Do no harm: A taxonomy of the challenges of humanitarian experimentation

tags

Innovation

Notes

protection and safety considerations are weighed against assumptions of immediate health benefits or knowledge to be gained.

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politics addressed as experimentality or government-by-exception

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framed in “terms of absolute emergency and unique exceptionality”

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humanitarian contexts can serve a number of commercial purposes

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Even if experiments fail, they might still produce other (commercial) benefits; valuable data and knowledge will also emerge from experimental practices that unfold in other ways than expected

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The mantra of “fail fast, fail often and fail early” can be found in the literature on humanitarian innovation, often presented without attention to trade-offs or costs, or in a manner that encourages humanitarian actors to simply embrace the risks that such a commitment to “experimental innovation” entails.

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“the ‘lean start-up’ model of experimentation and fail fast may not be appropriate under conditions where the ethics of playing with people’s lives may be at the heart”

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assumption of the functionality of the underlying intervention, which misses the larger source of harm: the distortion of the underlying system that deploys it

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appreciate how the effect of technology success constitutes an important dimension of the range of potential risks

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striving to improve the management of refugee flows is not solely a humanitarian undertaking but also a high priority for States, whose security practices are increasingly based on a logic which associates terrorism with migration

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cross-matching of data in humanitarian and national databases was an integral part of the system design

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these practices did not simply help protect refugees; they effectively rendered the safety of this refugee population subordinate to the production of ostensibly safe technologies

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humanitarian community asked for access to data that was illegal for it to have, under false pretences, without a strong rationale or proof of value. This wasted significant resources, complicated coordination, and broke a wide range of laws

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overwhelmed the tenuous trust relationship between the Liberian government and its people

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confused the lack of legitimacy as a data problem.

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primary proposed uses of CDRs were (1) to coordinate response efforts, and (2) to contact trace the spread of the disease

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coordination problems, however, were as much a product of politics and the role of institutions as they were about technology or data

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The digitization of the response and the use of CDRs did not result in better coordination, but drew limited attention and resources towards fixing digital problems, at the expense of responding

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Many of these organizations also stood to gain commercially from access to CDRs

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humanitarian community’s request for CDRs functionally commoditized the state of exception created by the emergency

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very limited access to civil airspace. Thus, the drone industry has a significant unmet need to test and improve the technology by increasing flight hours and trial applications

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Africa is also a place where drones can obtain legitimacy as a “good” technology that is cheap, effective, precise and safe

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threshold for flying over densely populated areas appears to be low

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as if drones were already solving humanitarian problems. However, most cargo drone models under development are still prototypes, and pilot projects are currently limited to lightweight, high-value goods

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risks emerging from the “success” of cargo drone promotion, in the sense that the modus operandi of the experimental phase compromises some of the more fundamental tenets of responsibility, accountability and credibility

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taxonomy of harm that weighs the organizational use of experimental innovation in humanitarian contexts against the potential to result in the following harms: (1) distribution of harm, (2) resource scarcity, and (3) legal liability and reputational damage

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When humanitarian organizations build systems to distribute relief, they implicitly influence the distribution of harm

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politicization and relationships of power shape mechanisms for need assessment and evaluation

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The humanitarian community’s willingness to include commercial application and acquired data as impact metrics is a derogation of its traditional priorities, and a distraction from critical analysis of positive beneficiary impact.

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Although emergencies are exceptional circumstances, they are not free from the rule of law

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