And this issue is no longer merely a periphery concern for the humanitarian community. ALNAP’s Pilot State of the Humanitarian System Report (SOHS) revealed that of all the challenges facing international humanitarian action, lack of effective leadership and coordination was, according to respondents, the most pressing.

When structures such as the clusters – designed to enhance coordination at a national level – were judged to be working well, respondents saw them as providing clear leadership and stronger sectoral coordination. Elsewhere however, findings from the recent ‘Review of the engagement of NGOs with the humanitarian reform process’, (summarized usefully by Anne Street in HPN) suggest that in four of the five countries looked at, strong leadership through the clusters was found to be missing.

The challenges of leadership are not confined to the UN system. ALNAP’s SOHS report uncovered views indicating leadership within NGOs may also be problematic – without, as one interviewee put it, ‘a forceful enough group of senior people running emergency responses in the big NGOs. And it’s become too managerial – not enough capacity to speak out well on the big issues’.

If we accept there is increasing concern about humanitarian leadership, we might do well to consider briefly some of the constraints and challenges facing those charged with such roles in increasingly complex humanitarian response environments.

When a humanitarian agency responds to an emergency, it necessarily moves into a space of high uncertainty and ambiguity, in turn placing severe stress on leadership functions, especially at an operational level. And although leaders in a range of sectors may face such demands, leadership in the context of humanitarian operations may be particularly intense because of the combination of extreme time pressures, media exposure, logistical challenges, the fluidity of the context, as well as the overarching humanitarian imperative that drives such work.

To address the increasing concern around leadership in the sector, and to bridge the gap between established leadership practices and the humanitarian context, ALNAP is participating in a Joint Initiative on Leadership in the Humanitarian Sector. Other members of the Initiative include the Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy (DRLA), the Humanitarian Futures Programme (HFP), and People In Aid. For our part ALNAP will be examining operational leadership, working to produce an ALNAP Study over the course of the year, including a number of field-level case studies.

We hope this collaborative research effort will further the humanitarian community’s understanding of how leaders can effect change within their organisations, as well as bring about change across organisations. And perhaps – even – move the debate from recriminations after the event to an honest dialogue on the demands of leadership.

We’re keen to hear your views and experiences, both good and bad, particularly around how to square the need for inspirational individual leadership with the demands of increased accountability and professionalization. Please feel free to use this space, or contact me directly.

The scope for humanitarian-private sector collaboration: Innovation as the way forward

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 10:49:25 GMT

Posted on 10 December at 10:49 by Ben Ramalingam.

Yesterday saw the RedR-HFP conference ''Hard Realities and Future Necessities: The Role of the Private Sector in Humanitarian Efforts'. In his keynote, U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator and head of OCHA John Holmes highlighted the lack of a systematic and productive engagement between the two sets of actors, pointed to innovations as a key area for working together going forward, and made mention of a number of innovations including some that were showcased at the ALNAP Innovations Fair (see a Reuters Alertnet article on his speech here).

Anne, Princess Royal, President of RedR, spoke on the importance of having a broad understanding of what constituted the private sector, and in particular to not exclude national and local actors.

ALNAP was asked to present in the Morning Panel session on 'The Corporate-Humanitarian Record To Date'. I gave a presentation which drew on 2007 GPPI-ODI work on business engagement in humanitarian relief, as well as ideas from the recent ALNAP work on innovations in humanitarian action.

The key 'take away' messages from my presentation were as follows:

The humanitarian caseload is increasing, the system is stretched, the 'new normal' means that collaboration is not an option but a necessity
We tend to learn and collaborate in the same way – within existing paradigms, and “catastrophe-first” - the tsunami saw a massive spike in business-humanitarian engagement which has since fallen away
Corporate engagement is clearly more than just buzz, but we need more strategic clarity around how to engage and why to engage
If effectively positioned, resourced and managed, humanitarian innovations can be the ideal entry point for enhanced, focused corporate-humanitarian partnerships. Such partnerships require effective brokerage and a clear sense of complementary competencies.
Ultimately, we need to move beyond 'catastrophe first' approaches of collaboration toward putting vulnerability first.

Subsequent sessions focused on the future possibilities of collaboration between the two sectors and on the perspective of local corporate players. One of the presentations was from Les Baillie of Safaricom, who were involved in a recent innovation process with Concern focusing on the use of mobiles for cash transfers in the post-election violence in Kenya. For more on this, take a look at the recently published Innovation Case Study, one of a new series of ALNAP products highlighting different innovations processes for the benefit of the sector.

"Local is more effective, say disaster relief experts"

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:26:15 GMT

Posted on 26 October at 18:26 by John Mitchell.

A recent article on Alertnet echoes a key finding of the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition:

"When a disaster strikes, international relief agencies receive the bulk of media attention and donor funding but experts say it is actually the people living in the damaged areas who save the most lives and help survivors long after foreign aid workers leave."

The article goes on to highlight a number of improvements that international agencies should try to put in place.

- "International aid agencies can... support local relief efforts better. They could work more closely with the local government and NGOs to avoid duplication and waste"
- They should "maintain a good relationship with local officials who have the power to determine whether or not foreign aid workers can be present in crises"
- They should run meetings in local languages, and "hire more local staff who have better connections and understanding of the local culture"
- They should "share contingency plans with local organisations and do joint simulation exercises to make sure they can work smoothly together when a disaster strikes"
- They should [develop a] "good overview of what problems the local government and NGOs can deal with themselves and what will require outside help."

All of which makes an interesting comparison with the findings of a 2005 ALNAP study on capacity building in humanitarian action, which suggested that at that time, international agencies were failing to live up to their commitments to build the capacities of their local partners:

"Headquarters’ declarations of the importance of developing and utilising local capacities were being quietly forgotten in field-level operations. With some notable exceptions, there are few indications that the ‘business as usual’ of humanitarian operations led by international staff, is actually in question. Local institutional capacit[ies] are not a central feature of humanitarian action today because, although local capacities are useful, they are generally not thought to be essential."

I wonder if this has changed significantly in the past 4-5 years? Are international agencies who do make the effort still 'notable exceptions'? Are effective local capacities restricted to natural disasters, or do they also play a role in complex emergencies such as Sudan, DRC and Somalia? And are there any good examples of the kinds of improvements called for in the Alertnet article? It would be good to know.

Field Level Learning

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 11:29:45 GMT

Posted on 9 September at 11:29 by Kim Scriven.

There has been an interesting debate started over at the blog of Chris Blattman, a Yale academic, about encouraging learning for field workers. Chris’ partner Jeannie Annnan is the new Research Director at IRC and they’ve been discussing the best way to bridge the gap between research and field practice. Chris noted that “Cost, bandwidth, and logistics of education materials are all big barriers. But these barriers are falling in the information age, even in Africa, and it seems to us there’s room for something new.”

He suggests three “more human barriers” prevent greater learning:

“First, a lot of people aren’t in the habit of reading, either because they don’t like it or (more likely) they want to, but (like many of us) they find it hard to turn aspiration into action, especially in the frantic business of aid. Second, it’s one thing to read more research, and another to read it critically. Alone. Without falling asleep. And third, it’s another great leap entirely to turn reading into application.”

ALNAP, as a network of organisations from across the humanitarian sector (including IRC), is dedicated to improving humanitarian performance through increased learning and accountability, including at field level. This this debate has touched upon one of ALNAP's core focus areas. Indeed, a few years ago ALNAP produced a study on field level learning, which is available here: http://www.alnap.org/pool/files/FCh201bl.pdf

Before somebody points out that it is too long and no one will ever have time to read it, I'd like to point out that there are summarised key messages (at the end), and in short they are as follows:

1) Greater recognition and support should be given to field workers’ preference for specific information and knowledge directly related to their operational priorities, and for accessing such information and knowledge through conversation with other field workers.

2) Stronger incentives are needed to encourage agencies to support and facilitate learning at field level and for more sharing of best practice in approaches.

3) The current ‘architecture’ of the humanitarian sector is not sufficiently supportive of knowledge sharing or cross-organisational learning, and some reorientation and gap filling is required.

There is also a brief Organisational Learning Self-Audit, to help organisations analyse how they currently approach learning at a field level. For more tools and resources on learning and knowledge management in humanitarian agencies and international development organisation more generally, it might be useful to look at a publication from the Overseas Development Institute, available here: http://www.odi.org.uk/resources/download/153.pdf

ALNAP tries to produce useful tools which are insightful and evidence-based, but also accessible and contextualised for people working in emergency contexts. In particular this includes Lessons Papers, which draw on the experiences from ALNAP member agencies and lessons captured by evaluations. Some are written specifically in response to new emergencies or contexts (such as Gaza, the Food Price Crisis or Cyclone Nargis) whilst others are more thematic (eg. Responding to Urban Disasters or Earthquakes). Both kinds of papers aim to provide good solid guidance, based on past experience, to aid workers in the field. Another key tool ALNAP has been developing and promoting for field-level learning are real-time evaluations, designed to take place early in an emergency response and to feed directly into management learning processes.

ALNAP is always looking for new and innovative ways to stimulate learning and improvements in performance, from incremental improvements, to more radical paradigm-busting ideas. This has been central to a new stream of work on Humanitarian Innovations, which looks specifically at how those in the field can be provided with the space and incentives to safely try new approaches in real world settings.

It’s really pleasing that this discussion is taking place. While there are obviously a plethora of opinions on how best to ‘do’ field-level learning, it’s encouraging that people are taking it seriously. It would be great to hear the current thinking on this from across the ALNAP network - what have you been doing to strenthen operational learning in your efforts? What has worked? What hasn't?

Thanks

Kim

What priorities for a better humanitarian evidence base?

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:22:53 GMT

Posted on 24 July at 12:22 by Ben Ramalingam.

Last week in the new DFID white paper, the UK government committed to four actions to ensure the international humanitarian system and national governments can meet growing global needs. These were:

1. Strengthening ongoing efforts to reform and improve the system, focusing on the UN reforms around the CERF and UN leadership.

2. Continuing to invest 10% of the funding provided by DFID in response to each major natural disaster to prepare for and help prevent future disasters.

3. Investing in building a deeper humanitarian evidence base, working to improve humanitarian assessments and reporting by humanitarian agencies.

4. Commit at least £5 million a year in new core funding to NGOs for humanitarian action.

The third of these is of particular interest to ALNAP members. The recently published 8th Review of Humanitarian Action has a number of explicit suggestions and recommendations about the role of evidence in humanitarian assistance.

Without going into too much detail here, there are three overarching messages which are of relevance to the White Paper:

- the humanitarian evidence base needs to move beyond fulfilling donor accountability demands around project outputs to fulfilling learning objectives. Importantly, we need better evidence across the project and programme cycle (from needs through to impacts) as well as at an organisational, operation-wide and, ultimately, system-wide level (see performance study)

- the humanitarian evidence base needs to go beyond its current narrow focus on inputs and outputs to address outcomes and impacts, and this presents technical and institutional challenges (see impact assessment study)

- the humanitarian evidence base needs to focus not just on what is done at the moment, but also on new and innovative practices which might improve how things are done and delivery against humanitarian objectives (see innovations study)

What are your thoughts? We wanted to ask Full and Observer Members to share ideas and opinions on:

(a) what should donor investment in the "humanitarian evidence base" look like - e.g what inputs and resources are needed by actors in the sector?

(b) what should be the priority focus for such investments, and why?

All thoughts and ideas welcome!