Changing Humanitarianism in a New World Order

Author: Dr. Dorothea Hilhorst, Sarian Jarosz, Mohammed Jelle, Mihir R. Bhatt, and Khayal Trivedi

2024 has been a particularly challenging year for the world—but especially for the humanitarian and development sector. In the wake of increased defence funding, military operations and an ongoing arms race, funding for the humanitarian sector has been drastically reduced in several parts of the world. The USAID freeze, one of the major causes and triggers of this change, led to the suspension of approximately 83% of USAID programs—a move described as a “seismic shock” to global humanitarian operations. But this is not the only challenge: similar cuts are affecting funding in the Netherlands, the UK, and other countries are lining up. During a recent panel discussion, humanitarian observatories from around the globe took stock of the situation to better understand the ramifications and devastation being caused to the international humanitarian order: from sectoral to system-wide changes.

Ongoing impact around the world

The amount of damage caused in numbers never portrays the intensity of the situation in a crisis-affected individual’s life. Because of the several freezes and cuts, we are witnessing hospitals in Myanmar sending people with tuberculosis back into the streets. The communal kitchens that used to feed people once a day, have stopped. Babies are being born with HIV again. There are no toilets anymore for refugees and immigrants in Congo, as those constructions have stopped.

Somalia is one of the countries that relied heavily on external aid and humanitarian response. The health and nutrition lifesaving services have come to an end now. It is estimated that about 3 million people displaced by armed conflicts rely on this aid. In addition, this cut could not have come on worse time as Somalia is still grappling with the devastating drought of year 2022 and 2023.

Within the Eastern European humanitarian sector, the biggest refugee response program with UNHCR went through another freeze causing several organisations to go bankrupt, resulting in mass firings and shutting down of several programs. These services were crucial for the Ukrainian response. Amongst them were programs for vulnerable groups such as LGBTQ+ refugees and for women and children, that practically account for 70% of the Ukrainian response. The impact in Belarusian and Polish response is even worse, and this is also where we see sadly, selective empathy and approach to humanitarian response.

What we are witnessing at a larger scale is fast-growing humanitarian disenchantment and compassion fatigue. In the past, we have seen the incredible resilience of civil society, which had the support of state policies from time to time. It shows that localisation works only when people are mobilising to enable huge resources. This was the narrative within Poland for the Ukrainian response. However, now, a few years later, the civil society is taking exactly the opposite turn as the states are not stepping in for support. We are also witnessing a huge rise of anti-refugee, anti-ukrainian rhetoric. In March 2022, 94% of Polish citizens were saying that they're declaring that they are in solidarity with Ukraine, and they want to help Ukrainian refugees, and right now the solidarity is lower than 30% (link).

The state politics are directly affecting the local response on the ground. What we are right now facing when it comes to Ukrainian response is a very uncertain future, in which the mood is definitely, extremely depressing, in which we are not able to cover neither Polish, Belarusian and Polish Ukrainian response, even though they are intricately interconnected.

No means to measure the impact amongst mass firing

But one of the most devastating impacts is that the people who are in capacity to measure the impact of these budget cuts and sudden freeze of funds, are being fired. The monitoring system of the humanitarian sector is being dismantled. The result of this would be that if there is a famine tomorrow, we would have no means to measure the intensity of it. And therefore, respond and save lives.

It is difficult to get a sense of the situation as we are witnessing a collapse of the system from different points. The suddenness of the situation makes it worse. But this is also the time for humanitarian actors, and particularly the humanitarian observatories, to observe and analyse why the collapse is happening. What have been our weak points? What have we not done? What can we do difficultly? What do we need to do but have not done?

In the past the sector has not actively nurtured alternative paradigms of humanitarianism, and somehow we took the top-down mainstream humanitarian action as the only way of going forward, thereby relying for all our funds and resources from few external donors. Every donor brings forth certain constraints and plays by certain business and political interests. How should we rebuild the sector with a multi-donor mechanism and increased localisation that protects us from witnessing such a collapse? How can we be more efficient and sustainable in our approach to providing aid? There are several questions to answer as the sector grapples for survival with the drip from the well-meaning Humanitarian Reset.

While the dust continues to settle down, the humanitarian observatories must continue their rigorous cross-border collaboration and exchange to gather as many recommendations, case studies and best practices that we would require to reimagine a stronger humanitarian system that leads us to humanitarian justice, and justice that leads us to peace.