JHA: A theory of obligation

Abstract:
This article presents a theory of obligation in the context of humanitarianism. Its foundational assumption is that there exists a moral imperative to assist the structurally dispossessed and functionally abused. It builds particularly on the cross-disciplinary work (both academic and applied) of anthropologists, but also of political scientists, sociologists, human rights specialists, and others. The links between human rights and humanitarianism are stressed, while suggesting principles that can guide humanitarian organizations as they serve those in need.

Humanitarianism is defined as "crossing a boundary;" risk usually is encountered by the service provider as scarce resources are used to help the vulnerable. Obligation is defined, in part, as "what one should do." A theory emerges as the "morally possible" and the "materially possible" intersect. Notions of human dignity are shown not to be appropriate in orienting the real-world work of humanitarians; notions of fairness are more appropriate as humanitarian work is organized and implemented. "Pragmatic humanitarianism" occurs as principled guidelines and achievable actions merge, and as non-neutral stances are taken as (for example) refugees are assisted. Humanitarian aid is shown to be fundamentally a moral relationship based on the obligation of "those who have" to address the felt needs of "those who have not." Examples from Bosnia are featured.

Read the rest on the JHA website.

VOICE newsletter: Water and humanitarian aid

Water is a very basic resource and elementary for human survival. Due to the impact of climate change and conflicts over resources, issues surrounding water are becoming more complex, and humanitarian assistance is facing increasing challenges. Both natural and man-made disasters have a damaging impact on access to water, for personal uses such as hygiene and consumption, for agriculture, irrigation, for public health, and for countless other reasons. Water shortages can themselves trigger conflict and population movements, exacerbating the above mentioned issues. Theses effects are invariably more intense for the increasing number of people in vulnerable situations, and as such are of significance to actors in the humanitarian sector.

Many VOICE members are active in programmes and projects related to water in Africa, Asia and Latin America. While prioritising the vital question of safe and reliable access to water, their perspectives and responses are varied, as can be evidenced from volume 7 of VOICE OUT LOUD. Further more, humanitarian assistance is also linking water with peace-building and conflict transformati on, as well as effective water management leading to community empowerment and improved disaster preparedness. VOICE members are also advocating and campaigning for much needed political action to the humanitarian reality of the millions of people who suffer from insufficient access to a basic resource - water - in the twenty first century.

Read the rest of the newsletter on Reliefweb.

Fire safety in refugee/ IDP camps

Reports of fires in camps housing survivors of the 'Boxing Day' Tsunami three years ago prompted the BRE Trust to commission research into the problem. As the research progressed, it became clear that the same issues extended to other refugee camps, as Martin Shipp and Kelvin Annable explain.

It is estimated that over 187,000 people died, 115,000 houses were damaged or destroyed and around 1.7 million people were left homeless after the tsunami struck countries surrounding the Indian Ocean on 26 December 2004. Immediately after the event, the BRE Trust funded a project on the needs of tsunami affected countries(ref 1).

In December 2005, a report made to the Disasters Emergency Committee2 stated that “the real cause for concern is the poor conditions in temporary shelter and the continuation of tented camps. In particular, these camps and shelters are at risk of fire, cyclone and flood”. It was separately reported by the BBC that the shelters provided to tsunami victims had poor fire performance. Further investigation on the web revealed that a number of tsunami camps had suffered major fires, some with loss of life.

Reported causes vary; some appear to be deliberate, some accidental, e.g. due to cooking or paraffin lamps. An initial examination of photographs of such camps suggested that fire spread between shelters should be easily limited by adequate spacing, with 5m or 6m spacing, as is done in the UK to protect mobile homes, for example. However, it was understood that practical, structural, environmental or social reasons might exist to explain why a solution could not, or is not, being adopted.

Read the rest on the Fire Safety Engineering magazine website! Thanks to Cathy for passing this on.

HealthDev.net: An interview with the Kenya Red Cross Society

The Kenya Red Cross' HIV and AIDS Programme Manager Dorothy Murithi was interviewed for HealthDev.Net recently about the link between HIV and conflict.

Read the article in full on the HealthDev forums.

ProVention: Characteristics of a Disaster-resilient Community webpage

The ‘Characteristics of a Disaster-resilient Community’ project, which supports processes of community mobilisation and partnership for disaster risk reduction, has a new webpage, on the ProVention Consortium’s website. This contains English and Spanish versions of the key resource document identifying characteristics of resilience, case studies showing how the ‘Characteristics’ resource has been used in the field, and other background material. More case studies and practical guidance will be added in the coming months, and a revised version of the ‘Characteristics’ will be published for the second session of the UN Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction in 2009.

Everyone is welcome to use the ‘Characteristics’ and feedback is welcome: visit the website or contact John Twigg.

HPN Network Paper: Public health in crisis-affected populations: a practical guide for decision-makers

Never before has it been clearer what interventions must be implemented to mitigate the adverse health consequences of wars and natural disasters, and what standards those interventions must strive to achieve; similarly, the range of interventions at our disposal has never been greater.

Despite these advances, reviews of the global relief system suggest an ongoing failure to deliver. They also highlight the dire lack of credible data to help us understand just how much populations in crisis suffer, and to what extent relief operations are able to relieve that suffering.

Political considerations often obstruct the delivery of appropriate relief. The premise of this paper, however, is that lack of knowledge is also an important limiting factor. This paper argues the need for advocacy for timely and appropriate relief, grounded in clearly outlined, scientifically sound reasoning, focusing discussion on substantive matters and reducing the scope for political manipulation. As such, the paper aims to enable readers to better face up to the political and bureaucratic aspects of the global relief system.

Download the paper from the HPN website.

ALNAP: Cyclone Nargis - Lessons for Operational Agencies

ALNAP have just released this report;

'...highlighting key lessons that have been learned from other natural disasters, specifically floods, hurricanes and cyclones. The report distils main findings and lessons from evaluations and synthesis reports contained in the ALNAP Evaluative Reports Database (ERD), as well as other learning initiatives concerned with responses to natural disasters. Where possible it provides links to these documents as well as to additional relevant papers and web sites. These are listed in the footnotes and the references.

It is important to state from the outset that the implementation of good practices is going to be very difficult, because of constraints in the operating environment. In this particular emergency, international agencies will know less about what happened and how best to respond. One overriding lesson is that agencies will have to find ways of dealing with this uncertainty and its implications for aid programming, accountability and delivery. They will also have to work to explain these issues and their implications to various stakeholders, including the media and donors.

Download the report from the ALNAP website. This report has been based on an earlier report on responding to floods produced by ALNAP and ProVention, which can be found elsewhere on the ALNAP website.

UN-ISDR: Indicators of Progress: Guidance on Measuring the Reduction of Disaster Risks and the Implementation of the Hyogo Framework for Action

In January 2005, at the World Conference on Disaster Reduction, in Kobe Hyogo, Japan, 168 States adopted the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015: Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters, with the overriding goal of achieving a substantial reduction in global disaster risk. The Hyogo Framework provides comprehensive action-oriented policy guidance based on a comprehensive understanding of disaster risks, which arise from human vulnerability to natural hazards.

In the preparatory negotiations on the Framework, States stressed the need for specific means, including indicators, to measure progress toward the reduction of disaster risks. In particular, it was requested in paragraph 33c that the ISDR system, supported by the ISDR secretariat, coordinates the development of "generic, realistic and measurable indicators" for disaster risk reduction. It encouraged States to thereafter develop and refine such indicators for national use. Indicators, benchmarks and targets are commonly accepted tools to focus and guide development investments, the Millennium Development Goals being an important example.

This report is an important step towards addressing this request. It is intended to assist not only national authorities but also civil society and community organisations, regional inter-governmental institutions and technical bodies, international and donor communities in setting priorities for policies, plans and programmes for disaster risk reduction, while regularly monitoring and reviewing achievements against the chosen indicators.

Download the report from Reliefweb.

GDN: The Gendered Nature of Natural Disasters: The Impact of Catastrophic Events on the Gender Gap in Life Expectancy, 1981-2002

Natural disasters do not affect people equally. In fact, a vulnerability approach to disasters would suggest that inequalities in exposure and sensitivity to risk as well as inequalities in access to resources, capabilities and opportunities systematically disadvantage certain groups of people, rendering them more vulnerable to the impact of natural disasters.

In this article we address the specific vulnerability of girls and women with respect to mortality from natural disasters and their aftermath. Biological and physiological differences between the sexes are unlikely to explain large-scale gender differences in mortality rates. Social norms and role behavior provide some further explanation, but what is likely to matter most is the everyday socio-economic status of women. We analyze the effect of disaster strength and its interaction with the socio-economic status of women on the change in the gender gap in life expectancy in a sample of up to 141 countries over the period 1981 to 2002.

We find, first, that natural disasters lower the life expectancy of women more than that of men. In other words, natural disasters (and their subsequent impact) on average kill more women than men or kill women at an earlier age than men. Since female life expectancy is generally higher than that of males, for most countries natural disasters narrow the gender gap in life expectancy. Second, the stronger the disaster (as approximated by the number of people killed relative to population size), the stronger this effect on the gender gap in life expectancy. That is, major calamities lead to more severe impacts on female life expectancy (relative to that of males) than smaller disasters. Third, the higher women’s socio-economic status, the weaker this effect on the gender gap in life expectancy.

In other words, taken together our results show that it is the socially constructed gender-specific vulnerability of females built into everyday socio-economic patterns that lead to the relatively higher female disaster mortality rates compared to men.

Download the document from Reliefweb.

Gendercc.net

A new site set up to provide 'information about women’s perspectives and gender aspects in climate change policies and measures', including;

• research on gender and climate change and related areas
• case studies that clarify and illustrate the gender aspects
• activities and campaigns to make women's contributions to climate protection visible and further the integration of the gender dimension in climate policy
• mechanisms and tools to put the integration of gender dimensions in climate change policies and measures into practice.

http://www.gendercc.net/.

Federation resources on global food crisis

The Federation has released a 'point of view' and practical guidance to NS and Zones on the recent sharp rise in global food prices:

Point of view on worldwide food price increases
Global food prices have been increasing continuously since 2000; however there has been a sharp increase since 2007. Over the last few months these food price increases, especially on staples such as wheat, rice and maize, have resulted in riots and civil unrest as well as impacting negatively on the poorest and most vulnerable who spend a large proportion of their income on food. While food prices are still below the peak reached in the mid 1970s in real terms, the potential for impact on vulnerable households is considerable.

Practical Guidance to NS and Zones on Food Price Rises
This guidance is provided in support of Zone office efforts to address the increase in food prices. It is meant to guide the thinking and suggest actions that can be taken either for ongoing programming or to think about preparing for situations that might arise resulting in countries and regions where we know recurrent disasters occur. It is not comprehensive in nature but should give programme managers and technical staff ideas on how to address the current situation. Consideration should be given as to how the current food price increases could be taken into account in the forthcoming planning period.

Download from the Federation website.

ODI: Rising Food Prices: A Global Crisis

Soaring food prices pose problems for three groups. First, the poor whose ability to buy food is undermined. Second, governments of low-income countries facing higher import bills, soaring costs for safety net programmes and political unrest. Third, aid agencies juggling increased demands for food, cash and technical advice. High food prices threaten the gains made since the 1960s and highlight the long-term need for investment in, and better management of, the global food supply.

This Paper examines the causes of rising food prices, expected trends, the likely impact, and possible policy responses.

The paper can be downloaded from the ODI website.

ALNAP 7th Review of Humanitarian Action

The 7th edition of the ALNAP Review of Humanitarian Action (RHA) explores critical issues involved in the development of mechanisms for assessing and improving the performance of humanitarian actors. It contains a short introduction and three main substantive studies.

The first study is on organisational change and provides perhaps the first substantive analysis of the experiences of humanitarian organisations in carrying out processes of change and improvement. The second study focuses on joint evaluations of humanitarian action and provides a comprehensive account of current strengths and weaknesses. This chapter also contains a meta-evaluation, which assesses the quality of joint-evaluation reports using the ALNAP Quality Pro Forma. The third study is an evaluation synthesis of key lessons learned from the international response to the 2005 Pakistan earthquake.

Download the review from the ALNAP website. Audio of the launch is available online from the ODI website.

TUFTS blog: Suffering is a profitable business

From Iraq to New Orleans to the tsunami hit coasts of Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Thailand, ...the fear and disruption that accompanies the suffering of crisis has been cynically exploited to push through the privatization of national assets and the corporate grab for real estate, profitable service provision and the extraction of wealth from already poor communities.

...

So the question is, now that these issues are out in the open, that they are being publicize in the popular press and not just the fringe media, will aid agencies, who bear witness to these economic crimes alongside human rights crimes, have the courage and competence to expose this dark side of disaster reconstruction?

Read more from Peter Walker on the Tufts blog.

OCHA: Global Symposium +5 on Information for Humanitarian Action - Final Report

With the ever-changing humanitarian landscape, challenges and opportunities continue to characterize the humanitarian community’s ability to share, manage and exchange information. While timely, relevant and reliable information remains central to effective humanitarian coordination and response, users increasingly expect information to support evidencebased advocacy, decision-making and resource allocation. Given these expectations, information professionals recognize they must work together to produce information tailored to serve a range of different needs in affected countries based on common standards and sound analytical methods. Today’s technology offers many solutions but real progress is still only possible through the willingness of people and their organizations to collaborate in sharing, managing and communicating information as a community.

It was in this context that the 2007 Global Symposium +5 on Information for Humanitarian Action was held in Geneva at the Palais des Nations on 22-26 October. The Symposium brought together more than 300 humanitarian professionals to build upon a community of practice on humanitarian information and knowledge to strengthen humanitarian response through timely and reliable information. Participation represented the broad spectrum of humanitarian actors globally. This report reflects the collective wisdom and learning of this wide base of humanitarian information professionals representing more than 100 organizations. The report outlines emerging themes, recognizes lessons and good practice, and reaffirms the agreed principles supporting quality standards. Most importantly, it provides recommendations that will guide the humanitarian community forward.

Download the report from Reliefweb.

Disasters June 2008: Commercial destocking interventions, drought, flood risk and security

This quarter's Disasters is now out and available from the BRC library in hardcopy or via their webpage - see the library for login details.

Papers include:

• Impact of a commercial destocking relief intervention in Moyale district, southern Ethiopia;
  
• Changing household responses to drought in Tharaka, Kenya: vulnerability, persistence and challenge;
  
• ‘It'll never happen to me’: understanding public awareness of local flood risk;
  
• Understanding the security management practices of humanitarian organizations.