Future humanitarian issues
This section suggests the types of changes that humanitarian policy-makers can assume will be likely to occur over the next decade and a half. This seven point vision ranges across a broad spectrum of likely developments in the humanitarian sector, from changing dynamics and dimensions of humanitarian threats to new types of humanitarian actors and new types of likely interventions – click on the titles to show/hide information:
[1] changing nature of humanitarian crises
- Uncertainty, rapid change and complexity will increasingly be the hallmarks of humanitarian crises in the foreseeable future.
- The foreseeable future will reflect new sets of sudden and slow-onset crisis agents, including technological systems failures, large-scale industrial and chemical collapse, nuclear seepage, water scarcity and pandemics.
- Profound transformations in state systems over the next two decades will mean that more and more people will live in so-called “no-man’s lands” where governments have little capacity or interest in providing security and social safety nets over large portions of state territory. Such people will survive on the margins, and their lives and livelihoods will fall prey to the most minimal changes in living conditions.
- Too little incentive is given by the donor community to anticipating the types of crises that might be.
[2] changing dynamics of humanitarian crises
- More and more future crisis will be interactive, global and synchronous.
- The inter-relationship between natural and man-made crises (eg “complex emergencies”) will become more overt as natural events trigger political turmoil which in turn will lead to violent conflict and more natural disasters.
- Humanitarian crises will become increasingly global. Pandemics are but one manifestation of the globalisation of humanitarian crises. Pollutants from eroding nuclear storage facilities is but another.
- A further change in the dynamics of humanitarian crises will include what can be called “synchronous failures” or the simultaneous collapse of infrastructures and economic systems that will rapidly threaten means of survival for large numbers of people, particularly in urban conurbations.
[3] changing nature of the affected
- The nature of affected populations will significantly change over the next decade in at least three ways. In the first place, the affected will no longer represent the “hapless South”.
- A second aspect of the emerging disaster affected is that they will be more and more urban. Over the next half-decade, approximately 54% of the world’s population will live in megalopolises, approximately 60% of whom will live in overcrowded, unsanitary and impoverished conditions. Provision of assistance to these emerging vulnerable will be far more complex than assisting rural populations.
- Thirdly, large-scale affected populations will suffer from long-term, agonising afflictions arising out of such disaster agents as chemical and nuclear exposure. Like HIV/AIDS victims now, their ability to survive will be limited, but their need for relief from suffering will be relatively long term.
[4] changing types of humanitarian actors
- The private sector will play a growing role in the “humanitarian cycle”. This private sector’s involvement will be underpinned by the fact that it will be forced to protect its operating environment in situations where conventional state structures no longer can provide minimum safety-nets or security.
- The sheer dimensions of future crises will require more campaign-like approaches to relief assistance that will see the military not only provide support to the civilian sector, but on occasion take the lead in “martial law” type operations.
[5] changing instruments in the humanitarian toolkit
- Prevention and preparedness as well as response will increasingly depend upon economic instruments rather than conventional food, shelter, water and clothing inputs.
- The humanitarian toolkit of the future will include remittances from what today are called the Diaspora, and will increasingly be dependent upon insurance-based schemes, covering food security as well as health.
- In most relief operations, one area that has been sadly lacking is assistance to deal with trauma. Psycho-social issues in the world of modern relief will have to play a much larger role, though its “delivery” is far more complex and requires different types of skills than those needed for standard relief provisions.
- The capacity to anticipate and monitor crises through communications technology and satellite imagery will be just two types of scientific contributions to the future humanitarian toolkit, while at the same time the humanitarian toolkit will be also contain far more sensitive social anthropological and social-psychological methodologies than have been used in the past;
- Overall greater attention needs to be given to innovations – scientific, technological – that can mitigate the impact of disaster threats.
[6] changing types of humanitarian worker
- There will be a significant decline in so-called “international” relief workers as ethnic and cultural sensitivities and lack of security make greater reliance upon local relief workers essential. This shift will be compounded by two intersecting trends in the relief world. The first is that those who are “internationals” may well be required to deal with humanitarian crises nearer to home, and secondly the humanitarian instincts and funds of today’s major donors may decline as operational environments become too hazardous and traditional donor inputs, eg. food surpluses and currency stability no longer can be relied upon.
- A great deal of the technical expertise which internationals had offered the authorities as well as the affected in the past will be readily available to local institutions and their staff. Ironically the relief worker of the future – similar to the diplomats of yore – will have to act as bridges across cultures and donor institutions, more able to translate needs and ensure accountability than directly administering assistance.
[7] new standards of accountability
- The interest of the conventional governmental donor community in providing humanitarian assistance as one understands it today will decline when compared to the level of interest and expenditure over the past twenty years. There are many reasons for this, including the economic pressures that donors will face in a decade’s time, the alternative commercial opportunities that assets such as food surpluses will provide, the aforementioned difficulties with operating environments, the related decline of perceived neutrality, impartiality and independence as valued principles and the fundamental changes in the types of assistance that will be required.
- Two such possible explanations for a decline in donor interests and commitment will be an increase in accountability and litigation. In other words, the days of the well-intentioned but haphazard response to human suffering will become subjects of litigation by governments, authorities and even the affected who may suffer more than benefit from international intervention. In that sense, litigation is an aspect of globalisation which may strengthen accountability but not necessarily the commitment of humanitarian workers.
