Human Currencies

 Some of the blogs I have written in 2024 appear to be on a crusade against due diligence. In “Neocolonialism Through Due Diligence. The Price of Depending on Imperialist Institutions for Brokering Trust” I made the point that document based due diligence not only fails in its stated goal of building trust, but more concerningly that it divides communities by favouring those more experienced in complex bureaucracy. 

The blog’s main point is that paperwork based due diligence should not seek to replace the building of trust achieved through human relationships. In other words, paperwork is not inherently bad, it becomes a problem when it is used to short cut human relationships. Due diligence contributes to the mechanisation of relationships that is often specifically designed to help humanitarian actors avoid human relationships. This is done explicitly for many reasons, some of the reasons stated include the quest for scale (“you can’t scale an idea if you have to know everyone involved”) and the lack of trust within institutions - due diligence is needed to protect institutions from themselves just as much to protect them from their external partners. However, if priority is given to building trust through human relationships then paperwork that runs in parallel is not per se a bad thing. In fact it is usually likely that paperwork is needed to document a trust based relationship simply to comply with the standards of local authorities such as NGO boards or the Charities Commission. When looking at it this way the documentation of a relationship and the trust building in a relationship should not be conflated as being the same thing. People have been saying to me “we agree that we should build trust through human relationships but what should be the basic minimum of due diligence that we should depend on?” The answer is that two different forms of interaction and exchange are being confused. 

Human Currencies

The concept of a currency of exchange can help open these ideas out to other dimensions. We can think about currency in its broadest sense as a medium of exchange between humans. Aside from the obvious form of hard currency, financial transactions, there are other material currencies such as the exchange of goods and services. Documentation and accountability make up another form of material currency whereby receipts and audits are provided as part of a financial exchange. Sociology might offer three other broad categories of currency in societies- political currency, knowledge and data, and social and emotional currencies, the currencies of the most real human interactions. Political currency exists between the voters and the elected. Reputational currency, social standing and influence could be bunched into this category as a form of political currency. Knowledge and data gets a category of its own owing to the importance of transaction in exchanging information or ideas. Finally, the real human currencies go to depths of human interaction that cannot be efficiently summarised, but would include ideas such as trust, compassion, respect, mutual support and solidarity. 

The main problem we have identified in the humanitarian sector is that while material and data forms of exchange have been elevated, the currencies of real human interaction have been sidelined or abandoned altogether. The only way the humanitarian sector can be humanitarian is if human relationships form the main basis of exchange - otherwise it should really consider a rebrand. Due diligence, money and data can serve their own purpose but we should not confuse them with real human interactions, they are a different form of currency.