One of the subjects that has been getting more attention lately as a consequence of the tsunami is the effectiveness of aid for both victims of natural disaster and chronic socio-economic failure. The idea of massive aid fueled by redistributive policies that played out so badly in the past few decades is toast, burned to a crisp by those failures. We care when people suffer and want to help, so it is worth thinking about why those efforts failed and whether there are more useful responses.

This article speaks to the issue:

... the tsunami was a simple act of nature. It bubbled up from the sea, and laid waste to half a dozen countries; it had nothing to do with human greed or cowardice or corruption. And so westerners responded generously, confident that an uncomplicated, unpolitical disaster could be swiftly remedied with charity.

This was a return to a simple vision of disasters, one that has been mostly absent since the first postcolonial relief effort in Biafra in the late 1960s. Bob Geldof conjured the same vision in Ethiopia briefly in the 1980s: the simple images of starving children swept away the complicating political context, and the money flooded in.

But for the most part, the political view has dominated. Ethiopia's famine is now understood as a consequence of the Mengistu dictatorship's crazy agrarian collectivism, and disaster relief is understood to have prolonged its grip on the country. Floods in Bangladesh are viewed not only as natural disasters but as the consequence of reckless logging; Caribbean hurricanes are understood to cause more damage than they should because governments refuse to prepare for them. Of course, these understandings kill the charitable impulse. You would not give to a beggar if you think he has chosen to be homeless, still less if you suspect your money will subsidise his choice.

If the public view of disasters has grown weary and worldly, disaster relief professionals have travelled even farther down this road.

The article notes specific instances of harm caused by inappropriate aid, both wasted efforts such as private donations of useless materials which clogged the aid channels while providing no relief, and counterproductive efforts such as the prolongation of the governance policies which created disaster in the first place.

It is worth reviewing the slow enlightenment of disaster relief professionals.

The path to humility for the development business began in the 1950s, when development thinkers believed that capital would trigger economic take-off in the ex-colonies. When capital transfers failed to unlock progress, development agencies experimented with other types of transfer. From the 1960s, they began to provide not just physical capital (dams, roads, water systems) but human capital (health, education). When that did not work as well as hoped, the development people went after the next apparent bottleneck: they spent the 1980s and early 1990s attaching ever more policy conditions to their loans. But by the late 1990s, a new consensus was emerging. Developing countries' policies were indeed crucial, but aid conditionality was too weak an instrument to affect them;...

The disaster relief business has followed a similar trajectory. In the early days, charities responded with supplies, almost any supplies: food, blankets, tents, medicines. Then, in the 1970s, they began to reflect on the consequences: aid in kind could destroy local merchants who supplied the same commodities, and who would be needed to keep life going long after the aid agencies pulled out. Pretty soon, this insight about the dangers of displacing local systems was applied more broadly. Feeding camps, regarded by most agencies as a logistical necessity, came to be seen as dangerous: they lured people off their land and away from what little food there might be left to harvest; they crowded people into unsanitary settlements where they easily fell prey to cholera; they delayed a return to normal subsistence agriculture when the rains returned.

When we hear cynical bureaucrats using disasters as excuses to flog their tired socio-political agendas and take cheap shots at their opponents it would be wise to think more deeply about what can be done. There is no magic, no easy fix for the problems that beset societies before they experienced natural disaster, made the need for external aid dire, and will still exist when all is said and done and the natural disaster all but forgotten except by wags in their anecdotage.

Above all, people have to save themselves. It is only when they wish to do so that external aid can be useful, and even then must be carefully provided so as not to destroy the self-rule and self-support systems so tenuously established and weakened by disaster.

The tsunami region is not some sort of film set for heroic western masters of disaster. Rather, it is what it always was before the crisis: a collection of prickly, independent nations muddling their way towards prosperity... Western money will flow into these bubbling, imperfect societies and some of it will be wasted, lost or stolen, and it will not usually be possible to know exactly how or why. When this is generally realised, the outpouring of western generosity will face its true test. Is it premised on the illusion that the relief business is easy? Or can we permit ourselves to hope that it is more durable than that?

That's a good question but just part of the larger aid question, and strikes at the heart of the whole charity industry. And it is an industry, not just bored and wealthy people in need of a cause to fill their lonely lives. Recent scandals about the amount of charitable giving that is siphoned off for fund raising and administration rather than directly benefitting the intended recipients has soured many and brought greater scrutiny of charitable organizations. Their efficiency - a measure of the percentage of funds raised that actually get spent on the target problem - is now being tracked and publicized to the grief of boiler-room operations set up primarily to bilk the public.

But it may be too simple a measure. Efficiency is not effectiveness, a measure that professionals claim is more relevant since it isn't merely a matter of how much is spent on relief but how well it is spent. This echoes the hard lessons mentioned above; that all aid is not equal and can do more harm than good when not insightfully given in ways that assist societies to achieve the goals they have set for themselves.

We are coming to have more mature understandings of what is possible as we at long last abandon the steam age ideas of command-and-control. Disaster relief, development, socio-political evolution, and environmental preservation are all coming to be understood in more realistic terms. As noted in the previous post dealing with the melt-down of the politicized environmental movement as its failures become better understood, patient assistance to local efforts works but mindless mobs with their fists in the air do not, since the problems do not yield to force. In the case of aid as well as environmentalism the driving insights for more effective interventions have resulted from actual measurement and monitoring, exposing the emptiness of "preservation on paper" or "aid given" tropes.

When we hear posers excitedly proclaiming that this is an opportunity to make dramatic change in the areas affected by the tsunami it would be wise to reflect on these truths. It won't happen. It can't happen. The people of these places will at best continue to muddle their way towards prosperity as best they can given their conceptions of possible futures. We can help them achieve their goals but attempting to impose our goals - or cherished illusions - will harm them rather than helping them. In a way we should forget that the tsunami happened. The immediate relief effort has happened and did require massive intervention of a quasi-military nature, but the rebuilding effort requires careful intervention more like development aid than relief aid if it is to have lasting beneficial results that do not destroy local initiative and doom those places to perpetual dependency and corruption of the sort we have seen so often in the past when thoughtless interventions have taken place.

Update:

See AID FAQ for a brief discussion with pointers to further discussion.