Summery of the book Be bad do good
Answers
The book is divided into three sections. The first section (chapters 1 and 2) sketches the mindset of the typical humanitarian actor and provides a brief history of humanitarian action. The second section (chapters 3-6) applies the economic way of thinking to evaluate the limits and realities of state-led humanitarianism. The last section (chapters 7-8) revisits the typical humanitarian actor from the book’s first section and offers a more constrained and realistic vision of humanitarian action. This review will provide a brief description of each chapter.
In the opening chapter, Professor Coyne introduces the reader to some key terms. First, he defines humanitarian action as “any coercive or noncoercive action intended to alleviate potential or existing human suffering and to improve the human condition” (18). This broad definition allows Coyne to examine short-term emergency relief assistance, long-term development assistance, and humanitarian-minded military action under one conceptual umbrella. The definition also distinguishes Coyne’s analysis from earlier critiques of humanitarian action, which fall into two categories: short-term emergency and long-term structural assistance.
Second, state-led humanitarianism “implies that a government or group of governments plays a leading role as the agenda-setter in designing, implementing, funding, or overseeing the humanitarian effort” (19). While the author acknowledges that the line is sometimes blurred between state-led and privately-led humanitarianism, especially when nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are involved, Coyne argues that since World War I, the state has become the central actor in humanitarian aid.
The first chapter also introduces the reader to the man of the humanitarian system who believes that “improving the human condition is a purely technological problem” which “downplays the complex economic, legal, and political systems underpinning the effectiveness of designed organizations and institutions” (16-17). According to Coyne, this mindset is pervasive in state-led humanitarianism and it gives policymakers “an inadequate model of the actual world” (21).
The man of the humanitarian system is the heart of Coyne’s analysis. Firmly planted within a Hayekian framework, Coyne argues that state-led humanitarianism fails to deliver as promised because humanitarian policymakers and practitioners face knowledge constraints and the political spheres they operate in provide the wrong incentives for successfully administered aid.[2] Like all resources, humanitarian resources are scarce and the knowledge needed to allocate these resources among competing and alternative ends is dispersed. Policymakers and practitioners who fail to account for the myriad of complexities involved in allocating humanitarian assistance invite unintended consequences from their actions. Making matters worse, political institutions incentivize policymakers to “secure control over more resources of power”, invite mission creep, and encourage “overly ambitious goals that extend well beyond the limits of what is theoretically possible for humanitarian action to accomplish in practice”