In the first days of January, George W Bush summoned his father (the ex-president), his brother (the future president?), and even Bill Clinton (the ex-president and maybe the future ex of a president), directing them all to assist revving up America's response to Asia's tsunami. Seldom has so much star power been so superfluous. Even before the stars were activated, a spontaneous emotional earthquake had occurred somewhere deep within the western psyche, and a tsunami of money had begun rolling towards the Indian ocean. By 3rd January, one week after the disaster, private US donations amounted to over £87m; Britons had given £100m; Germans had come through with £107m. On 6th January, the New York Daily News, a gossipy tabloid not known for its interest in global poverty, plastered the number $103,474 across its front page—the amount the paper's own appeal had raised in a 24-hour period.
Why this incredible response? There has been much talk of Christmas spirit, and of westerners' ability to identify with a tragedy that killed western beachgoers. But there was something deeper at work here, and something quite ironic too. For the generosity reflected the unspoken feeling that this crisis stood apart from other crises in poor countries. The tsunami was unlike Aids, which seems to spread relentlessly because developing country leaders won't challenge sexual taboo and social prejudice. The tsunami was unlike the murderous wars in Sudan or Congo, for which the blame can be laid even more clearly at the feet of local leaders. The tsunami was not even like the general problem of global poverty, which most people reasonably believe is tied up with corruption and bad policies, making it at least partly impervious to western assistance. Instead, the tsunami was a simple act of nature. It bubbled up from the sea, and laid waste to half a dozen countries; it had nothing to do with human greed or cowardice or corruption. And so westerners responded generously, confident that an uncomplicated, unpolitical disaster could be swiftly remedied with charity.
This was a return to a simple vision of disasters, one that has been mostly absent since the first postcolonial relief effort in Biafra in the late 1960s. Bob Geldof conjured the same vision in Ethiopia briefly in the 1980s: the simple images of starving children swept away the complicating political context, and the money flooded in.
But for the most part, the political view has dominated. Ethiopia's famine is now understood as a consequence of the Mengistu dictatorship's crazy agrarian collectivism, and disaster relief is understood to have prolonged its grip on the country. Floods in Bangladesh are viewed not only as natural disasters but as the consequence of reckless logging; Caribbean hurricanes are understood to cause more damage than they should because governments refuse to prepare for them. Of course, these understandings kill the charitable impulse. You would not give to a beggar if you think he has chosen to be homeless, still less if you suspect your money will subsidise his choice.
If the public view of disasters has grown weary and worldly, disaster relief professionals have travelled even farther down this road. Interviewing the veterans at American relief agencies in the aftermath of the tsunami, I heard anguish as well as delight at the outpouring of generosity: had people taken leave of their (political) senses? And how would they react to the discovery that translating their gifts into humanitarian progress is very hard? However touching this moment of innocent giving, successful emergency efforts are almost as much about fending off untutored charitable impulses as about raising charitable money; relief workers have learned to install incinerators at warehouses to dispose of unhelpful donations. Julia Taft, a veteran of USAid and of the UN development programme, told me how after the Armenian earthquake of 1988, the Armenian diaspora in America was asked not to send anything initially. Relief professionals feared that mountains of stale food and unwanted cuddly toys would clog the distribution system. The instruction worked: Armenians in the US waited, listened, and then gave just what was wanted.
Moreover, there has probably never been a time when the public's open-walleted innocence could have been more awkward than now. For the disaster-relief profession has evolved more or less in parallel with its first cousin, the development business—many leading players, from Oxfam to the World Bank to governmental aid agencies, are involved in both disasters and development—and each of these professions has grown wiser and humbler. They have come to an understanding of what they cannot do as well as what they can. This is why the prospect of millions of bright-eyed first-time givers—supporters who donate dramatically in the expectation of dramatic field successes—produces mixed emotions.
The path to humility for the development business began in the 1950s, when development thinkers believed that capital would trigger economic take-off in the ex-colonies. When capital transfers failed to unlock progress, development agencies experimented with other types of transfer. From the 1960s, they began to provide not just physical capital (dams, roads, water systems) but human capital (health, education). When that did not work as well as hoped, the development people went after the next apparent bottleneck: they spent the 1980s and early 1990s attaching ever more policy conditions to their loans. But by the late 1990s, a new consensus was emerging. Developing countries' policies were indeed crucial, but aid conditionality was too weak an instrument to affect them; Pakistan signed 22 loan agreements between 1970 and 1997 promising to cut its budget deficit, and failed to do any cutting throughout the period. So the new development consensus acknowledged development aid's limited influence. Poor countries themselves were now said to be "in the driving seat." Development agencies focused on identifying the best performers and concentrating money on them so as to accelerate their progress.
The disaster relief business has followed a similar trajectory. In the early days, charities responded with supplies, almost any supplies: food, blankets, tents, medicines. Then, in the 1970s, they began to reflect on the consequences: aid in kind could destroy local merchants who supplied the same commodities, and who would be needed to keep life going long after the aid agencies pulled out. Pretty soon, this insight about the dangers of displacing local systems was applied more broadly. Feeding camps, regarded by most agencies as a logistical necessity, came to be seen as dangerous: they lured people off their land and away from what little food there might be left to harvest; they crowded people into unsanitary settlements where they easily fell prey to cholera; they delayed a return to normal subsistence agriculture when the rains returned. In Ethiopia in the 1980s, the US branch of Save the Children broke new ground when it refused to work through feeding camps, investing in donkey trains to bring food to remote villages.
Like the development business, however, the disaster business has come to defer ever more devoutly to the role of locals. This is partly because the long slog of post-disaster reconstruction depends on local management. Last year a World Bank study of Hurricane Mitch reconstruction in Honduras emphasised this point. Since the Honduran economy is beset by overdependence on coffee, chaotic urban planning, large debts and mistrusted rulers, it has been almost impossible for donor-assisted reconstruction efforts to pay off. But the deference to locals also holds for the immediate aftermath of a disaster. When the hurricane or earthquake hits, it is local organisations that will be there, and locals who will mount the first effort. It will be days before foreigners jet in, and even then they will rely on local staff to learn the ropes.
And so, to borrow the development jargon, locals are in the driving seat. When I asked an old hand at Care, a leading American relief charity, what struck her about the reports from the tsunami region, she told me she had heard journalists complaining about the absence of foreign relief staff—an absence she regarded as a hopeful sign, given the unintended consequences of heavy-handed foreign charity. When I called Michael Wiest, the chief operating officer at Catholic Relief Services, he launched into a speech about his relationships with foreign partners. In India, Catholic Relief has long-standing relationships with local charities, and it quickly underwrote their procurement of relief supplies. In Aceh, by contrast, a lack of local counterparts was forcing it to fly in foreigners as a second-best option. Even in Aceh, Wiest was pleased to have discovered a local Jesuit with a relief operation that could benefit from extra cash.
The last thing any relief agency wants to do these days is to arrive, as Wiest puts it, "like a triumphant invading army." And yet a triumphant army—or, more precisely, navy—has been one of the dominant television images of the tsunami coverage: US naval helicopters have been buzzing the remote portions of northern Sumatra, air-dropping supplies to desperate villagers. It seems likely that this image of brave western charity has fuelled the extraordinary giving: it has made the fruits of generosity appear certain and tangible, brushing away the normal doubts about aid's effectiveness. But the helicopter image is misleading. When relief agencies figure out a way to spend the tsunami millions, they will do so through Indonesians and Indians and Sri Lankans, and the results will depend on the competence of these partners.
Bit by bit, the true nature of the relief effort will become apparent. The tsunami region is not some sort of film set for heroic western masters of disaster. Rather, it is what it always was before the crisis: a collection of prickly, independent nations muddling their way towards prosperity. India has a tendency to put its national pride before its people's welfare, which is why it refused western assistance that could have saved lives on the remote Andaman islands; Sri Lanka and Indonesia each face insurgencies, which were brutal before the tsunami and will doubtless be brutal again now. Western money will flow into these bubbling, imperfect societies and some of it will be wasted, lost or stolen, and it will not usually be possible to know exactly how or why. When this is generally realised, the outpouring of western generosity will face its true test. Is it premised on the illusion that the relief business is easy? Or can we permit ourselves to hope that it is more durable than that?
