The Foreign Service Journal, December 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2016 19 staffer on her first overseas posting: “I got out more in the beginning, but it’s very hard to do. I’m being asked to support an approach with partners, but don’t know really what’s going on out there and who they are. You’re always led by other imperatives.” Also typical is the complaint by a young USAID officer who had spent four years in Zambia and was then posted to a French-speaking country, without any knowledge of the language. Though he is taking weekly courses at USAID’s expense, he said: “By the time I’ll be able to com- municate with someone in this country, I’ll be ready to leave.” The isolation of USAID personnel has an effect on those with whom the agency would like to establish close working rela- tionships. “Why bother?” they ask them- selves. As an Asian government health official who works with USAID projects told us: “I’m getting tired of having to edu- cate anew each new USAID health officer who comes in every two or three years. We don’t get anywhere because we always need to start from scratch.” In our conversations with more than 70 USAID staff in overseas missions, we detected an underlying patronizing attitude. Use of the term “the locals” is common; and after a year at post, some staff begin to cast their hosts in terms of two-dimensional stereotypes that tend toward a dismissive throwing up of one’s hands, if not contempt. There is frustra- tion at the difficulty in convincing “them” to do things our way, and exasperation at certain native habits. Rather than trying to penetrate a foreign culture, many surren- der to a “that’s just how they are” mantra. Perhaps the most constant refrain was that we are being “ripped off”—“they” just cannot be trusted with our money. A civil society leader in East Africa who has had experience working with the agency told us: “They [USAID] are all about the ‘gotcha.’ That’s how they are recruited and, more important, that’s how they are trained. They need to listen—the starting point [with local partners] has to be ‘we both want the same thing.’ But instead, they go in [to an agreement or a contract] with the belief that ‘you’re trying to screw us.’ They are simply not going to be able to get into a relationship of understanding with local organizations with that mentality.” Back in Washington, a recently retired officer with 30 years at USAID asked reflectively: “Are we good listeners? Is our decision-making based on evidence? Or do we appear arbitrary or ideological? Do we appreciate and respect a given country’s political and economic accom- plishments? Or do we appear dismissive, disrespectful, untrusting and arrogant? Are we distinguished by our presence— are we out and around, easy to find, see, speak to and understand? Are our agendas and processes clear? Or are we invisible, distant, impossible to reach and under- stand, opaque?” Security Constraints There are a number of reasons for both the isolation and the related hints of con- tempt that we found. Most lie in the physi- cal, bureaucratic and human resource realms, and so there is some hope for change, at least in the latter two. As for physical isolation, this key constraint has to do with 9/11 and the perceived need to reduce the risks to U.S. official personnel overseas—and it is unlikely to change. The architecture of embassy com- pounds, into which more and more USAID offices have been required to move, has become fortress-like (if not prison-like); many have slit windows and 300-pound steel doors and on the outer perimeters, razor wire and concrete barricades. Significantly, the FY 2016 budget request for the Department of State included $4.8 billion in “Support to Embassy Security”—that’s the equivalent of one-third of USAID’s entire budget. It is hard, even for visiting Americans, to get into the compounds. People from local civil society, municipal government units and private firms who have gone through the experience tend not to want to do it again. Visitors must be accompanied everywhere (even to the door of the rest room, though thankfully not inside, or at least not yet). Passports and cell phones are surrendered. Muscles are strained opening the heavy doors. Leaving the compound, essential for USAID staff to be able to develop those close relationships, is almost equally daunting. The joke we heard a few times fromUSAID personnel is that it is as hard to get out of the embassy compound as it is to get in. Surely something could be done about the bureaucratic constraints against more spontaneous outside visits. At the least, the current process could be stream- lined. Traveling to a rural area for four or five days, for example, requires (in most cases) submitting an application, justify- ing it, waiting for both budget and senior management approval, and then applying to the transport office for the allocation of vehicle and driver, and sometimes a security detail—all of which takes a lot of time and paperwork. Moreover, the nature of the routine workflowmakes superiors reluctant to allow any extended interruptions. Accord- ing to the Tanzania mission director, inter- viewed in late 2014, as much as 60 percent of staff time goes to reporting and routine paperwork. In a few places, the logistics of travel are made still more cumbersome. When we visited Angola, it was policy that any official going on a field trip needed two