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Key messages
Bold, moral humanitarian leadership that prioritises humanity, and is willing to accept risks of retaliation by promoting protection in the best interests of affected people, is desperately needed. But leaders are expected to maintain presence and access to deliver services, and often prioritise this whatever the cost.
Calculated risk-taking requires institutional and organisational support, even (and especially) when there are risks of failure. Leaders need to be held to account, and hold their teams to account for promoting protection. Crucially, leaders require the right set of skills (e.g. diplomacy and negotiation).
Leaders at all levels must work towards a coherent, strategic approach to reducing protection risks. But this is undermined by the humanitarian sector treating protection as a technical issue, with technical responses. Leaders need to work towards a common plan, agreeing on priority risks to address over the long term, including through sustained humanitarian diplomacy.
To support this, there should a comprehensive understanding of drivers of protection risks, including a political economy analysis, monitoring trends over time. Analysis must come from a range of expertise (peace, political, human rights, research and academia) across multiple levels (local, subnational, national, global). Critically, it should be delinked from individual agency programming and funding so that the most acute risks can be tackled.
Protection challenges are multifaceted and cannot be resolved by humanitarian actors alone. Collective responsibility and mutually reinforcing approaches across human rights, peace and political actors are critical to reducing risks. This requires a mindset shift to ensure protection is central to humanitarian action, and a culture shift to normalise complementary approaches to addressing protection risks within and beyond the humanitarian system. Critically, it requires political will and commitment from the highest level of the humanitarian system.
Introduction
Humanitarian leaders are critical to setting and advancing strategies that help reduce protection risks for crisis-affected people. They are key to contributing to cultures that support protection within the institutions and organisations that they lead. However, within the humanitarian system, protection is poorly understood. It lacks institutional and political support. In the absence of leadership that promotes protection as central to humanitarian action, there is a lack of commitment to and prioritisation of protection (Cocking et al., 2022).
At the highest levels of leadership within the United Nations-led international architecture, including the UN Secretary-General (UNSG), rhetoric on prioritising the protection of civilians has rarely translated into results. Geopolitical tensions, fragmentation of traditional alliances, and a crisis of multilateralism have all led to paralysis on protection risks at the UN Security Council (Bowden and Metcalfe-Hough, 2020; Metcalfe-Hough, 2020; 2022; Davies and Spencer, 2022a).
Lack of clarity on roles and responsibilities at the global, regional, national and subnational levels has led to a fragmented, mandate-driven approach to protection, with the prioritisation of specific population groups or risks (e.g., children, refugees and gender-based violence (GBV)).
Rather than being recognised as a strategic issue across responses, protection is often delegated to a technical level. This has undermined progress towards a strategic, coherent and collective approach to strengthening protection (Bowden and Metcalfe-Hough, 2020; Metcalfe-Hough, 2020; Cocking et al., 2022).
The need for stronger, more courageous leadership at the institutional, system and individual levels is well recognised, including the need for an increased use of humanitarian diplomacy as a tool to strengthen protection (Bowden and Metcalfe-Hough, 2020; Cocking et al., 2022;
Metcalfe-Hough, 2022). Opportunities exist. Protection and advocacy are stated priorities of the current Emergency Relief Coordinator (ERC). Humanitarian leadership of protection was a key recommendation of the Independent Review of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) Protection Policy, and leadership is a priority for the UNSG’s 2020 Call to Action on Human Rights and the Agenda for Protection. If implemented, these could offer opportunities for more effective leadership of protection. However, translating such calls into action requires commitment from the highest levels of the humanitarian sector – the UNSG, the ERC, and the UN Principals and executive directors of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs). It requires political will, with identified actions to empower leaders, and to address barriers and disincentives.
This paper focuses on challenges, barriers and enabling factors involved in strengthening humanitarian leadership of protection as a central tenet of humanitarian action. It will focus on the role of leadership in reducing protection risks to civilians, defined in this paper as risks of violence, coercion and deliberate deprivation.
It considers leaders from the country to global levels, and asks what is required for bolder, more empowered leadership of protection (Cocking et al., 2022). Due to the focus of the Global Executive Leadership Initiative (GELI) project, this paper predominantly focuses on humanitarian leaders within the formal humanitarian architecture, with the recognition that effective leadership of protection does not and should not come solely from within this system.
This briefing note is based on the recent IASC Protection Policy review led by HPG (ibid.), as well as its three-year programme of research and policy engagement on the role of advocacy in strengthening the protection of conflict-affected civilians (Metcalfe-Hough, 2022). This research was complemented by a small number of targeted interviews with current and former humanitarian leaders, as well as with people who work on leadership and protection, to ensure it is situated within current policy and operational dialogue and practice.