by Adelina Kamal & Marc DuBois
Forced and insufficient, the United Nations-led humanitarian reset nonetheless offers a coherent response to the financial crisis so painfully disrupting the sector. Or does it?
As part of ODI Global and NEAR’s Advisory Panel on the Future of Humanitarian Action, we have come to a different conclusion: that the crisis affecting humanitarian action is primarily one of legitimacy, of its moral and political rather than commercial currency.
The legitimacy at stake is in the eyes of both the societies paying for much of aid programming and (especially) the communities receiving it. Our panel believes that humanitarians have spent decades talking proudly of principles that they have often failed to honour. But they have not been listening.
We lay out three pathways to reimagining humanitarian action to address this legitimacy challenge:
- Champion an updated interpretation of the principle of humanity.
- Centre justice and equity in the narrative of humanitarian response.
- Counter the protracted exceptionalism that mis-applies emergency mindsets and actions over decades of multi-dimensional crisis.
[The full blog is published on the ODI Global website and was written in partnership with Adelina Kamal, another panel member. CLICK HERE for the rest of the article. It is part of my work as a member of a joint advisory panel set up by ODI and the NEAR network in response to the crisis in aid funding. Our assignment is to advise major government donors on the future of aid and shape the discussions to come. Our sights are set on the big picture — the changes we want to see — and not the downsizing forced by the cuts.]