Islands in the stream: Why mainstreaming fails

For those not conversant with relief and development jargon, the verbified term ‘mainstreaming’ usually evokes the educational practice of integrating children with special needs into regular school classes. In aid work, we speak of mainstreaming ideas and approaches—for instance performance standards, gender equality, and accountability to recipients—into our wider programming. All important issues, which aid providers have long failed to sufficiently consider in their plans and project designs, to the detriment of their results.

The mainstreaming concept couldn’t be more appealing or intuitive: If you want a major change in how the work is done, that change must be embraced in organisational thinking and doing at all levels. It must be ‘built in’ to every aspect of operations rather than treated as an add-on or side activity. Humanitarian organisations have applied mainstreaming strategies for the Sphere standards, protection, gender and other ‘crosscutting issues’ such as age, disability, and environmental impact. But in light of the overall disappointing results to date, it’s time to question whether these strategies may have backfired.

The paradox of mainstreaming is that in their attempts to achieve it many organisations have set up separate structures and processes that have had the effect of isolating the subject more. And the more structure that is built up around it, with new mainstreaming units, officers, information products and the like, the more marginalized it becomes. The new units become their own little islands within the organisation, and their issue becomes a box to be ticked rather than a new way of doing core business. At worst, it can become a tiresome and superficial exercise, and ‘mainstreaming fatigue’ has now entered the lexicon.

Yet, understandably, no one wants to give up on what are unquestionably worthy goals. This ambivalence can be seen in a 2011 evaluation of the Protection and Gender Capacity Standby tools, the rosters of advisors deployed to assist humanitarian operations in mainstreaming protection and gender issues. The evaluation found scant evidence that either of these mainstreaming initiatives had any effect on changing humanitarian programming. Despite this stark finding, however, the report concluded that they should be continued regardless, because they had succeeded in raising awareness about these issues, which aid workers felt to be relevant and worthwhile. As a rule, when ‘raising awareness among humanitarian actors’ is cited as a marker of success, we can safely assume that no progress of any real value has been made in the actual provision of aid. Even if we were certain that raised awareness leads to action (and we are not), awareness gains could be quickly lost in staff turnover.

Mainstreaming as it’s currently practiced has missed the mark, not only by creating the organisational islands, but also by targeting only part of the organisational behavior dynamic. Organisational culture is largely an amalgamation of habits: processes, procedures and practices. In his book showcasing the latest research on the dynamics of habitual behaviors, Charles Duhigg illustrates how organisational habits, like habits in people, consist of particular routines that are prompted automatically by a certain ‘cue’ or trigger, and driven and sustained by a reward. (B.F. Skinner, in his Reinforcement Theory, referred to these nodes in the feedback loop as ‘antecedents’, ‘behavior’ and ‘consequences’.) The automatic nature of the loop makes habits extremely difficult to eliminate or replace. In order to change the routine (say, the coffee and pastry at 4:00 pm, or the aid project design that consults only with the – all male – village elders) you must also focus on the reward (the caffeine/sugar buzz, the easy way to validate a funding proposal and set in motion a whole other set of operational routines in programming).

Mainstreaming has focused on the cue and routine side without enough attention to the rewards that drive and sustain the loop. Humanitarian organisations need to consider the potential incentives and disincentives that will make mainstreaming a permanent new work reality. Money, of course, is one of them. If in their grantmaking all donors rewarded the organisations that meaningfully incorporated best practices into their programming, and studiously excluded those that didn’t, it would go a long way indeed. After all, John Snow in 1854 did more than try to ‘raise awareness’ about the spread of cholera from a contaminated water supply – he removed the pump handle.

Financial incentives are not the only tool, however. Aid practitioners and organisations can be incentivised by the recognition and prestige that comes from technical excellence in programming. Research has shown that such ‘intrinsic motivation,’ as it’s known, is often a more potent driver than monetary rewards.

Finally, if you ask a seasoned practitioner, he or she is likely to tell you that the most influential incentive of all is strong evidence that working in a certain way will achieve better results for aid recipients. For example, if the superior outcomes of projects using the Sphere standards could be demonstrated in a rigorous comparative study, that would not only serve as incentive in itself, but would also help bolster the first two incentives (funding and good reputation).

The humanitarian field could stand to focus less on creating structures for mainstreaming, and more on manipulating incentives and drivers. As it is now, the concerns of protection, gender, accountability standards, and all our other ‘special needs children’ in humanitarian aid, are not being well served by mainstreaming.

Abby Stoddard is a Partner at Humanitarian Outcomes and a Senior Program Advisor at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation. She serves on the board of Doctors of the World (MDM USA).