IX-b. International Humanitarian Assistance
Many people around the world suffer as a result of armed conflict, genocide, exploitation, and disasters of different kinds. In some cases the international community provides humanitarian assistance in the form of food, health care, and shelter to alleviate their suffering. The system under which international humanitarian assistance (IHA) is provided has become increasingly effective, significantly reducing the misery. However, there is room for improvement, especially with regard to the targeting of humanitarian assistance. In a world full of people with many different kinds of needs, where should the resources that are available for humanitarian assistance be used? Who should be helped? The argument presented here is that the system for providing international humanitarian assistance could be managed more effectively if it were based on application of human rights principles. In particular, its management should be based on the understanding that in some circumstances people have specific rights to assistance.
The concern here is not with the radical social change that may be needed to prevent suffering in the world, but rather it is about the need to relieve suffering immediately. The focus here is on symptomatic relief, not on the roots of the problems. The premise is that while we work to forecast and prevent future crises, we should not neglect the many severe crises that are currently ongoing.
At the global level the lead agency for IHA is the United Nations Department of Humanitarian Affairs. Other global organizations such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the World Food Program, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations play major roles. The International Committee for the Red Cross plays a major role in armed conflict situations. Many international nongovernmental organizations, such as Care and M�decins sans Fronti�res, are actively involved in international humanitarian assistance. There are several countries that are major donors of humanitarian assistance, donating both directly and through international governmental and civil society organizations. In the United States, the lead agency is the Bureau for Humanitarian Response (BHR), and under it, the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA), in the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
There are many different kinds of assistance. The focus here is specifically on humanitarian assistance, defined here as assistance whose primary motivation is to provide relief for people in situations of extreme need. It can be provided by individuals, local and national governments, and international governmental and civil society organizations. International humanitarian assistance may be private or public; that is, it may be supplied either by private agencies (civil society organizations), or by governmental (public) agencies. Governmental agencies often work with and through civil society organizations, sometimes on a contract basis.
Frequently the humanitarian motivation is mixed with other motivations. IHA may be used to strengthen political alliances or to increase sales of domestic products. Governments may provide international food aid not only to help others but also to provide an outlet for the nation’s agricultural surpluses, and thus provide assistance to their agricultural sectors. In some cases, humanitarian motivations may be claimed in order to justify actions wholly motivated in other ways. Nevertheless, no matter how difficult it may be to discern in concrete situations, humanitarian assistance is understood here as action driven primarily by compassion, by concern for the well-being of others who are in extreme need.
Foreign assistance agencies and analysts sometimes count humanitarian assistance as a subcategory of development assistance, but it is useful to distinguish the two. Humanitarian assistance is mainly about directly meeting extreme human needs, especially (though not exclusively) in the short term. In contrast, development assistance is mainly about economic benefits, usually in the long term, designed to help build self-sufficiency. Humanitarian assistance is often based on delivering immediate benefits in the form of food, medicine, or shelter.
Some analysts suggest that development assistance is humanitarian because "economic growth is bound to trickle down to the poor and the disadvantaged (Human Rights Council, p. 7)". However, in many development assistance efforts economic growth is the primary motivation, and the "trickle down"–if there is any–is incidental. Development assistance projects are assessed primarily in economic terms.
Worldwide, donor governments provide humanitarian assistance directly (bilaterally) or through UN and other international agencies (multilaterally). In 1993 donor nations that contributed to humanitarian assistance in three or more receiving countries were Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, the European Union, France, Germany, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, and the Vatican. Direct aid totaled more than $3 billion in 1992 and 1993. The largest direct donors were the United States, the European Union, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Some countries spread their resources around, while others concentrate on particular receiving countries. Saudi Arabia, for example, has contributed more than $200 million to Afghan refugees since 1980.
The major contributors of IHA are members of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). For the DAC group, in 1994:
Bilateral expenditure on emergency and disaster relief (excluding food) rose to an all-time high of $3.5 billion. If DAC Members’ emergency food aid and their contributions to multilateral institutions for emergency purposes are included, the total would be about $6 billion, or roughly ten percent of their total ODA [Official Development Assistance] expenditures.
Within this total, DAC Members’ expenditure on developing country refugees rose to $2.5 billion in 1994 (Michel, p. 95).
For DAC members, in 1993 emergency aid (other than food aid) was about 6.1 percent of their total Official Development Assistance. Food aid accounted for another 2.8 percent (Michel, p. A46).
Resources are limited, so choices must be made among different situations in which assistance might be offered. Where should IHA resources be used? The concern here is with situations in which IHA might be provided if the government of the target country welcomed it. It is not about the targeting of combat-oriented interventions, whether humanitarian or otherwise.
Targeting means systematically identifying options and then choosing among them in a reasoned way. One can imagine the preparation of a targeting map showing different instances of earthquakes, civil strife, epidemics, etc. that are potential candidates for IHA. Since different IHA providers specialize in different kinds of situations, each of them could prepare its map of potential targets, based on its specialization. Information could be assembled to show which of the situations received IHA and which did not. With more detailed information, one could show how much was being spent by each agency in each situation. With still more information, it might be possible to show how many lives were saved in each situation, and at what cost.
If there is to be a comprehensive map, clear categories of IHA situations must be established. The main categories used by the United States' BHR/OFDA are: earthquakes, civil strife, food shortages, fuel shortages, displaced persons, epidemics, cyclones, typhoons, floods, droughts, landslide, and volcano eruptions (U.S. Mission). Other agencies use broad categories and then finer subcategories. For example, some studies distinguish between manmade and natural disasters, and some further divide natural disasters into those that are geophysical (earthquakes, volcano eruptions), and those that are meteorological (cyclones, floods, droughts).
If we review, say, the annual reports of the major national and international agencies involved in IHA, we find that they don’t mesh together. Each of them has a different way of categorizing IHA situations. Sometimes, even within a single country (e.g., the U.S.), different agencies use different languages to talk about work they commonly label as humanitarian. There is nothing wrong with agencies having particular approaches and areas of specialization, but currently this partitioning is not the result of an orderly division of labor. The turf battles–whether to gain or to avoid specific areas of responsibility–have not been completed. If there is to be orderly targeting of IHA resources, potential IHA situations need to be identified in terms of well-defined, consistent, widely accepted, mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive categories. This is not simply an issue of linguistic orderliness; it is an important basis for effective policymaking.
It is not difficult to construct an orderly list of labels for IHA situations. However, if it is actually to be adopted, the system should be devised by the agencies themselves. The formulation of such a system would help to achieve a more coherent division of labor among the providers of IHA.
Some IHA agencies focus on "complex humanitarian emergencies," defined as internal conflicts with large-scale displacements of people, mass famine, and fragile or failing economic, political and social institutions". These are important situations. They get special attention largely because these pockets of instability can lead to serious regional security concerns. There is a problem, however, if it is suggested that complex humanitarian emergencies are the entire domain of IHA. This sort of misunderstanding can lead to the neglect of other important kinds of situations, especially the pockets of quiet suffering that continue on a chronic basis in several parts of the world. In the Indian state of Orissa hunger and poverty are so intense that families sell their children for small sums of money (Banerjee). In places such as Malawi, Niger, and Togo the disasters seem to have no beginning and no end.
Some agencies speak as if they were covering all of IHA when in fact they are selective, operating only in one specific area of the map of possibilities. There is a tendency to equate international humanitarian assistance with action taken under international humanitarian law (IHL), or action taken by the international Red Cross system, especially the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC). Similarly, some observers seem to assume that international humanitarian assistance takes place only in situations of armed conflict. This sort of shrinking of the domain of IHA can result not only in confusion of terminology but also in real neglect of some types of situations in which humanitarian assistance is needed.
The possibilities of gains through reallocation of resources are suggested by the grand totals. As the International Federation of the Red Cross counts things, "worldwide disasters, excluding war, kill over 150,000 people a year (International Federation, p. 124)". More than $3.5 billion a year is spent currently on IHA. At the same time we know that around twelve million children die each year before their fifth birthdays, most from a combination of malnutrition and disease. Yet the budget of the United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF) runs at only about one billion dollars a year. It is difficult to see how one could say that the pattern of chronic, massive child mortality is not a disaster.
What are the bases for targeting international humanitarian assistance? There is little explicit guidance. Assistance is now provided in some situations and not in other seemingly comparable situations. Why? Is there some common feature that distinguishes the cases that are neglected? Is the exclusion deliberate, or is it a matter of neglect? In examining targeting policy it is important to know not only where the IHA system has responded but also where there have been comparable situations in which no assistance has been provided. Some surveillance studies have been made to identify areas of potential need, but most have been issued only sporadically. All such studies have been selective, highlighting the interests of particular IHA providers.
There has not been any systematic global assessment of IHA operations and, as the International Federation of the Red Cross observes, the objectives of humanitarian assistance "have become more complex, opaque and confused since the end of the Cold War era (International Federation, p. 63)." What are potential IHA situations, and how can the effectiveness of IHA operations be assessed?
The International Federation for the Red Cross says "relief work is about the ‘bottom line’ of ensuring basic minimal necessities to keep people alive (International Federation, p. 47)." It might be useful for IHA agencies at all levels to formally adopt the view that the primary purpose of international humanitarian assistance is saving lives. If that is accepted we would see that IHA is potentially needed in any situation in which mortality risks are, or are likely to become, extraordinarily high. In this approach, disasters would be defined as life-threatening situations.
With this explicit focus, the effectiveness of any IHA operation would be estimated in terms of the number of lives saved. Where IHA is provided, the actual mortality rate would be compared with an estimate of the mortality rate that would have been likely in the absence of the IHA operation. The cost-effectiveness of such operations could be estimated in terms of the cost per life saved. With experience it should be possible to make reasonable estimates. Techniques of estimation could be borrowed from specialists who assess the effectiveness of public health interventions.
One could ask whether different allocations of funds across life-threatening situations might have resulted in more lives saved. One could also ask whether allocations for other purposes might have yielded greater social benefit if devoted to lifesaving.
Most of the guidelines available with regard to IHA now focus on the management of ongoing IHA situations. They say little about the selection of situations. Taking the core purpose of IHA to be saving lives would help in formulating targeting guidelines. Those who call in IHA would have to present the case that lives were at risk, and that assistance could substantially reduce that risk. With experience, guidelines could be formulated to help providers of IHA to more systematically assess and decide which situations to select.
Every organization has internal policy guidelines, whether formal or informal, to help direct its work. There is always some shared understanding within the organization regarding the organization’s goals and the means for achieving them. However, in addition to internal guidelines, organizations also need systematic pressure from the outside, some form of accountability. Without accountability, organizations tend to lose their sense of mission and go off track. Institutional arrangements to assure accountability can be provided through the creation of auditors, inspectors general, and the like.
One good mechanism of accountability is to give the customers, the purported beneficiaries of the agency’s service, a clear say. Agencies should make explicit commitments of service to their customers, and when there is a failure to deliver, the customers should have available a mechanism for lodging complaints and obtaining redress. People should have a right to particular services. If, for example, your mail carrier decides not to deliver your mail for a week, there should be a systematic way in which you can complain and have that situation corrected. You are not supposed to get mail only when the carrier feels like it. You are entitled to a specific level of service.
Under some conditions people should have a right to assistance. If I have a fire at my home, I want to know that I have a right to expect firefighters to come. The firefighters should have a counterpart obligation to come. These rights and obligations should be clearly specified in the law. There should be some rights to assistance in relation to IHA as well. Some analysts believe that such a right already exists in armed conflict situations, under international humanitarian law, but in my view the law is now so vague that it cannot be regarded as a real right (Sandoz 1992; Corten 1992; Guiding Principles 1993; Beigbeder 1991, Macalister-Smith 1985 ). Where there are clear rights to assistance there should be specifications regarding who has what obligations to provide assistance.
With entitlements the needy can know what sorts of assistance they are supposed to receive under particular circumstances. They should have some means of legal recourse, some means for lodging effective complaints, if they do not receive what is due them. Many public assistance (welfare) programs within nations are based on the principle that the needy have specific rights to assistance; they have an entitlement. Without such rules, public assistance is likely to be arbitrary, and used as a political tool by those in power.
In the global IHA system, accountability will not come from above. There will be no systematic accountability unless the providers of assistance themselves agree to it. Why should they agree? Accepting that the needy have specific rights, and thus the providers have specific obligations, would reduce the providers’ freedom of action. Why should IHA providers agree to a rights-based system? How can the granting of entitlements to the needy be viewed as advantageous to the providers of assistance?
The question of why donors would want to recognize that the needy have a right to assistance in some circumstances may be viewed as a special case of the broader question of why anyone, or any government, would want to recognize that others have human rights. The answer is based not on conceptions of narrow self interest but on some form of enlightened self interest. We all benefit from social order rather than anarchy. We recognize that in some circumstances we get better results when we limit our freedom. Anyone who joins an organization or signs a contract gives up some freedom in exchange for other kinds of benefits. The argument here is that an entitlements-based IHA system can achieve effectiveness, efficiency, and justice beyond what can be obtained with guidelines that do not include entitlements.
However, for a single donor nation, there would be no reason to agree that the needy in other countries have authoritative claims on its resources. The prospect has been considered and rejected by USAID:
Some favor an entitlement approach premised on a fundamental U.S. obligation to provide basic human needs to the vulnerable peoples of the world. Universal rights to health and education have become a byword in these circles, the implication being that the U.S., as the world’s wealthiest nation, should be the provider of last resort. . . . Americans like to see progress around the world, but our commitment to doing anything about it falls far short of any consensus on global entitlements to automatic U.S. aid (USAID 1989).
But consider this argument with the term "international community" substituted for "U.S." While it might not make sense for the U.S. alone to shoulder the burden, a system of entitlements would make sense for the global IHA system taken as a whole, at least for some kinds of extreme circumstances.
The international community should accept some level of obligation to assure the well-being of all people, at least up to some minimal level. The world should look after its most vulnerable just as national governments are expected to look after the most vulnerable within their particular jurisdictions. If we see looking after the weakest among us as a common, shared global responsibility, and not just a U.S. responsibility, the proposal of entitlements becomes much more palatable.
The IHA donor countries as a group should adopt a collective, self-imposed obligation to provide assistance to the most needy under specific extreme conditions. They should commit themselves to creating a global "rescue squad" which would operate under specific obligations. The reasoning is similar to that behind the creation of a village fire brigade. There was a time when villages had no systematic fire protection. If someone’s house started to burn, he would run out and yell for help. The help might come or it might not. During and after the fire people would help out, sometimes providing emergency shelter, and possibly offering funds to rebuild.
Each incident was treated as if it were an entirely unpredictable surprise. However, after each incident, procedures for managing fires would be discussed and reconsidered. After a while it was recognized that such incidents occurred often, and institutional arrangements–fire equipment and fire brigades–were set in place, on standby, in anticipation of future fires. Community members willingly contributed to the effort. These contributions were motivated in part by the recognition that each individual would benefit from this protection. They would benefit directly or indirectly. Even though the need for protection may have been uneven (some had solid brick houses while others had flimsy wood houses), all recognized that having institutionalized fire protection made the village as a whole a better place to live.
An important element of this story is that the fire brigade was required to respond to all fire alarms. It was not free to choose, responding only to fires in brick houses, or only to owners of particular ethnic or political affiliations. The brigade’s responsibility was to the community as a whole, not to any selected segment of it. To assure that there would be no such discrimination, it was established in the rules that any villager was entitled to have the services of the brigade if needed. Anyone not served properly could bring a complaint to the village council. On finding that a complaint was warranted, the complainant might be awarded damages, and the rules regulating the fire brigade’s operations might be tightened up. Thus there was a system of accountability to assure that the fire brigade performed its mission.
The global system of international humanitarian assistance is beginning to be institutionalized. However, there is still a need to negotiate procedures and policies anew with almost every incident. Rather than stationing substantial standby resources "at the ready" throughout the world, new resources must be solicited with each incident. The rules of engagement are being standardized, but slowly.
The global IHA system is evolving slowly because some national participants want to maintain their own control, and do not want to be subjected to a centralized authoritative command structure. This difficult political problem might be resolved partly by working out a clear division of areas of responsibility and authority for different aspects of IHA. There already exists some informal partitioning of responsibility, with some providers concentrating on disasters in certain geographic areas or in countries with particular cultural affinities.
There is a need for clarity regarding the IHA obligations not only of individual nations but also of the global community taken as a whole. On the basis of the fire brigade analogy, the providers of global IHA should collectively agree that there are some kinds of situations to which they must respond collectively, through joint action. They can do this by creating a standing institutional arrangement to provide rapid and effective responses, a global rescue squad. If it is to maintain its effectiveness, that institutional arrangement should be held accountable, based on the idea that people in certain kinds of disaster situations are entitled to specific services. If the required service is not provided, there should be some forum in which the disaster victims or their representatives could voice their complaints.
Structurally, the fire brigade analogy here is a variation of Garrett Hardin’s "tragedy of the commons" (Hardin). It is based on his insight that in some situations we benefit from arrangements of mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon. That is the best institutional mechanism we have for balancing the fundamental political tension between the desire for freedom and the desire for order.
The international community should systematically recognize global obligations to protect the most vulnerable. The UN’s Department of Humanitarian Affairs, the International Committee for the Red Cross, the World Food Program, the United Nation’s Children’s Fund, the World Health Organization, and many other international governmental and civil society organizations have begun to establish an effective global IHA system. That system could be strengthened by systematically recognizing that the international community, as a whole, has specific obligations to provide IHA.
It has been argued here that, as a matter of principle, some people under some conditions ought to have a recognized legal right to assistance. Such rights should be recognized both within nations and internationally. While specific designs cannot be elaborated here, it may be useful to suggest some ways in which such rights could be implemented.
One approach would be to focus on children’s mortality. Under current policy:
The UNICEF programme budget in each country is allocated according to three criteria: under-five mortality rate (the annual number of deaths of children under five per 1,000 births); income level (GNP per capita); and the size of the child population (UNICEF Annual Report 1996, p. 81).
Although UNICEF allocates its resources on the basis of these clear guidelines, and publishes the amounts allocated to each country, the receiving countries cannot claim they are entitled to these sums. They have no legal recourse if they should receive less than they feel is due to them, and the amounts vary from year to year because the contributions made by national governments are voluntary. The system could be strengthened by establishing that the countries with the worst child mortality rates have a right to at least a minimal level of assistance. The donor countries could meet in a kind of anticipatory pledging conference. At this conference they could commit to providing at least a specified level of support every year for, say, the twenty countries with the worst child mortality rates in the world. The obligation on the part of the donors could be firmed up by having them agree to contribute in accordance with an agreed formula based on factors such as gross national product and population size.
Policies with regard to IHA are most fully developed in relation to armed conflict situations. International humanitarian law provides the framework, and the ICRC serves as the recognized lead agency for humanitarian assistance in such situations. The ICRC should continue to press for fuller articulation of victims’ rights to assistance and the international community’s obligations to provide assistance in armed conflict situations.
There is still a great deal to be done to improve IHA in conflict situations. Curiously, however, there is even more to be done in regard to non-conflict situations. Although such situations are inherently easier to address, there is a need for much more attention to IHA in non-conflict (or post-conflict) situations. For example, while often there is extensive and generous assistance in cases of natural disaster, there is little clarity about the principles underlying IHA decisionmaking in such cases. Similarly, much more attention needs to be given to appropriate policies, principles, and guidelines for providing assistance to refugees. The international community’s obligations are distinctive is in relation to refugees since refugees, by definition, are no longer under the care of their home states.
The global IHA system should be designed as a central agency managing a global rescue squad. The donors would sit on its board of directors, participating in the shaping of policy. The rules under which IHA operations would be undertaken would, in effect, articulate the rights of needy people to receive assistance under particular circumstances. To keep the agency on track, there should be some mechanism through which the needy or their representatives could complain and call for corrective action. The creation of such a global rescue squad, operating under explicit, agreed rules of engagement, would mark an important step forward in the governance of the global order.
Continue to IX-c. Strategizing the Reduction of Malnutrition
Subsection IX-b last updated on September 26, 1999