Diaspora as "Discovery": Thinking Long-Term

In the face of undeniable problems, such as climate change, that will confront future generations, democracy’s presentism is a major liability. (Rob Reich, Just Giving)

Over the past few weeks as confusion and uncertainty became the normative fabric of economic, social and political tapestries across the globe, it got me thinking about Gabriel Sheffer’s founding assertion on diasporas of a few decades ago – that they are “at home abroad”. Specifically, it got me thinking about how – in times of despair and distress – these distant affinities are often the spark of creative thinking, encouragement and hope that bring some short-term relief to folks back home.

It’s a powerful idea and story if you think about. That a city, country, or region can have a global network of affinity and influence “going into bat” for its well-being far away from home.

The aim of this article is not to delve into the complex academic treatise of these phenomena – minus to say that diaspora studies as an academic discipline is witnessing a re-emergence and is one that we should all support – but to stay rooted in the practicalities of engagement to add some value to where we are today.

We have seen remarkable courage and leadership from individuals, communities and governments alike in terms of diaspora recently. There are incredible stories of people uprooting their lives to help their countries back home (physically and remotely), diaspora leaders reaching into their networks (and pockets) to help, diaspora community organizations on the front-line helping those more silent members of the diaspora in their adopted lands (such as the elderly and irregular), and governments stepping up to the plate to help their people abroad (especially the most vulnerable).

We are collating these stories from across the globe and, in a few weeks, we will share them – they need telling. Please do share your stories with us via this platform.

And the beauty of these stories is that they are not deterred by the perpetual limitations of what is often shaped to scare us about migration. These stories – much like the virus we have come to learn – do not care about borders, ethnicity, or race.

Let’s try to debunk another nonsense here whilst we are at it! Just because you also care about where you are from does not make you any less committed to where you are. If you are Irish or Indian in America and helping back home that does not make you any less American. If you are French or Italian in Ireland helping back home that does not make you any less Irish.

However, in the introduction above, there is one term that really worries me for the future of diaspora engagement: short-term, or the liability of presentism.

Sadly, we have been here before in terms of diaspora engagement. We have seen diasporas as first movers across the globe at moments of seismic economic, social and political disruption such as climate induced disasters, conflicts, earthquakes, and other humanitarian crises. We can currently see this microscopically in Albania and Croatia – diaspora have been stepping up due to recent earthquakes along with the pandemic.

So, the question I am thinking about out loud here is how we can mitigate against the risk of presentism in diaspora engagement, however well-meaning it is. Or another way of looking at it: making continuity not crisis the glue of diaspora engagement.

 Diaspora as Discovery: Thinking Long-Term

Because of their size and longevity, foundations can operate on a different and longer time horizon than can businesses in the marketplace and elected officials in public institutions, taking risks in social policy experimentation and innovation that we should not routinely expect to see in commercial firms or state agencies. Call this the discovery argument. (Reich, Just Giving)

I was lucky enough to be introduced to the hard and soft skills of diaspora engagement by some phenomenal people along the way – both inside and outside the walls of the university! One thing a series of mentors struck into me at an early stage was a three-fold insight:

1)     Never underestimate the power of reading (never assume you have all the answers);

2)     Work at this topic from an inter-disciplinary method (look where others may not);

3)     Be the least intelligent person in every room you walk into (easily achievable in my case!).

The idea I want to introduce in this article stems from this insight. I’ve been actively using the downtime to increase my reading out-put, across various interests, and from people who are pushing new ground in their areas. This led me to a challenging and interesting read, Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better by Rob Reich.

Reich really pushes some creative and fresh analysis on the need for a political theory of philanthropy. The book was a fascinating insight into the nuances of how philanthropy – particularly private foundations – are currently interacting with democracy and how perhaps they should interact with the democracies they are based in. Reich has a powerful way of shaping his challenge to our mindsets and understandings on philanthropy. I’m happy to admit that I had to get the dictionary out a few times reading it!

He advances one justification around philanthropy that – at a conceptual level – may point a more purposeful way forward for diaspora engagement also. Before I get hammered from any academic friends, the transfer-ability here is at a conceptual level. The application groundwork follows in the next few paragraphs and some ideas to follow in the coming weeks.

His conceptual use of the discovery argument as outlined above has got me thinking about the long-term horizon of diaspora engagement beyond our current market reality. And, why is this important given where we are today?

Or, as he notes:

In light of constant change in economic, cultural, technological and generational conditions, the discovery process is, in ideal circumstances, cumulative, in contributing to society a storehouse of best, or simply very effective, practices for the different contexts and shifting priorities.

 We can all agree that we are moving to different contexts and shifting priorities over the next while. In essence, Reich claims that “foundations can be one mechanism among others….for this important work of discovery and experimentation”. I contend that diaspora is one other such mechanism of discovery and here’s why we should be scaling such work.

Diaspora as Discovery: Proof of Concept Exercise

How can we prove that diaspora as a tool of discovery has the potential of scale to deliver? This may start, believe it or not, with something very simple – calling diaspora when we see it. And this has been a shortcoming of diaspora in recent years. We have failed to call diaspora as we see it and if we do, we will see diaspora is a substantial marketplace.

So, let’s try set an exercise!

1)     In your personal or professional life, reach out to 10 people who have truly helped or inspired you along the way.

2)     Or, make a list of 10 people you admire globally.

3)     Do some fun homework on the list: Ask them or research about their story and see if there is an element of diaspora in their story.

Let me know how you get on. Here’s a little story that woke me up this fact.

For those of you who know me, you know that the result of my favourite football team – Tottenham Hotspur – usually determines my mood for the week! In the last game I attended at (even I must boast) our incredible new stadium, 8 of the players who started the game for my team were diaspora members.

Diaspora is everywhere you look – in my story, from walking up the high street to go to the game, going to the pub prior (a necessity), to the people working around the stadium, to the players on the pitch and to walking home after we lost. Those of you who know football will know that supporting Tottenham is a great character-building exercise!

Joking aside, the numbers alone will tell us that the likelihood of a diaspora element in your exercise is high with the incremental growth of the number of migrants in the world. Most people around you have a diaspora story. Let’s start calling it that; then this nonsense around the negativity of migration may get overturned.

Migration is the language of borders and identity. Diaspora is the language of affinity and belonging.

Which one do you think has more power in the 21st century?

Diaspora as Competitiveness

Whether we like it or not, we are moving towards a fundamental realignment of the boundaries of the public-private sector emanating from the current outbreak. The demarcations of these sectors have been blurred and the tightening of partnership between the sectors will slowly be unearthed as an operational model of preference for many landscapes. None more so than international development which is primarily the contemporary landscape for diaspora engagement.

But there may be a new kid in town due to the outbreak. Developed countries are facing a hefty bill over the next few years due to the outbreak. Re-starting economies will not come back to the old status quo. Whilst competitiveness has always been important, it is a new currency now as cities, countries and regions shift from the short-term to mid/long-term implications of the outbreak.

Developed countries will need their global friends networking for them; Diasporas can be your best friends and will be one of the few remaining options of unchartered territory for many countries.

Or, as Kingsley Aikins astutely notes: “To do nothing in diaspora engagement will mean being left behind.”

Diaspora Creates and Cultivates: Corporate and Civic Leadership

Let’s be honest here, the recent relationship between government and citizenry in most democracies have been fraught with discord and discontent. Collectively, we have probably been to the ballot box more than the post box in recent times.

Yet during this crisis, a lot of this discontent has been muted. Government gets a bad rap daily so let’s give them due credit when it is deserved. Of course, different governments have reacted differently in different jurisdictions, but at its core, I think it is far to say that most have worked with the well-being of their citizenry central to their thinking.

Governments have been stepping up to the plate and citizenry’s dependency to government has been illuminated if not entrenched. The demands to stay at this plate in the mid to long-term is beyond the reach of government. Many will just not be able to afford it.

They just cannot “think long” now.

Therefore, we need to be thinking about strategic allocations of effort, time, and cash that bring people to the table to offset the pressure on government long-term.

Diaspora communities, as a mechanism of discovery, are natural repositories of such creative solutions and can cultivate access to other relationships of substance for citizenry and governments alike. The diaspora of any country will consist of the corporate and civic leaders that everyone needs right now. Thinking of diaspora as discovery will enable us to be proactive in creating continuity of engagement, not just reactionary engagement.

Diaspora & Social Capital: Working for an Equitable Society

A democratic society, recognizing its elected leaders are not all-knowing, that reasonable disagreement on the best means to pursue just ends is likely, and that social conditions are always evolving, might just wish to stimulate and decentralize experimentation in social policy so that better and more effective policies at realizing democratically agreed upon aims can be identified and adopted. Moreover, this need for experimentation is never-ending. (Reich, Just Giving)

Positioning diaspora as means of discovery will be a huge opportunity for how we envision the role of diasporas long-term and should spark a more innovative ask of diasporas other than asking for their money. Their social capital may well outweigh the much more lauded financial dynamism of diaspora remittances in this configuration. Such asks may well be more palatable to diaspora constituencies.

Social capital, defined in Just Giving as, “individual or collective attitudes of generalized trust, civicness, and reciprocity that are generated by and embedded in cooperative activities and networks”, will likely to be a currency in short supply in a few months. The presence of such social capital as being “above the family and beneath the state”, is an apt descriptor of how many diaspora communities reside “at home abroad”. Quite often, social capital is the poor relation of economic or political capital, but it is likely to emerge as a determinant of long-term success in overcoming the challenges downstream of COVID-19.

Diaspora social capital, then, may arguably be construed as instrument for an equitable society. Connotations of such a society are now in flux and we need a new appetite of risk to deliver our commitments to this mission. This echoes Reich’s appreciation that:

Foundations serve as a democratic society’s “risk capital,” a potent discovery mechanism for experimentation in social policy with uncertain results over a long-time horizon.

Diaspora capital, in its holistic sense, is a similar fund of such risk capital. Over the past few years in partnership with Kingsley, we have come to diaspora capital as:

The overseas resources available to a country, region, city, organisation or location and it is made up of flows of people, networks, finance, ideas, attitudes and concerns for places of origin, ancestry or affinity. In short, flows of people, knowledge and money.

Realising Diaspora as Discovery: Smart and Long-Thinking

In the commentary above, I have tried to amplify some justifications on the need to envision diaspora as “discovery” in a similar conceptual thread to that of Reich’s appreciation of philanthropy. If we stop at justification, then the age-old question of realisation appears over the horizon: So what?

Amidst all the uncertainty now, there is one certainty: the calendar is not stopping. We are investing in some remarkable medical and scientific minds to get us out the other side of this. That other side is waiting and hopefully will arrive quicker than we think. But it is still waiting.

That landscape, I contend, needs a discovery mindset. One that will run towards and not from the new realities that we find ourselves. This means business as usual or business as we knew it is not fit for purpose. We will need corporations, constituencies and communities who can navigate these complexities and provide pathways for interconnected solutions.

I am aware that what I am arguing for here is not comfortable thinking for us. After all, “humans tend to favor the present and short term over the distant and long term.” Democracy’s have a “systematic and pervasive bias in favor of the present.” We cannot embrace this bias.

Make no mistake, there is a significant political and philosophical danger now if short-termism and isolation (politically not personally) is normalized. The demand and need for bridges of economic, social and political commonalities will reach new levels. Or, smart power as it is known. Diasporas, much like Reich’s treatment of foundations, should “think long. They can be the seed capital behind high-risk, long-time-horizon discoveries that benefit and protect future generations.”

Diasporas are one of the great potential marketplaces to explore for discovery aimed at global recovery. The idea behind this article is the exploration of a global call to action on diaspora engagement that positions diasporas as conduits of capital and commonality for the long-term well-being of global citizenry.

 This is the moment that diaspora engagement has been waiting for. If we do not think and act long, then it will be unforgiveable.