Humanitarian Assistance: What are the components of relief?

This is a summary and reflection of two papers on Sphere Standards. Walker deals with the primary objectives of this coordinated effort and Young revises it through food security lenses. A brief reflection on the main position of each paper follows the summary of Walker’s and Young’s main propositions. Walker points out that the objective of Sphere is to introduce quality standards. He claims that these standards are meant to improve the quality of humanitarian action and move it from supply and assistance approaches to rights and dignity standpoints. Local communities and NGOs should be in charge of setting these standards; however, Walker acknowledges that this is not in itself a coherent group of interests. MSF exemplifies the suspicion over the international effort for standardizing global efforts towards humanitarian assistance. MSF’s concerns lie in the lack of solidarity, the neglect of the protection role, and the shift from value-driven business to supply-driven solutions. Even though MSF initially objected to Sphere goals, it later joined the effort and Walker states that the main success of these minimum standards to coordinate humanitarian efforts worldwide was the impact it had on the daily work of NGOs operations by forcing them to review their principles and missions. Young’s paper reviews the Sphere system. It assesses how this revision process incorporated the values of human rights -- dignity, non-discrimination, impartiality, and participation – into Sphere’s minimum standards, specifically in food security. Along with Walker, Young concludes that Sphere and its revision process have done more good than bad to the coordinated effort to shift humanitarian assistance from a supply-driven approach to a human rights valued institutional decision-making process which aims to secure food for all after disasters. The critique of Walker’s and Young’s ideas starts from the different interpretations of what standard is, when it is needed, and how it can implemented. Standard is commonly understood as an established, accepted, and dominant set of rules that dictate decisions and operations. The positive interpretation of this definition is that standard provides predictability and security for the myriad of players investing their resources in a risky environment. However, standard is also presented as a rigid and robust force that prevents stakeholders -- and oftentimes the communities themselves -- to adapt and take control of ground challenges. In the case of Sphere’s Minimum Standards, both papers emphasize the positive aspects of standards from the perspective of the major international humanitarian aid non-governmental institutions. The participation of local communities -- even though briefly mentioned in Walker’s paper -- was neither adequately highlighted nor explained how it should be systematically incorporated in the decision-making processes. Another aspect of both papers that deserve some scrutiny is the attempt to incorporate human rights into standard processes. Before this incorporation takes place, it is necessary to discuss the ability of international agencies to enforce human rights across nations. From past and recent events, it is clear that human rights is a validated rationale only for those regions and countries that lack strong political ties with the most wealthy and powerful international network. Therefore, advocating the incorporation of human rights into decision-making models governed by “widely-agreed” rules deviate the attention of the international and local communities to the real causes of humanitarian crises and advocate temporary solutions to complex problems. Lack of governance led by internal political issues and external economic interests explains most of contemporary human induced disasters. The complexity of adopting standard procedures and enforcing human rights must encourage humanitarian assistance stakeholders to adopt a realistic rather than a normative position on public health outbreaks. There is nothing Machiavellian in acknowledging that several institutions and individuals largely benefit from humanitarian crises and that their main interest lies in securing part of a 160 billion dollars valued-market. The challenge is how to generate and conduct a pragmatic discussion on the effective allocation of financial and human resources in areas of desperate need of aid -- regardless of underlying political and economic interests. References Young, Helen, Anna Taylor, Sally-Anne Way, Jennifer Leaning. “Linking Rights and Standards: The process of developing “Rights-Based” Minimum Standards on Food Security, Nutrition and Food Aid.” Disasters, v. 28(2), 2004, pp 142-159. Walker, Peter, and Susan Purdin. “Birthing Sphere” Disasters, 2004, v. 28(2), pp 100-111. Walsh, S. “Hauling”, Code 7, 2010.