Competitive humanitarianism: Relief and the tsunami in Sri Lanka

aster relief: high levels of competition between the agencies involved, coupled with a lot of talk about the need for 'co-ordination'. The particular setting for the discussion is the relief that poured into Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the tsunami of 26 December 2004, and the article is based on my role as an advisor (on a voluntary basis) to one of the major British-based agencies which became involved in the relief and rehabilitation process. Lack of co-ordination among agencies and high levels of competition between them is frequently mentioned as characterizing disaster relief. The post-tsunami efforts in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand and India were no exception to this. The recent evaluation of the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) response to the tsunami alludes to this issue on a number of occasions and sees it as a problem which has to be overcome by better co-ordination.1 In this paper, I shall be suggesting that 'better co-ordination' is unlikely to lead to less competition. Rather, I shall argue that competition of various forms, particularly among NGOs, is inherent in the structure of humanitarian relief, and that this is the result of a basic contradiction at the heart of philanthropic approaches to relief and rehabilitation (and, one might suggest, to development interventions in general, especially those mounted by NGOs). For various reasons which I will examine in this paper, agencies which are based on disinterested principles are forced into situations where organizational and individual interests become increasingly important, and which undermine the principles upon which philanthropic interventions are based. The discussion is based on my experience of relief activities in the southwest of Sri Lanka, the coast between Colombo in the north and Hambantota in the south. The