Unintended consequences emerge because humanitarian action takes place in the context of complex systems that cannot fully be understood through human reason

From Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails by Christopher J. Coyne. Page 144.

Beyond these domestic humanitarian issues, the collapse of the Gaddafi regime has had broader regional effects, including contributing to an ongoing humanitarian crisis in Mali. To understand how, consider that in 2007 Tuareg forces in Mali mounted a rebellion against the Malian government which was eventually defeated. Following the failed insurgency, many of the rebels fled Mali, finding sanctuary in Libya, where they were employed and trained by the Gaddafi government as part of its armed forces. With the collapse of the Gaddafi regime the rebels left Libya and returned to Mali with superior training and military equipment, and resumed their rebellion against the Malian government. This has had devastating humanitarian consequences. The UN estimates that, since January 2012, 160,000 Malians are externally displaced, with another 200,000 more internally displaced in Mali due to attacks by Tuareg rebels. This led one Amnesty International researcher to conclude, “This is the worst human rights crisis in northern Mali for 20 years.”

These undesirable outcomes of the Libyan intervention are examples of the negative unintended consequences of state-led humanitarian action. The fact that humanitarian action has unintended consequences is not, by itself, a new insight. Indeed, policymakers and humanitarian practitioners are well aware that efforts to help those in need have a long history of generating negative consequences. In some cases, these unintended consequences weaken the positive effects of humanitarian efforts. In other cases, unintended consequences have the more extreme effect of either harming the very people humanitarian action aims to assist or causing entirely new suffering among innocent bystanders, as in the case of displaced Malian citizens.

Unintended consequences emerge because humanitarian action takes place in the context of complex systems that cannot fully be understood through human reason. This means that the design and implementation of humanitarian activities is necessarily simple relative to the complexity of the system within which those activities are carried out. In fact, because humanitarians cannot possibly have a complete grasp of the system in which they are intervening, unintended consequences are likely to be the rule rather than the exception.

However, despite recognition of unintended consequences in humanitarian action, the implications have not been fully internalized, in part because developing the skill of thinking in terms of complex systems is no easy task. It is more natural to think in linear terms: a problem situation is first identified and then a solution is developed and implemented. Linear thinking characterizes many engineering problems that involve purely technical solutions. For example, building a bridge requires those with relevant knowledge to determine the appropriate bridge structure—beam bridge, truss bridge, arch bridge, suspension bridge, or so on—and then identify the necessary inputs to achieve the desired output. This type of linear thinking, however, is too simplistic for a large majority of humanitarian actions.