[Lars Peter Nissen] (0:00 - 0:03)
Welcome to Trumanitarian, I'm Lars Peter Nissen.
[Carla Vitantonio] (0:04 - 0:09)
Welcome to Transformative Leadership in Times of Polycrisis, and I am Carla Vitantonio.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (0:10 - 0:22)
And Carla, it's great that we have agreed to do a joint episode. We both do a podcast, and we met at a conference here in Doha, where we are recording this, and we have agreed that we want to explore why the heck we are podcasting.
[Carla Vitantonio] (0:23 - 0:29)
Exactly, why we are podcasting despite our very complicated life in this very complicated time and space.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (0:29 - 0:38)
Exactly, so let's begin with you. Tell me a bit about the podcast you do, and the origin story, if you want. Why did you do it?
[Carla Vitantonio] (0:38 - 0:43)
My podcast is called Living Decoloniality, and it was born...
[Lars Peter Nissen] (0:43 - 0:50)
Can I ask, why isn't it called Living Decolonialism? Why is it decoloniality? What does that mean?
[Carla Vitantonio] (0:51 - 1:45)
Because I refer to a theory that has become a little bit my compass, that is the theory of the colonial matrix of power. It's a Latin American theory developed by a scholar called Anibal Quijano in Peru in the 2000s. And Anibal Quijano invents the word coloniality.
What is coloniality? Coloniality is everything that stays in structures, in minds, in behaviours, and in beliefs, even when colonialism is over. So coloniality stays in the education system in Uganda, where English is taught while traditional languages are just suggested.
Coloniality stays in the way we make decisions. So Living Decoloniality, because of this, decoloniality is for Quijano the opposite of coloniality, and it's a process. It's not a point, a fixed point, it's a process.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (1:45 - 1:45)
Okay.
[Carla Vitantonio] (1:46 - 1:46)
Okay.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (1:46 - 1:48)
Good, I think I got some of that.
[Carla Vitantonio] (1:48 - 3:18)
And so I started this exactly because I thought that the colonial matrix of power as a framework could be a good reading key for what we were living as humanitarians, humanitarians trying to find out how to change what we saw. So we were saying, oh, we have to decolonise the sector. And this was upsetting me profoundly, because decolonisation for me was a historical process.
And then I realised that yes, what we mean is destroying the coloniality of our practices. And this gives me a biggest pun, because if you want to decolonise or to bring the, to cancel the coloniality of your practices and behaviours, you act at the individual level, at the structural level of your own organisation until the systemic level, that is what we are talking about. So what I did, I took one year off, I was employed by an INGO at that time, I took one year off.
And I found a sponsor for this project that was meant to be a toolkit for practitioners and policy leaders on how to introduce practices of decoloniality in their life. I did the whole podcast, prepared everything. And when it was ready, my sponsor, that was a very big European university, ghosted me.
Because they felt it was too risky that a person without even a PhD speaks of coloniality in a big respected European university. So they did not want to produce the podcast.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (3:18 - 3:26)
I think we should say as a disclaimer to the listeners that I don't have a PhD either. So really, you shouldn't believe anything you hear on this podcast.
[Carla Vitantonio] (3:26 - 3:55)
So I cannot talk to you. I only talk to people with PhD. And so they ghosted me and I had this podcast.
And I thought, what do I do? I called the Centre for Humanitarian Leadership. And I told them, would you be interested in broadcasting this?
And now and then, thanks to the fact that they have a big readership, the podcast became a point of reference for a few humanitarians and also researchers that look for practical ideas on how to move into decoloniality.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (3:55 - 3:57)
How many episodes have you done?
[Carla Vitantonio] (3:57 - 4:35)
Well, we did already, I did, we, me, myself and I, we did already three seasons of seven, eight episodes each. So it's about 24 episodes. And it's a miracle.
And after the first season, one other miracle happened that a young student of anthropology called me and told me that she had listened to my podcast, she was working on decolonizing museums, and she wanted to be my assistant for free. I told her, you know, I'm doing this as a hobby. And so now she's supporting me since season two.
And now you have to answer the same question. Tell me the story of Trumanitarian
[Lars Peter Nissen] (4:36 - 5:46)
Yeah, I think it had a lot to do with COVID somehow. I started more or less five years ago. And I think it was two things.
It was COVID. And then I lost a very good friend who was also working in the industry, if you want, he had a stroke and later passed away. And I think the combination of that social upheaval and, and the reaction to his passing and just, just a, a deep frustration with the sector as such came together.
And I felt like we weren't having the right conversation. And then I thought it was sufficiently sort of provocative to call it Trumanitarian, because then everybody would go, oh, so you think you're the Trumanitarian or true humanitarian or whatever. But really, what I just want to do with it is to, to have smart, honest conversations.
That's basically the tagline. And so I'm really curious about anything from fleet management to mental health, to protection to education, complexity, AI, tech, a lot of tech on there. It's a search for the new humanitarian paradigm.
[Carla Vitantonio] (5:46 - 5:48)
And how do you find your people?
[Lars Peter Nissen] (5:49 - 6:06)
Some of them come to me, some of them come and say, I've written a book or I've got something really interesting here. Some of them I find on social media or meet at conferences, the conference we had here, I've met a couple of people I'm going to do episodes with. And so they sort of, it's very organic.
[Carla Vitantonio] (6:07 - 6:24)
Hmm. That's, that's interesting, because even though the system seems so broken, people are eager to show that they are looking for alternatives. And they believe in these alternatives.
We all do. I include myself with my podcast, no?
[Lars Peter Nissen] (6:25 - 6:58)
Yeah, I think we have a never ending need to be the good guys. And I think that's a problem. I don't think we're the bad guys.
I don't think we're the good guys. I think we're the guys and gals, by the way. I think we are just people who are doing a job and some of us do it well, some of us doing it less well.
But what we suffer under is a desperate lack of accountability of the institutions we work in. And so the ones who don't do it very well, tend to hang around for too long.
[Carla Vitantonio] (6:59 - 7:43)
What you said made me think about a couple of things. The first thing that you said is, we just do a job, no? And I feel a lot of sympathy with this thought.
It resonates because one of the things that, for example, emerged a lot in my podcast is that people don't want to be hero. And in way too many contexts, I hear this narrative of the new hero. These are real heroes.
This is the hero. And why do we really need a new hero? Because heroes are superhuman and therefore are non-human.
Don't we just do a job? Don't we try to do our best like a doctor, a waiter?
[Lars Peter Nissen] (7:44 - 8:31)
Yeah, I think we see people doing heroic things and going over and above and saving people and sacrificing themselves. And so it's not to detract from what's being done. I'm so proud of us as a community.
And I think we do really well. And I think one of the things that always makes me feel bad is when people feel like, I'm being quite critical on the show when I try to push the envelope in terms of punching the organizations we work with. But I deeply, deeply respect the people who work in the sector and who have chosen to follow this line of work.
If you call them heroes, you lock them into a very fixed position. And I mean, it's just not healthy.
[Carla Vitantonio] (8:32 - 9:20)
And it's a script that at the end is colonial because the hero is part of a certain tradition. A tradition where you lead because you are unusually talented into something while we want. And in Living the Coloniality, there's a lot of community leaders, for example, that talk and they consider themselves part of the movement.
Also, sometimes it's difficult for me to understand whom I have to interview because I reach out to organizations that are structured in the way a Western organization is structured. And so they don't have a CEO or they don't have a board. So they would tell you, well, tell me what's your interest and we will find the person.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (9:20 - 10:21)
Yeah. And exactly the sort of institutional design is something I find really, really interesting. Because one thing that drives me mad is that I think humanitarian reform by and large has been to teach big dysfunctional bureaucracies new words.
And if we teach them a new word, whether that is resilience or agility or whatever it is, then things will be a nexus. Then things will be different. And I don't think so.
I think because I think these institutions have a logic to them and they're incentivized in a certain way. So no matter which language they actually speak or what words they say, if you look at the way they exercise power, that's exactly the same. And that seems to be something we refuse to engage with.
We love tweaking the discourse. We love coming up with more precise terms. We refuse to deal with the underlying incentives driving the sector.
[Carla Vitantonio] (10:22 - 11:24)
Yeah. What I was thinking yesterday during the conference was very similar to what you say, and I will share it before asking you a question on on humanitarian. And that is that sometimes it is as if we all see the lines that power draws, but we don't want to unveil them.
And and I think that unveiling the dynamics of power would be revolutionary enough because we don't necessarily need to change things. But it would be nice to this is a room where power is sitting now in this other room. There's another dynamic.
And I think that there is a sort of protocol taboo of never speaking about power in our sector. And here I go with my question. Do you think that your podcast after five years, people have talked about this podcast to me?
So do you think that it has become a potential tool for advocacy?
[Lars Peter Nissen] (11:25 - 12:42)
It makes me happy, first and foremost. It really makes me happy. And it keeps me curious.
And I'm having so much fun, it almost feels guilty to actually do it. So that has changed for me. I think that's important.
I think if there's one thing I wanted to achieve, it was just for there to be a different way of talking about things, a different focus, a questioning of the story we seem to all have to buy into. And I don't like drinking the Kool-Aid, if you know what I mean. I don't, I really don't like that.
And I think there is an element of almost like Hans Christian Andersen and the Emperor's New Clothes that there has to be that boy who says this one is naked. And if the podcast has made some people think or understand that there's more than one way to see an issue, and if they begin to question some of the documents coming out from very big and very powerful organizations, then I'm happy. And that's really the level of ambition.
I'm not really pretending that we are finding answers. We're just asking much better questions, having great conversations and having fun while we do it. And I don't say that to be, to not want to own what it does or whatever.
But I think that is what it is.
[Carla Vitantonio] (12:43 - 13:12)
I agree with you. I think that, as you know, I do the podcast exactly in the same way, like by myself and for myself. But I think it's a relief to do something like this podcast.
And just to say, you know, this podcast is for this. I'm happy if it serves an extra purpose. But if my friend who is a researcher in Amsterdam writes and say, you know, I listened to this episode, it's cool.
And maybe I will try to do this and that. I'm happy. You know, it's already, it's already something.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (13:14 - 13:23)
And it's a powerful medium, right? Because you're in people's ears. It's a very intimate experience, actually.
And so people come and feel like they know me.
[Carla Vitantonio] (13:24 - 14:17)
And it's very democratic. And that's why I fight, even publicly sometimes, against videocasting as podcasting. So not saying that I don't like videocasting, but I try to say, you know, if you are videocasting, call it videocasting, because a podcast is something that you can do also with your telephone.
And that's why it was democratic when it was born. You know, you have the first experiments of podcast. I did my first podcast.
It was called Pyongyang Blues. It went everywhere. And I did it in my closet with my mobile.
And that was a podcast. So I think I also choose podcasts because it's a democratic tool. Everybody can do it.
People that answer to my podcast, they answer really from the bushes with their mobile. They send me WhatsApp and then I edit them. Do you only do podcasts live or do you also do Zoom?
[Lars Peter Nissen] (14:17 - 15:07)
No, I record online as well. I much prefer to be with people because I like to push people. But in a way where it's a safe space, it has to be.
I'm not a journalist. I'm not here to get you, right? I'm here to poke you, to get some interesting stuff out of you.
And I think that's easier when you're in the same room, especially if you haven't met people before. Because if you want to be a nice person, you also want to be respectful for people. So if you interview people who are different from you, from a different generation, you're always a little bit more careful because you don't want to just assume.
And being Danish, we're very blunt. So I'm always, you know, sort of catching myself not to push it too hard.
[Carla Vitantonio] (15:08 - 16:38)
You made me think that we are very different on this because, well, my podcast is different from yours in the structure. I have always the same structure. I have three questions and I have a process.
So we meet online and we go through a process of mutual understanding and we try to understand if really what you want to say matches with the colonial process that I want to show. So when we agree, then I leave you the time to frame your answers to the three questions as you like. And when you are ready, you send me the recordings.
This means that you can send it, you can record one million times. And some people tell me this was really difficult. It was really challenging.
And some said I appreciated that I could frame it several times because I really needed the right words. But I did only a couple of episodes live on Zoom because also living in Cuba, Zoom is not an option. So a couple of times I was not in Cuba and I did episodes live.
And Matilde, my assistant, she likes to call herself, she told me that she especially liked them. But the reality is that it was super challenging because my guests flew with the flow. So it was difficult to keep them to the structure that I had thought for the podcast.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (16:39 - 16:39)
But that's what I like.
[Carla Vitantonio] (16:40 - 16:40)
Yes, I know.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (16:41 - 17:50)
Because it's that emergence of insights and ideas. So I try to agree on three or four broad areas we want to talk about. And the structure varies according to who we have on.
I should say I also have two absolutely outstanding young professionals working with me. Ila and Rigmor are both volunteering with me. They're my producers.
And we just have such a wonderful working relationship in this little podcast. So hi Ila, hi Rigmor. But you see, if I had to say, if I had to say, okay, what is for me the most colonial thing in the whole bloody industry?
It's a lock frame. I bloody hate lock frames, right? And indicators and smart indicators.
I actually sometimes tell my team, you're not allowed to do smart indicators. You have to do dumb indicators. And dumb indicators are activity indicators and they have to be as low as possible so that we actually exceed our target.
And then we get the bean counters from the donors out of the room. And then we can have a meaningful conversation with the program people about what works and what doesn't, because we have overperformed on our lock frames. So let's do some dumb indicators.
[Carla Vitantonio] (17:50 - 18:29)
I completely agree with you. And I will tell you a little bit of gossip. Of course, I will not mention the donor.
But very recently, I reported an overachievement. And the donor wrote an email to my boss asking if we had cheated on the indicators, putting it too low. But the reality is that we just had a good bid with the provider.
So we could buy much more than we thought. And this was one thing. And on living the coloniality, I would never ask you the most colonial thing, but I would surely ask you, what is one kind of coloniality that you have met?
[Lars Peter Nissen] (18:30 - 19:46)
So for me, and it's something I reflected on in this conference we've just been at, we are terrified of having empty spaces in the agenda. That conference was packed with content. And there was a lot of excellent, fantastic content.
But there were so many fantastic people, and I didn't have time to meet them. Right. And so for me, we overload everything, we overload our organizations.
It's that bloody hamster wheel we're running around in. But I'm sorry, that hamster wheel, if the hamster stops running, it stops. And, and I think we are creating a lot, we have a lot of burnout, we have a lot of issues around mental health of people working in the sector, not least because we are being very, very critical of ourselves, we are self-flagellating like there's no tomorrow, right.
But it is also something we create ourself. It is, it's a it's a whole superstructure we create, because we think this is how we tell very, very small stories about what we're doing. And then we're so busy, and we feel so useful.
And that's colonial for me, that is the tyranny of insecurity, maybe.
[Carla Vitantonio] (19:47 - 20:28)
And I completely agree with you, I was touched by the generosity of the people who prepared the conference, in spite of all that has happened in the past four or five months. I could see how tired they were, and nevertheless, how rentlessly they were working. But I also felt that there was some coloniality in the hierarchy of the knowledge that was presented.
And I thought that for each one of those panels, we would have needed one hour to debrief. Of course, you cannot make a four days conference.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (20:29 - 20:45)
But let me just be precise, because it feels very unfair somehow to be critical of what was a fantastic couple of days organized by the Center for Humanitarian Leadership. But I've never been at a conference where the audience was as well curated as this one.
[Carla Vitantonio] (20:46 - 20:46)
Definitely.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (20:47 - 20:51)
You ran a session I participated in around leadership, and you even made a joke.
[Carla Vitantonio] (20:51 - 20:52)
On you!
[Lars Peter Nissen] (20:52 - 21:05)
Yes, on me, because we were describing a leader. And you were basically saying, oh, you know, it sounds like a male, pale, stale person. And we don't have any of those.
Oh, by the way, we have you last week. I thought it was a fantastic joke.
[Carla Vitantonio] (21:05 - 21:08)
I just said you had the physique du hall.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (21:09 - 21:22)
I heard you very clearly. I heard you very clearly. What I'm trying to say is the diversity and the powerful experiences from the global South that were at that conference, it's been a long time since I've experienced that.
[Carla Vitantonio] (21:23 - 21:35)
I agree with you. I agree with you that the program was a program that we don't see often in conference. Some voices we heard that we would not hear everywhere.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (21:35 - 21:37)
I would say the people were different.
[Carla Vitantonio] (21:37 - 21:38)
Yeah.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (21:38 - 21:40)
But the form was quite traditional.
[Carla Vitantonio] (21:41 - 21:41)
Yes.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (21:42 - 22:33)
And what I actually was thinking was what this conference was about for me was the dichotomy between a traditional, very linear, if you want, colonial, patriarchal, whatever you want, all those things, right? Sort of very institutional big aid, if you want, on one side, and then an absolutely organic grassroots based emergent, right? And so the million dollar question for me is, you fly all these people together.
And what do you then give them? Do you give them an organic conference that can breathe and explore and meet and evolve and serendipity and whatever? Or do you give them a linear, you know, patriarchal 10 minute coffee break conference?
It's an interesting thought.
[Carla Vitantonio] (22:33 - 23:07)
Yeah. And again, there's no right answer, because everybody can disagree, because this is subjective, no? I stay with the gratefulness of having met so many people and with the fatigue.
I would have needed a four days conference. No, as I said, I would have needed a one hour after each panel. And maybe more, I'm a bit of an old school hippie, more circles, more breathing exercises, more feedback in small groups.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (23:07 - 23:07)
More volleyball.
[Carla Vitantonio] (23:08 - 23:12)
More volleyball. Yeah, definitely. That would have been amazing.
Yeah.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (23:13 - 23:17)
I'm not a hippie. Only on the inside.
[Carla Vitantonio] (23:18 - 23:20)
A very well hidden hippie.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (23:20 - 23:20)
Yeah, exactly.
[Carla Vitantonio] (23:21 - 23:30)
And so do you want to anticipate some or any of the episodes that you will produce after this conference?
[Lars Peter Nissen] (23:31 - 25:52)
I want to do one with the white helmets. Because I just did one with one of the ERR's, Emergency Response Rooms from Sudan, and that was incredibly powerful. And there's such strong parallels to what the white helmets are doing and the history they've been through.
And just, it's humbling how impressive they are. It's just fantastic, right? And they haven't always been equally well appreciated by the mainstream system, and I think that's an important story to tell.
And then I am really interested in understanding better how all of these different community-based or grassroots initiatives what is it that, what are the underlying rules that governs the way they emerge? Not to write like a long cookbook on how to be a grassroots, right? But to simply understand how do you water a garden best possible so it grows the most beautiful flowers, right?
How do we from outside help water? So the white helmets will be, for me, an interesting episode. I also really want to do one with, there were a couple of philanthropists at the conference, and particularly one of them really spoke to me.
Because what I heard her saying was that she wanted, I heard her saying something along the lines of exploring loss of control, trust. She used words that really sounded to me like she was working in a much more network-centric way than we normally see from the money side of things. And I thought that was interesting.
She was also not from one of the huge, huge philanthropies, but sort of a mid-sized one, I guess. And so I think we need some new money in this situation. And I'm really interested in learning about the thinking among a donor like that, and to see whether there's some new answers coming from there.
Because to be honest, I don't think that the big ones will bring those answers. I think they somehow are where they are. And that's good, they're doing good things and all of those things.
But the agility and the shift and the pivoting that we need right now, I don't think will come from there.
[Carla Vitantonio] (25:53 - 26:20)
I'm not sure that all traditional donors are doing the good things. I don't know if I got you correctly, but I feel that in this moment, few donors are doing the good things. Traditional donors, many are just putting their political agenda in front of...
[Lars Peter Nissen] (26:20 - 27:48)
I mean, yeah. So I'm probably a little bit more hopeful with the traditional ones. I think what I was trying to say was around the philanthropies and what comes from their side.
Because, of course, when our traditional governmental donors cut their money, of course, we run to the billionaires, right? Oh, geez. And I'm not sure that it's going to be transformative.
First of all, the donors I speak to, I don't see them as monoliths. There's a real discussion going on internally. And I think there's a lot of tolerance for that discussion right now, because there's a lot of confusion as to what to do, because the tectonic plates in terms of geopolitics are really shifting.
So nobody really knows what to do. And so I don't think the chips have come down yet. I don't think the decisions have been made.
I feel like there is an appetite for different ideas that is bigger than I've ever seen. And so I'm hopeful that there will maybe be a counterpoint. Maybe we can end up in a situation where we do 80 percent of what was done before, but then there's 20 percent or 10 percent or whatever.
Just a story that says, yes, we work with this big system, and that is good because we help people. But we also realize that some things need to change. So we set aside some money, some real money to experiment and foster new types of organizations and new ideas.
That's probably my best case scenario.
[Carla Vitantonio] (27:49 - 28:36)
I'm looking forward to listening to this episode. You know, I thought that I should do a season of living the coloniality in Spanish. Because, well, no English or Spanish are my native language, and Italian is not a big language in the humanitarian system, even though there are some very respectable Italian actors.
Although I don't have any name now in mind. But what I realized is that, and I live in the Caribbean, and there's a whole landscape of very interesting movement that are both engaged in the coloniality and in the humanitarian and development system. And they are cut out of the podcast because they don't speak English.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (28:36 - 28:38)
Yeah, I think that's an excellent idea.
[Carla Vitantonio] (28:39 - 30:03)
So one season in Spanish with the commitment, maybe with the help of Matilde. Matilde, don't hate me that we do the transcript in English also. You made me think that today I was attending the extra day for the Pledge for Change community.
And the CEO of the Zambian Governance Association, I hope I mentioned this correctly, in Guatemala, she explained the concept of the reverse call for proposal. Did you hear about it? That's a very interesting concept.
And basically a community creates a project and assesses the possibility of INGOs to implement this project. It's super interesting. It even contains some ironic elements.
When, for example, imagine the local community does the due diligence for the INGO. And the INGO says, what is this? But what I wanted to say is, while we were talking, I thought maybe I should give more space to these things also in my podcast now.
But there is one thing that I feel that initiatives like the Pledge for Change that still are niche initiatives are already rather known. And I am afraid that if I start giving them too much space, we will end up like, you know, in a living room talking to each other.
[Speaker 3] (30:03 - 30:03)
Yeah.
[Carla Vitantonio] (30:04 - 30:11)
And I would like to avoid this with living decoloniality. That's why I always go to the remote areas of the world looking for activists.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (30:12 - 30:20)
Yeah, I fully empathize with that. I can see how my selection of guests has a clear bias.
[Speaker 3] (30:21 - 30:21)
Really?
[Lars Peter Nissen] (30:21 - 31:47)
I think I have a tendency to gravitate towards people who speak at the global level and focus less on interesting experiences from the global South. And some of that is because what I'm sort of trying to get at is that paradigm, right? Is that how do we actually put things together at the global level?
Because I think it's good. Of course, we need to focus on the amazing experiences that are at the crisis level, at the grassroots. And I think we do that.
I want to de-monopolize the conversation of humanitarian reform, because I think that is exclusively owned by the big ones. I mean, the grand bargain, who signed that? That was big aid, that was the supertankers and the big donors, right?
And so what the problem with that is, if you read the document, the analysis of the problems we have is very accurate. We understand very well what the problem is. The minute we start talking solutions, those solutions can only be implemented by these big agencies.
The types of solutions that they cannot do are not on the table. That's the problem. We think broadly in terms of problem and solutions.
It's so narrow. It's incredible. And then we expect miracles.
[Carla Vitantonio] (31:47 - 32:26)
I think these two podcasts are very complementary. And I also feel, I don't know, when I started the career in the sector, we spoke a lot about this theory of the twin track approach. You remember, no?
Working with the national government of a certain country, but also working with the community. So achieving change from a personal perspective and from a systemic perspective. And it's exactly what we are doing.
Because for me, being myself an activist and also being, I'm not the most diplomatic person in the world.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (32:26 - 32:26)
No shit.
[Carla Vitantonio] (32:28 - 32:54)
So I am closer maybe to individuals who are trying to make a change in their community.
And I felt that they were at loss, you know, with hearing all this noise about we need to change something and having no example of how to change practices. And that's why I collect practices because I think every individual can benefit from the practices. And then there's you, so people then will listen to you.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (32:55 - 32:55)
Maybe.
[Carla Vitantonio] (32:56 - 32:56)
Yeah.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (32:57 - 33:02)
Can I ask what's your favorite example from the podcast that people have brought to you?
[Carla Vitantonio] (33:04 - 33:06)
You can ask me, but I need to think.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (33:07 - 33:08)
We have time.
[Carla Vitantonio] (33:12 - 36:12)
So I have one example that made me think a lot, and I'm almost sure it will make you think also. And then one example of one activist that really fulfilled me with what she said. The first example is a researcher called Michelle Lukot.
She is Sri Lankan ethnic Australian passport living in the UK, so perfectly integrated in the UK academia and working on GBV and research. And she problematized the idea that the way we address GBV in humanitarian context may be colonial, that there is some coloniality of gender. This is called the coloniality of gender mixed with coloniality of race and power.
And that this puts us in the position of not really supporting the resolution of the problem, but doing harm. And she can talk plenty of this. And in my in the episode she recorded with me, she was very gentle.
She did not go very deep into the thing because it can be very controversial. I can hear some gender expert colleagues, screaming and shouting. But I think this is something we should talk, especially people like me working in country offices, we have the obligation to implement or our safeguard policy.
And I ask often myself some questions of this. So this is the controversial example. And the enlightening example.. well the enlightening person, she touched me profoundly.
Her name is Karishma Shafi. At that time, she was working for an Indian collective called One Future Collective. And they were working on social change and social justice.
And, and she explained to me how they worked on their fellowship, and how they realized at a certain point that certain criterias that they were having, that were colonial per se, for example, that every person had the linear experience of life so that if you want a fellowship, you are 25. But then she realized that in India, there are people that are 60 that may need a fellowship. So they removed the age limits.
And then they started to think, for example, how to draw from the immense oral knowledge of India, when they do research, and they face the coloniality of the fact that they cannot quote if all the knowledge is written through, you know, sewing. It's not written, it's a piece of fabrics. So I would encourage you to look for the episodes of Karishma.
She problematizes a lot. Also the attempt to decolonize knowledge and practices.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (36:13 - 36:20)
We'll put these episodes in the show notes so that we can, everything we make reference to, show notes, so you can find that they are listeners.
[Carla Vitantonio] (36:21 - 36:32)
And besides the episode that you recommended to me offline, which episodes struck you the most? Well, in five years, at least two.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (36:33 - 37:55)
I've done more than 100 episodes, and I've only been in tears once. And that was when I spoke to Dr. Ola Halam from Syria, who has done amazing work there. And it was actually also about deconstructing the hero figure and being uncomfortable with being put in that box.
And she has lost more than 30 members of her extended family. And she spoke about trauma, and how to treat that, and how to heal after experiences like that. And that knocked, I started crying.
So that's probably the one that really got to me. I enjoy moments from many of the episodes. I did a short, I did four episodes on Ukraine.
And they were sponsored by Care Denmark. It's the only time I've ever gotten any money to do something. And I had the SG from Care Denmark on the show, and I asked him, because you had your own money, you had flexible funding.
He basically said that he felt like they weren't taking the risks that they could have taken. I mean, they can't hide behind fiduciary risk if the money is flexible. They actually get the money from the public, to be flexible and take risks.
And he said, I don't feel like we did that. And that takes a tremendous amount of courage for somebody in that position to do. So I respect that deeply.
[Carla Vitantonio] (37:56 - 37:59)
And I asked myself if his colleagues listened to this.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (38:00 - 38:45)
I think they do. I think they do. I think we all know how messed up it is.
But I think people feel stuck, especially when they come up in, when they climb the corporate ladder, the humanitarian ladder, whatever it is, right? The more constrained you are, when the higher up you get, the more constrained you are, both in terms of governance, but also in terms of just finances. And, you know, some of these organizations have 10,000 employees.
It's a tremendous responsibility to be the employer of so many people. So of course, you have to be careful. Of course, you have to be prudent.
Of course, you have to find risk. And I think that that's what happens. But I think the people who get to that level are not idiots.
They're very smart people.
[Carla Vitantonio] (38:46 - 38:54)
I'm sure they are. But then my question from the bottom is again, if the big boss cannot change things, who can change them?
[Lars Peter Nissen] (38:55 - 40:06)
Yeah, so that's where I think we need to look for systemic solutions. We need to look at incentives and we need to look at how we handle risk. And we need to look at a whole bunch of issues that has nothing to do with discourse.
It has to do with finances and power. And the way I think organizations behave, if you take an organization with 10,000 employees, no matter what the logo is, but no matter what their technical expertise is, there will be some very strong characteristics that they have in common and they walk and talk in the same way. And so we talk so much about ecosystem and so on.
And I'm always like, no, we don't have an ecosystem. We have a herd of elephants. And, you know, elephants are really good at some things and they suck at some things.
And so what I'm trying to say is I think the basic problem we have, and if you really want to see change, you have to enhance the institutional diversity of the humanitarian ecosystem. You simply have to have different types of organizations being complementary with each other and creating value and holding each other accountable in ways that we don't have today. It's an incredibly flat humanitarian architecture we have.
[Carla Vitantonio] (40:07 - 40:36)
There are a few NGOs that are going through a process of change, radical change. I'm thinking of HelpAge that has closed almost all these country offices or transformed them. But my feeling is that they did not reach a critical mass.
So the idea is that the others are actually taking advantage. Oh, they closed, so more money for us.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (40:36 - 41:56)
Exactly. Of course they will. So would I, if I was...
I mean, so would I in that situation. Of course I would, because I, of course, think that what I do is really important. And if I work with UNICEF, my job is to advocate on behalf of children.
So of course I will fight day and night to get as much funding for UNICEF as I can, because that's what my job is. From HelpAge International, I will look after the elderly and I will focus on the vulnerable. And if I'm WFP, every single crisis I go to will be a food crisis.
That's the incentives. That's how it is. And I don't think that's necessarily wrong.
I think we can get unfortunate outcomes if some of those players are too strong and can sort of start monopolizing the story we tell. So for me, it's around deconcentration of power and enhanced institutional diversity, growing a new generation of humanitarian actors that can actually create some change. And that's the basic question I have with the Pledge for Change.
I don't think that these organizations can change significantly from the inside. I don't think... almost no matter who leads them.
Of course, you can move the needle a little bit here, a little bit there. It is very, very difficult for them.
[Carla Vitantonio] (41:57 - 42:45)
And I agree with you to some extent. And then that's my thought and maybe dream, what I imagine. So these organizations signed to the Pledge.
So we have three scenarios. They managed to get the change. Almost impossible, but still.
Then they don't manage. Scenario two, they don't manage and they acknowledge. We tried to change.
We did not manage. So what do they do? They surrender to the reality or scenario three, that is what our system is very good at, is they don't manage the change, but they dress the defeat as a change.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (42:46 - 42:55)
Or we do Pledge for Change 2.0. .
[Carla Vitantonio] (42:56 - 42:56)
And we keep, like after the MDG, we did the SDG and now we will have the RDG.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (42:56 - 43:12)
And I don't mind that. And I think some types of problems can be solved like that.
But if you look at the types of problems we have not been able to solve through humanitarian reform, transformative agenda and grand bargain, those problems are all around issues where the big organizations have to let go of power.
[Carla Vitantonio] (43:13 - 43:53)
I completely agree. And that's why I think what Themerise Khan insists in saying is super interesting. The idea, and we say it so that people don't stay with the secret, Themrise advocates for a new humanitarian geography where the center is every country that is anchored around structures that are countrywide or regionwide.
And she's not naive. She knows very well that not every government wants the best for all their people. But at the beginning when I was here, she recorded with me one episode, by the way, several in the first season.
[Speaker 3] (43:53 - 43:54)
And with me.
[Carla Vitantonio] (43:55 - 44:05)
I will listen to Temeris episode. So I think it's very interesting. And I think she has a vision that may be a future, no?
[Lars Peter Nissen] (44:06 - 45:22)
I think it is one of the answers. And what I really, really appreciate about her is, as you say, she's not naive. She's very critical of national civil societies.
She calls out the issues she sees wherever she sees them. But she says, but we have to fix our own problems. That's where we start.
And I really appreciate that. And then I think we need to then figure out what else can we do? That's the watering of what can be done to support national civil society in collaboration with the government where possible in solving these problems.
But what do we do? Because we also cannot have a total divorce of the international and the national. There has to be a global where there has to be a chain from the community affected by crisis all the way up to the Security Council or whatever global governance there is, because that's a lot of power up there.
And so there has to be a connectedness. If we want to change, we have to change at all levels. The fantastic work that Themrise is doing, and it is one of the answers that we really bloody need to get right.
And then we need some others as well.
[Carla Vitantonio] (45:23 - 46:08)
Yeah. In fact, today at the pledge session, at a certain point, some colleagues were advocating for the identification of a pilot. And I was saying a pilot is capitalistic economy.
You have a pilot and then you scale up and you replicate. But we are humans and no context is the same than others. So I would tend to disagree with the pilot.
I would rather agree with having a capitalization on different experiences. And then each reality can draw inspiration and adapt good practices that are never the best practices to the specific contest.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (46:08 - 46:27)
Carla, what a fantastic privilege it's been to meet you here and to have this conversation. It's nice to really understand how our approaches to podcasting is the same and different and how they're complementary. And I think at the end here, I'd just like to ask you for advice.
Do you have something you would like me to do differently?
[Carla Vitantonio] (46:29 - 46:34)
I don't know if I would like you to do something differently, but I would like you to keep doing something.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (46:34 - 46:48)
Okay, I promise that. I have something for you. Do more live ones.
Don't let people sit there somewhere in their homes and record. No, do more live ones. Get some action in there.
[Carla Vitantonio] (46:49 - 47:13)
I will try to do the Spanish season live. At least 50-50. And so what I would like that you keep doing, I think that you disguise very well.
But I think it's very beautiful when you enter a room and finally you let go some of your irony. So keep putting this energy when you meet people, because they will be willing to join your podcast.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (47:14 - 47:15)
Excellent. That's a fantastic place to end.
[Carla Vitantonio] (47:16 - 47:16)
Thank you very much.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (47:17 - 47:17)
Thank you.
[Carla Vitantonio] (47:17 - 47:18)
Until the next time.
Welcome to Trumanitarian, I'm Lars Peter Nissen.
[Carla Vitantonio] (0:04 - 0:09)
Welcome to Transformative Leadership in Times of Polycrisis, and I am Carla Vitantonio.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (0:10 - 0:22)
And Carla, it's great that we have agreed to do a joint episode. We both do a podcast, and we met at a conference here in Doha, where we are recording this, and we have agreed that we want to explore why the heck we are podcasting.
[Carla Vitantonio] (0:23 - 0:29)
Exactly, why we are podcasting despite our very complicated life in this very complicated time and space.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (0:29 - 0:38)
Exactly, so let's begin with you. Tell me a bit about the podcast you do, and the origin story, if you want. Why did you do it?
[Carla Vitantonio] (0:38 - 0:43)
My podcast is called Living Decoloniality, and it was born...
[Lars Peter Nissen] (0:43 - 0:50)
Can I ask, why isn't it called Living Decolonialism? Why is it decoloniality? What does that mean?
[Carla Vitantonio] (0:51 - 1:45)
Because I refer to a theory that has become a little bit my compass, that is the theory of the colonial matrix of power. It's a Latin American theory developed by a scholar called Anibal Quijano in Peru in the 2000s. And Anibal Quijano invents the word coloniality.
What is coloniality? Coloniality is everything that stays in structures, in minds, in behaviours, and in beliefs, even when colonialism is over. So coloniality stays in the education system in Uganda, where English is taught while traditional languages are just suggested.
Coloniality stays in the way we make decisions. So Living Decoloniality, because of this, decoloniality is for Quijano the opposite of coloniality, and it's a process. It's not a point, a fixed point, it's a process.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (1:45 - 1:45)
Okay.
[Carla Vitantonio] (1:46 - 1:46)
Okay.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (1:46 - 1:48)
Good, I think I got some of that.
[Carla Vitantonio] (1:48 - 3:18)
And so I started this exactly because I thought that the colonial matrix of power as a framework could be a good reading key for what we were living as humanitarians, humanitarians trying to find out how to change what we saw. So we were saying, oh, we have to decolonise the sector. And this was upsetting me profoundly, because decolonisation for me was a historical process.
And then I realised that yes, what we mean is destroying the coloniality of our practices. And this gives me a biggest pun, because if you want to decolonise or to bring the, to cancel the coloniality of your practices and behaviours, you act at the individual level, at the structural level of your own organisation until the systemic level, that is what we are talking about. So what I did, I took one year off, I was employed by an INGO at that time, I took one year off.
And I found a sponsor for this project that was meant to be a toolkit for practitioners and policy leaders on how to introduce practices of decoloniality in their life. I did the whole podcast, prepared everything. And when it was ready, my sponsor, that was a very big European university, ghosted me.
Because they felt it was too risky that a person without even a PhD speaks of coloniality in a big respected European university. So they did not want to produce the podcast.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (3:18 - 3:26)
I think we should say as a disclaimer to the listeners that I don't have a PhD either. So really, you shouldn't believe anything you hear on this podcast.
[Carla Vitantonio] (3:26 - 3:55)
So I cannot talk to you. I only talk to people with PhD. And so they ghosted me and I had this podcast.
And I thought, what do I do? I called the Centre for Humanitarian Leadership. And I told them, would you be interested in broadcasting this?
And now and then, thanks to the fact that they have a big readership, the podcast became a point of reference for a few humanitarians and also researchers that look for practical ideas on how to move into decoloniality.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (3:55 - 3:57)
How many episodes have you done?
[Carla Vitantonio] (3:57 - 4:35)
Well, we did already, I did, we, me, myself and I, we did already three seasons of seven, eight episodes each. So it's about 24 episodes. And it's a miracle.
And after the first season, one other miracle happened that a young student of anthropology called me and told me that she had listened to my podcast, she was working on decolonizing museums, and she wanted to be my assistant for free. I told her, you know, I'm doing this as a hobby. And so now she's supporting me since season two.
And now you have to answer the same question. Tell me the story of Trumanitarian
[Lars Peter Nissen] (4:36 - 5:46)
Yeah, I think it had a lot to do with COVID somehow. I started more or less five years ago. And I think it was two things.
It was COVID. And then I lost a very good friend who was also working in the industry, if you want, he had a stroke and later passed away. And I think the combination of that social upheaval and, and the reaction to his passing and just, just a, a deep frustration with the sector as such came together.
And I felt like we weren't having the right conversation. And then I thought it was sufficiently sort of provocative to call it Trumanitarian, because then everybody would go, oh, so you think you're the Trumanitarian or true humanitarian or whatever. But really, what I just want to do with it is to, to have smart, honest conversations.
That's basically the tagline. And so I'm really curious about anything from fleet management to mental health, to protection to education, complexity, AI, tech, a lot of tech on there. It's a search for the new humanitarian paradigm.
[Carla Vitantonio] (5:46 - 5:48)
And how do you find your people?
[Lars Peter Nissen] (5:49 - 6:06)
Some of them come to me, some of them come and say, I've written a book or I've got something really interesting here. Some of them I find on social media or meet at conferences, the conference we had here, I've met a couple of people I'm going to do episodes with. And so they sort of, it's very organic.
[Carla Vitantonio] (6:07 - 6:24)
Hmm. That's, that's interesting, because even though the system seems so broken, people are eager to show that they are looking for alternatives. And they believe in these alternatives.
We all do. I include myself with my podcast, no?
[Lars Peter Nissen] (6:25 - 6:58)
Yeah, I think we have a never ending need to be the good guys. And I think that's a problem. I don't think we're the bad guys.
I don't think we're the good guys. I think we're the guys and gals, by the way. I think we are just people who are doing a job and some of us do it well, some of us doing it less well.
But what we suffer under is a desperate lack of accountability of the institutions we work in. And so the ones who don't do it very well, tend to hang around for too long.
[Carla Vitantonio] (6:59 - 7:43)
What you said made me think about a couple of things. The first thing that you said is, we just do a job, no? And I feel a lot of sympathy with this thought.
It resonates because one of the things that, for example, emerged a lot in my podcast is that people don't want to be hero. And in way too many contexts, I hear this narrative of the new hero. These are real heroes.
This is the hero. And why do we really need a new hero? Because heroes are superhuman and therefore are non-human.
Don't we just do a job? Don't we try to do our best like a doctor, a waiter?
[Lars Peter Nissen] (7:44 - 8:31)
Yeah, I think we see people doing heroic things and going over and above and saving people and sacrificing themselves. And so it's not to detract from what's being done. I'm so proud of us as a community.
And I think we do really well. And I think one of the things that always makes me feel bad is when people feel like, I'm being quite critical on the show when I try to push the envelope in terms of punching the organizations we work with. But I deeply, deeply respect the people who work in the sector and who have chosen to follow this line of work.
If you call them heroes, you lock them into a very fixed position. And I mean, it's just not healthy.
[Carla Vitantonio] (8:32 - 9:20)
And it's a script that at the end is colonial because the hero is part of a certain tradition. A tradition where you lead because you are unusually talented into something while we want. And in Living the Coloniality, there's a lot of community leaders, for example, that talk and they consider themselves part of the movement.
Also, sometimes it's difficult for me to understand whom I have to interview because I reach out to organizations that are structured in the way a Western organization is structured. And so they don't have a CEO or they don't have a board. So they would tell you, well, tell me what's your interest and we will find the person.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (9:20 - 10:21)
Yeah. And exactly the sort of institutional design is something I find really, really interesting. Because one thing that drives me mad is that I think humanitarian reform by and large has been to teach big dysfunctional bureaucracies new words.
And if we teach them a new word, whether that is resilience or agility or whatever it is, then things will be a nexus. Then things will be different. And I don't think so.
I think because I think these institutions have a logic to them and they're incentivized in a certain way. So no matter which language they actually speak or what words they say, if you look at the way they exercise power, that's exactly the same. And that seems to be something we refuse to engage with.
We love tweaking the discourse. We love coming up with more precise terms. We refuse to deal with the underlying incentives driving the sector.
[Carla Vitantonio] (10:22 - 11:24)
Yeah. What I was thinking yesterday during the conference was very similar to what you say, and I will share it before asking you a question on on humanitarian. And that is that sometimes it is as if we all see the lines that power draws, but we don't want to unveil them.
And and I think that unveiling the dynamics of power would be revolutionary enough because we don't necessarily need to change things. But it would be nice to this is a room where power is sitting now in this other room. There's another dynamic.
And I think that there is a sort of protocol taboo of never speaking about power in our sector. And here I go with my question. Do you think that your podcast after five years, people have talked about this podcast to me?
So do you think that it has become a potential tool for advocacy?
[Lars Peter Nissen] (11:25 - 12:42)
It makes me happy, first and foremost. It really makes me happy. And it keeps me curious.
And I'm having so much fun, it almost feels guilty to actually do it. So that has changed for me. I think that's important.
I think if there's one thing I wanted to achieve, it was just for there to be a different way of talking about things, a different focus, a questioning of the story we seem to all have to buy into. And I don't like drinking the Kool-Aid, if you know what I mean. I don't, I really don't like that.
And I think there is an element of almost like Hans Christian Andersen and the Emperor's New Clothes that there has to be that boy who says this one is naked. And if the podcast has made some people think or understand that there's more than one way to see an issue, and if they begin to question some of the documents coming out from very big and very powerful organizations, then I'm happy. And that's really the level of ambition.
I'm not really pretending that we are finding answers. We're just asking much better questions, having great conversations and having fun while we do it. And I don't say that to be, to not want to own what it does or whatever.
But I think that is what it is.
[Carla Vitantonio] (12:43 - 13:12)
I agree with you. I think that, as you know, I do the podcast exactly in the same way, like by myself and for myself. But I think it's a relief to do something like this podcast.
And just to say, you know, this podcast is for this. I'm happy if it serves an extra purpose. But if my friend who is a researcher in Amsterdam writes and say, you know, I listened to this episode, it's cool.
And maybe I will try to do this and that. I'm happy. You know, it's already, it's already something.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (13:14 - 13:23)
And it's a powerful medium, right? Because you're in people's ears. It's a very intimate experience, actually.
And so people come and feel like they know me.
[Carla Vitantonio] (13:24 - 14:17)
And it's very democratic. And that's why I fight, even publicly sometimes, against videocasting as podcasting. So not saying that I don't like videocasting, but I try to say, you know, if you are videocasting, call it videocasting, because a podcast is something that you can do also with your telephone.
And that's why it was democratic when it was born. You know, you have the first experiments of podcast. I did my first podcast.
It was called Pyongyang Blues. It went everywhere. And I did it in my closet with my mobile.
And that was a podcast. So I think I also choose podcasts because it's a democratic tool. Everybody can do it.
People that answer to my podcast, they answer really from the bushes with their mobile. They send me WhatsApp and then I edit them. Do you only do podcasts live or do you also do Zoom?
[Lars Peter Nissen] (14:17 - 15:07)
No, I record online as well. I much prefer to be with people because I like to push people. But in a way where it's a safe space, it has to be.
I'm not a journalist. I'm not here to get you, right? I'm here to poke you, to get some interesting stuff out of you.
And I think that's easier when you're in the same room, especially if you haven't met people before. Because if you want to be a nice person, you also want to be respectful for people. So if you interview people who are different from you, from a different generation, you're always a little bit more careful because you don't want to just assume.
And being Danish, we're very blunt. So I'm always, you know, sort of catching myself not to push it too hard.
[Carla Vitantonio] (15:08 - 16:38)
You made me think that we are very different on this because, well, my podcast is different from yours in the structure. I have always the same structure. I have three questions and I have a process.
So we meet online and we go through a process of mutual understanding and we try to understand if really what you want to say matches with the colonial process that I want to show. So when we agree, then I leave you the time to frame your answers to the three questions as you like. And when you are ready, you send me the recordings.
This means that you can send it, you can record one million times. And some people tell me this was really difficult. It was really challenging.
And some said I appreciated that I could frame it several times because I really needed the right words. But I did only a couple of episodes live on Zoom because also living in Cuba, Zoom is not an option. So a couple of times I was not in Cuba and I did episodes live.
And Matilde, my assistant, she likes to call herself, she told me that she especially liked them. But the reality is that it was super challenging because my guests flew with the flow. So it was difficult to keep them to the structure that I had thought for the podcast.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (16:39 - 16:39)
But that's what I like.
[Carla Vitantonio] (16:40 - 16:40)
Yes, I know.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (16:41 - 17:50)
Because it's that emergence of insights and ideas. So I try to agree on three or four broad areas we want to talk about. And the structure varies according to who we have on.
I should say I also have two absolutely outstanding young professionals working with me. Ila and Rigmor are both volunteering with me. They're my producers.
And we just have such a wonderful working relationship in this little podcast. So hi Ila, hi Rigmor. But you see, if I had to say, if I had to say, okay, what is for me the most colonial thing in the whole bloody industry?
It's a lock frame. I bloody hate lock frames, right? And indicators and smart indicators.
I actually sometimes tell my team, you're not allowed to do smart indicators. You have to do dumb indicators. And dumb indicators are activity indicators and they have to be as low as possible so that we actually exceed our target.
And then we get the bean counters from the donors out of the room. And then we can have a meaningful conversation with the program people about what works and what doesn't, because we have overperformed on our lock frames. So let's do some dumb indicators.
[Carla Vitantonio] (17:50 - 18:29)
I completely agree with you. And I will tell you a little bit of gossip. Of course, I will not mention the donor.
But very recently, I reported an overachievement. And the donor wrote an email to my boss asking if we had cheated on the indicators, putting it too low. But the reality is that we just had a good bid with the provider.
So we could buy much more than we thought. And this was one thing. And on living the coloniality, I would never ask you the most colonial thing, but I would surely ask you, what is one kind of coloniality that you have met?
[Lars Peter Nissen] (18:30 - 19:46)
So for me, and it's something I reflected on in this conference we've just been at, we are terrified of having empty spaces in the agenda. That conference was packed with content. And there was a lot of excellent, fantastic content.
But there were so many fantastic people, and I didn't have time to meet them. Right. And so for me, we overload everything, we overload our organizations.
It's that bloody hamster wheel we're running around in. But I'm sorry, that hamster wheel, if the hamster stops running, it stops. And, and I think we are creating a lot, we have a lot of burnout, we have a lot of issues around mental health of people working in the sector, not least because we are being very, very critical of ourselves, we are self-flagellating like there's no tomorrow, right.
But it is also something we create ourself. It is, it's a it's a whole superstructure we create, because we think this is how we tell very, very small stories about what we're doing. And then we're so busy, and we feel so useful.
And that's colonial for me, that is the tyranny of insecurity, maybe.
[Carla Vitantonio] (19:47 - 20:28)
And I completely agree with you, I was touched by the generosity of the people who prepared the conference, in spite of all that has happened in the past four or five months. I could see how tired they were, and nevertheless, how rentlessly they were working. But I also felt that there was some coloniality in the hierarchy of the knowledge that was presented.
And I thought that for each one of those panels, we would have needed one hour to debrief. Of course, you cannot make a four days conference.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (20:29 - 20:45)
But let me just be precise, because it feels very unfair somehow to be critical of what was a fantastic couple of days organized by the Center for Humanitarian Leadership. But I've never been at a conference where the audience was as well curated as this one.
[Carla Vitantonio] (20:46 - 20:46)
Definitely.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (20:47 - 20:51)
You ran a session I participated in around leadership, and you even made a joke.
[Carla Vitantonio] (20:51 - 20:52)
On you!
[Lars Peter Nissen] (20:52 - 21:05)
Yes, on me, because we were describing a leader. And you were basically saying, oh, you know, it sounds like a male, pale, stale person. And we don't have any of those.
Oh, by the way, we have you last week. I thought it was a fantastic joke.
[Carla Vitantonio] (21:05 - 21:08)
I just said you had the physique du hall.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (21:09 - 21:22)
I heard you very clearly. I heard you very clearly. What I'm trying to say is the diversity and the powerful experiences from the global South that were at that conference, it's been a long time since I've experienced that.
[Carla Vitantonio] (21:23 - 21:35)
I agree with you. I agree with you that the program was a program that we don't see often in conference. Some voices we heard that we would not hear everywhere.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (21:35 - 21:37)
I would say the people were different.
[Carla Vitantonio] (21:37 - 21:38)
Yeah.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (21:38 - 21:40)
But the form was quite traditional.
[Carla Vitantonio] (21:41 - 21:41)
Yes.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (21:42 - 22:33)
And what I actually was thinking was what this conference was about for me was the dichotomy between a traditional, very linear, if you want, colonial, patriarchal, whatever you want, all those things, right? Sort of very institutional big aid, if you want, on one side, and then an absolutely organic grassroots based emergent, right? And so the million dollar question for me is, you fly all these people together.
And what do you then give them? Do you give them an organic conference that can breathe and explore and meet and evolve and serendipity and whatever? Or do you give them a linear, you know, patriarchal 10 minute coffee break conference?
It's an interesting thought.
[Carla Vitantonio] (22:33 - 23:07)
Yeah. And again, there's no right answer, because everybody can disagree, because this is subjective, no? I stay with the gratefulness of having met so many people and with the fatigue.
I would have needed a four days conference. No, as I said, I would have needed a one hour after each panel. And maybe more, I'm a bit of an old school hippie, more circles, more breathing exercises, more feedback in small groups.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (23:07 - 23:07)
More volleyball.
[Carla Vitantonio] (23:08 - 23:12)
More volleyball. Yeah, definitely. That would have been amazing.
Yeah.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (23:13 - 23:17)
I'm not a hippie. Only on the inside.
[Carla Vitantonio] (23:18 - 23:20)
A very well hidden hippie.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (23:20 - 23:20)
Yeah, exactly.
[Carla Vitantonio] (23:21 - 23:30)
And so do you want to anticipate some or any of the episodes that you will produce after this conference?
[Lars Peter Nissen] (23:31 - 25:52)
I want to do one with the white helmets. Because I just did one with one of the ERR's, Emergency Response Rooms from Sudan, and that was incredibly powerful. And there's such strong parallels to what the white helmets are doing and the history they've been through.
And just, it's humbling how impressive they are. It's just fantastic, right? And they haven't always been equally well appreciated by the mainstream system, and I think that's an important story to tell.
And then I am really interested in understanding better how all of these different community-based or grassroots initiatives what is it that, what are the underlying rules that governs the way they emerge? Not to write like a long cookbook on how to be a grassroots, right? But to simply understand how do you water a garden best possible so it grows the most beautiful flowers, right?
How do we from outside help water? So the white helmets will be, for me, an interesting episode. I also really want to do one with, there were a couple of philanthropists at the conference, and particularly one of them really spoke to me.
Because what I heard her saying was that she wanted, I heard her saying something along the lines of exploring loss of control, trust. She used words that really sounded to me like she was working in a much more network-centric way than we normally see from the money side of things. And I thought that was interesting.
She was also not from one of the huge, huge philanthropies, but sort of a mid-sized one, I guess. And so I think we need some new money in this situation. And I'm really interested in learning about the thinking among a donor like that, and to see whether there's some new answers coming from there.
Because to be honest, I don't think that the big ones will bring those answers. I think they somehow are where they are. And that's good, they're doing good things and all of those things.
But the agility and the shift and the pivoting that we need right now, I don't think will come from there.
[Carla Vitantonio] (25:53 - 26:20)
I'm not sure that all traditional donors are doing the good things. I don't know if I got you correctly, but I feel that in this moment, few donors are doing the good things. Traditional donors, many are just putting their political agenda in front of...
[Lars Peter Nissen] (26:20 - 27:48)
I mean, yeah. So I'm probably a little bit more hopeful with the traditional ones. I think what I was trying to say was around the philanthropies and what comes from their side.
Because, of course, when our traditional governmental donors cut their money, of course, we run to the billionaires, right? Oh, geez. And I'm not sure that it's going to be transformative.
First of all, the donors I speak to, I don't see them as monoliths. There's a real discussion going on internally. And I think there's a lot of tolerance for that discussion right now, because there's a lot of confusion as to what to do, because the tectonic plates in terms of geopolitics are really shifting.
So nobody really knows what to do. And so I don't think the chips have come down yet. I don't think the decisions have been made.
I feel like there is an appetite for different ideas that is bigger than I've ever seen. And so I'm hopeful that there will maybe be a counterpoint. Maybe we can end up in a situation where we do 80 percent of what was done before, but then there's 20 percent or 10 percent or whatever.
Just a story that says, yes, we work with this big system, and that is good because we help people. But we also realize that some things need to change. So we set aside some money, some real money to experiment and foster new types of organizations and new ideas.
That's probably my best case scenario.
[Carla Vitantonio] (27:49 - 28:36)
I'm looking forward to listening to this episode. You know, I thought that I should do a season of living the coloniality in Spanish. Because, well, no English or Spanish are my native language, and Italian is not a big language in the humanitarian system, even though there are some very respectable Italian actors.
Although I don't have any name now in mind. But what I realized is that, and I live in the Caribbean, and there's a whole landscape of very interesting movement that are both engaged in the coloniality and in the humanitarian and development system. And they are cut out of the podcast because they don't speak English.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (28:36 - 28:38)
Yeah, I think that's an excellent idea.
[Carla Vitantonio] (28:39 - 30:03)
So one season in Spanish with the commitment, maybe with the help of Matilde. Matilde, don't hate me that we do the transcript in English also. You made me think that today I was attending the extra day for the Pledge for Change community.
And the CEO of the Zambian Governance Association, I hope I mentioned this correctly, in Guatemala, she explained the concept of the reverse call for proposal. Did you hear about it? That's a very interesting concept.
And basically a community creates a project and assesses the possibility of INGOs to implement this project. It's super interesting. It even contains some ironic elements.
When, for example, imagine the local community does the due diligence for the INGO. And the INGO says, what is this? But what I wanted to say is, while we were talking, I thought maybe I should give more space to these things also in my podcast now.
But there is one thing that I feel that initiatives like the Pledge for Change that still are niche initiatives are already rather known. And I am afraid that if I start giving them too much space, we will end up like, you know, in a living room talking to each other.
[Speaker 3] (30:03 - 30:03)
Yeah.
[Carla Vitantonio] (30:04 - 30:11)
And I would like to avoid this with living decoloniality. That's why I always go to the remote areas of the world looking for activists.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (30:12 - 30:20)
Yeah, I fully empathize with that. I can see how my selection of guests has a clear bias.
[Speaker 3] (30:21 - 30:21)
Really?
[Lars Peter Nissen] (30:21 - 31:47)
I think I have a tendency to gravitate towards people who speak at the global level and focus less on interesting experiences from the global South. And some of that is because what I'm sort of trying to get at is that paradigm, right? Is that how do we actually put things together at the global level?
Because I think it's good. Of course, we need to focus on the amazing experiences that are at the crisis level, at the grassroots. And I think we do that.
I want to de-monopolize the conversation of humanitarian reform, because I think that is exclusively owned by the big ones. I mean, the grand bargain, who signed that? That was big aid, that was the supertankers and the big donors, right?
And so what the problem with that is, if you read the document, the analysis of the problems we have is very accurate. We understand very well what the problem is. The minute we start talking solutions, those solutions can only be implemented by these big agencies.
The types of solutions that they cannot do are not on the table. That's the problem. We think broadly in terms of problem and solutions.
It's so narrow. It's incredible. And then we expect miracles.
[Carla Vitantonio] (31:47 - 32:26)
I think these two podcasts are very complementary. And I also feel, I don't know, when I started the career in the sector, we spoke a lot about this theory of the twin track approach. You remember, no?
Working with the national government of a certain country, but also working with the community. So achieving change from a personal perspective and from a systemic perspective. And it's exactly what we are doing.
Because for me, being myself an activist and also being, I'm not the most diplomatic person in the world.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (32:26 - 32:26)
No shit.
[Carla Vitantonio] (32:28 - 32:54)
So I am closer maybe to individuals who are trying to make a change in their community.
And I felt that they were at loss, you know, with hearing all this noise about we need to change something and having no example of how to change practices. And that's why I collect practices because I think every individual can benefit from the practices. And then there's you, so people then will listen to you.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (32:55 - 32:55)
Maybe.
[Carla Vitantonio] (32:56 - 32:56)
Yeah.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (32:57 - 33:02)
Can I ask what's your favorite example from the podcast that people have brought to you?
[Carla Vitantonio] (33:04 - 33:06)
You can ask me, but I need to think.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (33:07 - 33:08)
We have time.
[Carla Vitantonio] (33:12 - 36:12)
So I have one example that made me think a lot, and I'm almost sure it will make you think also. And then one example of one activist that really fulfilled me with what she said. The first example is a researcher called Michelle Lukot.
She is Sri Lankan ethnic Australian passport living in the UK, so perfectly integrated in the UK academia and working on GBV and research. And she problematized the idea that the way we address GBV in humanitarian context may be colonial, that there is some coloniality of gender. This is called the coloniality of gender mixed with coloniality of race and power.
And that this puts us in the position of not really supporting the resolution of the problem, but doing harm. And she can talk plenty of this. And in my in the episode she recorded with me, she was very gentle.
She did not go very deep into the thing because it can be very controversial. I can hear some gender expert colleagues, screaming and shouting. But I think this is something we should talk, especially people like me working in country offices, we have the obligation to implement or our safeguard policy.
And I ask often myself some questions of this. So this is the controversial example. And the enlightening example.. well the enlightening person, she touched me profoundly.
Her name is Karishma Shafi. At that time, she was working for an Indian collective called One Future Collective. And they were working on social change and social justice.
And, and she explained to me how they worked on their fellowship, and how they realized at a certain point that certain criterias that they were having, that were colonial per se, for example, that every person had the linear experience of life so that if you want a fellowship, you are 25. But then she realized that in India, there are people that are 60 that may need a fellowship. So they removed the age limits.
And then they started to think, for example, how to draw from the immense oral knowledge of India, when they do research, and they face the coloniality of the fact that they cannot quote if all the knowledge is written through, you know, sewing. It's not written, it's a piece of fabrics. So I would encourage you to look for the episodes of Karishma.
She problematizes a lot. Also the attempt to decolonize knowledge and practices.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (36:13 - 36:20)
We'll put these episodes in the show notes so that we can, everything we make reference to, show notes, so you can find that they are listeners.
[Carla Vitantonio] (36:21 - 36:32)
And besides the episode that you recommended to me offline, which episodes struck you the most? Well, in five years, at least two.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (36:33 - 37:55)
I've done more than 100 episodes, and I've only been in tears once. And that was when I spoke to Dr. Ola Halam from Syria, who has done amazing work there. And it was actually also about deconstructing the hero figure and being uncomfortable with being put in that box.
And she has lost more than 30 members of her extended family. And she spoke about trauma, and how to treat that, and how to heal after experiences like that. And that knocked, I started crying.
So that's probably the one that really got to me. I enjoy moments from many of the episodes. I did a short, I did four episodes on Ukraine.
And they were sponsored by Care Denmark. It's the only time I've ever gotten any money to do something. And I had the SG from Care Denmark on the show, and I asked him, because you had your own money, you had flexible funding.
He basically said that he felt like they weren't taking the risks that they could have taken. I mean, they can't hide behind fiduciary risk if the money is flexible. They actually get the money from the public, to be flexible and take risks.
And he said, I don't feel like we did that. And that takes a tremendous amount of courage for somebody in that position to do. So I respect that deeply.
[Carla Vitantonio] (37:56 - 37:59)
And I asked myself if his colleagues listened to this.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (38:00 - 38:45)
I think they do. I think they do. I think we all know how messed up it is.
But I think people feel stuck, especially when they come up in, when they climb the corporate ladder, the humanitarian ladder, whatever it is, right? The more constrained you are, when the higher up you get, the more constrained you are, both in terms of governance, but also in terms of just finances. And, you know, some of these organizations have 10,000 employees.
It's a tremendous responsibility to be the employer of so many people. So of course, you have to be careful. Of course, you have to be prudent.
Of course, you have to find risk. And I think that that's what happens. But I think the people who get to that level are not idiots.
They're very smart people.
[Carla Vitantonio] (38:46 - 38:54)
I'm sure they are. But then my question from the bottom is again, if the big boss cannot change things, who can change them?
[Lars Peter Nissen] (38:55 - 40:06)
Yeah, so that's where I think we need to look for systemic solutions. We need to look at incentives and we need to look at how we handle risk. And we need to look at a whole bunch of issues that has nothing to do with discourse.
It has to do with finances and power. And the way I think organizations behave, if you take an organization with 10,000 employees, no matter what the logo is, but no matter what their technical expertise is, there will be some very strong characteristics that they have in common and they walk and talk in the same way. And so we talk so much about ecosystem and so on.
And I'm always like, no, we don't have an ecosystem. We have a herd of elephants. And, you know, elephants are really good at some things and they suck at some things.
And so what I'm trying to say is I think the basic problem we have, and if you really want to see change, you have to enhance the institutional diversity of the humanitarian ecosystem. You simply have to have different types of organizations being complementary with each other and creating value and holding each other accountable in ways that we don't have today. It's an incredibly flat humanitarian architecture we have.
[Carla Vitantonio] (40:07 - 40:36)
There are a few NGOs that are going through a process of change, radical change. I'm thinking of HelpAge that has closed almost all these country offices or transformed them. But my feeling is that they did not reach a critical mass.
So the idea is that the others are actually taking advantage. Oh, they closed, so more money for us.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (40:36 - 41:56)
Exactly. Of course they will. So would I, if I was...
I mean, so would I in that situation. Of course I would, because I, of course, think that what I do is really important. And if I work with UNICEF, my job is to advocate on behalf of children.
So of course I will fight day and night to get as much funding for UNICEF as I can, because that's what my job is. From HelpAge International, I will look after the elderly and I will focus on the vulnerable. And if I'm WFP, every single crisis I go to will be a food crisis.
That's the incentives. That's how it is. And I don't think that's necessarily wrong.
I think we can get unfortunate outcomes if some of those players are too strong and can sort of start monopolizing the story we tell. So for me, it's around deconcentration of power and enhanced institutional diversity, growing a new generation of humanitarian actors that can actually create some change. And that's the basic question I have with the Pledge for Change.
I don't think that these organizations can change significantly from the inside. I don't think... almost no matter who leads them.
Of course, you can move the needle a little bit here, a little bit there. It is very, very difficult for them.
[Carla Vitantonio] (41:57 - 42:45)
And I agree with you to some extent. And then that's my thought and maybe dream, what I imagine. So these organizations signed to the Pledge.
So we have three scenarios. They managed to get the change. Almost impossible, but still.
Then they don't manage. Scenario two, they don't manage and they acknowledge. We tried to change.
We did not manage. So what do they do? They surrender to the reality or scenario three, that is what our system is very good at, is they don't manage the change, but they dress the defeat as a change.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (42:46 - 42:55)
Or we do Pledge for Change 2.0. .
[Carla Vitantonio] (42:56 - 42:56)
And we keep, like after the MDG, we did the SDG and now we will have the RDG.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (42:56 - 43:12)
And I don't mind that. And I think some types of problems can be solved like that.
But if you look at the types of problems we have not been able to solve through humanitarian reform, transformative agenda and grand bargain, those problems are all around issues where the big organizations have to let go of power.
[Carla Vitantonio] (43:13 - 43:53)
I completely agree. And that's why I think what Themerise Khan insists in saying is super interesting. The idea, and we say it so that people don't stay with the secret, Themrise advocates for a new humanitarian geography where the center is every country that is anchored around structures that are countrywide or regionwide.
And she's not naive. She knows very well that not every government wants the best for all their people. But at the beginning when I was here, she recorded with me one episode, by the way, several in the first season.
[Speaker 3] (43:53 - 43:54)
And with me.
[Carla Vitantonio] (43:55 - 44:05)
I will listen to Temeris episode. So I think it's very interesting. And I think she has a vision that may be a future, no?
[Lars Peter Nissen] (44:06 - 45:22)
I think it is one of the answers. And what I really, really appreciate about her is, as you say, she's not naive. She's very critical of national civil societies.
She calls out the issues she sees wherever she sees them. But she says, but we have to fix our own problems. That's where we start.
And I really appreciate that. And then I think we need to then figure out what else can we do? That's the watering of what can be done to support national civil society in collaboration with the government where possible in solving these problems.
But what do we do? Because we also cannot have a total divorce of the international and the national. There has to be a global where there has to be a chain from the community affected by crisis all the way up to the Security Council or whatever global governance there is, because that's a lot of power up there.
And so there has to be a connectedness. If we want to change, we have to change at all levels. The fantastic work that Themrise is doing, and it is one of the answers that we really bloody need to get right.
And then we need some others as well.
[Carla Vitantonio] (45:23 - 46:08)
Yeah. In fact, today at the pledge session, at a certain point, some colleagues were advocating for the identification of a pilot. And I was saying a pilot is capitalistic economy.
You have a pilot and then you scale up and you replicate. But we are humans and no context is the same than others. So I would tend to disagree with the pilot.
I would rather agree with having a capitalization on different experiences. And then each reality can draw inspiration and adapt good practices that are never the best practices to the specific contest.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (46:08 - 46:27)
Carla, what a fantastic privilege it's been to meet you here and to have this conversation. It's nice to really understand how our approaches to podcasting is the same and different and how they're complementary. And I think at the end here, I'd just like to ask you for advice.
Do you have something you would like me to do differently?
[Carla Vitantonio] (46:29 - 46:34)
I don't know if I would like you to do something differently, but I would like you to keep doing something.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (46:34 - 46:48)
Okay, I promise that. I have something for you. Do more live ones.
Don't let people sit there somewhere in their homes and record. No, do more live ones. Get some action in there.
[Carla Vitantonio] (46:49 - 47:13)
I will try to do the Spanish season live. At least 50-50. And so what I would like that you keep doing, I think that you disguise very well.
But I think it's very beautiful when you enter a room and finally you let go some of your irony. So keep putting this energy when you meet people, because they will be willing to join your podcast.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (47:14 - 47:15)
Excellent. That's a fantastic place to end.
[Carla Vitantonio] (47:16 - 47:16)
Thank you very much.
[Lars Peter Nissen] (47:17 - 47:17)
Thank you.
[Carla Vitantonio] (47:17 - 47:18)
Until the next time.
