NGOs and UN Humanitarian Action

There is increasing focus on operational and organisational cooperation between NGOs and the UN system, not on the role of the military or the media, but in the humanitarian response system. Operational NGOs in particular have been increasing their activity in policy and advocacy work in complex emergencies. In Africa, the Balkans, the Middle East and the former Soviet Union, the growing number of failed states has produced a widening level of chaos to which NGOs and the UN have tried to respond. These complex humanitarian emergencies are defined by five common characteristics: the deterioration or complete collapse of central government authority; ethnic or religious conflict and widespread human rights abuses; episodic food insecurity, frequently deteriorating into mass starvation; massive unemployment and net decreases in GNP; and population movements of displaced people and refugees escaping natural disaster, or conflicts. There is an argument that these emergencies have caused a shift of increasingly scarce resources away from sustainable development to life saving humanitarian interventions. Relief NGOs frequently specialise in one or more of the five activities that are commonly understood to compose the releif discipline: food distribution, shelter, water, sanitation and medical care. To this may be added the rehabilitation efforts to bring a society traumatised by a complex emergency to minimum self sufficiency: animal husbandry, agriculture and primary health care. The larger development NGOs such as Oxfam GB have the added advantage in many complex emergencies of having had development programmes and staff to run them in the countries before the onset of the emergency. This advantage gives them a familiarity with the culture, ethnic groups and development programmes of the country as well as with indigenous staff.

Since the Ethiopian famine of 1985 - a watershed event for most of the major NGOs that work in relief - a quiet revolution has taken place in doctrine and practice between releif and development. Traditional relief efforts were commodity-driven and logistically based, with little programmatic, economic or developmental thought given to how the relief effort might be more than simply pushing down death rates and saving lives. As a general proposition, NGOs make an effort in good faith - given t he altruistic motivation of most of their workers nad managers - to invovle the people they serve in the field with how resources are spent. Community participation I s an elemental axiom of NGO work. Thanks to dissemination, advocacy, training and follow up among and by international NGOs, the Sphere standards and the Red Cross and NGO Code of Conduct have achieved centre stage position in the awareness of many organisations, including Western donor administrations and UN agencies. Although staff and associates of the Sphere project emphasise that the Sphere Charter is as important as the ‘minimum standards’, in practice the technical delivery minimum standards are more actively used by aid workers than the Charter with its very brief references to the Refugee Convention, Human Rights Law and International Humanitarian Law. While the Refugee Convention may be a daily reference for UNHCR, for example, it is neither well known nor regularly used by international NGOs (often the operational partners of UNHCR) – hence the creation of the Reach Out project to familiarise aid workers across the globe with the Refugee Convention.

There is a much wider range of relevant yardsticks or benchmarks that can – and sometimes must – be used to plan, review or ‘judge’ the quality of a performance and to hold agencies to account. These yardsticks have different status. An organisation is not obliged to accept an inter-agency benchmark and some are of the view that they are only bound by legal references and their own internal yardsticks.
1. International and national legal references: These spell out rights and obligations. Of particular relevance here is the constitution of a country. While typically little known to the overwhelming majority of people, a constitution spells out rights and obligations within the national framework. In certain circumstances, it can possibly be a more powerful tool for advocacy and accountability in the country where humanitarian action takes place than an international convention or an interagency ‘code’.
2. National policy framework: National policy may be perceived by some as inappropriate in certain crisis situations, or even counter-productive, but it is
preferable that aid agencies argue their case with the national authorities rather than simply bypass them. The latter practice undermines the credibility of local authorities and also contributes to the perceived confusion of roles and responsibilities that aid agencies then subsequently lament.

3. Inter-agency references: Some refer to rights and principles. As such they have no formal legal status but are fairly widely accepted. They can be given a more authoritative status by the national authorities. Some countries, like Colombia, have
incorporated the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement into national law.
Uganda has used them to develop a National Policy Framework on Internal Displacement.

A series of other guidelines, developed on an inter-agency basis, refer more to good practices.
5. Each organisation also has a series of internal references, ranging from mission and values statements to policy statements and practical manuals, which it has developed internally and against which it can plan, monitor and review its performance. Finally, there are situational references that can be used as yardsticks: project agreements (with donors but also withintended beneficiaries), operational
plans, etc.

Benchmarks for humanitarian action

■ International Human rights Law
■ International Humanitarian Law
■ 1951 Refugee Convention
■ Convention on the Rights of the Child
■ Laws of Country of Association
■ Constitution of country of operation
■ Laws of country of operation
■ Disaster policy and management framework
■ Sectoral policies
■ Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement
■ Red Cross and NGO Code of Conduct
■ People-In-Aid Code
■ Guidelines for the Protection of Refugee Women
■ Guidelines on Older People in Disasters and Humanitarian Crises
■ Good Practice Reviews
■ Sphere sectoral standards
■ Local Capacities for Peace
■ Coordination on protocol
■ Values and principles
■ Policies and procedures
■ Code of personal conduct
■ Sectoral manuals
■ Operational plans
■ Project agreements

Sources:
www.oxfam.org.uk
www.sphere.org
www.reachout.ch
www.dec.org.uk
www.act-intl.org
www.hapgeneva.org