Tag Archives: capacity building

Capacity Control: Managing Personal and Collective Discontent, Dr. Robert Zuber

7 Feb
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You see what is, where most people see what they expect.  John Steinbeck

The world had scarcely become known as round and complete in itself when it was asked to waive the tremendous privilege of being the center of the universe. David Eagleman

That was the thing about the world: it wasn’t that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn’t expect. Lev Grossman

As gloom and doom have been creeping into their lives, many can’t feel anymore the freshness of their emotions that withered alongside the wearisome path of their expectations. Erik Pevernagie

I am either lacerated or ill at ease and occasionally subject to gusts of life.  Roland Barthes

People never expect silence. They expect words, motion, defense, offense, back and forth. They expect to leap into the fray. They are ready, fists up, words hanging leaping from their mouths. Silence? No.  Alison McGhee

Expectations were like fine pottery. The harder you held them, the more likely they were to crack.  Brandon Sanderson

I and others in our small team spent much time this week zooming in to virtual UN meetings on topics from security deficits in Yemen and humanitarian crises in Ukraine and Afghanistan to global peacebuilding initiatives, narrowing the digital divide, and solidifying a political breakthrough in the long Libya conflict.

In the background of all these discussions, almost like some nefarious wallpaper, was the COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis which has unfolded as some experts and officials had long feared, with more infectious variants, a wave of fresh economic and food security challenges, and a mad scramble for vaccines which is leaving behind people of color in the “developed” world not to mention the vast swaths of the global south which are only now seeing their first of what are likely to be sporadic shipments.

This was the context swirling in my head on Tuesday as I approached a large parking lot in a working class neighborhood for my first COVID shot complements of Pfizer, a clever family member who found an appointment that I could not seem to find for myself, and a bevy of medical workers who were young, cheerful and diverse. 

They also weren’t very busy.  In fact, I was one of the only candidates for vaccination in a lot which could easily have accommodated hundreds of vaccine seekers, a lot surrounded by neighborhoods which surely contained thousands of people at least as deserving as I to be given this pandemic protection, people with family members who likely have to leave the home to go to work, who may have no health insurance attached to such employment, and on whom others depend more than anyone currently depends on me.  I wondered how many of the relatives of those dutifully checking me in had managed to find the protection that my bare arm now beckoned?

Seriously, how could this lot be so empty?  How is it that people like me get to jump what was in this instance a non-existent queue without any clear protocols for determining who are most deserving of protection in this health emergency, a crisis characterized in part by lost and wasted vaccine doses, mixed (and often defensive) messaging on protection, and other grave mis-steps, including with regard to the vaccines we pledged to share but decided instead to horde?  How does this happen and how do we allow it to happen still?

Those of you who know me personally (and are willing to acknowledge as much) know that this “looking a gift horse in the mouth” scenario has long been an unfortunate part of my DNA.  So too is what Sigmund Freud (and his less gender-biased successors) described as the guilt that I have tried to explain by reference to my privilege, but which is more aptly characterized by a deeper and incompletely examined unease, a discontent with too many “things as they are” which has led on my part to a fair amount of brooding but also occasionally manifests itself in positive efforts to ensure full parking lots with people from all walks of life getting protection for themselves, a desire to share instead of horde, a desire to harness my own contributing energies rather than being ensnared by the perceived limitations and inequities around me. 

Indeed, to invoke one of Freud’s more compelling descriptors, I have been and remain one of those “discontents,” someone who has likely spent too much of my cumulative life energy cursing the darkness more than organizing and contributing to a world of greater equity and justice, a world featuring institutions that are both competent and trustworthy, a world where solidary is in evidence more than selfish interest and where cynicism is in abeyance as more of us demonstrate that we are able not only do the right thing, but to do it for the right reasons.

Thankfully my own “discontent” has undergone an evolution over the years, from a focus on the failure of the world to meet my self-derived (and often petty and self-serving) expectations to the weightier matters of capacity and its deficits; our wasting of resources and opportunities; our sometimes relentless clutching to power and institutional mandates rather than to ensuring inclusive delivery; our inability to plan for generations to come and not only to fulfill the desires of the present; indeed the refusal of human civilization to become genuinely civilized across all borders and amongst all peoples and the other life forms with whom we share this fragile planet.    

After a lifetime of trial and error, it is now possible for me to distinguish more clearly and fairly between the good and the not-yet-good enough, to focus more attentively on the “tricks” that we often inadvertently play on ourselves and others, tricks which prompt others to anticipate the arrival of the metaphorical cavalry to help set things right when its horses are still back in the barn, waiting for water and saddles.

With respect to COVID, entire dissertations will be written on our many mistakes on policy, capacity and humanity which have undermined confidence in government and medical authorities and which continue to lead to staggering death and infection totals in most corners of the world.  Sadly, we have conspired to make an already hard thing that much harder, in part due to our inability to get on the same page regarding our messaging about the evolving pandemic science and in part due to our failure to provide adequate access and capacity support for testing and tracing, and now for vaccinations, those tools that remain the scientifically acknowledged pathway to less crowded Intensive Care units, schools with live children in them, and businesses that can reopen without the risk of becoming an accessory to mass infection.

There are, indeed, lessons to be learned here, ones which are applicable well beyond the current pandemic, lessons about fidelity to the tasks deemed most urgent, about the need to “put our money where our mouth is,” about promising less and delivering more, about not allowing our mandates to impede our performance, about escaping that trap characteristic of some institutions that who gets to respond is somehow more important than ensuring capable, timely, competent response in the first instance.  Lessons such as these are surely relevant within the peace and security realm as well, where the UN Security Council remains both bogged down in its own institutional limitations and uncertain about levels of collaboration it is willing to tolerate with respect to other diplomatic chambers and initiatives. This is especially apparent with respect to the Peacebuilding Commission which has done much in its relatively short lifespan to fill policy voids and establish viable policy connections, attract the best diplomatic talent from across the UN system, offer guidance to states at earlier stages of conflict threat, and free up resources to address peacebuilding deficits in real time and in diverse communities of need. As last year’s PBC Chair (Canada) noted this week, the world is “one or two shocks” from falling into deep crisis, and the PBC is well positioned to “anticipate such shocks and promote inclusive responses,” including, as Japan noted, building institutional capacity and genuinely “listening to the people,” talking with them and not at them.

This blend of institutional strengthening and dialogical engagement remans fully relevant to a host of pandemic and non-pandemic threats. There are many urgent needs in this world that we must address with greater care and competence if we are to have a world that can continue to provide a base for our own survival.   Such response must do better at enlisting and enabling the most diversely effective actors and capacities that we have at our disposal, both legacy and innovative, if we are to pull ourselves and others back from the brink of so many contemporary shocks.

And at more a personal level, we must ensure that our “discontent,” my discontent, continues to evolve beyond its often petty and self-referential grievances; that in so doing we become better able to seek out and identify the good in our world that is not yet good enough. And so we can better highlight and expand access to those “gusts of life” that enable and empower individual and institutional capacity for change; gusts that help some to see beyond the gloom and others to experience stability beyond the threat; gusts that fortify our determination to see what is really going on in the world beyond our expectations of it; and gusts to help us identify which personal and collective capacities — which tools and traits of character — are best suited now to take us to more peaceful, healthier and sustainable places.

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For Whom the Bell Tolls: The UN Rings in a Commemoration of its Core Mandate and our Common Obligation, Dr. Robert Zuber

21 Sep

Peace Bell

On Monday, September 21 at 9:00 AM, the UN held a ceremony at the Peace Bell — given to the UN by Japan in 1954 — to commemorate the International Day of Peace.

The event was a bit somber, held in blustery conditions and only modestly attended.  The themes shared by the Secretary General and others related to the need to “lay down weapons” and substitute armed violence for negotiation and sustainable “cease fire” arrangements.

In some ways, as the Secretary General himself seemed to recognize, this international day fell a bit short on enthusiasm, certainly not because the world is particularly ‘peaceful,’ at present, but because it isn’t – violence rages if many regions, refugees angrily bang at the doors of reluctant recipient states, our climate’s very health is increasingly called into question, our oceans are, ironically, drowning in plastic, trafficking of drugs and arms is making life hellish for too many poor and indigenous peoples.  Thus, the day is less a celebration in the conventional sense and more a reminder of the challenges that lie ahead and which are to some considerable degree of our own making.

The pursuit of peace is now less about ending cross-border conflicts and more about ensuring stability, equity and safety within states, some failing and others at death’s door.   The peace and security environment envisioned by the framers of the UN Charter bears little resemblance to the one we now inhabit, and we still struggle with how to care for this new world while employing the tools, habits, and other limitations of our past.  More and more, though perhaps not with sufficient urgency, people recognize the impact of some things on other things – discrimination on governance, armed violence on development and migration, illicit weapons on mass atrocities, and so forth.  But while we increasingly critique our policy “silos,” we continue to fund them and overly honor their narrow brands.

Global Action has gone through its own evolutionary path in an attempt to maximize our modest contributions to more globally peaceful outcomes.   We have largely abandoned, for better or worse, grand policy narratives and their often arrogant and inflammatory political rhetoric, preferring to place our limited energy on being attentive to global policymakers , offering hospitality and organizational support to global civil society, and providing guidance for what we hope will be the next generation of policy leaders.

Beyond the peace platitudes that at times still define our collective mission in the world, we see our role as reinforcing connections between issues and people, and helping in our small way to end inequalities of all kinds – including power imbalances within the UN itself.  We try to accomplish this without forgetting to sit in front of the mirror that we are so quick to hold in front of others, to understand better the violence that lurks at the core of our material obsessions, to confess our largely unearned privileges; and to stay connected to the erstwhile ‘end users’ of policy who, more often than we like to think, don’t find those policies so ‘useful’ at all.

And we do what we can to examine and at times expose the cultural obsessions and distractions that impede peaceful progress, including the willingness of people to prefer branding to substance; who use language to manipulate outcomes rather than to forge meaningful connections with others; whose narrow ambitions have largely turned their attentiveness and compassion into emotional side shows.

We have learned, in ways that are sometimes enlightening and sometimes discouraging, that peace in the world is elusive in part because peace within ourselves and our communities still largely lies beyond our grasp – and that presumes we are willing to “grasp” in the first place.

This International Day has not been (at least as of this writing) marked by cease fire agreements or by any other commitments to lay down arms and beat swords into ploughshares.  It will not likely herald a breakthrough in Syria or Yemen, nor will it motivate masses of people to renounce their material addictions, pay attention to the world around them, and live a simpler, more community-engaged, less materially ambitious existence.

The ringing UN bell mostly “commemorated” what those standing at the event already knew: that the world remains in peril from our consumption excesses, our appetite for weapons, even our resistance to the inclusiveness we say we want. We need better policies, healthier communities, happier families, more creative schools, more attentive governance.    But we also need more hands in this work, more minds to help us sort out our limitations and inconsistencies, more ‘heart energy’ to remind us – and not only on international peace day – that our policy triumphs have limited shelf-life and must continually adapt to new and sometimes discouraging circumstances made possible in part by our collective indifference.

We are in the ‘peace business’ not because we are so clever and virtuous, but because it is our responsibility and there are still too few others with the time or inclination to respond to these difficult challenges. Fortunately, there may be more people at the UN and in diplomatic missions and NGO offices worldwide committed to peaceful societies than has been the case previously.  We work with some and know of many others in every corner of the planet.

While we do what we can to honor those existing commitments, our collective efforts remain insufficient. We need to find stronger hands, sharper minds, more caring hearts.  We need to recruit for a common cause rather than for our narrow organizational interests.  Without setting up barriers to participation, we need to help people from many walks of life — healers and teachers and drivers and actors and parents – to actively identify with the hope of peaceful societies.  In the absence of major peace developments, this building of our common capacity for peace constitutes a useful, tangible response to today’s ringing of the UN bell.

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