Humanitarian governance: accountability, advocacy, alternatives

How is humanitarian governance evolving in response to global and local changes, and how do civil society actors and crisis-affected people shape humanitarian governance from below using accountability and advocacy?Growing humanitarian need, increasing population displacement, and expanding impact of climate-related disasters multiply the challenges of preserving life and dignity in crisis-affected populations.

At-risk populations are increasingly difficult to capture using the traditional categories of disaster/conflict victims and refugees, and humanitarian governance (attempting to govern individuals and groups to preserve life and reduce human suffering) is in flux. Changes in humanitarian governance include a paradigm shift to resilience and localization of aid reforms.

As yet, these changes and their consequences are poorly understood.Through a dynamic research programme engaging at-risk populations and civil society actors, the project pursues the objectives of 1) understanding changes in humanitarian governance; 2) clarifying advocacy and accountability relations in changing landscapes of humanitarian governance; 3) identifying variations in humanitarian governance and revealing how they relate to key variables, including the type of crisis and the local context; 4) providing conceptual tools for analysing variations of humanitarian governance; and 5) addressing inequalities in humanitarian studies.Using a mixed-methods approach combining conceptual work on ethics and humanitarianism with four case studies using qualitative and participatory methods, the project will explore how the interplay of actors and contextual factors produce variations in humanitarian governance, with a special focus on how crisis-affected populations and civil society actors use accountability and advocacy to influence the system.

The project has the potential to transform humanitarian studies and to impact protection and service delivery in humanitarian emergencies worldwide.