Men der er håb forude, for flere store organisationer har skabt nytænknings-celler (innovation units), som skal give råderum til eksperimenterende tiltag og mindre test-projekter i det humanitære hjælpearbejde kloden over.
LONDON, 24 July 2014 (IRIN): Alexander Aleinikoff, deputy high commissioner for refugees at the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), is frank about the challenge of innovating within what he refers to as “stodgy (tunge) and sclerotic (forbenede)” UN organizations.
He says: “I have not been to one of our operations where people are not doing really new and interesting things; they just do not tell headquarters about it. Because they are sure that if they tell headquarters it will be squashed (skrottet).”
Sucked into a culture of negativity
Aleinikoff came to the UN system at the end of 2009, from a high flying career in the USA. But even he felt himself getting sucked into the culture of what he saw as inertia (træghed) and negativity bedeviling the UN system.
“I can give you a couple of examples, where I had to catch myself from doing the squashing,” he recalls.
The deputy high commissioner was speaking in Oxford, at a Humanitarian Innovation Conference organized by the university’s Refugee Studies Centre.
His own organization is now one of those which has a dedicated innovation unit, as do the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
These are not necessarily very large or lavishly resourced – the ICRC innovation unit has just two members – but they can offer ways of freeing up staff to work on their good ideas, like the UNHCR’s iFellowships (sic), as well as some funding for pilot projects.
Designing a refugee settlement
One of the things UNHCR has fostered is a collaboration with Stanford University and Ennead, a prominent firm of US architects.
Ennead has experience of designing liveable and sustainable settlements, but in a humanitarian crisis when refugees are pouring across the border there is no time for the normal design process.
So they have been devising a toolkit which allows the preparatory work to be done in advance, perhaps from many thousands of miles away.
Overlaid data maps and google earth topography help identify a suitable site and layout for a refugee settlement, and visualization tools and 3-D printers allow the masterplan to be presented in an easy-to-imagine form.
Often a political rather than a technical decision
Obviously the choice of a site for a refugee settlement is often a political rather than a technical decision but UNHCR’s Monica Noro hopes the toolkit will lead to better choices.
“Usually the government is the one selecting the location,” she told IRIN, adding:
“But the tool aims to provide more information about whether those sites being proposed are viable or not, and whether another option eventually could have a better impact, not just on the life of the refugees but also on the life of the local population.”
Noro hopes the toolkit will provide the kind of evidence that will allow UNHCR to make a more compelling argument for the most suitable site, and give it a bit more bargaining power in this kind of negotiation.
The project is innovative in its collaboration with a private sector architectural firm and its use of newly available technology.
It has the potential to change ways of working and relationships between players. It is also good because it is trying to find the answer to a real, felt problem – how to design a good refugee settlement in the heat of an emergency.
“Not a huge demand at the moment”
It is the antithesis of the kind of innovation where someone says, “Hey, look, we have discovered this really neat thing. Let us see what we can use it for.”
Tarun Sarwal, the Innovation Lead for the ICRC, says it is this sort of innovation which worries him:
“What we are finding,” he says, “is that a lot of it is supply-driven. We are having solutions, in a sense, trying to find problems. And we find that when we go in the field and when we go into communities, it is not as if there is a huge demand at the moment”.
“It is about new technology, and it’s also about corporate interests which want to go into these areas – legitimately so – but there is just a little bit of a question about how one deals with this.”
Learning from failure
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http://www.irinnews.org/report/100400/innovation-what-s-new
