How can anthropology and humanitarian action be better combined?

This article makes no distinction between humanitarian aid and development. Yet these two fields of action have different timescales and objectives. While humanitarian action is aimed at meeting the vital needs of the most vulnerable, development is a long-term process, designed to accompany social change.

The remarks that follow on the value of anthropology and the ways in which it can be integrated into humanitarian and development actions must therefore be adapted according to the situation on the ground – more or less urgent, conflict-ridden or unstable. In the humanitarian field, anthropology is perhaps most useful when emergencies become chronic, and in post-crisis and reconstruction phases.

The terms international aid/international action/aid actors are used to refer generally to development and humanitarian actors and action. However, it is important to be aware of the distinction between these actors and modes of action when reading this article.

How can anthropology and humanitarian action be better combined?

Anthropology has long included development mechanisms and humanitarian action in its field of study. It often takes a critical look at the logics of power inherent in the international actions of NGOs. Many anthropologists have studied these issues, and it is now generally accepted that there is such a thing as “development anthropology” or “humanitarian anthropology”. The reverse – the integration of anthropology into humanitarian action – is also true, but to a lesser extent.

In fact, anthropology is not always integrated into the design of aid programs, or into NGOs’ reflection on their own actions. Yet there is a broad consensus on the value of this discipline for humanitarian action[i]. Anthropological studies of the populations targeted by international action provide a better understanding of the populations concerned, the power dynamics within groups, and the knowledge and practices in place. This information, once taken into account by aid actors, would enable projects to be better targeted and their adoption by the people targeted to be reinforced. So, what hinders its integration, and what solutions are available to humanitarian actors?

Ati regional hospital, Batha region, Chad – August 2018, ©Solidarités International

1. What hinders the use of anthropology in humanitarian aid?

a. Opposite modes of intervention

Anthropology and humanitarian aid have quite different modes of intervention. While the former aims to describe the world with as little alteration as possible to its object of study, the aid sector assumes a modification of its field of action and, in the case of development, aims to accompany social change.

These two disciplines operate in opposing timeframes. Anthropological research, by virtue of its ethnographic method, takes a long-term view. It requires an in-depth understanding of the logics of actors, and a sharing of their experiences. Development and humanitarian aid, on the other hand, take a shorter timeframe, often defined by the funding granted by donors. Action must be efficient – achieving its objectives in a short space of time – since the NGO is accountable to institutional or private backers, donors and beneficiaries alike.

Finally, because of these two characteristics, anthropology and humanitarianism have distinct approaches to reality. Anthropology, which seeks to understand the complexity of social relationships, looks at things from an actor’s point of view. Humanitarianism, on the other hand, takes a programmatic approach to reality. The latter sometimes requires a simplification and homogenization of social reality.

These very different ways of working make it difficult to work together. There is sometimes a lack of understanding between these two working cultures and their respective players. The anthropologist is said to be too academic and detached from the “field reality” of the humanitarians. His work does not fit in with the developer’s timeframe, and is not operational enough. Humanitarians, on the other hand, are at the service of action, and are unable to stand back and reflect on more abstract issues that are far removed from the field.

b. A project-based rationale that prevents a long-term approach

Integrating anthropology into the humanitarian field is made difficult by the very way the aid sector operates. NGOs have little time between the call for projects and the first response they have to give. This does not allow them to carry out a proper needs analysis before defining activities and expected results.

The project approved by the donor is already complete, presenting a needs analysis, baseline study, planned activities, deliverables and targeted results. Once the funds have been released, the project can begin. The anthropological study, when it fits into the project, is often located in the needs assessment phase, integrated into the project. This is where the problem lies: the assessment phase takes place once the activities have been defined and approved. But once the terms of the project have been validated, there’s no way of changing them easily.

However, readjustments are sometimes essential, as shown by this example from Chad, detailed by Florence Chatot[ii], Groupe URD research manager, during a telephone interview. Groupe URD works in partnership with an NGO that combats female genital mutilation, and has carried out operational research focused on analyzing the dynamics and social norms associated with this practice. One of the NGO’s planned activities was the professional retraining of excisers by setting up IGAs to compensate for the loss of income associated with abandoning the practice. The study revealed that such a strategy was far too simplistic to address a problem as complex as the practice of excision. In fact, far from being restricted to a strictly female “excisor/excised” interaction, the study uncovered the existence of a real excision economy bringing together multiple community players with divergent interests who, through their social function in the practice, legitimize its persistence. In fact, one of the study’s recommendations was to reinvest the budget initially allocated to IGAs in prevention activities.

This example highlights the need for precise studies, carried out by people already familiar with the subject, prior to the definition of activities, in order to avoid readjustments whose costs – organizational, human and financial – are easy to imagine.

Some associations have the capacity to carry out socio-anthropological studies upstream of calls for projects. Médecins du Monde, for example, has even integrated anthropological expertise into its head office “Research and Learning” department. The infographic below, taken from their website, shows where the socio-anthropological study fits into the association’s program cycle. This organization is made possible by the relative freedom of Médecins du Monde, which has its own funds not earmarked for any particular project.

2. What kind of anthropology do we need for humanitarian aid?

The humanitarian community’s interest in anthropology is real, but it’s not so easy for the two disciplines to meet. The researcher is too often presented as a critical academic, rather than a source of proposals, or idealized as the “rescuer” of a failed project.

What kind of anthropology do we need for humanitarian aid? The argument put forward in this article is that anthropology must be at the service of action. It must not be subservient to it, but must keep as its objective the improvement of humanitarian action.

a. Making local action logics intelligible for international action

Anthropology is concerned with specific social functions, always trying to grasp the vision of the people living the phenomenon in order to understand it. Humanitarian action is often carried out by multinational players – the UN and its agencies – or by non-governmental actors operating outside their own borders – international NGOs. Anthropology’s interest here lies in making the link between this local scale and these international players. It makes the social exchanges of some intelligible to others. It can be mobilized both to help the “global” – the international players – and to support the “local” – the populations targeted by aid programs.

This is what is put forward by Sharon Abramowitz in her article “Ten Things that Anthropologists Can Do to Fight the West African Ebola Epidemic” (2014). In it, she sets out 10 actions that anthropologists can put in place to be useful to humanitarians, as part of the fight against Ebola in West Africa in 2014. I’ll use three of her proposals here.

/ Anthropologists can observe, report, interpret and explain local perspectives on external action. The aim here is not to understand for the sake of understanding, but to operationalize their understanding in order to propose arrangements, adapt humanitarian action and make it acceptable to local populations.

2/ Anthropologists can identify local health capacities and structures that can contribute to the epidemic response (in this case, Ebola). For the anthropologist, this means not only sharing “objective” knowledge of existing health structures, but also his or her knowledge of social constructs that could be useful to the humanitarian response in place. Faced with a disaster, populations invent and implement ways of responding and mitigating its effects. Anthropology’s interest lies in identifying these structures and bringing them to the fore, so that international action can integrate them into its response strategy.

3/ Anthropologists can share their local contacts with the global health experts coordinating the response. Whether they are researchers, members of civil society or leaders in the public or private sectors, these people can help and communicate with those involved in international action. Humanitarian response targets different scales and therefore needs contacts belonging to these different levels – local, national, international.

Anthropologists can also make the international humanitarian response intelligible to local populations. They play the role of “cultural mediators”[iii] with target populations.

This work can help defuse social tensions, as Faye has shown in the case of the burial of women who have died pregnant in Guinea[iv]. Among the Kissi, in Forest Guinea, it is forbidden to bury a pregnant woman with her child in her abdomen. Instead, the fetus is removed from the woman’s body and the two are buried separately. In the context of the Ebola epidemic, it was not feasible to operate on the woman to achieve this separation. Faye explains that “if it were impossible, for one reason or another, to extract the fetus from the mother’s womb, a rite of reparation consisting of offerings and various ceremonies would have to be sacrificed”. This is how the burial took place.

b. Operational research provides recommendations.

Action research”, or “operational/participatory research”, is a way of bringing together those involved in international action (development and humanitarian aid) and researchers. It’s not a question of erasing the specificities of these two disciplines. On the contrary, as Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan points out, “all action research must submit simultaneously to the rules of research and those of action, otherwise it will be nothing but bad research and bad action”[v].

Thus, action research must respect academic criteria such as the recognition of the researcher’s involvement in his object of study, and the taking into account of personal and subjective biases. This is all the more relevant given anthropology’s emphasis on participant observation, in which the researcher plays an active role in what he or she observes.

New constraints apply to “action research”: the delimitation of a more restricted subject, a shorter timeframe and more accessible writing.

Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan points out that research is subject to the same principles of selection and detour as development projects. The people targeted by the study select what they share in order to best serve their objectives. The researcher must be able to identify and integrate these processes.

Action research helps to guide action so that it is in line with the logic of the target populations.

The case detailed at a Médecins du Monde seminar[vi] on unwanted pregnancies in Côte d’Ivoire shows how the project was guided by the socio-anthropological study that preceded it.

The aim of the study was to “understand the difficulties encountered by Ivorian secondary school pupils in adhering to the prevention messages distributed in schools”[vii]. It revealed the coexistence of two opposing discourses that confined high-school students and reduced their capacity for action. The first, conveyed by peers and social networks, encouraged “early sexuality and a multiplication of partners”. The second, conveyed by adults and certain Ivorian institutions, makes sexuality a taboo subject and presents numerous barriers to access to contraception.

The approach described above enabled us to involve all stakeholders (social, educational, health) in questioning their perception of sexuality, taking into account their position in society and their capacity for action. Young people were integrated into the project by hosting radio programs to support behavioral change. Community agents were recruited to reduce the gap between young people’s experience of sexuality and the communities’ perception of it.

Goundam, Timbuktu region, Mali. Solidarités International has been present in Mali since 2012, working closely with the local population / ©Solidarités International

3. How can anthropology and humanitarianism be linked? The example of Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan’s “contractual model
a. Three preferred areas of interaction

To link anthropology and development, J.-P. Olivier de Sardan presents the solution of the “contractual model”, in which “researchers and operators agree to define a clearly circumscribed zone of interaction and collaboration, without renouncing their specific identities”[viii]. This way of thinking about anthropology/humanitarianism is both broader and more specific than action research. The author details three “preferred areas of interaction”.

Firstly, the training of development workers in the method of ethnographic inquiry, which would protect them from certain clichés. Secondly, anthropologists should be involved in monitoring project drift. Lastly, new types of survey that are neither entirely quantitative nor entirely qualitative.

b. What type of survey?

i. Anthropo experts

J.-P. Olivier de Sardan proposes three ways of overcoming these survey problems. The first method is to call on socio-anthropologists as “experts”. These researchers are long-term specialists in a particular theme or region within a research framework, and bring these skills to the development framework and the constraints that go with it – constrained subject matter, speed of action, efficient delivery. The richness and accuracy of their contribution to the world of development is nourished by their knowledge, built up over many years in an academic setting.

This is what Desclaux and Anoko (2017) describe during the Ebola virus disease epidemic in West Africa in 2014. The WHO called on anthropologists, including some who had already been mobilized during the 2000-2001 epidemic in Uganda, the 2003 epidemic in Congo and so on. The scientists mobilized during these various episodes gathered and created knowledge on “the medico-technical aspects [of the disease], biosafety constraints, the history of population reactions during previous epidemics, and institutional dimensions”[ix].

When the epidemic broke out in Guinea, the WHO immediately called on these experts to “implement the humanization of public health measures, clarify people’s interpretations of the disease and the social logics underlying their reactions”[x].

ii. Mixed research

J.-P. Olivier de Sardan then suggests setting up doctorate programs in which development and research players become involved. They would jointly define the research theme, and the development players would commit to making a field site available to the doctoral student.

These research techniques have proved their worth. This was the case for research manager Florence Chatot, who worked in Niger on a water access program. Upstream of the project, she conducted a needs assessment in partnership with a water, sanitation and hygiene engineer. The study showed the importance of traditional wells for the target population and highlighted the difficulties, particularly financial, associated with borehole maintenance.

Thanks to the integration of social science and technology, the association has adapted its activities by proposing improved traditional wells that do not necessarily meet international standards, but correspond to the needs expressed by the people interviewed.

Linking technology and social science enables us to find technical innovations that are adapted to the field.

iii. Combining surveys

Finally, it is possible to implement a combination of individual and collective surveys in the medium and short term, in order to produce relevant observations in a timeframe acceptable to aid providers. Ethnographic surveys, which focus on individuals over a long period of time, can be carried out in conjunction with rapid collective surveys of the MARP (Méthode Accélérée de Recherche Participative) type.

J.P. Olivier de Sardan and Thomas Bierschenk have proposed the ECRIS (Enquête Collective Rapide d’Identification des Conflits et des Groupes Stratégiques) method or “framework”[xi]. This multi-site comparative analysis approach aims to capture local conflicts, contradictions and issues “from the inside”, in order to build qualitative indicators tailored to the field and the survey theme.

This methodology makes it possible to introduce non-standardized qualitative indicators and common lines of inquiry, which then guide the researchers’ individual fieldwork. It is useful for comparing several sites, but also meets needs linked to “the preparation, monitoring or assessment of development operations”.

The proposals set out in this article to facilitate the integration of anthropology into the humanitarian field are in line with the humanitarian sector’s constant aim to improve the quality of its programs. Anthropology, with its ethnographic method, and the anthropologist, with an outside viewpoint, help to highlight the complexity of the world on which the humanitarian and the developer are working. Anthropology brings a fresh perspective to humanitarian action, even if it is sometimes difficult to integrate.

Madeleine Trentesaux

Due to its interest, we are republishing this article by Madeleine Trentesaux which appeared in issue no. 49 of January 12, 2021.

Who is Madeleine Trentesaux?

Interested in humanitarian and public health issues, Madeleine Trentesaux is currently completing a Master’s degree in “Human Rights and Humanitarian Action” at Sciences Po Paris. Prior to this, she studied anthropology at the University of Paris Nanterre. She worked for a year as an intern at Fondation Mérieux, and took part in international solidarity and development projects in France, Armenia and India.

Madeleine Trentesaux on LinkedIn

[i] De nombreuses publications existent sur l’intérêt de l’anthropologie pour l’humanitaire. Pour exemple, le dossier « Anthropologues et ONG : des liaisons fructueuses ? » piloté par Laëtitia Atlani-Duault.

[ii] Chatot F., 2020, « Dynamiques et normes sociales liées aux mutilations génitales féminines dans le Mandoul » [accessible en ligne], Groupe URD, URL : https://www.urd.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/PASFASS_Rapport-Etude-MGF_FINAL.pdf.

[iii] Anoko J., Desclaux A., 2017, « L’anthropologie engagée dans la lutte contre Ebola (2014-2016) : approches, contributions et nouvelles questions » [accessible en ligne], in. Santé Publique, Vol. 29, n°4, pp.477-485. URL: https://www.cairn.info/revue-sante-publique-2017-4-page-477.htm.

[iv] Fassasi A., 2014, « Ebola : les anthropologues, composante clé de la riposte » [accessible en ligne], URL : https://www.scidev.net/afrique-sub-saharienne/sante/article-de-fond/ebola-les-anthropologues-composante-cl-de-la-riposte.html.

[v] Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, 1995, « Conclusion », in. Anthropologie et développement. Essai en socio-anthropologie du changement social, Paris, éd. Karthala, p.192.

[vi] « Les recherches socio-anthropologiques à Médecins du Monde : quelle utilité dans l’action ? », 2019, Accessible en ligne : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkC9jwTUNT4&list=PLo2mlOZ6tXWu11oMUMLAkVkSO6EAsVRNe.

[vii] Magali Bouchon, 2019, « Innover dans les pratiques humanitaires par la recherche en socio-anthropologie », in. Alternatives Humanitaires, n°10, p.3.

[viii] J.P. Olivier de Sardan, ibid., p.194.

[ix] Anoko J., Desclaux A., ibid., p.479.

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, ibid., « Arènes et groupes stratégiques », p.180.

The resilience of populations and the importance of (very localised) governance in the Sahel.

The case of center and northern Mali.

Mali is today the epicentre of the great Sahelian crisis around which regional governments, the international community, donors, diplomats, researchers, journalists and humanitarian actors are mobilising. The multi-dimensional crisis, which mainly affects the most vulnerable and most isolated Malian populations, is continuously fuelling the root causes of a withdrawal of the State and an almost total abandonment of the population. These populations are thus left to informal activities and humanitarian assistance as the only “lifeline” in a context where insecurity and criminality are also undermining existing social equilibrium.

Between displacement and resettlement, food and nutrition crises, the closure of schools and health centres, and the flight from official authorities due to the lack of security, the populations of the north of the country, and later those of the centre, have sometimes found themselves in autarky, reinventing their modes of local governance, either under pressure from armed groups, or as a result of a form of freedom regained in the absence of any normative presence of the state.

Such a configuration highlights the tremendous resilience capacity of communities, which it is important to better understand, particularly by clearly identifying the limits at which external assistance becomes vital, while taking into account the continuous changes and developments to which these communities are exposed.

The term “resilience” is used generically according to its most common definition, which refers to “the return to normal of a territory or society following a shock or disruption” (Dauphiné and Provitolo, 2003; Paquet, 1999). The definition used here is that of Groupe URD, which refers more precisely to “the capacity of people to anticipate, adapt to and recover from crises”.

The KEY programme (“being upright” in the Songhaï language) is part of several strategies and visions, including Mali’s priorities established within the framework of the Global Alliance for Resilience Initiative (AGIR) in the Sahel and West Africa. The latter aims to strengthen the resilience of Sahelian and West African countries in the face of recurrent food and nutrition crises, based on the premise that these crises can and must be eradicated.

While emergency responses remain a necessity, the premise of these strategies is that a focus on “the root causes of crises will eventually lead to a reduction in their number and cost”. AGIR defines resilience as “the capacity of vulnerable households, families and systems to cope with uncertainty and the risk of shocks, to withstand and respond effectively to those shocks, and to recover and adapt to them in a sustainable manner”.

Population resilience: a concept that must become a human reality

One of the primary indicators of success is determined by the number of vulnerable people benefiting from access to basic social services (health, education, water, sanitation, hygiene) and by the improvement of their capacity to increase their income.

Sahelian countries and donors have adopted the following principle: food and nutritional security concern induce the necessity to no longer dissociate humanitarian aid in times of crisis from the more structural action aimed at combating endemic poverty and undernutrition.

From a practical point of view, the European Union (through the ETF – Emergency Trust Fund – and the EDF – European Development Fund) has provided resources to the tune of €40 million in the form of funding for the KEY programme with the general objective of contributing to the resilience of vulnerable populations faced with food and nutrition insecurity in the six regions of northern and central Mali by working on 4 pillars combined:

Nutritional care focused on children under 5 years old at the community level;
Cash transfers to the most vulnerable in connection with the lean season;
Reinforcement of household means of economic production;
And, finally, governance via support to local authorities (mayors, prefects, technical services and regional bodies) in a context where their presence is so threatened by men-at-arms that many have no choice but to take refuge in the large urban centres.

It is in this context that Groupe URD was asked to support the actors as a “third party” responsible for learning, coordination support and agility or “adaptive management” of the programme as a whole. Contextual monitoring and the analysis of the programme through capitalisation studies and iterative evaluation processes opened up new perspectives for reflection in order to “go further” in improving the relevance of the interventions. Among these, the first is the observation that the resilience of an individual or a community, hitherto measured economically, cannot be dissociated from local governance, participation factors and the quality of social-political relations within and between communities.

If we retain that good resilience is the capacity to withstand a shock by using resources to reach – or even surpass – the previous situation, it should also be noted that part of the population was already subject before the 2012 crisis to repetitive climatic shocks that the security situation simply increased in intensity and recurrence by seriously affecting the capacity of households to consume.

For some authors, resilience is moreover measured by the index of consumption and production of material goods. However, in a context of human and community confrontations, as in northern and central Mali, it also seems to be determined by a factor that is rarely measured: the quality of inter- and intra-community relations and, consequently, the population’s capacity to manage tensions and create a form of stability.

These relations are nevertheless measurable, notably on the basis of the number of incidents between individuals, their nature, the depth of their direct or indirect causes, and also the existence and effectiveness of mechanisms or moral entities legitimately recognised and accepted as such to serve as a lever for mediation and conflict prevention. This should be a direct and concrete link with the “new operational approach” which recommends consolidating the links between humanitarian, development, diplomatic, military and security initiatives, grouped under the expression “triple nexus” in which the Sahel countries are engaged.

Societal decomposition-recomposition and antagonisms linked to limited resources

At the level of the institutional scheme, the decentralisation implemented in the 1990s opened the door to an institutional master plan inspired by the French model where central government, region, circle, sub-prefecture, commune and village (or fraction) are the legally recognised top-down entities representing the descent and ascendancy through which the interaction between development actors and populations should ultimately pass.

The most local scale of this scheme, the scarcity of resources and a lack of vigilance on the part of political actors have led the populations to split up more and more into autonomous ‘sites’. Each initially homogenous geographical entity was registered in several fractions, each holding a legal act of constitution issued by the authorities.

This population strategy aims to reduce the risks of their exclusion in terms of targeting and to limit the impact of misappropriation at higher levels, but at the same time it multiplies the number of sites to be covered and the people to be contacted. It also poses problems with administrative standards and the practices of development actors: a newly constituted extended family settling 10 km from its site of origin thus wants to claim a school, a borehole and a health centre on the same basis as a village of 5,000 people with the sole aim of turning the dividends into a family income-generating activity to the detriment of the rest of the geographical community.

When it comes to targeting the most vulnerable, scales are multiplied and individualities often take precedence over the notion of community: “nobody represents anybody in reality”. Interests and antagonisms’ guide individuals to the detriment of the social ties usually agreed upon as the basis for defining a community.

In addition to these elements, there are criteria for affiliation (or not) to a political party, a wider social group, or even an armed group, which encourage the multiplication of ‘arrangements’ with aid intermediaries (actors, traditional or state authorities, etc.), develop a form of brokering via local actors – intermediaries sometimes created to measure – and revive new competition between communities in terms of access to basic services but also new ambitions for political representativeness.

This connection between political representativeness and instrumentalisation (or appropriation of basic services by individuals or groups of individuals) is not without impact on social relations and the degradation of good local governance. Consequently, it leads to injustice, conflict and instability.

Between the needs of populations to access basic services and their capacity to control their total management at the most decentralised level of the state, other ‘actors’ are trying to infiltrate. The motivations and challenges are in fact multiple: political ambitions of personalities from these communities, lack of vision and sometimes corruption of state agents, armed movements in the race for legitimacy to become significant interlocutors in the framework of the Algiers Agreements (signed between Mali and the armed groups of the North), radical groups seeking support and relays to better establish themselves, etc. The populations have therefore become “actors and victims”, “instrumentalized” and “instrumentalizing” at the same time.

These different elements explain the complexity of the context and the difficulties for international humanitarian and development actors to find an effective formula to achieve the objectives in terms of the resilience of the most vulnerable populations, but also to respect the “do no harm” principle while guaranteeing optimal conditions in terms of accountability.

During our analyses and evaluations, we often identify “weak signals”, including accusations of aid diversion, particularly in relation to cash transfers, school canteens or the salaries of teachers or nurses who are considered by the population to be “fictitious”. These accusations are particularly made against the “intermediaries” who make the decisional link with the populations.

Even if the context is favourable to a form of omerta preventing the production of indisputable evidence, we have nevertheless observed that these charges oscillate between reality and, at times, attempts to discredit “the other”. This logic of competition in terms of access to resources can be coupled with another social strategy for redistributing wealth (distribution according to criteria specific to communities – different from those of humanitarian actors and in their absence) which can be analysed as an “internal reorientation in relation to the objective of the projects” which does not necessarily produce “illicit enrichment”.

Vaccination of herd ©Hamada (Wandey) AG AHMED

Governance and accountability “by” and “for” beneficiary populations

However, most programmes integrate a “governance” dimension as a vertical pillar or cross-cutting activity but take little account of the need for intra-community governance as a starting point and the main factor of success or failure, which is totally independent of the technical expertise deployed.

Complex realities at the heart of this accountability converge individual interests, collective stakes, rigid frameworks and local participation, posing challenges for the integration of people’s visions in local development plans. Why not a “right to good governance” as an inalienable right of the citizen?

Activities related to governance mainly concern traditional development structures and actors: administration, technical services, NGOs, associations, technical and financial partners. At the level of local authorities, there are three types of structures: the Communal Committee for the Orientation, Coordination and Monitoring of Development Actions (CCOCMDA), the Local Committee for the Orientation, Coordination and Monitoring of Development Actions (LCOCMDA), and the Regional Committee for the Orientation, Coordination and Monitoring of Development Actions (RCOCMDA), which constitute the structural framework around which activities to strengthen and support local governance are organised (common, circle and regional levels).

However, in the Malian and more generally Sahelian context, with the major crisis of confidence that exists between the populations and everything that represents the State, we have nevertheless noticed that participation in consultation frameworks and local political bodies (motivation to be a member of the boards) can often be linked to personal agendas with the aim of social, political, security or financial ascension, with the interest of the communities being relegated to the background.

On the one hand, these mechanisms have little reality other than on paper and, when meetings actually take place, the weak capacity of the elected officials and customary chiefs who constitute and lead them, combined with the sometimes self-serving motivations on sub-contracting and procurement (among others) and/or community issues discussed above, quickly compromise dialogue between stakeholders. Solutions are often found on a case-by-case basis to unblock the participation of these so-called “representatives of the populations” but they do not systematically work over time.

It is indeed difficult – even “blocking” – to do things “without the authority” when the financial responsibility for activities such as the convening, holding and monitoring of consultation frameworks does not fall within the remit of NGOs. However, the reports of their deliberations are, in concrete terms, one of the indicators of the achievement of a programme’s objectives. Thus, a large number of activities requiring the full involvement of state and/or local government services exist only because they are financed by NGOs or donors. While the underlying causes are too numerous to be developed here (among them, the limited resources available to the state), the result is ultimately the ‘monetisation’ effect of regalian services transformed into ‘services for the payer’ with a view to their effectiveness. We are therefore sometimes far from the ‘homogenous and constant public service’ whose functionality is the starting point for the budgetary programming of aid actors.

In the decentralisation master plan, each activity must also be integrated into the appropriate framework (regional and local) through the economic, social and cultural development programmes (ESCDP) of the communes, which allow the legitimate concerns of the populations to be taken into account and appropriate responses to be provided.

These programmes are drawn up – in theory – every five years and revised – still in theory – every year. Therefore, for humanitarian actors who operate on a different timeframe (that of needs in the face of crises), a priori programming in the institutions’ calendar conflicts with a posteriori “budgetary” programming linked to the dynamics imposed by donors. As a result, these two often asynchronous processes lead to tensions or result in a form of “forced integration” which is also monetised via dedicated funding so that it can be passed on to donors as effective and successful integration.

This rigidity of the framework and these interplay of interests have an impact on the agility and adaptability of projects and are compromising for stakeholders where the hyper-localized accountability of aid should call for the preservation of a citizen culture and ethics. In a context of absence of the State, characterised by the predominance of informal actors of violence, what strategy should then be adopted to limit these pernicious effects and ensure the achievement of effective and reinforced resilience of the populations most exposed to vulnerability?

All of these factors that fuel intra-community crises and overlap are essential to understand and take into account with better adapted and even more localised responses that integrate the “accountability and governance” binomial within the beneficiary communities as well as in the chain of interlocutors and intermediaries.

If yesterday’s struggles were called, among other things, “the right to humanitarian intervention”, tomorrow’s struggles should not be limited to a theoretical “triple nexus” but should go far beyond this and call for the imperative need to introduce into the corpus of international law and practice the binding notion of the “inalienable right to collective organisation” which respects the relevance of territoriality with and through sufficient control over the public apparatus, always remaining “representative”.

The challenge would be to find the right strategies to support individuals’ capacities to organise themselves, in order to get out of the dynamics of dependency. Supporting this right and encouraging its free exercise rather than trying to establish solutions that are always technocratic in place of individuals affected by crises would be a good course of action.

It is on this condition alone that the framework will probably become conducive in the long term to the sustainability of aid and stabilisation and will therefore make the development of these communities a reality.

Hamada (Wandey) AG AHMED

Who is Hamada (Wandey) AG AHMED?

Wandey is a graduate of the University of Paris 12 (Master’s degree in humanitarian management and development actions) and of the Bioforce school in Lyon.

He has been working for 20 years with several organisations (French Red Cross, Solidarités, ACF, Save the Children, Oxfam among others) and most recently at SIF as Africa Regional Manager based in Paris.

After his first experiences in Central Africa, he held several head of mission positions in the Sahel, with programmes focusing on resilience, health, nutrition and food security before joining Groupe URD in April 2019 as Country Coordinator in Mali. He is in charge of supporting the KEY programme funded by the European Union.

This Franco-Malian with a dual culture is particularly interested in “weak signals” and issues affecting the most vulnerable and most at risk populations as an observer-witness to change and analyst.

He has notably coordinated several studies, the most recent of which focuses on the “forgotten human and environmental heritage” of Lake Faguibine in partnership with AFD.