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By Dr. Randolph Kent, Director of the Humanitarian Futures Programme (HFP) at King’s College, London,

Some of the most favoured words in the humanitarian lexicon reflect potential stagnation in creative thinking and mind-closure to the greater threats of the future. I would stigmatise ‘practical’ and ‘academic’ as foul words for the future which threaten the efforts of those who recognise that saving lives by mitigating future threats will require new thinking and greater sensitivity to global transformations.

I would also characterises the popular humanitarian reference to, ‘the field’, as condescending and unattractively colonial.

But my main concern is about concepts which are hidebound in convention. As long as humanitarian actors insist that being ‘practical’ is the initial criterion for new ideas, the less likely it is that the changes the sector requires is happening and the more likely it is that practical and conventional practices are synonymous.

My question is, whether the sector’s insistence on being ‘practical’ would allow for the prospect of failure, acceptance of risk and eventual adaptation so essential for the sort of creativity that would be needed to deal with the humanitarian challenges of the future?

I would argue that innovation and innovative practices rarely start as something that can be readily used. They have to go through the agony of tests, failures and perhaps eventual success. And I would challenge humanitarian policymakers to be self-criticising – consider whether our ostensibly greater professionalisation is in effect greater managerialism, and that, under the rubric of being practical, we have become risk-averse and too tied to ‘well-tried’ methods and procedures.

I think the phrase we often hear, “a bit too academic,” is an indication of mind-closure. What does too academic mean? Does it mean that humanitarian actors are unwilling to consider concepts and approaches that reflect new understandings about vulnerability and the context in which vulnerabilities occur? Does it mean that we should not make consistent efforts to relate the sort of global transformations that we are witnessing to our humanitarian objectives?

It concerns me that implicit in the use by humanitarian organisations of the term, ‘the field’, is a reflection of an old and outmoded humanitarian order and I would therefore was users of this term, “would you want your own countries described as ‘the field’?”

The implications of the term are condescending and in a sense unattractively colonial. I believe it is a term that fails to acknowledge the increasing confidence and capacities of a growing number of countries and their governments. It also presumes a level and type of access for conventional Western humanitarian organisations which will less and less be the case.

The context to which humanitarian actors will have to adjust will be more and more demand driven, more and more aggressively controlled by governments of the afflicted and in turn more and more resistant to ‘the boots on the ground’ assumptions of traditional humanitarians.