REVIEWS
“Krause’s The Good Project is a powerfully original analysis of humanitarian relief organizations like MSF and the ICRC. Observing closely the practical logic through which these NGOs manage their activities, Krause addresses crucial questions: How do NGOs assess what is a ‘good’ project? Why are some beneficiaries more worthy of help than others? How do relief organizations decide where they should work? How do these organizations position themselves in the field of humanitarian relief as a whole? Even as Krause shows how NGOs compete in a market for projects, with beneficiaries served as the commodity for which funders pay, she creates a vivid picture of the complex humanity–and the strategic interactions–of both NGO staff and the refugees and victims they serve. Poignant and funny in places, the book is a great piece of original sociological theorizing.”
— Ann Swidler, author of Talk of Love: How Culture Matters
“This is an urgently important book. It explains how humanitarian organizations work, do their work, and why that work succeeds or fails. It also offers fresh insights into the rationality of bureaucracies—an analysis in depth written in clear, evocative prose.”
— Richard Sennett, London School of Economics
“The Good Project is a highly welcome and original contribution to our knowledge of contemporary humanitarianism. Drawing from sociological institutionalism and Pierre Bourdieu, and positioning herself between studies that fetishize humanitarian ideas and critiques that vilify the compromise of those ideals, Krause uncovers some of the central practices and driving logics of really, existing, humanitarianism. By studying what humanitarians do, Krause's reveals an unexplored side of what humanitarianism has become.”
— Michael Barnett, George Washington University
“The Good Project fills a gap in the humanitarian NGO literature by exploring how these organizations actually do their work. . . . Recommended.”
— Choice
“Can yet another critique of the aid business contribute anything new? Krause has done so. . . . Krause has written an excellent, wide-ranging, and cogent contribution to the debate on humanitarian practice.”
— European Journal of Sociology
“With this theoretically ambitious and empirically rich account of the practices of humanitarian relief organizations, The Good Project makes a powerful case for focusing on relief organizations themselves rather than assuming that they function as vehicles for the ideals and interests of either donors or states.”
— Social Forces
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction - Monika Krause
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226131535.003.0001
[Bourdieu, project-management, humanitarian relief, NGOs, humanitarian relief NGOs, Field, global governance, fields of practice, distant suffering, humanitarianism]
This chapter discusses humanitarian relief NGOs as one of the key mediating forces between Western audiences and distant suffering. It introduces the role fields of practice can play in governance and, building on the work of Pierre Bourdieu distinguishes the field of humanitarian relief organizations, from humanitarianism as a set of ideas and as a set of practices. It summarizes the argument that the practices of project-management and the pursuit of the good project develop dynamic of its own. It discussed the methodology and the organization of the book. (pages 1 - 13)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
In Pursuit of the Good Project - Monika Krause
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226131535.003.0002
[project-management, humanitarian relief, NGOs, humanitarian relief NGOs, triage, project, organizational routines, indeterminacy of values, manifest function, latent function]
This chapter asks how managers in humanitarian relief NGOs make decisions about where to go and whom to help. Humanitarian relief NGOs are committed to serving people “according to need”, without regard to race, ethnicity, gender, or religion – but they also need to practice some triage. While some observers would lead us to expect that organizations are driven by their values or manifest functions, others, more cynically, point at hidden interests or latent functions. This chapter, in contrast, begins from the observation of the indeterminacy of both values and interests. Neither values nor interests tell managers what to do. Based on in-depth interviews with managers in of the largest Western humanitarian relief NGOs, the chapter analyses the organizational routines that shape their work. It argues that mangers in humanitarian relief agencies seek to make a contribution and intervene in the form of projects. Their professional concern is to produce good projects, and the pursuit of the good project develops a dynamic relatively independently of values, interests, and needs on the ground. (pages 14 - 38)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Beneficiaries as a Commodity - Monika Krause
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226131535.003.0003
[beneficiaries, non-profit firms, clients, organizations, humanitarian relief, civil society, third-party buying, charitable giving, indirect domination, institutional donors]
This chapter explores what the pursuit of the good project in humanitarian relief means for how managers imagine people in need. The role of the populations being served has often been ignored by economists researching non-profit firms, third-party buying or charitable giving. It has been misunderstood by theorists of civil society who either posit populations in need as entirely separate from NGOs or as entirely the same as NGOs. When agencies produce projects for a quasi-market in which institutional donors are the consumers, populations in need are part of the product being packaged and sold by relief organizations. This means beneficiaries are put in a position where they are in competition with each other to become part of a project. As a mode of governance, in addition to the benefits for those in need emphasized by liberal observers and the forms of direct domination highlighted by critics, we also find a form of indirect domination in humanitarian relief, which is mediated by the market for projects. (pages 39 - 69)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
The Logframe and the History of the Market for Projects - Monika Krause
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226131535.003.0004
[management tools, project, project management, results-based management, logframe, aid, development aid, humanitarian relief, NGOs, beneficiaries]
This chapter analyses the management tools that have shaped service-delivery in development aid and humanitarian relief. The logframe made the project possible as the central unit of planning of provision and as the central unit of exchange between funders and NGOs. A version of results-based management, the logframe has introduced an emphasis on clear goals and evidence for results but, in doing so, has separated evidence of results according to very specific project aims from broader questions of coverage of people's needs and broader consideration of possible effects. The logframe created the “beneficiary” as the specific part of a population in need that is selected to be served. Tools like the logframe enable an organization to produce results without a commitment to any specific part of a population. It has linked results to costs and it has thus made it possible, in principle, to compare projects for different groups of beneficiaries according to price. (pages 70 - 91)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
The History of Humanitarian Authority and the Divisions of the Humanitarian Field - Monika Krause
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226131535.003.0005
[humanitarian relief, field-specific capital, symbolic capital, NGOs, humanitarian authority, MSF, International Red Cross, symbolic divisions, Bourdieu]
This chapter describes the symbolic divisions and differences within the field of humanitarian relief NGOs. In developing their distinctive position on questions of humanitarian policy, agencies draw on different intellectual and national histories, but diversity is also shaped by competition for a specific type of symbolic capital: humanitarian authority. While some field approaches following the work of Bourdieu posit a two-fold division between economic and cultural capital, this chapter maps organizations along the dimensions of field-specific capital, on the one hand, and different kinds of capital dependent on other fields on the other hand. The field of humanitarian relief NGOs has its origins in a move that combined the authority of the suffering produced by war with the authority of states, and the authority of the medical profession. When the pioneering position of the International Red Cross was challenged on its own terms by Doctors without Borders (MSF) in 1968, the contestation around humanitarian authority that defines the field became possible. (pages 92 - 125)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
The Reform of Humanitarianism - Monika Krause
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226131535.003.0006
[Sphere, Humanitarian Accountability Project, HAP, NGOs, project, fair-lobar standard, accountability, relief operations, beneficiaries, humanitarianism]
This chapter discusses some of the most prominent reform projects that have arisen from within humanitarian relief: the Sphere project to develop standards for humanitarian relief operations and the Humanitarian Accountability Project (HAP), an effort to make relief agencies accountable to beneficiaries as well as donors. I will show that the impact of these reform projects is shaped and limited by NGOs’ pursuit of the good project described in this book. Indeed, these reform initiatives end up becoming a part of the institutional structure of the market for projects – one approximating a standard for products in this market; the other a fair lobar standard, which seeks to contain the most extreme versions of unfair competition among agencies. (pages 126 - 146)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
What about Human Rights? - Monika Krause
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226131535.003.0007
[human rights, humanitarian relief, NGOs, fields, organizational fields, protection, rights-based relief, sociology of practice, international community, humanitarianism]
In talk of the “international community”, many commentators assume that human rights work and humanitarianism are pulling in the same direction. Others see human rights work and humanitarian relief as two fundamentally different modes of engagement. What both of these approaches share is a focus on the content of ideas. This chapter re-examines the relationship between human rights and humanitarian relief from the perspective of the sociology of practice and of organizational fields. Since the 1970s, two separate fields have emerged – one centred around human rights and one centred around humanitarian relief. Staff in humanitarian relief NGOs have used the language of human rights more and more, for example in the context of discussions about the project of “rights-based relief” and about “protection”. But the impact this language has had in humanitarian work has been mediated by the practical constraints and symbolic divisions of the humanitarian field discussed in the earlier chapters of the book. (pages 147 - 167)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Conclusion - Monika Krause
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226131535.003.0008
[organizational practice, field of humanitarian relief NGOs, humanitarian relief, NGOs, distant suffering, fields of specialised practice, politics of organizational practice]
This chapter summarises the argument of the book and returns to the questions about global order raised in the introduction from the perspective of the sociology of fields of specialised practice. It discusses the form of indirect domination created by the market for projects in humanitarian relief and in some domestic forms of service delivery. Having described the specific mediation, which the field of humanitarian relief NGOs provides between donors and distant suffering, this chapter outlines some of the implications for a politics we can develop vis-a-vis this mediation. It argues that we need a politics not just of ideas but a politics of organizational practice. (pages 168 - 176)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
