IRIN: Afghanistan: A tight squeeze on humanitarian space

“In the south, south-east and east, isolated reports were received regarding government officials being forced to bribe insurgent commanders in order to facilitate the continued operation of schools and allow for the implementation of certain development projects. This highlights the heightened ability of the insurgents to exert their authority and influence over the implementation of development activities,” the UN Secretary-General said in a report to the Security Council in December 2009.

Laurent Sailard, director of ACBAR, a consortium of over 100 Afghan and foreign NGOs, said aid workers must not make payments to insurgents for security, access or safe passage.

“Buying a passage for humanitarian convoys or access is a bad strategy with long-term negative impacts. Demands could increase, and if not satisfied could lead to increasing threats. It is a never-ending process that always leads to the worst,” he said, adding that aid workers had to ensure access and security through acceptance among local communities and impartial dialogue with belligerent parties."

Movement policy is not to use armed escorts but gain access by negotiating and being accepted by all parties to a conflict.

Read the rest of the article on the IRIN website and read more on the Movement's position here.

UNHCR: Safeguarding humanitarian space

Nonetheless, not all humanitarian actors are in agreement that humanitarian space is in fact shrinking. During the Cold War many conflict-affected areas (such as parts of Afghanistan, Angola and Mozambique) were off-limits to aid workers. The diversion and manipulation of aid has also been a perennial feature of the operating landscape. What has changed is the nature of the challenges to principled humanitarian action, underpinned by significant shifts in the global political and security context.

Read more on Reliefweb.

Updated: ALNAP State of the System report is out

Bringing together much of the work done by ALNAP since the tsunami, this first pilot report provides a baseline and working methodology which will be built upon and improved in subsequent iterations.

Download the report from the ALNAP website. Although there is an excellent executive summary, a quick run-down of the key points follows in the full post.

Aims of the report: Provide a system-level mapping and assessment of international humanitarian assistance over the last two years according to key criteria. Includes new, previously unavailable descriptive statistics and highlights some new initiatives in policy and practice.

Areas of focus: Operational performance of the ‘formal international humanitarian system’, focussing on emergencies involving international agencies and an appeal for international assistance. Limitations: did not eventually cover national, local and community-based organisations and does not measure beneficiary-level impacts.
Key findings:

• the international system has grown in staff size by an average annual rate of 6% over the past decade, and has reached a population of roughly 211,000 humanitarian workers in the field.
• In 2008, some $6.6 billion was contributed by donors directly to international emergency response efforts, and the combined humanitarian expenditures of aid organisations on overseas programme activities totalled around $12.8 billion.
• In terms of performance, findings indicate an overall positive trend in areas having to do with the internal workings of the humanitarian system – such as coordination mechanisms, funding vehicles and needs assessment tools – while at the same time some fundamental issues, such as leadership and the system’s engagement with and accountability to beneficiaries, remained weak. The findings thus depict a system steadily and incrementally improving its own internal mechanics and technical performance, while remaining deficient in some big picture requirements for effectiveness.

Findings against the OECD DAC review assessment criteria:

Coverage/sufficiency: still insufficient as despite growing sector and rise in funding, needs have also gone up. Nonetheless coverage is improving over time - over 85% of total stated requirements met in 2007 and 2008, compared with 81% in 2006 and only 67% in 2005. Declining in some contexts due to insecurity or host government restrictions. In the most contested environments, insecurity for aid workers has increased markedly.

Relevance/appropriateness: Quality of needs assessments still seen as a weakness, but have improved with a majority of respondents reporting adequate inter-agency needs assessments in their contexts and wider breadth of types of programming improving flexibility. However evaluations and beneficiary consultations show common instances of multiple assessments without sufficient follow-up. Beneficiaries continue to be inadequately consulted and involved in assessments and subsequent programme design. Prioritisation is improved but may be proliferating with too many parallel processes appearing.

Effectiveness: Responses are more timely thanks to significant agency investment in standby capacity and new mechanisms (e.g CERF). Growing attempt to better link humanitarian and development actors with disaster risk reduction (DRR) efforts and to increase investments in DRR. Overall, coordination seen to improve with introduction of Cluster Approach and positive views about the value of clusters outnumbered negative ones. But leadership was a noted weakness - the Humanitarian Coordinator (HC) system needs strengthening. Other coordination trends highlighted included a growing role for regional bodies (e.g. ASEAN) and agency consortia. Monitoring identified as a continuing weakness. HR improvements (in capacity, quality, and professionalism) were encouraging but Many agencies made real efforts to increase investment in operational capacity and quality of human resources. Improvements in professionalism of humanitarian staff noted, but high staff turnover and a need to invest more in national staff development. There are also growing capacities on the part of national governments to meet the needs of their own citizens in times of disaster in many contexts, which requires greater consideration in advance of launching response efforts.

Connectedness: An unmitigated scarcity of investment in local and national capacities was a repeated theme, as were concerns with the top-down tendencies of the system and the risk of undermining local capacities. However, there are also signs of improvement in how international agencies work with local humanitarian actors, with the survey finding a majority of respondents felt efforts at capacity building had increased in the past two to three years. A clear momentum around need for greater downward accountability and participation, and a growing number of examples of investments in feedback and complaint mechanisms and greater transparency, which benefits programmes.

Efficiency: Efficiency issues, including the risks of corruption, continue to be relatively neglected in literature/evaluations of humanitarian action, although Transparency International is developing an anti-corruption toolkit. -Widespread concern about overhead and programme support costs, particularly in relation to new financial mechanisms. People also noted, however, that constant drive to minimise administrative costs was leading to chronic under-investment in key capacities that could serve to improve performance. Arguably too great a focus on driving down admin costs.

Coherence: focus on: i) whether core humanitarian principles, international humanitarian law (IHL) and refugee law were being respected in humanitarian programming - a real challenge with a noted lack of respect for IHL and the principles in many recent conflicts and integrated or 'whole of government' approaches threatening humanitarian space - both requiring renewed advocacy efforts and more principled action by agencies, and ii) consistency in objectives and actions for protection and for advancing the crosscutting issues of illness, age, gender and disability which are hard to keep sight of once 'mainstreamed'. Improved guidance and awareness but confusion about the concept of protection and who has responsibility. There has been criticism of the quality of protection work, including the deployment of inexperienced staff, breaches of confidentiality of affected populations and inconsistent knowledge and application of relevant laws.

Wall St Journal: on the ICRC negotiating UN access to children in Afghanistan

International Committee of the Red Cross, the only international organization that maintains regular communications with the Taliban command, acts as an intermediary every time a new letter of support is issued. That happened 10 times in 2009, each time a new vaccination campaign was launched.

Dr. Mir of the WHO says he decided to ask the International Committee of the Red Cross, or ICRC, for assistance after watching how that organization facilitated talks between the South Korean government and the Taliban that led to the freeing of 23 Korean hostages kidnapped by the insurgents in July 2007.

...Afghan insurgents generally respect the ICRC's neutrality, unlike their counterparts in Iraq, who blew up the organization's Baghdad headquarters in October 2003. The ICRC maintains first-aid posts in some Taliban-held parts of the country and runs special taxi-ambulance services that evacuate wounded Taliban fighters from the battlefield as well as Afghan civilians caught in the crossfire.

Read more on the WSJ website.

Meanwhile, a new intelligence report proposes that analysts should focus on deep analysis of local social and political structures in Afghanistan:

He also calls for a complete culture change in the intelligence community which will see them forgoing their much loved Power Point slides for "meaty, comprehensive descriptions of pivotal districts throughout the country" produced on word processors.

"Analysts must absorb information with the thoroughness of historians, organise it with the skill of librarians, and disseminate it with the zeal of journalists," the report says.

Read more on the Guardian website.

FIC + HFP Humanitarian Horizons: tackling future challenges

The Feinstein International Center (FIC) of Tufts University and the Humanitarian Futures Programme (HFP) of King's College London initiated a joint project called Humanitarian Horizons. This project, launched in October 2008, focuses both on HFP's analyses of changing dimensions of future crisis drivers and on making more practical the exploratory futures research of FIC's Ambiguity and Change project. So far four papers by leading experts have been released, which will be incorporated into a "Practitioners' Guide to the Future", to be published in December 2009.

The Humanitarian Horizons project is a futures capacity-building initiative intended to assist the humanitarian sector to prepare for the complexities of the future by enabling organizations to enhance their anticipatory and adaptive capacities. The first step in this process is the exploration of four futures-related drivers widely expected to have an impact on humanitarian crises and responses to them. These four drivers are:

• climate change;
• globalization;
• major demographic shifts;
• drivers internal to the humanitarian community, e.g. technological advances, the "shrinking" of humanitarian space, new actors, changing financing structures and the like.

Happy World Humanitarian Day

19 August will from now on be dedicated to all humanitarians, commemorating those that have lost their lives doing their jobs. The day is very symbolic, as it coincides with the day that a bomb hit the UN compound in Iraq in 2003, leaving 22 deaths among the present UN personnel, including Sergio Vieira de Mello.

As a tribute to all humanitarians, there is now World Humanitarian Day. The family of de Mello also created a Sergio Vieira de Mello foundation to honour those people that have contributed in a special way to the humanitarian cause and to peace and conflict resolution.

It has also been a day to think about humanitarian action in the world of today. Many news sites have reported on the humanitarian space necessary to operate in safety honouring the humanitarian principles (IRIN/AlertNet), the growing lack of this space and the need for higher security measures for humanitarians in Afghanistan (IRIN, Mediapoint Press). Neil Barry, humanitarian specialist at ODI, has put up an interesting post reflecting on his two decades of experience as a humanitarian and humanitarianism in general.

Disasters: New Theme Issue on Reconstruction

ODI has published a new Disasters theme issue, Emerging Perspectives on the Politicisation of Reconstructing Conflict-Affected Countries. This issue tries to bridge the gap between academic reconstruction theories and the local practices:

Studies of reconstruction have, despite being a critical issue for many years, long suffered from an acute disassociation between theory and practice on the one hand and academic and policy circles on the other. Recent events in Iraq and Afghanistan have exacerbated these problems, necessitating a thorough and, perhaps most pertinently, critical evaluation of both the state of the debate and the state of the art. This theme issue aims to contribute to such a process of reflection by drawing on evidence from reconstruction efforts undertaken in a wide range of local contexts.

The theme issue contains the following articles:
Emerging patterns in the reconstruction of conflict-affected countries
'Rule of Law' initiatives and the liberal peace: the impact of politicised reform in post-conflict states
Insurgency, militias and DDR as part of security sector reconstruction in Iraq: how not to do it
The gift of disaster: the commodification of good intentions in post-tsunami Sri Lanka
Who owns the peace? Aid, reconstruction, and peacebuilding in Afghanistan
A very political reconstruction: governance and reconstruction in Lebanon after the 2006 war

This and other editions of Disasters are available from the BRC library, or online by emailing library@redcross.org.uk.[...].

The first contribution, Emerging patterns in the reconstruction of conflict-affected countries, contextualises the five main contributions to this issue. The overall argument that Tim Jacoby and Eric James make is that the comination of three patterns, 'marketisation', 'politicisation', and 'securitisation', has narrowed the space in which humanitarian and reconstructive interventions into conflict-affected countries are organised and undertaken.

In the second article, 'Rule of Law' initiatives and the liberal peace: the impact of politicised reform in post-conflict states, Jenny H. Peterson talks about how the instrumental use of RoL programming provides further evidence of weaknesses and contradictions within the politicised liberal peacebuilding project (since it increases security in the short term, but threatens the sustainability of peacebuilding reforms in the long run, as seen in Kosovo), necessitating reconsideration of its role in post-conflict transformations.

In Insurgency, militias and DDR as part of security sector reconstruction in Iraq: how not to do it, Alpaslam Ozerdem discusses the dangers and pitfalls of DDR in a highly complex and insecure environment such as Iraq.

Benedikt Korf et al. analyse in The gift of disaster: the commodification of good intentions in post-tsunami Sri Lanka, the perpetuation of the political economy that has driven social conflict and discontent in the post-independence years in Sri Lanka.

The fourth article, Who owns the peace? Aid, reconstruction, and peacebuilding in Afghanistan, by Jonathan Goodhand and Mark Sedra, examines how aid policies and programmes have become part of a complex bargaining game involving international actors, domestic elites, and societal groups. It argues that international donors' failure to appreciate or engage sensitively and strategically with these bargaining processes, when combined with contradictory intervention objectives, has contributed to the steady unravelling of a fragile war-to-peace transition in Afghanistan.

In the last contribution, A very political reconstruction: governance and reconstruction in Lebanon after the 2006 war, Christine Sylva Hamieh and Roger Mac Ginty examine how in general many Western states and Western-backed international institutions favoured governance programming (software) while many Arab and Gulf State donors preferred physical reconstruction projects (hardware), often with an emphasis on large-scale, high-visibility infrastructure projects. They argue that the latter were able to connect more effectively with the political culture of Lebanon.

IASC Annual Report 2008

The first IASC report produced for the wider humanitarian sector, and includes items on:

• 'Humanitarian reform - no longer a trend, but the way we work'
• 'Discussions on humanitarian space with DPKO'
• the Early Recovery cluster

Download the report from Reliefweb.

'Eroding humanitarian principles: Who's to blame?'

By Samir Elhawary, Humanitarian Policy Group at ODI

This article is in response an earlier article expressing serious concern at current UN humanitarian reforms that seek to enhance coordination among humanitarian agencies and establish more effective funding mechanisms for emergencies, which views these latest reforms as an attempt to further align political, military and aid objectives.
Access the original article via Humanitarian Practice Network
Access the response via Humanitarian Practice Network

A recent article by members of the well known humanitarian agency Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) expressed serious concern at current UN humanitarian reforms that seek to enhance coordination among humanitarian agencies and establish more effective funding mechanisms for emergencies. It views these latest reforms as an attempt to further align political, military and aid objectives. This, they argue, blurs the lines between political and humanitarian action, fostering an environment that isn’t conducive to upholding the core humanitarian principles of independence, impartiality and neutrality. These principles are understood as vital to ensuring access to affected populations and the security of aid workers.

Reform of the institutional framework to enhance strategic coordination isn’t new, as the authors acknowledge. It’s part of a trend since the mid-1990s that seeks to achieve greater coherence among humanitarian, development, military, diplomatic and commercial interventions. This attempt to bridge aid and politics stems from the general acceptance among Western states – especially since 9/11 – that ineffective or failed states can no longer be ignored or simply provided with relief. The thinking is that instability creates fertile grounds for radicalisation which, in tern, poses severe threats to the liberal democratic world.

Afghanistan and Iraq are some of the most recent interventions that are symptomatic of this trend, and the places in which aid workers have expressed most concern over their ability to operate. In fact, in 2004 MSF pulled out of Afghanistan after several of its aid workers were killed. This would tend to reinforce concerns that greater coherence and the consequent blurring between political and humanitarian interventions are eroding humanitarian principles and hindering the ability of aid workers to save lives.

However, while the evidence suggests that there has been a loss of ‘humanitarian space’, two qualifications need to be made. Firstly, as emphasised recently by Laura Hammond, increasing attacks on aid workers are more likely to be due to the considerable benefits that can be gained by those who carry out the attacks – namely, massive publicity which can be used to promote a particular message – rather than because of any erosion of principles. Attacking aid workers can also be a way to send a powerful message in terms of showing military prowess and, in effect, become a strategy of war.

Secondly, apart from those organisations that espouse a relatively strict adherence to principles of independence and neutrality, some agencies have started to actively take sides, supporting what they perceive as ‘good’ political objectives in their advocacy campaigns; such as calling for intervention in Darfur. Others have pursued a development or social justice agenda that seeks to transform the societies they engage in through ‘conflict resolution’, ‘recovery’, ‘reconstruction’ and ‘peace-building’ interventions. In such a context, talk of neutrality makes little sense. There is a need to move away from the current tendency to solely blame the role of the ‘system’ and/or other political/military actors and emphasise the fact that it is often the agencies themselves that are the prime drivers in politicising aid.

These trends raise important questions with regard to the relevance of applying humanitarian principles in the current environment. Should agencies pull out, reject funds or suspend activities if they feel the principles are being overly compromised? Or is there a case for enhanced coherence between political and humanitarian objectives in order to support the long term welfare of these societies – and perhaps also their security in the shorter-term? Until such dilemmas are resolved we will continue to see a humanitarian enterprise that is deeply divided.

MSF: 'Independence and Innovation in Humanitarian Action'

From the Dialogues series of discussions aiming to promote debate on some of the pressing issues facing humanitarian action.

Access the dialogue from MSF

TUFTS: Peter Walker gives us the good news

All too often those in the humanitarian world sees the cup half empty. Maybe it is as a result of working in a business that is about constant problem-solving, crises and distress. So last week, at the prompting of some of our students, I asked eight experienced long-time humanitarian workers what they saw as the successes of the past generation. Their answers ... make hopeful reading.

The legal framework of humanitarian work has improved, the assertion and recognition of people’s rights have improved. Humanitarian space is being negotiated more robustly and there is a greater understanding of the global and local context of emergency operations. The norms of the endeavor, standards, codes etc have become more effective. And finally there are many individual relief operations over the past generation which have made a significant difference to people’s lives.

Read the full list on the Tufts blog.

MSF Dialogues: Humanitarian NGOs' responsibilities and limitations in providing 'protection'

In this fourth Dialogues publication from MSF, two speakers (Marc DuBois from MSF and Katy Barnett from Save the Children) discuss what they see as the main issues - and respond to each other's viewpoints. The publication is available from the MSF website.

If you find the discussion thought-provoking, or vehemently agree or disagree with one of the speakers, then check out the latest postings related to this debate on the Dialogues website, and post your own opinions.