So here we are. The world before us has collapsed. Humanitarians who see the world through its sufferings could feel it coming, even if the brutality of the shock allows us to be a little dazed. It is all the more violent because the system, already under great external pressure, is collapsing from within. The budget cuts announced by many European countries gave us the beginnings of what was to come.

All of a sudden, we’re left with nothing. For a long time, report after report, we have all known that the concentration of humanitarian funding in the budgets of a small handful of donors represented a danger. Many efforts have been made to diversify, with little result. Why is this?

Development cooperation and humanitarian aid are so ingrained in our systems – the rich help the poor – that we forget why they exist. It’s not really a question of morality. States do not fall within the realm of morality, and if your government spends your tax money to give it to people outside the national community without any obvious return, it is because it has an interest in doing so. When this interest is no longer perceived or perceptible, then there is a problem.

America’s ruthlessness should not obscure the fact that many donor countries have been announcing budget cuts for months. But no one is giving any more. Why should we give to countries whose governments, and sometimes whose populations, no longer want to hear from us? Why should humanitarian aid, which is counted in the budget as official development assistance and financed almost exclusively by the countries of the political West, be perceived as neutral? For a long time now, humanitarian neutrality has only been perceived by those who provide it.

With a clear political objective in mind, development aid was designed to enable the least economically advanced, newly independent countries to compensate for the lack of a tax base that would have enabled them to invest in their own physical and social infrastructure. Some countries, particularly in Asia, did this and integrated into the world economy, while others did not. Development cooperation then became a way of getting the least developed countries to converge towards a Western model, not only in economic terms, but also in political and societal terms. Democracy, human rights, gender equality and so on. Can there be economic development and a reduction in poverty outside this model? It would seem so, as surprising as it may seem to us.

Historically, humanitarian aid came from private or religious initiatives. Governments then took over. Since we can’t prevent or stop war, let’s repair its consequences as best we can. Humanitarian aid is as much a reflection of the bad political conscience of rich, democratic countries as it is of our collective good conscience. Funded almost exclusively by government budgets, it has become an industry with no economic competition or ideological adversaries, and therefore resistant to introspection and reform. The marker of success was the constant increase in budgets, and the increase in budgets led to a concomitant increase in the field of humanitarian aid. This cycle has been broken, what are the consequences?

The countries of the ‘South’, now very sensitive to external signs of sovereignty, do not want aid, but investment, the only way to stay afloat and develop economically. They have much more choice than before, and are mixing and matching their partnerships according to their interests, sectors and offers. Imagine a country negotiating arms and education with one partner, roads with another, and technical assistance with yet another. Humanitarian aid is rarely negotiated, but it comes largely from the same donors and players.

The countries of the North, now very sensitive to their spending, do not want to help, but to invest, as the only way of maintaining their geopolitical and economic standing. The focus seems to be on the transition from aid to investment, with this summer’s Seville summit on financing for development as the high point of the forthcoming reforms. This means that the focus will be on countries with economic development potential, and that the others will be satisfied with humanitarian aid.

This is how the ‘global Gateway’ model has mapped out a path that is the only valid and politically audible one. The ‘differentiated approach’ to be applied to the most fragile contexts is far from being defined, and it is no coincidence that ECHO is nominally in charge of it, nor that the Commission has postponed the development of an integrated approach to fragility. It is not a priority.

So what are we changing?

Aid reform cannot really avoid thinking about why we want to help and how. This is no longer intangible, and the arguments of the twentieth century no longer hold water, either in the South or in the North. Even if humanitarian budgets are better protected from cuts, solidarity NGOs will have to rethink themselves in terms that are audible. Preservation of values or creation of added value? What is on offer? Perhaps this is what we need to redefine, beyond the ‘capacity to manage programmes in complicated areas’ that defines the humanitarian world. Human solidarity still exists, and should continue to exist. Whether this necessarily translates into programmes for the distribution of goods or services on behalf of donors is perhaps open to discussion.

Of course, it’s the closest communities that make the first effort, and sometimes the biggest. Because they are there on the spot, because they themselves have been affected by a disaster or conflict, they mobilise. This effort is not standardised, but it is often adapted. Local organisations exist, and they mobilise all the better because they are known and recognised in the affected communities before the shock. In this respect, ‘localising aid’ is one of the biggest sea snakes in humanitarian aid. But the concept is flawed. Localising aid’ implicitly means that aid is primarily international, but that local actors – often conceived solely in terms of local NGOs – need to be involved. But if international players are providing essential volumes of aid, who said that they alone were responsible for helping victims everywhere? What if our role was not so much to ‘localise’ aid as to support local efforts on their own terms? Because the capacity of local players is built up in the same way as that of international players: by the number of operational responses they have decided on, managed, financed and evaluated, and by the number of mistakes they have made.

This is undoubtedly where one of the changes lies. At the level of mentalities. We need to ask ourselves who on the ground has the capacity to act and how we can help these initiatives, technically and financially, making the most of our technical and logistical expertise, rather like the many very local development NGOs that were very active in the 1960s to 1980s, before the humanitarian steamroller drained all resources. It’s a different approach, based on partnership rather than immediate action, but perhaps one worth exploring. Could we do it?

Cyprien Fabre is head of the “crises and fragility” unit at the OECD. After several years of humanitarian missions with Solidarités, he joined ECHO, the European Commission’s humanitarian department, 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 countries. He has also written a series of “policy into action” and “Lives in crises” guides to help translate donors’ political and financial commitments into effective programming in crises. He is a graduate of Aix-Marseille Law School.

I invite you to read these interviews and articles published in the edition :

• • Humanitarian and geopolitics overview
  • Humanitarian action put to the test by dwindling public funding. An article by Antoine Vaccaro
  • Who wants peace prepares for war. An article by Grégoire de Saint-Quentin
  • Interview with Marie-France Chatin, producer of RFI’s Géopolitique programme
  • Défis Humanitaires, what do you think?
  • Put your pens to the test!