Mary B. Anderson
Mary B. Anderson (born March 31, 1939 in Kentucky ) is an American economist and president of Collaborative for Development Action (CDA), a small consulting firm in Cambridge , Massachusetts .
With her most important work “Do No Harm” ( Eng. “Do no harm” ) she specified basic rules for planning aid measures in conflict situations (for example in war and post-war regions), which are recognized as binding by many governmental and non-governmental aid organizations .
Life
Mary B. Anderson grew up in rural Kentucky as the daughter of a Presbyterian pastor. Her father was a pacifist and campaigned for the recognition of the civil rights of black Americans, what groups like the Ku Klux Klan on the scene. Her childhood was marked by death threats against her family and the resulting insecurity. Her father was shot several times.
Mary studied economics at Mount Holyoke College ( Seven Sisters ). After graduating in 1961, she went to Tanganyika in Tanzania with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and worked there on rural women's projects. This time in the villages of Tanganyika was formative, she said later. She experienced what poverty is and what it means to live in a poor country. But she also experienced the creativity of the people and the euphoric joy that the people in the villages felt about the impending independence.
She left East Africa on June 1, 1963 the day in Kenya Jomo Kenyatta was sworn in as head of internal self-government of Kenya. Back in the USA she was involved in Chicago with the AFSC in the civil rights movement and in the resistance against the Vietnam War. At the end of the 1960s she continued her studies in economics, which she completed with a doctorate in 1970 . After completing her studies, she worked in the field of development research at Harvard , MIT , Bielefeld University and Jerusalem University before becoming a freelance consultant in the mid-1980s.
Development research
Initially, the focus of Mary B. Anderson's work was how development work and humanitarian aid address gender issues and issues. On behalf of UN organizations ( UNIFEM , UNHCR , UNICEF ) and other international organizations, she investigated the question of how the “ gender perspective” could be incorporated into the planning, organization and structures of development. In the study “Gender Analysis in Development Planning” (1991), which was carried out jointly with Aruna Rao and Catherine Overholt , she drew conclusions from a large number of case studies and developed practically applicable instruments from them.
Work on gender issues inevitably led Anderson to war zones again and again. The experience gained and the discussions with employees in projects gave rise to the idea of dealing systematically with the question of how emergency aid measures must be designed so that they do not impair the conditions for later sustainable development work. A number of non-governmental organizations could be won over to this idea. Anderson and Peter J. Woodrow organized a process in which NGO staff examined their experience of the long-term effects of emergency response and - against the background of collective experience - developed a method of project planning. In the book “Rising from the Ashes. Development Strategies in Times of Disaster ” (1989) the process and the result were documented.
This discussion found a logical continuation at the beginning of the 1990s in the Local Capacities for Peace (LCP) project. The international community and aid organizations had just been shown in Somalia and - after the genocide in Rwanda - in Eastern Congo , how international emergency aid measures can contribute to the destabilization of society and the state, to the escalation of violence and to general insecurity . The failure of the US-initiated and long-dominated UN mission in Somalia and the largely devastating results of the emergency aid measures against the famine in Somalia carried out in the slipstream of the UN intervention had already made many NGOs realize in the early 1990s that Emergency aid and development work do not “in themselves” and “by definition” promote peace and de-escalate violence. The events in Eastern Congo emphasized this knowledge once again.
A group of NGOs commissioned Anderson and her small consulting firm "Collaborative for Development Action" (CDA) to conduct a comparative study to examine the effects of emergency aid measures and development projects on conflict dynamics. As before, Anderson organized a process in which aid workers gathered their experiences. The findings were passed back to employees of aid organizations who were currently carrying out projects in war and crisis areas, and they were checked against the background of their own experiences. Over a period of four years, around 700 project employees were involved in the “Local Capacities for Peace” process, including Wolfgang Jamann, the German World Vision employee at the time . The result of the investigation was the publication “ Do No Harm. How Aid Can Support Peace - or War "(1996/99).
"Experience shows that aid, even if it is effective and achieves its goals by saving lives and promoting development, at the same time in many cases nourishes, intensifies and prolongs conflicts."
“It would (however) be a moral and logical fallacy to believe that help can cause harm if harm would be avoided by not providing help. In reality, the decision to withhold help from people in need would have outrageously negative consequences. "
The findings, known as the “ do-no-harm approach ”, have since strongly influenced the debate about the peace-promoting or peace-inhibiting effects of aid measures.
In 2001 Anderson started the “Reflecting on Peace Practice” (RPP) project. In this project, she worked with more than 50 organizations involved in peace work and conflict management to investigate the question of how the peace-strengthening effects of such measures can be more precisely understood and demonstrated, and how their effectiveness can be increased. Under the title “Confronting War. Critical Lessons for Peace Practitioners ”(2003), the first fundamental findings are documented. These are currently being examined and further refined with people who have worked in peace work.
Works
- Mary B. Anderson, Peter J. Woodrow, Robert T. Snow: Approach to Integrating Development and Relief Programming. An Analytical Framework. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Graduate School of Education, 1988.
- Mary B. Anderson, Peter J. Woodrow: Rising from the Ashes: Development Strategies in Times of Disaster. Boulder / San Francisco / Paris, UNESCO, 1989, ISBN 0-8133-7828-1 .
- Mary B. Anderson, Peter J. Woodrow: Disaster and Development Workshops: A Manual for Training in Capacities and Vulnerabilities Analysis. Cambridge MA: Harvard University, 1990.
- Mary B. Anderson, Aruna Rao, Catherine A. Overholt: Gender Analysis in Development Planning: A Case Book. Kumarian Press, 1991, ISBN 0-931816-61-0 .
- Mary B. Anderson: Education for All: What are we Waiting for? New York, UNICEF, 1992.
- Mary B. Anderson: Do no Harm: Supporting Local Capacities for Peace through Aid. Cambridge MA, Collaborative for Development Action, 1996.
- Mary B. Anderson: Do No Harm: How Aid Can Support Peace - or War. Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder / London, 1999, 160 pages, ISBN 1-55587-834-2 .
- Mary B. Anderson: Options For Aid in Conflict. Lessons from Field Experience. Ed., Cambridge MA, Collaborative for Development Action, 2000.
- Mary B. Anderson, Angelika Spelten: Conflict Transformation. How International Assistance Can Contribute. Bonn, SEF, 2000.
- Mary B. Anderson, Laura Olson: Confronting War. Critical Lessons for Peace Practitioners. Cambridge MA, Collaborative for Development Action, 2003.
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Anderson, Mary B. |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American economist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 31, 1939 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Kentucky |