28 Feb 2003 NGOs rebuild in Bosnia without planning ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
Hans Skotte: "Housing may not be the most suitable vehicle for reconciliation" Hans Skotte argues that international NGOs and donors in Bosnia and Herzegovina have taken it upon themselves to rebuild houses without professional planning and have prioritised their own political agendas with little consideration for community sustainability or post-war realities. Skotte, who is completing a PhD at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, makes his own recommendations. My work is based on studies in Bosnia where international NGOs have done housing for almost 10 years now. And they have done all of it. They are the true master builders of the Bosnian reconstruction. International NGOs have so far spent more than 600 million dollars on housing construction and reconstruction. This takes place in a country where even the incredulous structure of government was set up by outsiders, and where there is no politically defined housing reconstruction policy at any level of the country. What is rebuilt, and where, is decided upon by independent organisations from all over the world, and who - with some notable exceptions - seem to have put an embargo on professional planning. Just imagine the United Kingdom being rebuilt after World War Two by a plethora of independently acting foreign organisations and agencies that did not think it necessary to engage planners. Okay, so it's impossible to compare the United Kingdom of 1945-50 with the Bosnia and Herzegovina of 1995-2000. Having said that, these are structural, or cumulative, consequences of ambivalent reconstruction policies set up by foreign governments, executed by international NGOs, with local institutions as passive bystanders who are not that dissatisfied with others doing the work. No one knows the scale of building works undertaken by Western NGOs. It is enormous. Of all the billions channelled into Bosnia, housing makes up the largest sector, yet when I was doing research last year, none of the 20 or so major international NGOs active in housing construction that I contacted had any idea how much of their work was on housing. Bar a selected few, none had separate organisational units specifically dealing with the housing or shelter sector, nor were there professional housing construction and/or management staff at headquarters, which is the strategic level in the organisations. Staff once responsible for housing in Kosovo were sent on to deal with education, or work on water in some other trouble spot. Housing is handled is if it was shelter and therefore of the same order as clothing, food, medicine and water. In terms of needs, this is true, but in terms of response, it is not. This is a conceptual challenge that NGOs and donors have not yet taken on board. MORE THAN SHELTER Shelter is just one attribute of housing -- that of being protected from the elements. Housing comprises a number of broader qualities that link the owner or user and society. Housing constitutes long-term investment, normally the largest financial venture of any family. The aggregate financial importance of investments in the housing sector makes it both a meter and a regulatory instrument of a county's economic health. For a foreign donor, however, housing remains, as per definition, items of project expenditure, not an investment. And these items of expenditure are given away free to a selected few. We understand, and act upon, investments differently than we do expenditure. At the other end of the spectrum, housing is personal refuge; a place-specific home for the people assisted. Combining these two attributes, housing is a manifestation of status, a public and personal symbol. Housing is a manifestation of territorial claims, and hence of significant political importance. That is why destroying housing in war is such a basic tactical feature. This political quality reappears in reconstruction. In Guatemala, investment in housing was written into the 1996 peace accords, although the promise was never kept. In Bosnia, rebuilding housing for minority returnees has become an urgent political mission for the international donor community, often with little regard for the development potential of the investment. Housing intervention -- I use the word deliberately -- takes place in two interacting phases or in two contexts in areas affected by violent conflict. First, to shelter displaced people in areas of relative calm and security during war. Second, constructing or reconstructing permanent housing for the displaced after the fighting has stopped. Issues of security, logistics, material supply, predictability are different, but more so are the objectives. EMERGENCY STATE OF MIND What we see in Bosnia is that these contextual changes do not change the practice of the interventions. The emergency state of mind prevails, not only in the NGO community, but also among donors. This is reflected in budget cycles, in conditions set for reconstruction support, but most of all by refraining from taking responsibility for the future consequences of present actions. In Bosnia, post-war reconstruction planning is in effect taking place by default. Present actions do have future consequences. That is what planners would be able to say something about, elaborate on possible - and preferable - present actions in order to score desirable future consequences. Instead we concentrate on acts of half-hearted intent. The overriding intent is now to have people move back to their former home in order to re-establish the multi-ethnic flavour of Bosnia, to make sure the ethnic cleansing project failed. Whereas the one-dimensional objective of "providing shelter" was on top of the list in the early years, that has now been replaced by "enabling return". Millions are spent on reconstructing housing in areas with no communication, sometimes with no roads, and with no prospects of sustainable livelihood or provision for sustainability. All this has evident results. In a recent Swedish programme covering around 4,000 people, the mean age of the returnees was 54.25 years. There is no development potential in a population this old living in remote rural areas in a war-ravaged country. And everybody accepts that. But international housing assistance is conditioned on the house being rebuilt on its old foundations. Better a house in the wrong place than no house at all. Consequently 4,000-5,000 houses, perhaps as many as 8,000 newly reconstructed houses stand empty in Bosnia to day. They will either be looted down to the last brick, or be used as weekend houses of the young. So much for housing as a tool for return. And so much for housing as an aid towards recovery. If the overriding goal of the post-war housing interventions has been to contribute towards a post-war recovery, my research leads me to call for: A much more honest assessment of how the interventions will affect development potential of the country. Today no one will take the responsibility for what will happen to all the elderly people who have been enabled to go home. When it becomes an issue all the foreign agencies will have left. These challenges are much more serious than they appear in current NGO jargon. Professionalise NGOs. Use the mirror on our own societies. If inexperienced social workers and teachers, for example, were to execute regional planning and manage the housing sector, the results would be chaotic, inefficient and create unforeseen hardship for a lot of people. Yet today this takes place in a massive, scale "out there" where we are judged -- or judge ourselves -- by intent rather than results. I would advocate strategic partnerships where professional planners join in at the strategic and tactical level of the agencies. Accept the realities -- the losses -- of war. Reconciliation also means being reconciliatory towards one's own fate. This is not condoning flagrant breaches of human rights, but realising that the war itself creates new priorities and that what was triggered by the violence was merely enhancing changes that were coming irrespective of the war. Urbanisation is one such oncoming change. Housing may not be the most suitable vehicle for reconciliation between former antagonists. Housing in terms of home attains its meaning by being a sanctuary, where one can exclude others. In this sense - which is also evident from the war - a house takes on personal life. It becomes a proxy for its inhabitants. Reconciliation between foes is better supported through infrastructure or value-free interventions. Let go of responsibilities, leave more up to the people we support. Housing is an exceptional vehicle for replenishing social and human capital. Social capital cannot be provided -- it must be earned. The way we organise our housing construction, management and beneficiary selection affect the capital formation of the place in question. The future development of these communities depends on the strength of their capitals, how these support each other, and how they interact with society at large. It is almost embarrassing to stress that all efforts must be mobilised to secure the use of local building materials. For each full-time labourer working in construction, two to five jobs are created in production and services. Housing construction is a key to economic recovery. Take on board the enlightened thinking of John Turner, who has written on housing and communities since the late 1960s: "It's not what housing IS; it' s what housing DOES." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
