Dialogue Forum 'RESEARCH GOES POLITICS' in the framework of the
Research Network of the Regional Implementation Initiative
Vienna, 27 June 2013
PANEL
Too Many Players? Is the Money Going to the Right Causes?
Who is Accountable?
Contribution: Neil Howard*
The questions I have been asking myself are much the same as those titling this
session –is the money going to the right causes? does our field actually do anything?
is anyone really accountable?
My research began when I worked for a small anti-trafficking NGO in Benin and was
struck by the difference between the narratives those young people who were
supposedly ‘victims of trafficking’ and those offered by the organisations whose job it
was to ‘protect’ them.
As I’m sure is the case in many of your own contexts, many of the ‘victims’ I met
considered themselves to be willing labour migrants who moved for a better life.
Indeed, their lives often did improve when they moved. The anti-trafficking field,
however, depicted them as slaves or as victims of kidnap sold into servitude.
At a policy level, anti-trafficking strategy tended towards the draconian. Policing
focussed and still does focus on dissuading or preventing labour migration, and NOT
on addressing the widely-acknowledged ‘root cause of trafficking’ –poverty. My
research suggests that this is failing – time spent in a ‘sending’ and ‘receiving’ zone
suggests that teenagers still move, still work, and where they are aware of the ‘don’t
move because movement leads to trafficking’ message, they ignore it, or try to
circumvent it.
The two major questions I try to answer with my research then are why does the antitrafficking field seem to be so wrong and why has it stayed so wrong for so long. In
briefly sketching answers to these two questions, I will also address the issues of
money and accountability, and i’ll finish my talk with a couple of personal
recommendations.
So what’s going on?
Analytically, my first point concerns a lack of understanding. Although this isn’t
really news to anyone in the room, it is clear that few people within the antitrafficking field have a genuine, empirical understanding of what happens on the
ground. That isn’t simply about ‘trafficking as a hidden crime’ or about ‘hard-to-reach
groups’, it’s also about a lack of direct engagement or proper research. As an
illustration, of the 100 or so anti-trafficking officials I interviewed and worked during
my Benin research, only 5 had ever actually met the young people that their policies
targeted as ‘victims of trafficking’.
I remember in one instance interviewing a very senior UNICEF official who was
responsible for UNICEF Benin’s anti-trafficking strategy. After listening to him hold
forth about what trafficking is and what UNICEF does about it, I asked him if he’d
ever actually been to the ‘field sites’ and ‘sending zones’ he mentioned. Of course, he
hadnt.
There’s more to this than simple ignorance though, and in fairness to my UNICEF
official, it’s worth remembering that institutional policy is such that he likely wouldn’t
ever have been asked, encouraged or even permitted to go to the field – so it’s
probably better to be talking about institutionalised ignorance-making rather than
individual ignorance.
There is also a lot of politics going on though, and in particular what I term the
politics of silence. What do I mean by that?
Let me illustrate briefly. In Benin, many young males leave the south and centre of
the country to go to work in the gravel pits of Abeokuta, in Nigeria. This is called
‘trafficking’ by the anti-trafficking establishment, but that is inaccurate, since in
reality it is hard but fair work, and for many youngsters it represents a good, often the
only, option to make some money.
Part of the reason why this is their only option is that the other major economic
activity in rural Benin – cotton production – has become less and less profitable in the
face of global price depression and US cotton subsidies. Indeed, even the WTO itself
recognises that US subsidies directly deflate global prices, and economists across the
world recognise this to have had a negative impact on farmer incomes.
What I suggest this means then is that, in Benin, we can identify not only the classic
‘root cause’ of trafficking – poverty – but arguably also one of the political-economic
‘root causes’ of that ‘root cause’ – US agricultural subsidies.
Surely, you’d think that policy-makers are addressing this?
Unfortunately not. In my work on Benin, I have never come across a single instance
of any agency addressing or even mentioning the political-economic causation of
poverty. Some people know that political economy is important, some are even aware
of the subsidy question, but they always stay silent.
And the dynamics of this silence are crucial. Sometimes, it is pre-emptively is selfimposed. When I asked one UN employee, for instance, whether she had the freedom
to speak out over things like subsidies, she said:
‘Look Neil, it depends. Generally, of course you can say what you want, but
you’ll be blasted left and right and bullied by countries if you do. Some
people criticise us for not being critical enough...but we take a long-term
view because we don’t want to endanger cooperation with the states’.
Sometimes, however, the silence is imposed from above. As part of my research, I
interviewed various people within the US TIP hierarchy and I asked them whether
they could bring things like cotton subsidies into the discussion, sitting as they are at
the top of the anti-trafficking tree, and only a few offices down from the cotton
subsidisers. These were two of their responses:
‘No way could I mention this! ‘We’re constrained by US interests and that
means we’re restricted to corridor discussions’.
‘Listen Neil, I can try and raise this in our meetings, but the chances of
success or of public discussion are slim-to-none, because there are very big
interests to fight.’
Even more telling were the words of two EU staffers I spoke to in Benin’s capital.
We’d discussed political-economy before, and we’d even mentioned the role that EU
or US policies play in perpetuating global conditions of poverty. So I asked them
whether they could ever consider including, if not in their policies, then at least in
their reports, mention of things like subsidies. This is what they replied:
The first: ‘We can take account of the effects of these things at ground level
– people being poor in Benin and such. But we can’t talk about the top level.
Our last reference is the national level, the Beninese government. The
Westerners who work here know that their policies cause poverty and
trafficking. Many of them would even like to change it, but they can’t.’
The second: ‘We simply cannot talk about this, Neil. This is a national
structure, it’s a national delegation. We structurally cannot go beyond
borders. If we want to do something like this regarding EU or US subsidies,
we need to have a formal political position sent down to us from Brussels.
Otherwise we cant mention it’.
So what’s happening here? The answer, I believe, is all about the politics of
representation.
What do I mean by that? Well, as you all know, most of the agencies active in our
field depend on funding, be that from donors, international agencies or multilaterals.
Almost always, as you also know, that funding is conditional on people being able to
report on ‘successes’, on being able to demonstrate ‘outputs’, and on being able to
show that their limited resources have been well spent. This has two fundamental
consequences:
1) Those in receipt of donor money have to be able to represent what they do as
an ‘output’ or a ‘success’, according to the definitions of success provided by
those who give that money.
2) Those in receipt of donor money cannot step outside the boundaries of what is
acceptable to say or do.
As a result, we have the dynamics already mentioned. Anti-trafficking actors silence
themselves or are silenced by those above them. When talking about trafficking or
designing anti-trafficking policies, then, this means eschewing the political-economy
of poverty in favour of simplistic narratives around ‘bad men capturing innocent
women or children’. Second, and similarly seriously, there is a perpetuation of
arguably futile policies or projects simply because the money that there is needs to get
spent and both donors and recipients need to at least pretend that things are happening
with that money, because if they don’t, that money – and with it their jobs,
livelihoods, and the wages on which their families depend – will dry up. As one wellrespected anti-trafficking figure said to me:
The reality, Neil, is that not much happens; people just produce papers –
they cut and paste, cut and paste, cut and paste. Or, it’s seminar, seminar,
seminar, conference. We have to do something to justify our money and to
show some form of tangible outcome. Otherwise, the gravy-train will stop
rolling.
So what can we conclude from this? How does it relate to money and accountability?
First off, as regards accountability, it seems that we face a massive deficit. Right now,
accountability goes upwards, towards the providers of the money, and not downwards
towards those whose suffering justifies that money. This absolutely has to change, and
it has to change in practice and not just rhetoric. Additionally, at an even more basic
level, and while I don’t want to question any individual’s moral commitment to
helping the trafficked or the exploited, I think we need to ask ourselves, all of us, very
real questions about our own personal accountability. Too often, we face a choice
between our own livelihoods and speaking openly and honestly about the politicaleconomic hypocrisies that plague both the work that we do and the ‘help’ we can offer
to the trafficked and the exploited. Do we really want it to be like that, to stay silent
for fear of the consequences of speaking out?
As for what we can do, what recommendations I make, firstly, as Julia and others
have suggested before, we need to address matters of political economy. And let me
be clear on this. I explicitly do not mean that we again state ‘yes, poor women and
children are migrating because they’re poor’. What I mean is that we get specific.
Let’s use our research budgets to hold a light to political hypocrisy, to target it them
strategically and identify provable examples of political-economic poverty-causation,
revealing the hypocrisy of our politicians and using empirics to challenge them.
Cotton subsidies and their link to migration-trafficking in Benin are one clear
example, but there are many others.
Second, if we make the choice to work on alleviating symptoms – helping the
exploited or trafficking on the ground – instead of working to challenge the structures
of injustice, let us be sure also to identify those structures of injustice. To borrow an
analogy from one of my colleagues, if we’re jumping in the water to save the
drowning babies, lets also be sure to shout out loud pointing toward the nasty man
upstream who is throwing them in the water. At the risk of sounding trite, this is about
speaking truth to power, and at least being honest, not cowed by the money, in
identifying real structural problems.
Finally, related to this, if it seems terrifying or impossible to impugn the hand that
feeds us, why not stand together to do so? Think of it like unionising. We could, as a
field, write an open-letter condemning donor political hypocrisy, comparing what we
do to whistling in the wind, and if we were all to do so together, where else would
angry donors punitively send the money they would previously have sent to us? I’m
not here to question anyone’s good will, even that of donors and politicians, but I’m
sure that with a little more bravery and a little coordination, we could shake things up.
*Neil Howard, is currently a Marie Curie Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence,
Italy. His research combines political economy and political anthropology, focussing on the causes and
experience of labour migration and ‘trafficking’, as well as on the creation and operation of policy and
practice around them. He obtained his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2013, after
conducting a study of the anti-trafficking field, using the example of Benin.