Ian Smillie (ed.) Patronage or Partnership: Local Capacity Building in Humanitarian Crises, Bloomfield CT: Kumarian Press, in association with IDRC and the Humanitarianism and War Project. ISBN 1-56549-129-7 (pbk)

Review by Deborah Eade, Development in Practice, Vol. 12. No 1, 2002.

As one of development's buzz-words, capacity building is more often invoked than it is understood. It is routinely used in project and planning documents and in practice as a substitute for training; sometimes for so-called institutional development; and currently as a proxy for support for democratisation and civil society. A real 'motherhood and apple-pie' term. But in the context of relief programmes, and particularly in complex political (or humanitarian) emergencies, the term gets only a cursory look in. Hardly surprisingly, since so many of the elements of a capacity building approach…an intimate knowledge of the wider context, a sensitive understanding of the inter-relationships among different social institutions, political clear-sightedness, flexibility, a long-term rather than a project-bound vision, a shared commitment to mutual learning, and so on…are predicated on the one resource characteristically in short supply: time. And these elements are also complicated by the resource that acts as the basic cornerstone of most aid efforts: money.

This edited volume is, therefore, a particularly welcome addition to the literature. Its contributors wrestle, often candidly and always eloquently, with how aid agencies can best 'build' or strengthen existing capacities (whose capacities? which ones? what for, exactly? and who is to judge the result?), but they do this against a backdrop of asking how on earth to go about doing so in unsettled and often chaotic or violent situations. Immediately striking is that so many of the chapters are written by development practitioners whose organisations have been on the receiving end of donors' capacity building experiments. That this should be so remarkable is itself an indication of how rarely these perspectives are truly allowed to shape the thinking, policies, and practices of the donors themselves. We are used to hearing a few words from 'community leaders' or 'victims' quoted in (Northern) journalists' reports or in (Northern) academic evaluations; but essentially they are seen as bit-part players in the (Northern) Aid Drama. By deliberately reversing 'the normal order of discourse and [soliciting] views, where possible, from a local perspective', Ian Smillie and his colleagues have broken new ground…for which they are to be warmly congratulated. None of the contributors would claim to portray the whole picture, nor can they be said to offer the only interpretation possible. (I myself would take issue with aspects of the critique of rights-based and gender-awareness work with Guatemalan refugees.) But that is, in a sense, beside the point. These are practitioners and local observers who are very much committed to serious debate, from their own standpoint. Their tone is generally sympathetic rather than swashbuckling: this is not, as Smillie says, another 'slash-and-burn exposŽ of bungled aid efforts'. Even if they are not the last word on the subject, their voices…especially that of Thomas Turay, writing about his country, Sierra Leone…have the unmistakable ring of authenticity.

The book comprises an introductory essay, which offers a broad-brush summary of some of the theoretical debates surrounding capacity building, and of the specific challenges besetting humanitarian assistance…neutrality vs perceived or actual partisanship, operationality (or DIY) vs the instrumentalisation of local structures (getting 'them' to do it for you), the need to act quickly and decisively in situations that are dynamic and often dangerous, and the vexed questions of mandate and accountability. This is followed by six detailed case studies…Bosnia, Haiti, Mozambique, Sri Lanka, Guatemala, and Sierra Leone…and rounded off with a concluding essay that distils some of the main points to emerge from these chapters. I say 'points' rather than 'lessons' because, as Mike Leffert comments: 'Humanitarian agencies cannot be sued for malpractice. They cannot be made to go back and clean up their messes. There is no ethical structure, no authority structure outside the agency world from which incentives or contingencies might flow that would lead agencies to deal with their mistakes. On the contrary, there are incentives for them to keep doing what they are doing. First, there will always be another and worse emergency coming down the pipeline. There is no time and no money to backtrack. Second, agencies profit from failure. They get to do lessons-learned exercises without ever having to test the assumption that learning occurred. Emergencies will always be sufficiently different from the other to guarantee more errors than trials' (p.153). The fact that these faults are not exclusive to the aid industry doesn't detract from the validity of the criticism. Many an evaluation officer has been heard to complain that 'lessons' from their agency's work in one country have not been transferred to, or assimilated by, programmes elsewhere. The same holds true across generations of agency workers…much to the consternation of the 'local actors' who don't just have walk-on parts on their own national stage.

It is impossible in a brief review to do justice to the richness and wealth of material in this volume. That said, I would pull out four of the many insights that impressed me. The first is that, when outsiders arrive with money in search of reliable local partners through whom to channel it and hence render their assistance 'sustainable', they will almost inevitably find (or create) organisations that correspond more or less to their own mirror-image…well versed in how to speak the language of projects and funding requests, but divorced by that very dependency from their wider political potential. The end result may well be that the (re)emergence of civil society is jeopardised. The second is that to tread, like an angel, with any degree of impartiality, and avoid being a well-meaning fool, requires an agency to be profoundly political. That doesn't necessarily mean getting directly involved in political negotiations, far from it. But it does mean knowing how to read the political situation and having a judicious grasp of one's potential role(s) within it. The third is that, just as the 'New World' was not 'discovered' by Europe, so complex political emergencies by definition pre-date the arrival of the fly-in fly-out donors and most of the longer-term resident agencies. Conflicts in Latin America, for instance, go back at least 500 years. So the onus is very much on the outsiders to learn to read between the lines, and to make this a first priority. This may well mean doing less, but should mean doing it better. The last is to balance the need to have basic principles and methods, with an appreciation (pace Leffert) of the uniqueness of every situation…and certainly to avoid the kind of blueprint approach that led to an EC-supported proposal that 'contained references to Bulgaria that its authors had forgotten to replace with the word "Bosnia"' (p. 44). Point made.