Trust in Cash Assistance Programming: Addressing Mega Trend Changes through Disaster Management and Impact Assessment

Abstract

Impact assessment faces challenges in dealing with the ‘magnitude, the speed and the complexity of current global problems and new societal dilemmas (needing) new facilitating strategic choices to achieve broader sustainability goals and objectives’ (Partidario 2020). The past is not necessarily a guide to future risk. Retief et al. (2016) identified global megatrends of demographics, urbanization, technological innovation, power shifts, resource scarcity, and climate change that demand new approaches. Responding to an escalating scale and complexity of disasters within this context necessitates rapid decision making – but the speed can compromise the quality of the response and its effectiveness. As fake news raises the question of who to trust (Fischer 2018), engaging and empowering citizens in developments generally becomes even more important (Bice and Fischer 2020). Human rights impact assessment offers a way to recognise and focus on the rights of the most vulnerable, in ways that are embedded in the legal obligations of states (Harrison 2011). Recent events highlight the need for effective localisation strategies that build self-sufficiency as anthropometric climate change intensifies. Some Pacific island states such as Vanuatu, in the forefront of such change, are building governance structures to address links between climate change, disasters, the wider environment, and the risks posed to the people and the economy. This has the potential to promote stronger and more coherent links between environmental governance, defined broadly, and disaster management, as envisaged by Tajima et al. (2014). Cash programming for multi-sector disaster response is empowering and has been successful in meeting human needs. Cash has been used both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Pacific – but when it is delivered and distributed too quickly problems can arise. Governments, donors, and administering organisations can do even better. They can, with pre-planning, public consultation, and ex ante impact assessment, design programs that are even more inclusive, more local, and better-aligned with their respective human rights obligations. Taking a double disaster – the combined impact of COVID-19 pandemic closures and the cyclone emergency in Vanuatu – shows why this is necessary. Vanuatu was one of four Pacific countries hit by Cyclone Harald that had closed their borders due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Those closures hampered rapid emergency reporting, response and assistance. Cash, delivered through technologically innovative forms, is particularly suited to these difficult circumstances – providing that those in need are the ones who receive it. This letter presents a strategy for improving cash programming in the urban Pacific that focuses, most immediately, on anticipating the effective and inclusive distribution for those in need, taking account of trends in demographics, urbanisation and power shifts. The letter also demonstrates how early selection of a cash delivery mechanism can allow for public consultation and can reinforce the importance of an equitable, rights-based, rather than a charity-based, approach to COVID-19 recovery that is grounded in local realities. A rights-based approach to impact assessment requires governments, donors, and aid agencies to find out more about the leadership structures and land conflicts in communities where they are allocating cash – and to work with community leaders to identify vulnerable populations and individuals in most need.