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Why bother to talk of pragmatism rather than values?

The approach to most aid and acts of compassion has almost always been to ignore the fact that any asserted values are undermined by deep difficulties, hypocrisies and contradictions in the delivery of that support or compassion. Should individuals, donors and agencies be open and acknowledge that much hypocrisy will be involved in their work. This will continue to be unlikely to be done openly as it would damage the public image of the agency concerned.

The following explores the difficulties of doing so.

Dimensions of values at different levels

Different types of value are held at many different levels

• Personal, Family, community, religion, political
• The extent to which they are followed vary over time, opportunity, level of accepted risk, situation.

Values are inextricably linked with identity

• There is a constant tension between the need to feel respected as an individual and the need to be a member of the group that gives the individual that respect. Respect and support is only provided if the individual conforms to the values set by that grouping.Membership of the group means externalisation of other groups (‘in’ groups versus ‘out’ groups).
• Values are arbitrarily set by the group and serve merely as markers of group identity.
• Even though some values seem similar across different groups (rights, equality, health) they may have very different interpretations (who has access to those rights, the level of hypocrisy accepted in contravening the values).
• Values are so strongly linked to identity that people will tolerate varying amounts of discomfort in order to follow those values and therefore remain part of the group on which their security and rights (and therefore their identity) depend. They range from accepting gender roles through wearing uncomfortable clothing in order to match the clothing for the group (e.g. suits or a particular hat); varying degrees of pain or mutilation (scars, circumcision; female genital cutting); considerable violence or murder (honour killing) and even death (martyrdom). These values will often conflict with the values of those who see such practices as inhumane, a violation of rights, or bad for health. So if programmes are designed to change those values, then they have to offer people identities and therefore groups which appear safer and better to the people concerned.

Problems in being open about contradictions

1. Those who are very poor depend on entirely different support systems (and therefore value systems) than on those who can afford to pay for them. People very poor people are strongly dependent on social ties, and so are dependent on following norms and values determined by those social ties. Should you break the norm, support will not be given.
2. Advice given by agencies using values that are similar to those who can follow advice (have the support, resources) may be useful for that population, but will not be useful for those outside the support system. Those outside the support system have a disproportionately large share of suffering in every way (health, security, access to aid). The aid will therefore not be improving that large share of suffering, although it can point to improvement in the indicators for the majority of the population who suffer perhaps 20% of the problem targeted.
3. Those outside support systems are often outside those systems precisely because they are disliked by a majority of an overall population. This can be at individual, family, community or national level. The reasons, especially with the context of familial support, can be very real (disputes, personality, situation, history).
4. The categories used for targeting populations are too wide to avoid supporting the majority who do not need support. Thus there are very strong skews in child mortality even among populations within these various categories (poverty, gender, classes of worker, youth, single parent households etc.)
5. The problem is therefore how to introduce systems that will facilitate improved support for those who lack support rather than just for those who are within the broader category.
6. So far such methods are very naïve. A prime example is that of training workers in communication. Most such programmes concentrate on providing instruction on how to communicate. Most people know already know how to communicate and have been doing so from birth. They know when they have to be polite, when they want to be polite, and they know that they can be rude or insulting to those who cannot retaliate. So communications training should focus on people understanding the situations in which they vent frustration on others and how to control that when working.
7. Another aspect of talking of values is that most aid is made in order to look attractive to those who support aid agencies (governments, donors) who have their own values in relation to compassion, and those who need support. Thus rather than look at the improving the various complex and inter-related factors that lead to HIV infection in their own right, for example, programmes labelled as targeting HIV infection are deemed necessary. This is true of many other vertical programmes, few of which can be effective because of the distortions of budgeting, reporting and evaluation.
8. Precisely because the ways in which aid or acts compassion depend on the values set by the donor and the agency concerned, values often conflict. Aid from any one government, for example, encompasses armaments, political trading, preventive programmes, action in disasters. Very often a single programme for, say, refugees, will introduce conflicts in relation to how the aid is given (the aid has to be given or is stolen by groups protecting or within the refugee population). Corruption is often high in order to allow some aid to be given.
9. Evaluation of programmes is often highly distorted in order to prove that the programme is upholding the values proclaimed or inherent in the provision of the programme.
10. This because the real underlying and unspoken value held by many donors and programmes is to show that their programme is successful, that the money is spent – rather than whether the underlying problems have been addressed. So health programmes will rely on proxy indicators such as numbers of those vaccinated or health talks given rather than whether health has been improved for those who suffer the disproportionately large burden of health problems.