We live in bad times for humanitarian protection. Massive aid cuts are, of course, the centre of the conversation today. It is no secret to anyone, however, that this factor compounds a longer-term trend of increasing conflict and displacement, mounting genocide, disrespect of international rules and growing militarisation. And the growing impact of climate change on conflict about resources does not help.
A clear consensus is emerging that localisation will be a key element of whichever humanitarian aid system replaces the current one. And support to community-led protection (CLP) initiatives has been gaining traction for a few years as a key element for localisation.
There are reasons to believe, however, that support to CLP by humanitarian actors or donors will not be easier in the years to come that it has been in the past. The points mentioned above are of course important factors. To these, we need to add two important ones to which less attention has been given in recent times. One is the rise of authoritarianism: according to Freedom House, freedom has been declining for 19 years in a row. And a second, closely related one is the increasingly restrictive space for civil society. Civicus reports that compared to last year, an additional 1.5 percentage points of the global population now lives in a repressed or closed country.
We in the humanitarian system have never been very good at partnering with community-led protection initiatives. Weak social and political analysis, reinventing the wheel, arrogance, competition, rhetoric and donor-pleasing combined with fear of losing control have been rife in our profession. However, particularly in this climate of increasing conflict and authoritarianism, CLP becomes more important than ever. More prosaically, but not less crucially: supporting CLP is not resource intensive. And when done right, it can be extremely effective.
So here go my seven tips on how to better support community-led protection initiatives.
1. Think civil society
We seem to prefer communities to civil society. In our world, “communities” suggest a lack of past before the humanitarian crisis, a relative level of disorganization and power and a reassuring lack of political drive. Yet as soon as a group of persons get organized to protect themselves they constitute civil society. Moreover, more often than not mobilization for self-protection arises from social capital or civil society organizations predating the crises and surviving displacement and war, sometimes among refugees and internally displaced persons. The somehow reassuring, innocuous concept of “communities” blinds us quite often to the forms of social capital, organization and cooperation already existing among the people we serve.
A common mistake we often make is to analyze social structures exclusively through the lens of marginalization, driven by our need to protect the powerless and achieve equity in protection, aid and representation. These are of course essential aims. We have of course long understood that social structures can harm the powerless. However, an empirical analysis of how people are really organized is still essential. Raw social power can be a threat. It can also be an ally for protection.
2. Consider the whole of protection
Most study and practice of community-led protection has focused on relatively small initiatives geared towards avoiding or mitigating the immediate effects of war. If we use the “Protection egg” devised by the ICRC, most practice has focused on the egg yolk, i.e. supporting grassroots mechanisms to respond and remedying abuses:
Yet grassroots initiatives dedicated to building a protective environment, such as participating in policy design, resistance, advocacy, denunciation, pressurizing Governments and armed actors to protect or refrain from abuse, are also community-led protection initiatives worthy of support. Community journalism, such as the one we see nowadays in Gaza, is, by all intents and purposes, humanitarian protection. There is actually no reason whatsoever why, whenever feasible, these activities should not be supported by humanitarian protection actors. The conceptual wall between communities and humanitarian protection, on the one side, and civil society and human rights, on the other, exists only in our minds.
As regards refugees or IDPs, remember that refugee or IDP-led protection initiatives can, later on, be important advocacy agents for durable solutions initiatives, including peace, development and transitional justice. This shows also how barriers between humanitarianism, development and peace quite often just don’t exist for civil society.
3. Manage risks
Partnering with community-led protection initiatives can be the bread and butter of humanitarian protection. It can also be extremely complex. Grassroots and civil society organizations can take sides and be partial. There is actually no reason why they shouldn’t. Many community-led protection initiatives arise from ethnically-based grassroots organizations fighting marginalization and seeking more power for their own communities. Smaller initiatives may have no ability, reason or motivation to work on both sides of a frontline. Actually, a shared identity can be at the same time at the origin of self-help and constitute an exacerbating factor of conflict. Social capital can be both poison and cure. It goes without saying that disrespect to humanitarian principles by humanitarian organizations can also create risks to communities.
Risks linked to lack of neutrality and partiality are real and humanitarian protection actors are right to worry about it and to reduce the risk of doing harm to themselves and others. The issue is not only one of principles, but also pragmatic and transactional. Civil society has the right to take sides. Humanitarians have the right not to support those not sharing their principles. More often than not, differences can be solved not in the terrain of principles, but in that of negotiation, pragmatism and finezza, driven by local knowledge.
4. Be professional
Supporting civil society from a position of power is a profession, and one that is more associated with development work than with humanitarian aid. This support can take many forms, including financing projects, training on international law and advocacy, facilitating networking with people in power such as embassies, and training on running civil society organizations. If the necessary competencies are not available to humanitarian protection actors, they should not engage.
There are however pragmatic ways to address this. As an instance, a humanitarian protection agency can assume directly training on advocacy, while partnering with a local NGO to train the same grassroots organizations on civil society governance. Also, well-designed material support can go a long way in shoring up strong, well-established initiatives by civil society organizations.
There is only hope that support to community-led protection initiatives will be included in the next edition of the ICRC’s Professional Standards for Protection Work.
5. Be ethical
Supporting CLP initiatives is rife with ethical pitfalls. Authoritarian or patriarcal leaders can see their positions reinforced. Civil society structures can be close to, or even be created by unsavoury regimes or armed actors. Humanitarian organizations often compete to support the best CSOs. They can also use “hit-and-run” techniques, enticing communities into dangerous work only to disappear into thin air when funds run out.
There is no ethical rulebook replacing time, patience, principles, context analysis, cautious experimentation and trust creation when engaging with CSOs. However, there go a few rules of thumb:
- Never lie.
- Underpromise, and overachieve.
- Advice on what you can do. Use a lot of caution when advicing on what communities can do. This should come from them, mostly.
- Undertake careful social, political and conflict analysis. And allow yourself to be analyzed. They too need to trust you.
- Never compete with other humanitarian or development organizations.
- Be careful with money. It can easily break a grassroots organization if social cohesion and managerial mechanisms are weak.
- If your intervention is structural, such as reinforcing social cohesion or governance mechanisms, engage only in the long run. If you don’t have the will, the competencies and the money, don’t engage.
- Promoting diversity and democracy in organizations is legitimate. But it will rarely work against powerful wills and interests, and you may create tensions. Engage in the long run, be transparent and seek local allies.
- Keep protecting. Community leaders can expose themselves to danger, threats and killings when engaging in protection. Use all the techniques at hand: protection by presence, protection by proximity (i.e. when a powerful humanitarian organization gives visibility to its alliance with a CSO, thereby raising the political cost of abuse), advocacy with duty holders, facilitating networking with protective agents such as human rights champions and ambassadors, etc.
- Always remember that in war, Governments and armed groups are the duty holders. Communities and CSOs should never become fig leafs for their lack of capacity or will to protect.
6. Get knowledge right
Protection is a contact sport. No guidebook can replace the hours and hours of dialogue with communities and leaders that you may need. Actually, you may be better off not reading humanitarian guidance at all, to prevent your judgement from being clouded with abstract concepts. Avidly seek key informants: your local staff, university teachers, community leaders, feminist activists. Assume that the best informants may not – sadly – sit at Protection Cluster meetings. If you are a book person, read: favour history, sociology, anthropology, economy and politics. CBP means also curiosity-based protection. The articulation between war and civil society needs to be understood from its historical, political and social angles too.
Learn the local language, or step aside – at least partially. Perhaps local staff are best placed to lead partnerships with CLP initiatives.
A good protection officer needs a pure heart – and a dirty mind. The best protection intentions and plans cannot be realized without a minimum understanding of the complexity, the messiness and the sheer evil of war, and its articulations with civilians and civil society.
7. Get relations right
Social relations with affected populations are shunned in the humanitarian world. This is one of the dumbest unwritten – and sometimes written – humanitarian rules.
The kind of trust between humanitarians and communities inherent to successful support to CLP initiatives necessitates also a level of personal relations between interlocutors. These relations may well develop a personal element, even evolving into a friendship surviving particular missions. It has been pointed out that such relations may endanger impartiality. A level of transparency is thus necessary, as well as a clear reason why such relations are established with one community and not other. Different humanitarian actors can also divide among themselves the communities they are supporting, in a transparent and results-based division.
Distortions can also arise from close social relations between humanitarians – yet we furiously network, socialize and party among ourselves. After all, you wouldn’t reject a beer from the Humanitarian Coordinator – would you?
These kind of relations have also value in terms of transmission and exchange of knowledge. Often, protection issues and solutions are much better conveyed in the natural language of conversation than in the technical, convoluted language proper to protection reports. Two aspects are important here. One is emotions: civilians’ fears, humiliation, trust, courage and steadfastedness are integral to any protection analysis worth its salt. The other is history. The most common question that the protection profession poses is: what are the problems? This is conducive to a neutral, asseptic classification of problems into neat, siloed and ever growing categories: GBV, child protection, etc. A much more natural question, the kind that arises in a normal conversation, is: what happened? This also tends to unveil the history, the background and the causes of protection problems and responses – without which little action can be taken in terms of CLP support. Most successful CLP initiatives arise from deep, trusting conversations in which different abilities and capacities (communities, humanitarians) are pooled for a common, agreed-upon objective in a spirit of partnership.
Finally, we humanitarians tend to evolve into an epistemic bubble made of people of similar socioeconomic background and education. This bubble creates two distortions. One is a distortion of knowledge. Received wisdom is consolidated and reproduced within the bubble, thereby shielding ourselves from epistemic and moral challenges. The second, most subtle one refers to accountability. Besides of technicalities, accountability refers also to the perceived moral duty to provide a satisfactory account of our actions to our peers, to people we resemble, we see every day and whose respect we seek. Thus, accountability is also a marketplace of mutual respect that happens informally both in working meetings and in social circles. When we shun affected communities from this circle, we deprive them of an accountability mechanism, which is in itself a community-led protection tool. And deprive ourselves of a tool to do better.
