Best practices are boring, but that's how it should be

I recently had a conversation with a friend – an aid industry outsider who pays close attention to the industry – about best practices. Her response: “It’s … just so boring!”

She’s right, of course. Best practices are boring; as are most things that make aid better. But what are these so-called “best practices” anyway? And why are they so boring?

Simply put, best practices are those things that we’ve somehow managed to figure out actually work, and work well. In some cases they’re very general and a step above common sense – like the code of conduct for NGOs working in disaster relief. In 2015 “we shall respect culture and custom” (number 5) feels like a no-brainer. But back when it was first written it was cutting edge, and even today a surprising number of organisations and practitioners get this bit wrong.

Sometimes they’re articulated as “principles”, like this recent declaration of 10 principles for cash-based assistance in humanitarian contexts: Number five says: “Multi-purpose assistance should be considered alongside other delivery modalities from the outset – we need to always ask the question ‘Why not cash?’ ” This is a little easier to put into concrete action day-to-day, than the code of conduct but is still pretty general. In other cases, best practice is specific and technical, like the rapid humanitarian assessment guide for urban settings, available on the ALNAP website.

There’s plenty of debate about what best practice truly means and what they are because, well, debate is what humanitarians do. But for my purposes, a best practice is something that we know works and is worth repeating. Sometimes best practices are explicit; other times you have to actually apply brain power and analysis. Some examples:

• Laying out refugee or IDP camps so that latrines are in places where everyone can use them safely
  
• Basing programmes on evidence
  
• Making sure that all T-shelters have 3.5 m² of covered living space per occupant
  

On the other hand, what it’s not is sending people who don’t really know what they’re doing to a disaster zone to “help” for a few weeks.

One of the challenges for a died-in-the-wool humanitarian is simply staying current. There’s just so much best practice, and it all keeps changing. The Sphere handbook, for example, updates every few years. And if it’s hard for us, imagine how the amateurs feel. It’s cool and kind of fun to bang on on Facebook or your blog about how aid isn’t transparent and accountable. But it feels a lot like work to actually read up on the IATI standards and understand what the aid industry sets out for itself as best practice when it comes to financial transparency, and then frame a critique based on that.

Which leads to the other issue, the one raised by my friend. It’s boring. Yes, for sure. I love humanitarian aid, and even I find the guidance notes to the Core Humanitarian Standard to be a cure for insomnia. If you’re plagued by jet-lag, and can’t sleep at 3:00 am, download it and read it. Go on, I dare you.

But then, maybe making aid and development more boring is actually the point. As the first FAQ on The Campaign For Boring Development blog says:

… the development enterprise is awash with trendy projects that don’t ultimately really address the needs of the bottom billion, and it’s time somebody said the obvious: the real work of development, the kind that turns around people’s lives, is kind of plodding. Rather than trying to sexy it up, we need to own it.”

Quite. And in the context of a conversation about best practice it seems obvious, as well. As tools and standards get better, it’s only natural that more and more of what we do day-to-day in the aid industry will become more standardised, more formulaic, more repetitive. Even those roles that many might think involve hands-on work in the field – logistics, perhaps, or security, or nutrition specialist – are mostly a daily-office grind of crossing Ts and dotting Is, meeting deadlines, responding to emails. More and more aid work is about following repetitive processes, laboriously triangulating information.

Many industry insiders, as well as newbies coming up through the ranks, and hopeful students still cling to romantic and outdated mental images of what we do. Many cling to the idea of a dusty expat, flying by the seat of her or his pants, figuring it out on the fly, doing whatever needs doing in order to get the Plumpy’nut delivered or the wells drilled. Maybe there’s still occasional need for that. But these days we actually know how to set up and run supply chains. We know how to deliver technical interventions. The reality is that it’s about doing what we know works, the way we know works. Super boring. Also best practice.

“J” has been working in aid for many years. He blogs pseudonymously ataidspeak.wordpress.com and Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like.

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