How NGOs Can Build Peace:
Landmine Clearance and Victim Assistance
Peacebuilding and
post-conflict reconstruction are multi-disciplinary from a governance,
organizational behavior, executive development and field perspective.
Rarely, though, are the tools of competitive advantage, project
planning and conflict resolution software used to seek linkages with
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to coordinate resources,
particularly to integrate the disparate sectors of landmine and UXO
clearance, victim assistance and resourcing across industries. One
method is to employ “best practices” from developed countries proven
to develop abilities for disabled farmers and youth in post-conflict
countries as one of a number of agrarian and health care initiatives
built around demining as agricultural preparation. The goal is for
NGOs and government departments to change the rules of competition
between post-conflict communities by shifting organizational behavior
to reflect quality of care as a measure of gaining donor support.
by Maureen
Morton
Introduction
Demining
and the clearance of UXO are necessary, extremely dangerous and
technically complicated jobs that require cross-functional skills. In
a post-conflict situation, many of the most skilled have either fled
the community or lost their lives. NGOs who are “first-in” deal with
crisis management and life-or-death community stabilization. These
organizations generally should have a long-term mandate to reconstruct
communities, which requires detailed planning with different interest
groups and donors.
There are
many national and international organizations that play a role in
addressing the problems of landmine survivors; a mine action center
(MAC) should involve the relevant organizations. Included in this
group are organizations of survivors. Such consumer organizations are
important targets of education, information and training, particularly
in the areas of self-help, maintenance of devices and the need for
accommodations, supports and follow-up care. Because so many landmine
victims are children, special attention must be directed towards the
needs of those who are growing and developing, and for whom most
prostheses or orthoses will have a limited period of utility.1
Longer-term planning requires industrial engineering, operations
research, management information systems, logistics, manufacturing,
human factors, engineering and operations management. Project tasks,
both outside and inside a country, need university/industry
collaboration. NGOs determine resident skill-sets and academic and
technical qualifications, as well as engage industries and
associations to support landmine and UXO clearance activities,
mine-clearance awareness and victim assistance. Support infrastructure
must be built with and by the communities.2
A Firm
Infrastructure
NGOs specializing
in mine and UXO clearance must interface with other
types of NGOs: medical, advocacy, technical, academic, societal,
institutional and religious—all of whom must collaborate with
government departments and militaries. Sadly, programs that do the
physical demining and true victim assistance are seriously
under-funded worldwide. Although expectations have been raised, the
demand cannot be satisfied. To reduce post-conflict problems,
financial backing and a sense of urgency are needed to clear land and
provide occupational programs to allow both amputees and able-bodied
individuals to return to their work and farms.
A
conceptual industry shift may be taking place from
advocacy/military/humanitarian demining to “demining as agricultural
preparation.” This is happening as individuals from academia and
demining NGOs seek the expertise of soil scientists, agrologists and
those who specialize in occupational therapy in disabled farming.
Every post-conflict country and community is facing environmental and
rural reconstruction issues. The task for an NGO is to search for the
linkages and common denominators, as well as network these disparate
groups of individuals to build a consensus across interest groups at
home. These vertical linkages are similar to the linkages within the
value chain—the way supplier or channel activities are performed
affects the cost or performance of a firm’s activities (and vice
versa).3 In essence, we must cultivate communities of practice.
Ideas have
been presented to deminers from a governance perspective to circumvent
military technical sensitivities pertaining to demining and UXO
remediation. Once clearance work can be seen as agricultural
preparation, it perceptually opens up new opportunities for victim
assistance. It especially creates program possibilities for disabled
farmers in developed countries to help their counterparts, disabled
farmers and disabled deminers in landmine communities. The similarity
of occupational and farm injuries such as upper or lower extremity
amputations and especially double or triple amputations, requires the
knowledge and coping skills of those who have lived the reality. The
poorest of deminers, if they survive an explosion, have to face life
severely disabled. The status of the disabled in society is one of
exclusion and alienation, which leads to a perception of the disabled
as “less than human.”4
Only those
rehabilitation programs that solve attitudinal problems by developing
and proving ability in the newly disabled population should be chosen
for this growing sector of post-conflict reality. Paths exist to
counteract violent anger and frustration by sharing coping skills.
Individual agrarian occupational expertise is not a skill easily
transferred.
Can peace
building be achieved through agrarian occupational best practices
after an individual survives a mine or UXO injury? Self-directed
employment for the disabled is always the goal for allied health
professionals and the community and family of those who have been
injured. Other disabled farmers working through university
farm-extension services may share the same language, type of farming
or the same disabilities. Can one learn from the another’s experience
of adapting his or her farming lifestyle? One university
farm-extension department specializing in fruit crops includes
research and education. Faculty have research projects in plant
propagation, viticulture, enology (wines), pathology, entomology,
pomology, virilogy and bio-engineering.5 Would this also carry with it
best practices in irrigation or agro-forestry? In poor post-conflict
communities, where traumatic injuries mean a life of begging, this
type of resilience is unheard of, but help is available to employ
skills and train others.
A recent
e-mail on MgM, the Deminer’s Network, detailed a partnership that has
developed through the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military
Affairs, Office of Mine Action Initiatives and Partnerships (PM/MAIP).
Twenty-five U.S. Army Special Operations personnel drawn from Special
Forces, Psychological Operations and Civil Affairs units—all graduates
of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Humanitarian Demining Training
Center—have joined five military Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD)
specialists in Azerbaijan’s Fizuli region to train local humanitarian
deminers and heighten popular awareness of the risks posed by
landmines. Concurrently, the U.S. Department of State, the Humpty
Dumpty Institute and the New York Wine and Grape Foundation have
launched the “Mine Action Partnership” to clear the Fizuli region’s
mine-infested vineyards and help restore its war-ravaged economy.6
Since the
demining and victim assistance effort overlaps every discipline, NGOs
have wide-ranging access to research markets and resources in order to
accomplish goals. A firm can pursue a broader scope internally or
enter into coalitions with independent firms to achieve some or all of
the same benefits that a broader scope would provide. Coalitions are
long-term agreements among firms that go beyond normal market
transactions but fall short of outright mergers. Examples of
coalitions include technology licenses, supply agreements, marketing
agreements and joint ventures. Coalitions can allow sharing of
activities without the need to enter new industry segments, geographic
areas or related industries. Coalitions are also a means of gaining
cost or differentiation advantages of vertical linkages without actual
integration, but overcoming the difficulties of coordination among
purely independent firms.7
Coalitions
may alleviate the problem of donor fund coordination, particularly
where communities strive to show a higher percentage of need, fueling
further competition. At the core, this is an organizational behavior
problem requiring a complete shift in the rules of competition to
change a disadvantage into an advantage. One method would be to rank
each community on quality of service comparisons of patient care
between hospitals. Holy Cross, a Chicago inner city hospital, improved
its ranking against 495 hospitals moving from the negative fifth
percentile to the upper fifth in one year.
If such a
concept were presented to Health Ministries and to donors, could the
rules of competition be changed to shift organizational behavior to
quality of care comparisons as a measure of gaining donor support? The
goal is to alleviate short-term chaos to prevent turf battles from
continuing 20 years into the future. If this change occurs, jobs may
be created in landmine-affected countries. By searching for best
practice solutions, we add to the goal of peacebuilding and
reconstruction. Demining is the larger objective. It changes the
dynamic of a country by accomplishing goals: employment, asset
recovery, organizational and institution building. This is in essence
an exit strategy. The baton should be passed to and trust developed
with individuals and populations who have experienced war.
A Field
Perspective
In
demining and UXO remediation, every type of geographic, soil and
infrastructure contamination is found at varying depths. As a
community transitions from war to peace, land clearance also shifts
from military breeching to humanitarian demining. In some cases with
plastic mines, the search is for parts-per-billion explosive ions.
Ordnance can be found in schoolyards, in trees, in and around homes
and factories, and around bridges, hydroelectric towers, irrigation
ditches/culverts, waterways, roads and well-used paths. Vegetation
covering the explosives can vary from golf-course smooth (Category A)
to impenetrable, jungle-like conditions that cannot be effectively
reduced. Funding restrictions may limit clearance activities to narrow
safe paths reducing freedom of safe movement within a community and
access to a water supply that graphically resembles the acid etching
of a circuit board.
Best
practices documentation may save development dollars for actual
demining and offer a better quality infrastructure in post-conflict
communities. The “Use of Range Clearance Re-Use Methodologies”
provides engineering infrastructure development completed stateside
through the U.S. Department of Commerce Re-Use Authority Economic
Development Administration (EDA) Grant Program [Capital Improvement
Projects]. Many post-conflict countries could also benefit from
legislation such as the Ontario Disability Act. Available in both
English and French, it provides detailed policy planning information
that would be helpful to a country wishing to anticipate and eliminate
its rehabilitation infrastructure reconstruction problems at the
design and planning stages. “The purpose of this Act is to improve
opportunities for persons with disabilities and to provide for their
involvement in the identification, removal and prevention of barriers
to their full participation in the life of the province.”8
Other
important mine action topic areas would include planning, impact
assessments, trade-offs, exit plans and partnerships with university
farm extensions and allied health faculties in conjunction with
Departments of Agriculture, Education and Health. Irrigation should be
addressed and crops should be planted with trees that grow quickly,
improve the fertility of the soil, and provide fodder to animals,
firewood, wood for construction, and protection from wind and erosion.
New,
creative funding avenues must be secured; innovative funding implies
proposal development that educates and demonstrates market
opportunities or links at the executive development level.
Opportunities are a progression of tasks, each bundled into a complex
negotiation of concerns and issues. Each individual task has costs
that are both qualitative and quantitative.
While NGOs
should continue their traditional relief and rehabilitation
activities, they must adopt a more long-term perspective on their
activities. Pamela Aall, in “Nongovernmental Organization and
Peacemaking,” Managing Global
Chaos, suggests that the initial
emergency relief response should be linked to a set of activities that
leads to the transformation of those conflicts in a way that promotes
sustained and comprehensive reconciliation among warring parties. Many
NGOs act at the middle and grassroots levels of society, and so are
well-placed to develop such links and transformative activities.
In
providing relief and rehabilitation, NGOs should seek to draw on local
resources. Developing local resources empowers people. Excessive use
of external resources can foster dependence and passivity. External
resources can also become a new object of contention, inadvertently
fueling the conflict. NGOs should also seek to draw new participants
into their activities. Women, who have often been overlooked in peace
processes, have recently played key roles in reestablishing
communication and economic ties between fighting groups in Somalia.
One way to make the peace process more effective is to shift more
towards a preventative approach to conflict. Local and
grassroots-oriented NGOs are uniquely positioned to recognize the
early signs of conflict and deteriorating social conditions. In many
cases, the international community has had early warning of a
potential conflict but has lacked the political will to act. Here,
NGOs might also act as advocates for early intervention.9
Through
consultation and gathering of competitive intelligence from public
sources, issues and tasks can be documented into project software.
Filters can be built that reflect organizational, tactical and
strategic activities of both donors and interest groups. This market
research provides the links to bridge specific technical problems
solved by industries, their associations and academia in developed
countries to create their counterparts in landmine communities.
Linkages
can lead to competitive advantage in two ways: optimization and
coordination. They imply that a firm’s cost or differentiation is not
merely the result of efforts to reduce costs or improve performance in
each value activity individually. More subtle linkages are those
between primary activities. For example, enhanced inspection of
incoming parts may reduce quality assurance costs later in the
production process, while better maintenance often reduces the
downtime of a machine. Linkages that involve activities in different
categories or of different types are often the most difficult to
recognize.10
Maximize the
Minimum Gain
While
studying for his doctorate in engineering at Cornell University,
Ernest Thiessen was working on a challenge given to him by his major
adviser, Professor D. Pete Loucks.11 He needed a rule for fairly
distributing benefits when generating an optimal solution relative to
an existing tentative agreement among any number of negotiators. The
mathematical framework for Thiessen’s solution was inspired also by
Howard Raiffa’s writings. Since Thiessen’s goal was to develop a
computer program to demonstrate the results of his research, an
important criterion was that the methods would perform well in
practical implementation. Thiessen came up with a rule called “maximize
the minimum gain,” which proved to be very effective
using proven mixed-integer linear optimization techniques.
Descriptions of these algorithms were first published in 1992.
As with Nash’s, Thiessen’s method of generating optimal solutions also
required rationality and well-represented preferences. Where Nash and
Thiessen part ways is the requirement of parties to fully know each
other’s preferences. Realizing that real-world negotiators would not
cooperate in that way, Thiessen specified a secure neutral site to
fulfill the knowledge requirement. Thiessen’s methods are now
recognized as a patented invention, currently implemented in the
SmartSettle Negotiation Support System.
Maximize the
Utility Product
Over the
years, Nash’s seemingly simple ideas have led to fundamental changes
in economics and political science (Milnor, 1998). Estimates of
benefits to business are already in the billions of dollars. This work
also has implications for world peace. If superpowers could find a way
of cooperating, then this would lead to a reduction in weapons and to
cost savings for both sides (Singh, 1998). Unfortunately, Nash’s
theories stop short of prescribing how to cooperate, which is an even
more complicated problem (Milnor, 1998).12
We believe
a unique opportunity and set of circumstances exist to test
cooperation and resourcing to the most disadvantaged communities to
dovetail demining, cooperation between NGOs and governments through
negotiation for development using the administrative tools of “industry value chain competitive advantage,” project planning and
the SmartSettle Negotiation Support System.
For
example, up until now in Afghanistan, “the talk of reconstruction has
ignored the restoration of the natural resource systems, [which is] so
crucial to Afghanistan’s economy. Rural recovery cannot be discussed
without [the] parallel discussion of critical natural resource issues.
Environmental issues should form a part of the package being
considered by governments for the rehabilitation of Afghanistan.” The
major environmental challenge facing Afghanistan is the impact of the
return of refugees on already stressed water and forest resources.
When the refugees return to rural areas, the carrying capacity of the
land will depend not only on food and fuel supplies, but more broadly
on success in rehabilitating agricultural systems—particularly
irrigation systems—including seeds and fertilizers.13
Desperate
farmers run to their lands with the smell of rain, only to be blown to
pieces by anti-personnel mines. Around 10 million landmines dot
Afghanistan—45,000 landmines every 25 square kilometers—making it the
world’s most densely mined area, according to UN Secretary General
Kofi Annan. And this is a major deterrent for the revival of
agriculture and animal husbandry, which account for 95 percent of the
population’s livelihood.14
If the
peacebuilding communication tool used between communities is the need
for mobile clinics and equipment to stock them, then opportunities for
collaboration between disputing communities may open up. Initially,
each country could be approached to cover the cost of one vehicle,
whether the country is a signatory to the Treaty or not. This should
be attainable. A fleet of 190 vehicles would test the potential
applications of surgical theatres, prosthetics workshops,
physiotherapy, occupational and psychological therapies, home care and
job training. In developed countries, many prototypes exist: surgical
theatres (airborne), prosthetics workshops (Terry Fox mobile), Red
Cross Blood mobile, and CAT, MRI and PET scanning.
Each
clinic could make “milk runs,” offering a monthly rotation of services
determined by greatest need. As communities can afford to build their
own infrastructure of medical buildings and staff, services can be
re-routed. Where simple community health care facilities exist, the
design dimensions of the loading dock of both building and vehicle
could align to allow for expansion to duplicate adjacent rooms to
optimize the clinical flow of patient services.
Industries
and their professionals can help by applying answers to problems
already solved in developed countries and sponsoring faculties and
associations in line with their expertise. Farming and demining
injuries are not limited to amputation, but also extend to burns,
hearing loss, vertigo, visual, sensory and communication impairment,
and head and neck injuries.
In poor
countries, technical difficulties within business decision support
structures (e.g., trade associations and ministries) inhibit
resourcing across and through industry value chains. The same
resourcing and staffing deficiencies exist across population health,
agriculture and job-related rehabilitation. It is often possible to
benefit both the firm and suppliers by influencing the configuration
of suppliers’ value chains to jointly optimize the performance of
activities, or by improving coordination between a firm’s and
supplier’s chains. Supplier linkages mean that the relationship is not
a zero sum game in which one gains at the expense of the other, but a
relationship in which both can gain.15
So many
micro-enterprise opportunities exist for both the able-bodied and
disabled: welding, machining, tool and die, manufacturing, and
mechanical. These skill sets are also required in a revised or
revitalized economy. Ideally, training at the college and university
level is needed to ensure competency and the ability to “train the
trainers.” The trainer can then accomplish support for less technical
capacity jobs and community-sustaining contracts to ensure the
long-term personnel development of the community.
Care
Canada’s Tools for Development, an excellent example, has a simple but
powerful premise: Make secondhand equipment (band saws, lathes and
sewing machines) available to poor entrepreneurs at an affordable
price. There are no handouts. The entrepreneur pays for the tools
either on credit or with interest rates slightly lower than the banks
offer. Founder Roy Megarry has bigger ideas as well. He would like to
tap U.S. corporations for tools. And he makes it clear again: “this is
not a charity. We’re fostering entrepreneurship.”16
There are
good times and bad times for intervening in a country’s affairs. We
contend that immediate post-conflict intervention provides the
appropriate moment of greatest opportunity through chaos for the
international community to become involved. There are very few
disciplines that are not touched on in this “cross-functional”
industry of demining and victim assistance. Most think of the
logistics of the mechanics of demining, few think of the human
resource, legal, soil science, agriculture, agro-forestry, information
technology, export and import, and shipping issues. The list is truly
endless.
Endnotes
- “Notice of a
Final Funding Priority for Fiscal Years 1998–99 for a Rehabilitation
Engineering Research Center,” Federal
Register, 24 Mar. 1998, Vol. 63,
No.56, p.14252
- An excellent
example is Care International’s “Tools for Development” program.
Staffing and resourcing deficiencies exist across every discipline,
especially allied and population health, agriculture, and job-related
rehabilitation.
- Michael E.
Porter, Competitive Advantage, Creating and Sustaining Superior
Performance, p.50
- Hugh Scher,
Lyn Smith, “Attitudinal barriers faced by the disabled mean exclusion,
marginalization and devaluation,” Action Life
News, Mar. 2000, p.5
- E-discussion
with farm extension service supervisor of the fruit stations field
crew.
- Three-Pronged
Attack on Azerbaijan’s Landmine Legacy, U.S. Department of State, MgM
Demining Network, 8 Jul. 2002
- Michael E.
Porter, Competitive Advantage, Creating and Sustaining Superior
Performance, p.57
-
http://www.odacommittee.net/docs/oda2001_english.doc http://www.odacommittee.net/docs/oda2001_french.doc
- Pamela Aall, “Nongovernmental Organizations and Peacemaking,”
Managing Global Chaos, pp.443–444, 439 Summary by Tanya Glasser
- Michael E.
Porter, Competitive Advantage, Creating and Sustaining Superior
Performance, pp.48–49
-
http://www.smartsettle.com/more/content.php?thiessen.html
-
http://www.smartsettle.com/more/content.php?mind.html
- Richard
Mahapatra, Kathmandu, Marinella Correggia, Kabul, Animesh Roul, Delhi,
“Back to Beginning,” Down to Earth Magazine 31 May 2002, p.34
- Richard
Mahapatra, Kathmandu, Marinella Correggia, Kabul, Animesh Roul, Delhi,
“Back to Beginning,” Down to Earth Magazine 31 May 2002, p.27
- Michael E.
Porter, Competitive Advantage, Creating and Sustaining Superior
Performance, p.51
- Kerry A.
Dolan, “Capitalist Manifesto,” Forbes, 27 May, 2002,
p.90–92. Care
Canada Tools for Development 1-800-567-6271
Contact
Information
Maureen Morton
Project Assistance
290 Gloucester Street, Suite 1A
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1R 5E4
Phone: 1-613-233-5334
E-mail: legs4amps@sympatico.ca |
