Framing attempts to abuse the system as opportunism, and in particular seeing them as the marker of moral deficiency, obliterates the need to search for the social causes of
opportunism (as opposed to framing it as a purely moral problem). This approach, in turn, legitimises the kinds of solutions that protection organisations currently implement to try and address this problem. The vast majority of these solutions revolve around “policing” existing resources and designing ever tighter control measures over them. For example, a protection practitioner – the same that had mentioned that defenders often falsify receipts - told me that their organisations tried to address this problem by putting in place strict procedures for any additional money being given. Disbursing this additional money would require prior approval
and documentary evidence for how it had been spent afterwards116 (Interview with protection
professional, 21 August 2014). More generally, protection organisations blacklist defenders who take advantage of the system, even in those instances when they only exaggerate (rather than invent) the risks that they are facing, in an effort “to let them [defenders] know it is not ok” (Interview with protection professional, 29 July 2014).
In turn, the approach to opportunism as an effect of moral deficiency and the resulting tight regulation of resources enact a broader dynamic of trusteeship, where protection
organisations often imagine themselves as the guardians of defenders. Conversely, internal representations of grassroots defenders as the problem, occasionally coupled with subtle nuances of infantilisation, combine to rationalise and legitimise current decisions about resource
management within the protection system. To give just one example, half way through a meeting of protection organisations that I attended during my fieldwork, the participants, all staff with protection organisations in Kenya, or organisations that might otherwise support defenders, started discussing updates on the situation of a grassroots group harassed by a land-grabbing company operating in their area, and strategies to support this group. During that discussion, someone suggested that the grassroots group apply for funding from an international body. In response, one of the participants in the meeting urged the organisation that had put forward the idea to apply for the funding themselves on behalf of the community-based group, so that they could have control of the money and its spending. After which, they added: “You know how these CBOs [community-based organisations] can be” (Ichim, personal fieldnotes). The assumption that this particular group would not be able to manage the money and/or would mismanage it, was based on a blanket judgment of community-based organisations, and
defenders from the grassroots more generally, as a whole category (see also Waldron, 1987: 1).
116 Anyone who has carried out research in those geographical and social spaces in Kenya where its extended
informal economy predominates will know that providing precise documentary evidence for all the expenses incurred during field-trips is very difficult. In such places – rural areas and the informal settlements in major urban centres such as Nairobi and Mombasa are good examples – it is not always possible to obtain documentary evidence (such as official receipts) of money being spent. Moreover, documentation – even in official institutions (like mortuaries, for example), sometimes requires expenses that by their very nature cannot be documented. To give just one example, a defender from a rural area mentioned to me the case of a police-shooting that they documented for a human rights organisation. To gain access to the mortuary where the body was being held, they had to bribe the mortuary attendant 1000 KSH (about £7). According to them, this money was never reimbursed to them (Interview with defender from outside of Nairobi).
There was also a deep irony about this remark occurring during a meeting whose venue was in Lavington, well-known in Nairobi’s expat circles and equally Kenya’s upper middle class for its green scenery, quiet streets, and its mixture of newly built flats and old, colonial-style houses surrounded by large, lush gardens. The guesthouse itself in whose conference room the meeting took place was located in such a compound, a mixture of alleys paved with cobbled stones, and abundant vegetation occasionally poked by wooden tables with matching chairs tucked away under large, green umbrellas. By start time, breakfast was ready to be served with a buffet style assortment of bacon, sausages, mushrooms and fried tomatoes, elements of French cuisine - croissant and other patisseries, but also the boiled roots traditionally served in Kenya – sweet potatoes or yams, as well as freshly squeezed juices, brewed coffee, tea and hot chocolate (Ichim, personal fieldnotes). To mention the set-up of the meeting in such detail might seem superfluous, but it is an extremely powerful reminder, precisely because of its material poignancy, of who has control over resources in the protection system, and what some of the benefits of controlling those resources are.
It is also a powerful reminder of the implications that resource-control has for how power relationships are being configured, a critical issue that raises the question of whether current resource management decisions and their rationalisations have the potential to challenge, or whether they merely re-inforce these power relationships. If the argument that power and resource control are deeply intertwined (Waldron, 1987) is correct, then its corollary is that empowerment necessarily entails processes of resource (re)distribution that open up different possibilities for action. That, however, would also require a radical rethinking of why
beneficiaries attempt to appropriate (“abuse”) the system in the first place. In the next section, I offer a re-reading of “opportunism” as “resistance”, based on beneficiaries’ own narratives as they emerge from my data, and I explore what the implications might be for protection.