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THREAD As donor states gather to pledge aid to Lebanon, they must tread carefully, or risk rewarding a regime that has proven not just corrupt, but unwilling and incapable of serving its people
For years, Lebanese factions have profited from countless foreign-funded development projects—from redundant infrastructure to vacuous “capacity building” programs
They used them for patronage and routinely funneled them through their front companies. Humanitarian programs, meanwhile, were spared the worst forms of encroachment
But now that development money has dried up, Lebanon’s factions are likely to shift their attention to aid, to cash in on clearing rubble or distributing food and fuel
They will deploy not just front companies, but organizations posing as “civil society” partners, while attempting to stash loyalists within UN agencies and INGOs
Donors must also contend with local banks, which are technically bankrupt, eager to tap foreign transfers to bail out their shareholders, and controlled by the same coterie
Finally, donors may undermine Lebanon’s much-needed non-humanitarian NGOs, by redirecting the bulk of support toward emergency aid—thus pushing local groups to repurpose themselves for tasks far outside their raison d’etre
In any event, Lebanon’s purely humanitarian NGOs and multiplying citizen-led solidarity initiatives cannot help on the right scale, leaving a gap that factions will maneuver to fill
Although Lebanon’s foreign partners have recently been more demanding of Lebanon’s political class, the current emergency will favor speed over precaution
The biggest obstacle to acting more strategically is the mantra that humanitarian aid is apolitical, which donors and NGOs invoke to avoid seriously reckoning with political realities
Thus the need to step carefully in what is not just a disaster zone but a political minefield. Solutions include the following commonsense measures:
-Systematically including in the planning of all interventions a cross-section of civil society representatives qualified in any given particular field
-Developing and pooling an extensive due diligence capacity to examine all potential signatories to contracts related to humanitarian interventions
-Publishing all such contracts transparently, ideally in a single repository keeping track of the interventions of most donors and implementing agencies
-Setting up large enough supervisory teams to manage multiple smaller contracts, rather than a few large ones, and accompany partners in their growth
-Channeling funds through the few non-Lebanese banks established in the country, and transparently publishing their rates and conditions
-Setting clear conditions for using Lebanese banks, notably publishing a forensic audit of the Central Bank’s accounts and implementing a floating exchange rate
-Prioritizing Lebanese pounds and vouchers for fuel, food, and other essentials, and refraining from flooding the market with dollars that weaken the pound and worsen inflation
-Balancing all interventions geographically, across Beirut’s affected neighborhoods, to avoid biases that factions will exploit to denounce aid as politically motivated
-And ensuring that interventions are equally balanced thematically, and maintain a strong focus on human rights violations, legal assistance, and anti-corruption initiatives
A sobering precedent was set in neighboring Syria, where top-heavy aid programs largely failed to capitalize on civil society networks, mostly for lack of agility among donors https://www.synaps.network/post/syria-aid-top-down-partners-un
