Attachments
INTRODUCTION
The world is increasingly entering a period where conflict and climate related humanitarian emergencies are becoming both more frequent and more intense. Since the formalisation of the global humanitarian ‘system’ and the creation of the Interagency Standing Committee (IASC) structures in the early 1990s, there has also been an increasing and well documented shift towards a more multi-polar international order with far more complex geo-politics. This has come with increasing risks to several established international norms in recent years, with humanitarian principles and respect for international humanitarian law being more overtly threatened.
Against this backdrop state and non-state actors have been increasingly instrumentalising aid, and directly or indirectly restricting humanitarian assistance in contested environments. This issue is likely to worsen as the impacts of the global climate crisis bleed into more and more highly contested civil conflicts. To continue to deliver principled assistance under these circumstances, international and national civil society, along with multi-lateral institutions, have increasingly been implementing or considering alternative humanitarian coordination and response models, to varying degrees of success. This has included assistance being coordinated more directly by International NGO (INGO) and National NGO (NNGO) networks, and community-led coordination structures. A prominent example is where aid in non-state-controlled areas is delivered cross-border, with or without the agreement of the state.
Whilst such mechanisms are far from a new concept and pre-date the IASC, if the current trends continue it is likely that such modalities will become more frequent. Although often developed as ‘work arounds’ to the barriers facing the system, they may also present opportunities for enhancing abilities to deliver principled humanitarian assistance in complex settings in a manner that is more contextual, locally owned, and accountable. It is critical that there is reflection at both response and global levels on what has and has not worked to date in such settings and how civil society actors at all levels can support such a continuation of principled aid modalities. This research offers some analysis drawing from specific contexts and their implications for global and response level humanitarian coordination.