Hold your horses! Are humanitarian cowboys a relic of the past?

Fred Spielberg says he isn’t a humanitarian cowboy, though he has been called one. “I started out as a U.N. volunteer, but I rapidly got on the circuit of being sent to every major emergency in Africa,” he tells Devex, rattling off countries: Angola, Somalia, Mozambique, Sudan — and that’s not even including his many short-term duty postings. “This was in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and that was the prime breeding grounds for humanitarian cowboys.” Anyone who’s spent time in the sector knows this particular brand of aid worker: White, male, armed with a threadbare passport and an unwavering confidence in his ability to fix a situation, often without asking a whole lot of questions. One report describes the culture as one of “heroism and risk-taking”; another speaks of “charismatic figures” with a “track record of getting things done.’’ Spielberg, who now works as a humanitarian response and preparedness consultant, has a slightly less generous take — his descriptors include “independent, arrogant, macho, culturally insensitive, short-term mentality, and generally a loose cannon in the field.” “I do think it’s a negative epithet. No one should want to be called a humanitarian cowboy,” he said. The making of humanitarian cowboys The humanitarian space has changed a lot in recent years, at least in theory. What was once an ad hoc, semilawless field has been professionalized, with protocols, standards, and processes adopted to ensure that programs are effective and communities are engaged. In 2016, the World Humanitarian Summit saw the creation of the Grand Bargain, which vowed to get more resources into the hands of people in need and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of humanitarian action. It also kickstarted serious discussion about the need for localization, which encourages a bottom-up approach whereby international players play a supporting role to national and local stakeholders. Globally, movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter also raised awareness about equality, prompting conversations about the structures of power and privilege that scaffold society. All of this surely means that the days of the macho humanitarian cowboy, full of swagger and bravado, have come to an end. Right? Not quite. One operations adviser, who has worked with the Red Cross and the International Committee of the Red Cross, or ICRC, for more than a decade and spoke to Devex on the condition of anonymity, recalls a retirement letter circulated by a high-ranking ICRC official a few years ago. “It was a nice retirement letter, and then, at one point, it said, ‘I miss those old days when we were uncommunicable in the middle of a deployment area, and we could get lucky with the local woman,’” the source recalls. “And this was a public letter.” Whether this counts as an improvement is a matter of perspective. On the one hand, the official inferred that the old days of cowboy behavior were over. On the other, he still felt comfortable lamenting those bygone days publicly. What has not gone away, the source says, is a system that rewards a superhero mentality of unbothered, nothing-affects-me machismo. Ending the cowboy mentality Humanitarianism as a concept was born amid war, its origins often traced back to the horror felt by Swiss businessman — and eventual Red Cross co-founder — Henri Dunant after witnessing the human devastation wrought by the Battle of Solferino in Italy, in 1859. While its aims are the opposite of a wartime combatant’s, the humanitarian structure is oddly similar, with those willing to take on multiple tours in insecure settings rewarded with advancement. In 1994, a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees analysis of the agency’s operations carried out in Yugoslavia two years prior found that “risk-takers were viewed as courageous, while staff more concerned about security were derided for their timidity or cowardice.” The motivation for taking on a dangerous assignment was less about helping people in need, and more about the opportunity to “make a name for oneself.” “Fortunately, attitudes toward security evolved and improved as staff began to relate the situation risks to their potential achievements and became more concerned about their well-being,” it concluded. However, according to the ICRC source, that mentality is still deeply ingrained in the humanitarian system 30 years later, and the sector continues to favor those who valorize risk over protocol. “This is a type that is usually very self-assured, that is usually very outspoken and present,” the source said. “Somehow, for an organization, it’s much better to have a person like that.” Putting on a front of invulnerability, however, is not the same thing as actually being invulnerable. There has been an increased emphasis on the mental health issues faced by aid workers, who are known to struggle with PTSD, depression, anxiety, and high levels of alcohol and drug consumption. Aid workers are often reluctant to seek help for fear of stigmatization and the perception that their careers will stall as a result. Additionally, many organizations still lack adequate support services. This creates an ongoing cycle of negative coping mechanisms, which can numb the ability to feel the empathy required to do the job well. Despite the lip service paid to mental health, the source said the system continues to promote those who mask their struggles. “It creates a loop of reinforcement from the institutional side because this person is ‘less problematic.’” The pros and cons of parachuting into crises One of the core tenets of the Grand Bargain is moving more resources and decision-making power into the hands of local communities. But localization has been patchy at best, as Devex has reported, and criticism of the term as little more than a conference buzzword is widespread. But experts agree that simply shifting resources will solve only part of the problem. Gemma Houldey, author of “The Vulnerable Humanitarian: Ending Burnout Culture in the Aid Sector,” asserts that while localization has somewhat reduced the prevalence of foreign aid workers zipping from one crisis to the next, power imbalances in the industry are still alive and well. “Even though there is more local staff filling certain roles, often the top senior roles, the sort of so-called experts, are still the white expats that are going from one mission to another, and that still exists — more in some organizations than others,” she said. The benefits of localization are manifold: Local and national players understand the cultural context in which they’re operating and are positioned to respond to a crisis early and remain there during the subsequent rebuilding process. Reducing the number of cavalier foreigners airdropping in — and the attendant problems they bring — is largely seen as a good thing. But Lars Peter Nissen, CEO of the humanitarian assessment organization ACAPS, says there will always be some need for outside intervention during an emergency. Before he was at ACAPS, Nissen worked in operations — in other words, he was what might be described as a humanitarian cowboy. In Nissen’s opinion, there remains a need for the skills that so-called cowboys bring, if not the machismo and other negative behaviors that often accompany them. When disaster strikes, there’s a massive influx of money, supplies, and other resources — and somebody with experience needs to be there to handle it. “It’s a very fragile moment when you have a sudden onset,” he said. “Things fall apart in a different way, and that I think is a specific skill set to manage something so complex.” Disasters are, by definition, an aberration from everyday life. Nissen points out that the workers who respond to these disasters have a high tolerance for ambiguity and a social ease that allows them to connect with people and earn trust quickly. And because it’s a relatively insular profession, they also tend to know each other — “they bring in social capital across different organizations, across all these inputs coming in, and that helps grease the wheels,” he explained. Nissen also offers a counterpart to the narrative that flying in and out of a place is inherently bad. “I think there’s a complementarity between people coming from the outside and people being part of the context,” he said, noting that it can be harder to be outspoken in a place where you have to live with the consequences long term. “Maybe it’s actually nice sometimes if somebody comes in and challenges that power and then leaves after a couple of weeks.” “It’s too easy to say, ‘let’s get rid of the cowboys, and then everything will be fine,’” he added. “We have to be careful that we don’t throw that knowledge and wisdom out with the white men in the bathwater.” Spielberg agrees that it’s entirely possible to enter a disaster zone as an outsider and actually do good and effective work. As he put it: “‘Humanitarian cowboy’ is not a job description; it’s a characteristic.” “You can get lots of different people to fill a post,” he said. “One can be a humanitarian cowboy, another can be a very process-oriented, culturally sensitive person that can still make decisions and manage operations, but has a lot more emotional intelligence.” The dark side of riding in on a white horse So how to cut down on the dark sides of cowboyism? To Houldey, one solution is to hire more women for senior roles. Though research has shown that women are well represented in humanitarianism’s lower ranks, their numbers thin considerably when it comes to leadership positions. Houldey also says the lack of accountability that comes with traveling from one place to another, paired with pervasive machismo and a “superhero” mindset, is a recipe for misconduct. There are certainly examples to support this claim: Sexual abuse scandals have rocked Oxfam, Save the Children, the U.N., and more, forcing a reckoning across the aid industry. The ICRC source says that while they’ve encountered cowboyism in both men and women, foreigner and local, white men are the ones whose behavior most often goes unchecked, while women and local workers are more likely to get caught and filtered out of the system. It’s not that this accountability is bad, they say — the issue is that it’s unevenly applied. More diversity in the field would offer a counterbalance to the flippant attitude the source has witnessed from their Western, male colleagues, who have belittled everything from security measures to psychosocial programming. In one instance, a female staffer wanted to include the dangers of the nighttime streets in a risk assessment, only to be told by her male coworker that she simply shouldn’t be out at night. In another case, a colleague suggested that a program on sexual violence be dropped because “that’s just cultural behavior here in the area, so it’s not related to the conflict.” “People feel like [increasing diversity] is just a tokenizing exercise,” the source said. But in fact, it’s necessary to keep one perspective from gaining too much power. “If you want to keep doing the same thing just with different people, then yeah, you’re doing it wrong,” they added. “But if you want to do better by bringing in different perspectives, then that’s the point of diversity and inclusion.” To Spielberg, the problem is less about gender and more about entitlement. Those with the means to volunteer abroad, earn a master’s degree, and learn the multiple languages often required to land a high-level position at a prestigious organization can carry an air of arrogance — another crucial ingredient in the making of a cowboy. And this attitude isn’t just among white men from the global north. Spielberg said he’s seen it from those working in their home countries, too. “I’ve found in several places that the people that are making the decisions may be from the global south, but their mentality, their attitude, is very much hierarchical and disparaging of the minorities within their country,” he said. Easy answers are rare in a disaster or conflict zone, where situations evolve rapidly, tensions are high, and decisions often need to be made without a lot of information. Confidence can be beneficial in this type of environment, but mistakes are also inevitable. “I think nine out of 10 people will make mistakes in a situation like that,” Nissen said. “It's very dangerous to think that we can sit and devise the perfect machine that will cope with these situations.” To Nissen, there’s an inherent push-and-pull to humanitarian work that simply can’t be localized away. “We have a great tendency to turn things into a zero-sum game. And I don’t think it’s right,” he said. “We need to find a way of talking about that ambiguity that we find in these situations. There’s not just one answer to this.”