Since its onset, one striking feature of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has been the narrative power of its novelty. This global narrative depicts COVID-19 pushing humanity towards a ‘historical divide’ of BC and AC (before and after COVID-19), where unknown, unpredictable futures await. Within the humanitarian sector, we reveal this same preoccupation with the post-COVID future in a plethora of reports and webinars. While the virus itself may be the antihero of this narrative, we believe uncertainty should be recognised as the second, less visible protagonist.
The current flurry of attention provides an important indication of how poorly we deal with uncertainty
Should we take the time to hit the pause button, however, we would be able to recognise three broader truths. First, the pandemic can be seen as anything but novel, forming a recurrent historical phenomenon of considerable impact on the evolution of human society. Second, it intervenes not in a vacuum but builds on, amplifies, and hinders existing power dynamics; it can be indulged via multiple and diverse visions for a better world. Third, the current flurry of attention provides an important indication of how poorly we deal with uncertainty, and this combines with how adept modern technology has become at monetising our fears. For the humanitarian sector, this is even more strikingly so if the locus of uncertainty shifts from aid receiving nations to the hearts of global decision-making, with high COVID-19 deaths in four of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus nations such as Brazil, Italy, Spain, and Germany.
Upon closer inspection, however, the supposed novelty of dealing with uncertainty rather starkly ignores the extensive, perhaps even constant, interaction between uncertainty and humanitarian work. Humanitarianism is riddled with substantial levels of uncertainty, and we have learned to build uncertainty into programme and budgetary planning, security management, and into the COVID-19 response.
The humanitarian sector has failed to engage with the bias in its attention and the political content of how uncertainty is interpreted, ignored, unseen, and suppressed
Much more importantly, we believe the sector’s focus on uncertainty remains incomplete, permeated almost exclusively by a technocratic discourse of systematic risk assessment and mitigation of uncertainty’s challenges. The sector has thus failed to engage with the bias in its attention and the political content of how uncertainty is interpreted, ignored, unseen, and suppressed. Tellingly, COVID-19 has exposed existing fault lines within the sector: international and local, Western and non-Western, individual and collective. And like the disease itself, the capacity of COVID-19 uncertainty to reach even the highest rungs of power masks how uncertainty’s impact is distributed unequally.
As the sector grapples with issues of racism, sexism, and neo-colonialism, so too should we interrogate how power dynamics and power inequities play a role in the establishment of meaningful uncertainty (the uncertainty that gets noticed, discussed, and actioned) or the limits between known and unknown risks. What are the factors, the current ways of working within the humanitarian sector, that allow or even require many important unknowns to remain as such?
Two uncertainties – known and unknown unknowns – largely define the sectoral discussion of uncertainty
We begin with the logic of Donald Rumsfeld and his categorisation of uncertainties; his argument that while known unknowns may be significant, it is the unknown unknowns that will prove the most challenging. These two uncertainties – known and unknown unknowns – largely define the sectoral discussion of uncertainty. However deeply political Rumsfeldian logic might be, it remains blind to two of the most important categories, as do we humanitarians.
First, Rumsfeld had no incentive to ground his analysis in, or call attention to, how the power dynamics or substructure of US foreign policy produced and deepened a particular configuration of the knowns and unknowns of uncertainty. Humanitarians therefore need an analysis of the filtering process that produces knowns and unknowns, that determines which uncertainties matter more and which matter less. We know that rationalising, systematising, and quantifying risks has been increasingly used as a way to tackle uncertainties. And that good risk management approaches have been credited with enabling good humanitarian responses. What we leave out of the equation is the risk of identifying uncertainties through a standardised determination of which ones matter. Not only do we do this as individual actors, but we fail even to entertain this notion as a sector at the level of our collective identity and power of agency. One prominent illustration of this gap is the degree to which the foreigner-led (donor, INGO, UN agency) humanitarian response is – almost grotesquely – unseeing of its context blindness and the crowd of attendant uncertainties.
Second, as Slavoj Žižek cleverly points out, “[i]f Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the ‘unknown unknowns’, that is, the threats […] whose nature we cannot even suspect, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the main dangers lie in the “unknown knowns” – the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.” By way of an obvious example, the uncertain risk of insecurity has shaped humanitarian action for decades, while the uncertainty surrounding the level and impact of sexual abuse and exploitation by humanitarians remained conveniently invisible.
The status quo in the ways of working in the humanitarian sector allows many important unknowns to remain as such. Clearly, humanitarians cannot be judged against a standard of omniscience, and some uncertainties can never be known. But humanitarian action deploys into protracted crises where the most important needs of the people and the primary environmental factors ‘belong’ to other sectors, such as development, peace, rule of law or governance.* Current efforts to build a ‘triple nexus’ of thinking evidence the impact of siloed thinking upon the sector, where the capacity of humanitarians to believe they do no harm rests upon maintaining a plethora of potentially knowable unknowns.
Humanitarian work is like plastic, which seems like an ingenious product if one examines it through six-month lenses. But what is the humanitarian project’s impact over a decade on the development of the social contract between state and citizens, on the growth of civil society, or on community peacebuilding efforts? As the international community calls for innovative governance approaches to sustain progress and mitigate the negative impacts of the pandemic on the Sustainable Development Goals, how should humanitarian actors understand their role vis-a-vis the SDGs? Note how easily the humanitarian toolbox and narrative sidestep these questions, pushing them from known to uncertain to unknown. Or note the relative weight given to assuaging the uncertainty of donors and HQs versus that of people in crisis.
Making ethical decisions or being a principled humanitarian actor is easy when the choices are black and white
It is essential for humanitarians to probe this line between known and unknown, recognised and unrecognised uncertainty, or meaningful versus ignorable risks because these demarcations are not arbitrary. No example can better highlight this distinction than the routine confrontation of humanitarian actors with ethical tensions or dilemmas. Making ethical decisions or being a principled humanitarian actor is easy when the choices are black and white. As any humanitarian may point out, however, that is too rarely the case. The humanitarian imperative offers no simple magic wand. Critically, however, both institutions and individuals rarely recognise the ethical dimension of the uncertainty of many operational decisions. This situation leaves humanitarians to engage with a litany of project-wrenching and morally distressing uncertainties without the benefit of potentially helpful insights to be gained from an ethical framing of these uncertainties or the use of an ethical framework to guide decisions. The internal cost is borne by the moral legitimacy of the sector and the mental health of the humanitarian workforce. This is the price that we knowingly pay to ensure that the inherent ethical uncertainty of deciding the right thing to do can be supplanted by a sectoral preoccupation with important yet technocratic efforts to do things the right way.
Another area of concern relates to the erasing of uncertainty from the processing of human needs data (the quantification of this need) and its inclusion in funding proposals and later reports of how those needs were met. Here, it is not simply the process of minimising or rendering invisible many uncertainties, it is the degree to which the sector’s interventions reflect what Glasman sees as “a faith placed in humanitarian indicators [that] is excessive.” In effect, as he continues, the ethical uncertainty inherent in the determination of human need is rendered invisible by replacing the “moral principle with a mathematical rule.” We do this even though we ourselves within the sector understand the weaknesses in much of the statistical data upon which decisions are based.** Žižek’s critique of Rumsfeld manifests clearly in this wilful ignorance, the rendering unknown of a known yet uncomfortable truth.
When confronted with uncertainty, humans seek out what we know best
After all, the greatest unknown knowns confronting humanitarian sector may be its own entrenched ‘habits’ – be they good or bad. What the pandemic has shown to us all so far is that we are all creatures of habit. When confronted with uncertainty, humans seek out what we know best. Humanitarian actors are no different. We tend to find solace in a system led by the UN and devoid of the diversity typical of an ecosystem, we approve of localising humanitarian response without first tackling the transfer of risks, and we resort to siloed thinking. Reform in the humanitarian sector has come but it has come incrementally, and often follows Giambattista Vico’s understanding that progress is regularly interrupted by cyclical reversals before it starts anew again. Rather than asking how best to manage uncertainty, maybe we should ask ourselves how best to reinforce good habits? Which ones should we keep? And in tackling that question should we consciously break an old habit by letting go of the control, ceding actual decision-making power to people and communities in crisis? Ceding power to people and communities when it is completely uncertain what might happen next, rather than pretending we must wait for a future in which this will be known.
* See e.g., Anderson, Mary B., Dayna Brown, and Isabella Jean. 2012. “Time to Listen: Hearing People on the Receiving End of International Aid”. Cambridge USA: CDA Collaborative Learning Projects.
** For an excellent, insider’s discussion of the data problems in the sector, listen to this podcasted discussion of Glasman and ACAPS director Lars Peter Nissen. It’s episode #8, “Needology”.
