The other day, while preparing a note on aid funding, I was reading some consolidated humanitarian appeals from the UN. I was trying to understand why the appeals were always getting bigger and bigger, why humanitarian aid was getting more and more expensive.

First and foremost, it is true, there are more crises. People caught up in these consecutive or cumulative crises quickly exhaust their capital, and when there is nothing left, they need external support to preserve their livelihoods, or even their lives. This external support is at first local, community-based. The family, the neighbourhood. It can also be national, such as the introduction of subsidised prices to make food or energy more accessible, or social protection measures. When these mechanisms do not work or are too weak, humanitarian aid is a measure of last resort.

The UN estimates that 306 million people are in need of some form of humanitarian assistance – 1 in 29 people worldwide. This year, twelve appeals are asking for more than $1 billion each. All of these appeals are based on the number of ‘people in need’.

I wonder then what a “person in need” really is in the current humanitarian framework. In Pakistan, Ukraine and Yemen, the humanitarian nature of needs is clear. But what makes a “need” humanitarian or not, who decides this and when is a need no longer considered humanitarian?

What qualifies a need as humanitarian is the fact that only an operation guided by humanitarian principles can access and serve the populations concerned, or is it the fact that there is no financial or political alternative to offering more sustainable national or external development projects?

Many humanitarian organisations are reluctant to coordinate their actions with development programmes, and are often reluctant to talk about politics, peace or security, out of respect for humanitarian principles. So if the marker of aid is the application of humanitarian principles, every project should be thought through in terms of these principles. But who really asks before a humanitarian intervention if the response to the needs of the population can only be guided by humanitarian principles, or if on the contrary the principles of aid effectiveness could be applied, even partially? Which donor is asking this question? Needs’ have multiple causes beyond conflict, including socio-economic crises such as in Venezuela or Lebanon.

In many contexts, scarcity and lack have become the norm and vulnerable people find themselves at the intersection of chronic poverty, exposure to regular stresses and sudden shocks such as conflict or flooding, as in Pakistan. The definition of ‘humanitarian need’ becomes complex. If support for access to health, water, education or food is still needed several years after the start of a crisis, should humanitarian budgets – which are supposed to be based on exceptionality and speed of execution rather than sustainability – cover the costs in all circumstances?

Yet this is what is happening, probably partly explaining the inflation of humanitarian appeals. For the members of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) who fund the majority of global humanitarian aid, humanitarian assistance is a sub-division of Official Development Assistance (ODA). The share of humanitarian ODA remains limited, but it is growing much faster than overall ODA. Between 2010 and 2020, the total ODA of DAC members increased by 33%, while their humanitarian ODA increased by 73% over the same period. By 2020, in some of the most fragile contexts, particularly where political dialogue is stalled, the share of humanitarian aid exceeds that of development cooperation. This means that for donor countries, the response to crises is increasingly about ensuring that the most vulnerable populations survive.

However, when we talk about humanitarian crises, we are talking about political crises that create humanitarian needs. The humanitarian prism through which crises are viewed leads policy makers to believe that more humanitarian aid is the best response to the crisis. This doxa has allowed humanitarian funding to be the fastest, most flexible and, indeed, the easiest to access. NGOs struggling to find funds will object, but most humanitarian funds go to UN agencies without too much scrutiny. Humanitarian money is easy, which is why even the UNDP now fits into consolidated humanitarian appeals, or why food security, traditionally a very political development sector, has become one of the most important parts of humanitarian aid, merging for some with food aid.

Humanitarian aid is designed to focus on the civilian victims of crisis and conflict, but the victims of conflict, or the ‘furthest behind’ in the sector’s terminology, are generally not those who have the political power, social standing or economic capacity to bring about the societal and political transformations necessary to influence a way out of the crisis. As such, humanitarian aid saves lives but is not transformative. It is therefore not sufficient on its own to respond to needs that go beyond the immediate. To meet multiple needs, humanitarian aid must be part of a combination of interventions designed to create the conditions for peace, to create the conditions for economic and social development, and to meet the most urgent needs.

Our collective way of looking at crisis response in a third country remains myopic because of this dichotomy between humanitarian aid which is deliberately separated from the economic and political context and development cooperation which is instead handcuffed to political dialogue. Whether we call it a ‘Nexus’ or simply coherence, a balance remains to be found, and specific types of funding need to be invented, regardless of the sectoral labels of ‘humanitarian’ or ‘development’ needs.

Cyprien Fabre

 

Cyprien Fabre is the Head of the Crisis and Fragility Unit at the OECD. A former Solidarités volunteer, then head of several offices for DG ECHO, he joined the OECD in 2016 to analyse the engagement of Development Assistance Committee members in fragile countries and refine the contribution of development assistance to peace objectives in crisis contexts.