Linking short-term relief and long-term sustainable development has long been an important policy ambition. Yet too often, humanitarian responses in the face of disasters become detached from building and strengthening livelihood systems. How can this disconnection be solved in practice?
The UK’s recent International Development White Paper aspires to a more joined-up approach to social protection, climate, humanitarian and disaster risk management, in order to help anticipate and better respond to future shocks. A commitment of 15 percent of bilateral humanitarian provision to building resilience and adaptation is certainly welcome. Likewise, anticipating future shocks and building resilience features as one of three core objectives of the UK’s Humanitarian Framework.
A focus on ‘resilience’ is increasingly central. But how can resilience help to connect humanitarian assistance with long-term development? This is a central challenge for the future.
Building resilience from below
Even when responding to immediate needs, too often humanitarian assistance can undermine the resilience of local livelihood systems. This often emerges from a lack of understanding of such systems, and of how vulnerabilities emerge amongst different people. A renewed focus on ‘sustainable livelihoods’ – for many years a central feature of UK development aid – is essential in rethinking how humanitarian responses can be redesigned to support, not undermine, long-term development.
This requires an interrogation of the much-used term ‘resilience’. Resilience conventionally refers to the ability to ‘bounce back’ from a shock, but how this is done, and by whom, is crucial. Drawing on local capacities and knowledges is vital, rather than relying on instrumental, external project interventions. This means enhancing forms of ‘vernacular resilience’ – resilience that’s embedded in people’s cultures and social practices – and supporting the work of local ‘reliability professionals’ and their networks, instead of imposing inappropriately framed ‘resilience projects’ on local communities.
Resilience and reliability in the Horn of Africa
A concrete example can be found in the dryland pastoral areas of the Horn of Africa. In these areas, numerous billboards announce ‘resilience projects’ of various types, focusing on developing irrigated agriculture, poultry projects, beekeeping and other forms of ‘livelihood diversification’.
Many of these assume that pastoral livelihoods need to be transformed due to recurrent crises in these regions. Yet drought emergencies persist in these areas, despite decades of aid intervention. Maybe such interventions are missing their mark?
While humanitarian assistance is clearly vital in times of extreme stress, responses can be enhanced through building the capacities of pastoralists to survive droughts and rebuild livelihoods afterwards. Such efforts must draw on local capacities, including local early warning, anticipatory action and response systems, rather than assuming that pastoral systems must be abandoned and replaced.
Here, local ‘reliability professionals’ become important. These people are essential in enhancing the capacity to survive droughts – providing early warning, facilitating movement, keeping the peace, supplying water and fodder or enhancing market opportunities.
Such professionals usually go unrecognised by outsiders, but they are essential within and across communities. They work in networks, embedded in local social relationships, and link with outsiders within NGOs and government. Instead of designing ‘resilience’ from outside, potentially undermining it through inappropriate projects, building resilience from below becomes an important alternative for humanitarian and development assistance in disaster and crisis settings.
Rethinking aid delivery: taking uncertainty seriously
There are many opportunities to build on these ideas. When assistance is offered through multi-year programmes, complementary humanitarian and social protection channels can be designed and delivered in ways that help people not only to survive but also help them rebuild livelihoods after crises. The design and delivery of such programmes, however, needs to take account of the uncertain and complex conditions of crisis and conflict.
Humanitarian assistance is still often dominated by the assumption that single disaster events can be predicted and therefore managed. Many current efforts focus on sophisticated early warning prediction, complex insurance products and standardised protocols for aid delivery.
Yet most crises and disasters are multi-dimensional and uncertain. They are embedded in complex livelihood systems, where the effects of climate shocks, conflict and displacement intersect.
In these settings, including in places such as Mali, Sudan, Gaza, Syria and Yemen, future outcomes and their likelihoods are unknown and cannot be predicted. The most carefully prepared humanitarian response plans and strategies come undone when uncertainties are not considered.
Strategies for uncertainty
When uncertainty, rather than risk, becomes the focus for humanitarian and social protection responses at scale, different priorities emerge.
Under uncertain conditions, experimentation, learning and improvisation become especially important. Many field-based humanitarian and development workers of course must experiment and improvise to deliver essential support, often under very difficult circumstances. Yet, there is little official encouragement of them doing so, given standard operating procedures and financing approaches.
To respond to inevitable uncertainties, learning and adaptation must be incentivised, supported and rewarded, including through more flexible advance financing systems that can respond to uncertain conditions.
Crucial to experimentation, improvisation and accumulated learning is also having the ability to fail. Organisations must and can do much more to encourage learning not only from ‘best practices’ and ‘what works’ but also what has not worked and, indeed, failed.
Linking humanitarian assistance and long-term development
What then should the priorities be for reforming humanitarian assistance so that it enhances rather than undermines long-term development? As crises proliferate in many places, the weight on humanitarian channels is growing ever larger.
The following are some priorities emerging from IDS research:
- Livelihoods: Understanding local livelihood systems and designing approaches to relief assistance and long-term support that are attuned to local livelihoods. Climate funds earmarked for adaptation and resilience building must be linked to wider development efforts and centred on supporting livelihoods. This will require the revival of ‘livelihood approaches’ for project appraisal, design and evaluation at the centre of climate, humanitarian development responses.
- Resilience: Rooting ‘resilience’ projects in local contexts, aiming at building resilience from below through recognising and supporting ‘reliability professionals’ and their networks for early warning and disaster response. This will require reconceptualising resilience and rethinking standard resilience projects too often imposed from outside.
- Uncertainty: Moving away from assumptions of risk-based prediction, planning and management – and so standard early warning and insurance approaches – to embracing uncertainty in the operationalisation of humanitarian assistance, social protection and development projects. This will require the recognition of adaptive learning, experimentation and learning lessons from failure in organisations.
- Localisation: New forms of financing for disasters and crises that allow for localisation and early action, where real powers to respond are entrusted locally. This will require locally-held contingency funds and advance-funding mechanisms that can support local responses, rather than relying on late and inappropriate relief funds.
Taken together, these priorities suggest how humanitarian responses to disasters can contribute to longer-term goals of building and strengthening livelihoods. This requires new ways of thinking and practice – learning from local knowledge and responses, paying attention to context, and recognising uncertainty in how disasters and crises unfold.
