CATALOGO GENERAL DE RAMOS DE INTEGRACIÓN DEL SABER
UPR: INST DE TEOLOGÍA
On a hot afternoon I hitch a ride with the IRC vehicle out to their offices in Makere to attend a staff meeting. They’re just past the long entrance road to Nyarugusu, surrounded by a bit of barbed wire, and not far from the TWESA and TRCS compounds. While we wait for Kasulu based staff to arrive, we sit in a wall-less makuti thatched hut, watching the news on a large flat- screen television. Al Jazeera is airing a feature on rape as a weapon of war in the DRC. The programming changes to a documentary on schistosomiasis. The staff are shocked at people bathing in the river. Someone comments indignantly on the fact that they do this right off the highway in Nyachege, one town over. Another staff member informs me of the fact that UNHCR
will build 30 houses in a compound right behind IRC; this means that the camp won’t close any time soon. It is supposedly meant to house IOM and UNHCR staff working on durable solutions.
The human resources manager opens up the meeting. He goes through logistical details – who will run meetings, what kind of agenda there will be, and announces the obvious fact that meetings are to discuss issues and challenges and to share information. The IRC manager has been in Kasulu for four months, this is his first time visiting the camp. He begins by explaining his priorities: “All eyes are on Kasulu” as the biggest IRC office in Tanzania, and thus “capacity building” will be his main agenda. There will be a mentorship program, so that all managers will have the opportunity to “be exposed to other managers around.” IRC is to have a “2025 strategy,” and all staff are to contribute to this. I am surprised to hear that IRC is actually under spending. It emerges that UNHCR cannot actually give more money to IRC, because they haven’t yet spent 70% of what they were meant to spend by March. A new monitoring and evaluation officer is to develop “activity tracking tools,” since they are now relying on BVA’s or “budget versus actual [spending].” He continues: “Performance management is one way of demonstrating accountability. We are developing performance objectives. I encourage you to set performance objectives. Documentation of performance is very important. It is not an event (tukio), it is a process (mchakato).”181 But this ongoing process was a haphazard one.
A definitive feature of the humanitarian operation – like most bureaucracies - in Tanzania was the abundance of documents. Binders full of reports, case files, intake documents, and statistics filled offices; meeting agendas, lists of stakeholders, donor visit plans, and maps
overflowed from desks. Fact sheets, SOP (standard operating procedures) documents, strategy papers, coordination notes, and background papers proliferated, along with minutes, case reports, carbon copies, handwritten notes, memos, and court proceedings. Over the years, aid agencies, donors, and consultants commissioned and produced numerous reports about the nature and effectiveness of humanitarian projects in the region, or, in aid parlance, conducted monitoring and evaluation activities. In short, meetings produced reports, and the production of reports necessitated meetings.
The previous chapter focused on individual attempts to receive services related to gender based violence and to be listened to carefully. This chapter focuses on group-based general demands on humanitarian actors, the constituent parts of humanitarian bureaucracy, and on humanitarian histories and meetings as central to the production of humanitarian knowledge. Rather than producing an ongoing state of emergency which “excludes both past and present,”182 interactions between humanitarian workers and refugees engender a heterotemporality of consciousness: the concomitant production of narratives of past and present suffering, and the possibility of present and future flourishing. Colin Hoag characterizes bureaucracies as ironic “objectivity machines,”183 and uses the concept of dereliction to describe bureaucratic operations, arguing that bureaucracy works to orient people to the future.184 This is certainly true in Nyarugusu, where the unpredictable and impervious nature of protection and resettlement aid as well as the designation of the camp as simultaneously “durable” and “temporary” focus
182 Agier, Managing the Undesirables: Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Government. pp. 79.
183 Colin Hoag, "Assembling Partial Perspectives: Thoughts on the Anthropology of Bureaucracy," PoLAR: Political
and Legal Anthropology Review 34.1 (2011).
184 Colin Hoag, "Dereliction at the South African Department of Home Affairs: Time for the Anthropology of
people’s attention on present needs and possible futures. Humanitarian bureaucracy as a whole operates on a short timescale of the immediate-to-near future. The production of texts is central to humanitarian operations, and a closer look at the nature of these texts and the circumstances of their production can certainly tell us more about the contingency, opacity and irony of humanitarian bureaucracy. However, in this chapter I pay attention to meetings as a genre constituting the “stuff” of humanitarian bureaucracy. Meetings were meant to inform and gain information from refugees, but they also became a key site for refugees to articulate a claim about inclusion in the category of humanity: the right to be heard/ to be listened to.
Donors and Evaluation
Located in a residential suburb of Dar es Salaam, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) country office is housed in a bungalow a stone’s throw from a fancy nightclub, and just down the road from former President Nyerere’s residence. Two SUVs and a small sign outside the heavy, 10-foot high black gates announce its location. There, I spoke with the Grants Coordinator, who explained how IRC planned, funded, and evaluated its projects in Nyarugusu. A high-school student from the nearby international school was shadowing her as part of a school project. No doubt under pressure owing to increased arrivals in the camp, she was curt with me and seemed annoyed by my ignorance of what were (to her) universal monitoring and evaluation standards and acronyms.185
IRC is what’s known as an IP – an Implementing Partner. Implementing partners are funded by UNHCR (as opposed to Operational Partners, who are not funded directly by UNHCR
but have significant involvement in refugee operations). The GBV manager at IRC works with UNHCR field teams, holding regular meetings. At the beginning of a grant cycle, IRC begins planning for the next year. The GBV coordinator, along with national and refugee staff and relevant partners, come up with a budget, which is sent to the grants manager and technical advisors at IRC headquarters, who “frame everything correctly.” They look up the literature on what’s current in the field, and make sure plans are aligned with the latest evidence-based programming. The grants manager and IRC staff incorporate these suggestions and then send it back for a final approval. Finally, the IRC “Business Development Unit” looks at all UN and US government applications.
Determinations on spending for camp operations are shaped by global trends in humanitarian and development aid and reflect the priorities of funding bodies. The actual budgets proposed reflect “wishlists,” which are “tweaked down” or sent back to sector leads (e.g. for education or GBV) who decide what they can live without. A few days before the final deadline, allocations are made for sector budgets. Projects are proposed to fit grants, and to “meet IRC’s global priorities and donor agendas.” Quarterly reports are sent to the US government Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM). UNHCR receives monthly and biannual reports. [These are in addition to weekly and monthly coordination documents at the sector level]. PRM funds a large part of IRC’s work in the camp, and is particularly interested in funding GBV and general protection issues.
Once funded, programs must be evaluated. UNHCR grant proposals include indicators and targets at the outset, for example, the number of women who are to be offered case
management. IRC “puts benchmarks for [themselves]” that are set by sector leads, and confirmed by technical advisors, who encourage them to “follow universal standards.” [These would include SPHERE Project (Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards on Humanitarian Response) and IASC (Inter-Agency Standing Committee, the primary mechanism for inter-agency coordination of humanitarian assistance) guidelines].186 Though IRC typically is meant to employ a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) officer, at the time of my interview, the position was vacant and had been for some time. PRM – like other donors - held focus group discussions to evaluate the work of IRC. Though there was no independent overall evaluator, IRC is audited annually by UNHCR and conducts a self-imposed audit every two years, including a randomized controlled trial and a standard impact evaluation (though neither had been conducted in Nyarugusu). The coordinator explained that there had been “donor fatigue” in Nyarugusu until the recent arrival of Burundian refugees; as a result, there had been little funding for basic programming needs. She pointed out that “no one’s looking long term.”187
Coordinating the Camp
In addition to evaluating humanitarian effectiveness, simply running the camp required reports to be produced on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly and multi-year basis. Annual reports detailed protection, GBV, WASH, and various other strategies. The professionalization and standardization of humanitarian practices has given rise to innumerable “best practices,” “standard operating procedures,” and handbooks full of acronyms. UNHCR’s Emergency Handbook contains a section on “CCCM” or ‘Camp coordination, camp management and
186 See http://www.sphereproject.org/ and https://interagencystandingcommittee.org/ 187 Interview with IRC Grants Coordinator, Dar es Salaam, June 2, 2015.
governance'. CCCM “refers to standardized coordination mechanisms that may be applied both to refugee operations (through the Refugee Coordination Model) and IDP operations (through the CCCM Cluster). CCCM mechanisms ensure that services are delivered efficiently and that populations of concern are protected in camp or camp-like settings.”188
The standard model of CCCM includes three coordinated parties, along with representatives from “persons of concern,” i.e. camp residents. These are 1) Camp Administration (usually national or local authorities; MHA in Nyarugusu), responsible for supervising the camp response as well as camp security 2) Camp coordination (UNHCR), responsible for “overall strategic and inter-camp operational coordination, covering issues such as setting strategy, setting standards, contingency planning, and information management.” 3) Camp management (an NGO partner or local authorities, or rarely, UNHCR; formerly World Vision and now TWESA in Nyarugusu), which coordinates a camp's services and maintenance of infrastructure. The simple fact of CCCM being structured in this way entailed much “inter- agency coordination.” There were weekly coordination and information sharing meetings, and weekly reports that circulated along with them. The provision of services and the organizational division of labor in Nyarugusu was complex enough that even aid workers struggled to understand it.189 Aid workers sometimes even asked me whether I knew the timing and location of agency meetings or other consultations, or whether they were happening at all.
188https://emergency.unhcr.org/entry/42975/camp-coordination-camp-management-cccm, Last accessed January 6,
2017
Matthew Hull argues that we should “analytically restore the visibility of documents, to look at rather than through them.”190 He encourages scholars of bureaucracy to ask “how documents engage (or do not engage) with people, places, and things to make (other) bureaucratic objects.”191 Following Hull’s insight about not succumbing to an “unproductive dichotomy between real and constructed,”192 in this chapter I will try to look at some of the practices that both shape and are affected by the production and circulation of paperwork. But rather than looking either at or through paperwork, I want to look around it. In Nyarugusu, this means not only considering how knowledge is constructed and circulated through reports, but also how fora like meetings and monitoring and evaluation missions are necessary to the production of such knowledge.
Humanitarian reports are concerned with i) norms, standards, benchmarks ii) status or progress assessment. Roughly speaking, the common features of humanitarian reports include background, strategy, evaluation and impact. Take, for example, the Nyarugusu Joint Assessment Mission (JAM) of 2013.193 The TOC lists acknowledgments, a list of acronyms, an executive summary, an introduction, assessment overview, methodology and rationale. These are followed by the JAM objectives, background, Status of Implementation of 2010 JAM Recommendations, assessment finding and recommendations by sector (Health and Nutrition, WASH, Nutrition, Food and Logistics, Self-Reliance, Non-Food Items and Environment, Education, Market Analysis, Environment, Non-Food Items), a joint action plan, and annexes
190 Matthew S Hull, Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2012). pp. 13, emphasis in original
191 Hull, Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan. pp. 5 192 Hull, Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan. pp. 5 193 Refugees, Joint Assessment Mission (Jam), Nyarugusu Camp, Tanzania, Final Report.
listing participants, team terms of reference (TORs) and areas of focus, and the status of implementation of 2010 recommendations. The status section lists observations and recommendations made in 2010, their level of priority, the agency responsible, and the follow-up action taken.
Reports like this are thus concerned with fixing (in both senses) a problem in time. The basis of actions are recommendations, which must be implemented by specific partners and people. The temporal orientation of these reports is the immediate to short term future, as determined by the nature of humanitarian aid itself. It is the view towards these “little futures” that precludes any significant structural change; each humanitarian action is meant to solve an immediate problem without much regard for future implications.194
Speaking of the “ordering” of humanitarian situations, Jennifer Hyndman writes that the “production [of maps, statistics, and assessments] often occurs without reference to the historical configurations of power that preceded them. In the context of refugee camps, cartography, counting, and recording are all acts of management, if not surveillance. They enact controversial power relations between refugees and humanitarian agencies. These strategic tools represent the field of refugee camps as orderly and comparable to other fields managed in various parts of the
globe.”195 These insights are certainly true of the verification exercise, GBVIMS, and other
instruments to standardize data and knowledge about refugees in the camp. But I suggest that rather than having no historical references, humanitarian aid doubles back on its own history to inform future practices, either by carrying forth standardized benchmarks and norms that have
194 Hoag, "Dereliction at the South African Department of Home Affairs: Time for the Anthropology of
Bureaucracy."
been development from cases representing “best practices,” or through prior studies of the same situation. Furthermore, the community involvement described in the previous chapter extended to the production of humanitarian knowledge, which now had to encompass refugee opinions (regardless of whether they were taken seriously or not) gleaned through meetings.
Text production happened at three levels: coordination, strategy, and operating procedures (reports produced by refugee workers and aid agency staff in the camp), policy oriented reports (monitoring and evaluation), and documents produced for refugees (including but not limited to case management, informational documents, and certificates). In Nyarugusu, the humanitarian operation was far from transparent; this opacity demanded that refugees furnish proof of their struggles in the form of documents provided and certified by various aid agencies.196 I saw many such dossiers, composed of copies of reports made to GBV centers, police, WLAC, and the UNHCR protection office, and health records, among other things. Some of my interviewees produced entire binders of certificates earned by participating in workshops on leadership, human rights, GBV and masculinity. In the course of interviewing people I often found that they had undergone extensive training directed at changing attitudes in the camp. They saved these documents very carefully, both to show that they were, despite their situation in life, educated and cosmopolitan. More importantly, they considered them as gateways to alternative futures: proof of qualifications that might make them more employable after resettlement.
As a humanitarian operation funded by various governments and international
196 Thomson, "Black Boxes of Bureaucracy: Transparency and Opacity in the Resettlement Process of Congolese
organizations, assessments – the holy grail of M&E or monitoring and evaluation - were thus de rigeur in Nyarugusu. These happened at a daily and weekly level with the production of reports by local offices – first at the camp, then in Kasulu – for weekly briefing meetings. Each camp event produced its own massive paper trail, with every agency writing up a summary afterwards for the record. At a larger scale, funding bodies like ECHO and PRM would send a representative or small group of observers. These M&E trips were quite short, lasting only a few days, and most required the use of a translator. Planned by the local offices, they involved meetings with camp leadership, visits to various sites in the camps, and meetings with pre- arranged groups of refugees. I attended a number of such meetings, which sometimes read as farce. Some refugees commented to me that since the missions never went beyond the aid outposts, they could not truly understand their struggles. I saw many of the same participants at various different meetings. Often, refugees complained that aid workers did not truly understand their situation due to their limited engagement within the camp – the fact that they only visited a few locations, and that these visits were brief in nature. For example, because people took great care with their appearance when attending official meetings and delegates only saw people dressed well, the true extent of poverty in the camp could not be known.197 The documentation of refugee struggles in assessment missions and field reports naturally could not adequately convey the scope of suffering or the affective reverberations of the difficulties of camp life.
The institutional language of the reports generated from these brief visits does not betray the position that Nyarugusu occupies in the humanitarian imaginary. Early in my fieldwork, I met with the head of the UNHCR field office, who was in her first non-war humanitarian situation. She was always impeccably polished, accessorized with an expensive watch and black
patent leather pumps. Carefully amending her words throughout our conversation, she expressed her desire for UNHCR to “start thinking outside of the box.” She told me her business law background impacted the way she saw things here. This was the “time to be bold, innovative, test something.” She littered our conversation with analogies and personal examples, ranging from the repair of her old car to her relationship with her mother, telling me in a hushed voice: “The beauty is that we have the resources.” She described the humanitarian intervention in the camp as "dreaming in color;” Nyarugusu represented a “prison door” that needed to be pried open – the humanitarian effort needed to “create a symbiosis where the refugee camp is not held up almost like a ghetto.”198
The official’s comments were personal, but indicative of how Nyarugusu was seen, on one hand, as an experimental site where new approaches could be tested, and on the other, as a known situation. Humanitarian aid would be tweaked and made better through constant evaluations. These gave rise to new recommendations to be implemented, new approaches