may be not a science but certainly an art
Dayuhan,
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Humanitarian "science"? First time I've heard of such an animal, tell us more...
Apparently it’s a French delicatessen…:rolleyes: Well, actually in France you have 3 Universities teaching humanitarian actions and humanitarian Rights and Laws.
Plus one more university teaching logistic/administration… all the NGO administration stuff.
This came to the point they are developing humanitarian anthropology which is based on different bases that development anthropology.
Myself, in order to be much more bankable, I just passed a master in Crisis management: humanitarian and development actions at la Sorbonne, Paris.
But you have the Oxford Master program… There are some stuffs being developed on Humanitarian action as a “science” integrating civil security, emergency management, legal issues, rule of law…
“Science” is the only work that comes to my mind actually concerning this. There are already devastating bad effects: you see coming in the field young guys and girls thinking they know everything because they have been taught to do so and have a degree on it.
Sometimes, I’ll just like to sunk them in concrete, head first, just to remind them the hard way “we”, the stupid guys with long years spend in the field, we have learn our knowledge the hard way.
They do the same mistakes as us but now have a degree to back it up…
But the good thing is that some quite interesting theories as the continuum/contiguum have come out. Also some analyses of Culture as a tool to legitimize “civil society” disconnected from politic.
May be not a Science but certainly an Art :D
Steve,
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An ineffective national government, no effective sub-national governance structure, or credible plan for one, and, at the bottom of that pyramid, soldiers are supposed to build local governance to hand off to the national system that does not exist.
Two things are missing. If there was a subnational gov plan, us civ/mil could synchronize efforts to focus on support for implementation, but there is none, and there is no entity to either link or hand it over to.
A district with a $6 budget, no staff, and no cell phone is hardly going to be able to accept a hand-off of responsibility for an island of villages "redeveloped" by the US, and certainly cannot sustain or support any level of infrastructure/projects.
We can give all the advices of the world to good guys trying to do their best to build local governance capacity (a local administration basically in a good governance cheap dress). But without plan and vision of where to go by the Afghan… We build a white elephant. No doubts on that.
But anyways, I still think that there are best practices coming from the field. It’s may not be plug and play projects but rather how to build a project, what to do for assessment, what to look at, what to not do…
Still, it’s best practices that will help to have a better use of the money, time, energy… And may be achive results in the end
Standards are not meant to be: 1 you build a school 2) you build a well 3) you build a road…
Standards can be: 1) you assess the local production and markets. 2) you dress the gender task division. 3) you conduct focus groups…
Standards can be approaches…
This, it self is a debate. But once you have decide what you want to support then you have a good list of stupid stuff to not do, just like the Appalachian example.
best or worst practices... all a question of words
Dear Dayuhan and Rex,
I see clearly your point on best practices. In some how, we do agree and words are probably what separates us.
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Absolutely agreed. Indeed, I've often that we should spend far less time on "best practices," with all of the potentially dangerous baggage of external omniscience that it sometimes carries with it, and spend a little more time trying to understand "worst practices"--that is, how well-intentioned efforts can go awry, and what can be done to to mitigate those risks (or, at the very least, what questions ought to have been asked).
For me (And it's a personnal understanding) best practices includes DO and DON'T DO. And it's most of the time easier to find all the DON'T DO than even 1 I recommand you to process that way...
In some context, as emmergencies, you do have standards actions with basically: you do that way and no others for technical responses (Food distributiojns, water distributions, camp management...).
But I agree that it is limited for what I know best: immediat emmergencies responses. The "first box" if I can say so.
Even for recovery, (The very next box) you have "better" approach/practices and "practices to avoid" rather than a omniscient knowledge that you just drop on the people. Nothing is worst than a solution droped from the moon.
After, comes stages of "development" I have no clue of what could be a best practice or even a project. (I have no clue of what you do in rural development of a low developed country as Burkina Faso for example.)
If we go on a SWJ Experiment project that looks at providing a compilation of this community knowledge for State Building some steps can be just recommandations of what to not do with illustrated real cases.
The example of Dayuhan is basically a very good one, once you have clearly expose the context, of what to not do, how to not approach the problem...
But this example is may be something that is too far from the target we are looking at: advices for civil/military projects/actions.
We probably should be able to define the limits of such action and build the pre requirement of the advice: at that point you redraw and handover to the civilian development agencies, the local administration and step back until the local context falls back in a need for military action.
Governments are like most everything else.
Centralizing is invariably efficient. However, it is rarely as effective a a local or distributed effort...
All politics is local, quoth O'Neill. :wry:
I'll bow to your semantic distinctions Mike but I do believe
your examples made my poorly stated case...:wry:
Two noteworthy items from your informative Post:
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So, how does a country without much administration to begin with handle even the basic aspects of tax collection ? Unless the government is supported by foreign funding, it would probably find the easier path to be funding by natural resources (oil, narcotics, etc.).
Steve The Planner has provided a sensible answer -- my nonsensical one is that "Yes, it is easier and that's why there's so much of it out there..." :D
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probably West Virginia (if Sen. Byrd managed to snag that one).
Almost certainly there is one there, IIRC, there are 14 IRS Call Centers nationwide. The IRS 'puter center is there: LINK. :rolleyes: