How to turn a vision into reality

How can we utilise Ban Ki Moon’s vision to change the realities for those affected by war and disaster?

CARE’s response to the Secretary General's World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) report by Gareth Price-Jones, Senior Humanitarian Policy and Advocacy Coordinator

We at CARE are delighted with the Secretary General’s report. It’s challenging for both politicians and humanitarians, and includes or develops a lot of what we’ve been calling for over the last few months. We like the “grand bargain”, love the gauntlet thrown down to leaders around the need for political action. The sections on anticipating crises building in prevention and resilience and the proposals for breaking down the divide between development and humanitarian responses make a lot of sense. As an agency who sees gender as fundamental issue, we’re very pleased with the paragraphs on this topic (paragraphs 77, 94, 97), and it makes perfect sense that it connects all of the four major policy agreements from last year, including the Paris Agreement on climate change. Without the action on climate change that the Secretary General (SG) has long championed, today’s crises will pale in significance compared to the climate disasters of tomorrow.

One slight gap from our perspective (also noted by others) is support for more independent routes for aid. The report can be read as being more focused on the formal IASC actors than securing humanitarian space for all impartial and independent humanitarian actors (see para 137 and other references to 'the UN and partners') – but that's a rather technical critique.

Though we think the report is excellent, there’s still a whacking great challenge to the WHS process that the Secretary General has yet to address: Why does he think behaviour might change as a result of the summit? Governments such as those in Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Burundi, South Sudan, Central African Republic and Syria are not going to change their behaviour just because of a summit or because the UN demands it, when their own political analysis suggests a different path.

Driving change

Likewise: What will change the behaviour of the UN agencies and NGOs?

Looking at the former first, CARE sees two main drivers for significant change in political behaviour. The first is a developing sense of what’s in UN member States’ own enlightened self-interest. As the refugee crisis has shown, no state is insulated from the impacts of the current disrespect of International Humanitarian Law (IHL). Not only do they have to deal with refugee flows and greater demands on both military and aid budgets, but internally politics, notions of rule of law and core freedoms and elements of national identity are devastatingly weakened when it becomes common for politicians to publicly claim that the scale of a problem or the need to fight terrorists justifies abandoning hard-won treaties and international norms. States like Germany and Sweden have not been naïve – they understand that closing borders in a world with 60 million displaced doesn't stop refugees, it just diverts them, or halts them to create even worse problems down the line. We need only look back scant decades to see where such poor policy decisions can lead.

The second main driver is a healthy respect for the consequences. If such behaviour translates into serious penalties imposed by the vast majority of fellow nations – be they reputational, diplomatic, economic or even military – then we can have some hope of behaviours changing. Of course, this won't always work. There are few levers that anyone has to influence the likes of Al Qaeda and Daesh, and even for established states the domestic payoffs for bad behaviour may well be seen to outweigh international penalties. But even in these situations, strong global consensus that penalties must be real will shift the calculations being made in presidential palaces. Realpolitik will often trump doing the right thing, but unified and strong leadership across the world can make the two align.

In terms of the humanitarian agencies part of the deal, why haven't we changed? Well, in reality we have, with many agencies already joining up their development and humanitarian programs and planning multi-year strategies and programs, but it’s not consistent. The Secretary-General highlights in his report that the humanitarian system is resistant to change – as an insider in that system I suspect it’s because many of us have yet to see an alternative we genuinely believe will improve humanitarian outcomes. It’s not simply because we're trying to protect our own jobs.

This shouldn't be surprising. Humanitarians tend to be highly motivated by the impact of their work rather than by our pay-checks, but we work in the most challenging environments imaginable. Recruiting and retaining skilled and creative staff willing and able to turn the SG’s vision into reality under such circumstances is difficult. Often it’s all stretched and stressed managers can do to meet the bare minimums – never mind deliver the best practice outlined in both the Synthesis report and the SG's Report. At the least we must be more open about our potential conflicts of interests as multi-million, or even multi-billion, dollar organisations.

Reasons to hope

So what might change this? There are a number of reasons to hope. Firstly, the promise of more, and more predictable resources will enable us to have greater impact. It’s easy to fear that more money will just bloat up what’s dismissed as the 'aid industry', so it’s important to hold us accountable to key indicators for how we spend it, as donors and parliaments increasingly do. Equally essential is to keep it light touch. It’s impossible to keep your overhead costs down when a single country program like the one I led in Bangladesh has 50-100 reports to deliver per year, perhaps 15 external audits to manage, around 100 visitors to host, and needs a full time staff member to secure government approvals and another to manage donor reporting.

Secondly, we're getting much better at winnowing out what's really important, and what's nice to have. Initiatives like the CHS and the new certification initiative help managers focus and deliver, and ensure time is freed up for the essential conversations with affected people that should drive all our decision-making.

So what does this mean for the commitments that are needed from politicians and humanitarians at the summit in May to change these realities? The first stage of many of these commitments are already outlined in the WHS work to date, but in CARE’s view they need to be taken one step further.

So the widely supported call for harmonised donor reporting must be translated into commitments to have open conversations between parliaments and donor ministries about to what extent they can subordinate their need for specific accountability in their national context to a wider global norm on what are the best indicators of impact.

States could discuss how a commitment to upholding IHL should translate into consistently placing personal travel bans and financial sanctions on all individuals implicated in IHL violations until they have been cleared by a credible national or international court of law, or establishing an independent investigatory body and explicitly giving it the authority to investigate (though not act upon) the actions of your own and allied armed forces.

INGOs could commit to regularly asking states who have not acceded to key treaties why they haven't, and as the SG calls for in paragraph 69, States can commit to doing so with urgency

UN Agencies and NGOs must discuss how humanitarian career paths can ensure we get the leaders of tomorrow we need, and publicly adopt key performance indicators that get staff promoted for collaborative working and engagement with affected communities over those who prioritise flying an agency flag. We must finally put a stop to the persecution of staff who highlight weaknesses and shortcomings, and ensure they are instead promoted when they speak out appropriately. They could commit to being more transparent about their recruitment principles, and what their salary comparators are.

Most importantly, all of us in May need to step up as inspiring leaders. We all need to state and champion principles and approaches that we all know are difficult to deliver in the realities of an earthquake or a vicious, no-holds-barred conflict. As the Secretary General notes in the report, the vision is not enough, but it’s still an essential part of driving change. At the end of the day, both the political system and the humanitarian system are human artefacts driven by human beings, and the inspiring vision outlined in the SG's Report can go a long way when supported strongly by global leaders and by the UN Member States they lead.