Laziness

Laziness

What has changed? Us, collectively. Modern industrialized humanitarian aid is a creation of the West, of rich countries that set the global political and economic rules. Even since decolonization, the West, victor of hot or cold wars, was the universal model of economic and societal development toward which all laggards were supposed to aspire. Development aid was indeed designed for this purpose, and it was easy and magnanimous for us to help those who had not benefited from these changes, the left-behinds of development, the ‘left behind’ to use the current terminology. Humanitarian assistance as a global Western safety net. But now, we have weakened financially, and above all I believe, there is no longer in our Western societies the real will to shape the world intellectually, economically, militarily. Laziness, my children would say.

From this follows, for better or worse, a global relativism supported by well-understood and very visible political double standards. If what we propose is not superior by nature, then everything is equal, and everyone might as well seek their own interest or propose their own model. Contemporary America is of course the illustration of this, carrying no values as a standard, no proposal for the world. Many countries have naturally used our laziness to their advantage to shake the established order. Look at ongoing discussions and peace negotiations. They no longer take place so much in Geneva, New York, or Paris, but in Istanbul, Jeddah, or Astana. The Tianjin summit is as important as the G7. If the West no longer wishes to dominate the systems that govern the world, then why should we concern ourselves with why and how Sudanese generals fight? Other people’s wars are ultimately quite bearable on television.

So, do we need human solidarity? Certainly. The current world is already globalized. There is less North and South, East and West, but a world of overlapping networks, leopard-like patches, in layers of a sociological rather than geographical nature. The effects of climate change, biodiversity loss, pervasive organized crime leaving public authorities failing or authoritarian, these are problems that occur in Grenoble, Caracas, or New Guinea. If the problems are global, then human solidarity may not only be linked to recognizing the suffering of our fellow humans, but to the interdependence of human beings among themselves and their capacity to act for themselves. The current world certainly needs an ethical framework and a practice of international solidarity. But the provision of life or care is not enough, especially since it is increasingly difficult to deliver. Should aid then be more activist, more openly political?

Should your taxes pay for it? All this is very fine, but if this solidarity is organized in a network, it always ends up translating into a transfer of resources. In the majority of cases, whether for the United Nations, the Red Cross movement, or NGOs, these resources are not their own funds. It is not direct solidarity. These resources represent indirect solidarity through states that outsource the operationalization of their humanitarian budgets as an instrument of their foreign policy. These are therefore political choices, difficult budgetary priorities, and not humanitarian considerations that primarily define humanitarian budgets.

Official Development Assistance, which includes humanitarian budgets, is an adjustment variable, and its elimination has no political cost for those who decide it. Who will protest or block roads to preserve ODA? It is therefore because aid in general, and humanitarian aid in particular, is not or no longer perceived as effective in defending our interests that it is cut. This perception is important: let us remember what Marco Rubio, gravedigger of USAID, said: “USAID created a globe-spanning NGO industrial complex at taxpayer expense with little to show since the end of the Cold War. Development objectives have rarely been met, instability often worsened and anti-American sentiment has grown.” If aid were perceived as directly useful to the interest and security of states, it would be preserved, in the United States as elsewhere. It is also interesting to see that in the available 2025 data, the United States still remains the largest humanitarian donor.

So, what now?

The nature of the world of the past is that it has passed, and one should not expect an ex-ante return. 2023 was the peak of a continuous increase in humanitarian budgets over more than a decade. The budgetary constraints of countries will not disappear, nor will the roughness of international relations. Either humanitarian aid — and development aid more generally — is integrated into a global security architecture that encompasses human security and environmental security, as Asian donors tend to do more willingly, or it is reduced to its bare minimum.

Localization? If we were honest with a local approach to aid, then a French NGO could quite easily support a Sudanese or Congolese NGO directly, without sending an entire mission to Port Sudan or Goma. Do we not hear in reports and workshops that communities are the first to respond and the best able to understand “needs” as well as the political environment in which these needs arise? What really prevents us from doing it? From establishing partnerships, signing framework agreements with NGOs whose “capacity building” we have supported for decades, using them as operational subcontractors, without paying operating costs that ensure sustainability, office rental, vehicle purchases, staff retention beyond the duration of a program? What also increasingly prevents us is the drying up of civic spaces and the possibility for citizens to organize and receive foreign funding. The urgency is also there. Enabling humanitarian response tomorrow means preserving and using as much as possible the residual civic spaces today.

Privatization? If countries outsource the operationalization of their humanitarian budget to a humanitarian system that is no longer perceived as sufficiently effective, the appeal of the private sector generally remains strong. It is an absolute anathema for many humanitarian actors, but in fact, the private sector is already mobilized and used for humanitarian logistics, distributions, and cooperation with governments. It is a very programmatic approach to aid, but for a donor, why would a company be less effective at distributing vaccines in a health center than UNICEF or an NGO? In the Indo-Pacific region, entire primary health and nutrition programs, straddling humanitarian aid and health sector support, are implemented by private companies that know their trade. In fact, no one dies from it. There are therefore situations where it will be politically and operationally possible and acceptable, and others — as we already see in Gaza — where it will not be.

We will not soon return to the era when humanitarian aid was driven by ideals of a better world for all. If all readers of Défis Humanitaires wanted to prove otherwise, we no longer have politically either the momentum or the means. Without substantial budgets, perhaps we must return to humanitarian entrepreneurs. Humanitarian aid may no longer be universal. Humanitarian aid will be what we make of it: a political tool, a lever of influence, an activist act, or a local action carried out by those who want and can. It may not even be neutral anymore. Neutrality protects humanitarian actors only insofar as the belligerents believe in it, which is increasingly not the case. Sad reality, sang Amadou and Mariam.

Cyprien Fabre :

Cyprien Fabre is the head of the “Crises and Fragilities” unit at the OECD. After several years of humanitarian missions with Solidarités, he joined ECHO, the humanitarian department of the European Commission, in 2003, and held several positions in crisis contexts. He joined the OECD in 2016 to analyze the engagement of DAC members in fragile or crisis-affected countries. He has also written a series of guides, “Policy into Action” and then “Lives in Crises,” to help translate donors’ political and financial commitments into effective programming in crises. He holds a degree from the Faculty of Law at Aix-Marseille.