Abstract
Citizen Initiatives for Global Solidarity (CIGS) are small, ad hoc, volunteer organizations that arise in certain humanitarian and development contexts. They operate outside of traditional aid structures and may or may not cooperate with traditional government and nongovernmental organizations. Using agent-based modeling, we derive narrative-based, qualitative scenarios from simulation data to extend the theoretical discussions of CIGS as a phenomenon. The scenarios allow further discussion of the role that CIGS may play as development and humanitarian response actors outside of the traditional context-specific descriptions of CIGS that permeate the development literature. We find that scenarios generated from the simulation data align somewhat with the qualitative researchers’ field observations, specifically in describing conditions under which some types of CIGS thrived while others failed. The points of departure from the model scenarios generated a dialogue that promises to further the theoretical and conceptual development of a generalizable framework for understanding CIGS as a phenomenon, which has been lacking in the field where most insights have been generated from country-specific, small sample case studies.
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Notes
- 1.
“banana girls” is a term local to the ad-hoc NGO environment in Lesvos, Greece used to describe the influx of tourists-turned-volunteers who generated donation money online, usually through crowdfunding, and only wanted to be the ones who pull refugees from the water or give them their first meals or other highly visible activities. Other needs that were less visible, such as preparing food in the kitchen or washing dirty clothes, did not attract as many of these accidental volunteers.
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Acknowledgements
This material, in part, was funded by project seed funds from the University of Agder in Norway.
This material, in part, was funded by a grant through the Office of Naval Research under the Minerva Research Initiative under agreement number N00014-19-1-2624. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation thereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of the Office of Naval Research.
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Frydenlund, E., Padilla, J., Haaland, H., Wallevik, H. (2020). The Rise and Fall of Humanitarian Citizen Initiatives: A Simulation-Based Approach. In: Thomson, R., Bisgin, H., Dancy, C., Hyder, A., Hussain, M. (eds) Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling. SBP-BRiMS 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12268. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61255-9_25
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