International Development Committee: Future of UK aid and development assistance inquiry
Written evidence submission from the Humanitarian Learning Centre (HLC), based at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS). This evidence draws from the expertise of
Jeremy Allouche, Professorial Fellow, co-director HLC
Lewis Sida, co-director HLC
Philip Proudfoot, Research Fellow, HLC
Tina Nelis, Knowledge Officer, HLC
The UK has an important role to play not only in financing but also defending the humanitarian system. Despite the cuts to Overseas Development Assistant (ODA), the UK is the fourth largest humanitarian donor, and is a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Since 2007, the position of UN aid chief has also been allocated to a British official.
The shift from international intervention to local provision
The Minister for International Development recently proposed four essential shifts in terms of the way the UK will work in partnership with others in its delivery of aid and development assistance. It is of course important to situate this policy shift in the context of the humanitarian reset, a 2025 reform project led by the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Tom Fletcher, to overhaul the international humanitarian system in response to a crisis of "legitimacy, morale, and funding". One of this policy shift is to move from international intervention to local provision; working through local partners and civil society to deliver sustainable, locally-led solutions.
From a humanitarian perspective, it is worth emphasising that this is not really a shift, as this was already a major policy that was agreed in 2016 at the World Humanitarian Summit, under what has been called the Grand Bargain. This was a global agreement between humanitarian donors and aid organizations to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of humanitarian action and which the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), is a signatory to. One of the policy highlights was the localisation agenda, under which 25% of global funding should shift to local and national responders by 2020, using more cash-based assistance, and reducing bureaucracy. While the target was not reached (..% in 2020 instead of the 25%), the localisation agenda remained a priority for FCDO after 2020. For instance, CAFOD, British Red Cross and FCDO partnered in 2023 to plan and implement an FCDO Donor Dialogue on Locally Led Humanitarian Action . The evidence here is based on what we have learned with respect to this process, building on the various research projects and consultancies the HLC was involved.
On localisation, our findings show that the humanitarian system does not systematically engage communities on their priorities and capacities. For example, humanitarian actors claim to do community engagement but this has not been done systematically (and certainly not in a participatory manner) as part of building the humanitarian needs overview (HNO) and humanitarian response plan (HRP).
Over the years the main humanitarian agencies have become highly specialised, a trend accelerated by the cluster system which explicitly breaks down the humanitarian response system into key specialised-technical areas. These types of national or wide-area based assessments are primarily used to ‘target’ – decide which areas need a particular type of intervention. There are then follow on, individual organisation-based assessments that are used for funding proposals. Despite the widespread impression amongst humanitarians that the system is constantly listening to affected populations, there is little evidence that this is in fact the case. Findings from our work as the learning partner for the Flagship Initiative suggest that people are being engaged with, but crucially on the organisations’ terms. However, according to affected communities, this form of engagement is insufficient, inadequate and lacks dignity. Currently the ‘system’ cannot respond to community priorities unless they are part of the pre-existing ‘offer’: an offer which is therefore supply rather than demand driven in a humanitarian marketplace which offers lip service to accountability and localisation.
Another project on New Community-Informed Approaches to Humanitarian Protection and Restraint: Women’s Agency in the Democratic Republic of the Congo focuses on the increasing attention given by some international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) to provide support for women’s groups in conflict-affected contexts.
These approaches recognise that women are the primary holders of essential knowledge about the risks they face and as such are best placed to lead, identify and respond with protection strategies that are most effective for them and the wider community.
The research found that women-led groups can strengthen the individual and collective protection of women. Women’s groups provide opportunities for women to build individual capacities and collectively participate in protection in different spaces. These spaces are not monolithic, and do not fit into neat categories of ‘bottom-up’ or ‘community-led’ approaches that are sometimes deployed by global discourses on gender that are prevalent in the INGO sphere. Rather, they are a combination of discourses and practices that influence different spheres of life – the family, the customary, the quotidian, the state, human rights, and NGO discourses – that are deployed to build individual and collective strategies of protection. Women navigate different spheres, mobilising their knowledge of human rights standards and Congolese laws to interpret custom and influence local decision makers on issues relevant to women’s protection.
Women tailor their discourses and strategies to their needs, negotiating with civilian and military authorities as well as religious and customary gatekeepers. In doing so, they contribute to wider social transformations: expanding women’s access to protection structures, advocating for change in discriminating gender norms, and tackling the backlash faced by women who take on leadership roles. However, our research also shows that, despite the support and capacity building received from INGOs, the ability of women’s groups to foster women’s participation in decision-making is mediated by several structural factors – the devastating effects of protracted violent conflict on governance, illiteracy, women’s vulnerability to poverty, and the persistence of discriminatory gender norms – all of which impede the development of sustainable women-led protection activism.
If the refocus on localisation is to be anything more than rhetoric or indeed seen only as a cost saving measure, then donors should support local and national actors to carry on with their humanitarian activities, as well as ensuring that international support is there when requested by these actors.
How the UK’s delivery approach for humanitarian assistance needs to adapt to changing funding and values landscape
The call for evidence rightly emphasised the UK cut in ODA from 0.5% to 0.3% of GNI and other cuts from other western donors, but there is another interesting figure with respect to humanitarian funding. At the turn of the millennium, global humanitarian funding was about $1.7bn. By 2027, it is estimated that number will reach $100bn.
There are many reasons for this surge in funding but one of the most obvious is the inability of the current system to deal with protracted crises. A crisis is 'protracted' when it faces over five years or more of coordinated UN appeals. The average crisis now lasts over nine-years stretching the system far beyond its ‘emergency’ mandate. Moreover, four out of five people-in-need (83 per cent) are located in protracted crisis contexts, meaning they are acutely vulnerable to death, disease, and disruption of their livelihoods over a prolonged period of time. There was once an imagined neat division of labour between development and humanitarianism, but even if today’s crises clearly demand they be cohered together – reality has outpaced reform. By our estimate, the UN is spending more on ‘humanitarian’ crises than all other functions (peace, security, normative functions, development) together.
On protracted crisis, one project Islands of Innovation in Protracted Crises: A New Approach to Building Equitable Resilience from Below shows how there is a limited understanding as to how communities learn from multiple shocks - from disasters to epidemics and conflict. Humanitarian sectoral analysis and approaches, as already highlighted in the paragraphs above, are structured around specific angles such as natural resource management, responses to health crises, zoonotic diseases, natural coastal hazards, and food insecurity. Political, cultural and social histories of these communities are helping to create new notions and idioms of community resilience that are central to capture and translate to help with dealing with the phenomena of protracted crisis.
Conclusion