Robin Davies
SUMMARY
It is anomalous that the world is equipped with no global humanitarian financing mechanism akin to existing global investment vehicles for tackling infectious diseases and climate change. A global humanitarian fund, properly constituted, could help meet the $10 billion annual humanitarian financing shortfall, complementing crisis-specific mechanisms and directing most of its resources to protracted crises.
KEY POINTS
• A global humanitarian fund (GHF) should be created as an independent intergovernmental organisation replacing the small, UN-internal Central Emergency Response Fund and inheriting its mandate—namely, to provide rapid financing in the wake of emergencies and help fill gaps in the financing of protracted crises.
• The GHF should seek to attract sufficient resources, from both public and private sources, to support annual grant commitments in the order of $10 billion. It should follow the same triennial replenishment process as the World Bank’s International Development Association.
• The fund should be free to allocate finance to any relevant actors according to the circumstances, and a high level of delegated authority should be vested in its Chief Executive Officer with respect to the allocation of resources to specific situations. The fund’s investment principles, strategies and impacts should be overseen by a board in which developed and developing countries are equally represented.
INTRODUCTION
Perhaps the most general problem afflicting the collective international humanitarian assistance effort is the centreless nature of resource mobilisation for humanitarian action.
Humanitarian assistance is, to a far greater degree than long-term development assistance, a fragile construct of bilateral donor agencies’ allocation decisions. The reasons for this are not entirely mysterious, even if they are not good.
One is that for a long time humanitarian assistance accounted for only a small proportion of global official development assistance (ODA), and was in fact considered a type of aid that should be kept low. In 2002, humanitarian assistance constituted less than 7% of total ODA from the member countries of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC)1. DAC members were encouraged, in the context of peer review processes, to avoid over-allocating funds to emergencies at the expense of long-term development investments, which at that time meant keeping allocations below the 7% weighted average just mentioned. Since that time, however, the share of humanitarian assistance in total ODA has steadily increased to about 11% and there is no longer any implicit or explicit norm according to which this is excessive. Humanitarian aid is no longer a footnote. Along with support for the provision of certain types of global public goods, it is likely to be an increasingly prominent part of future ODA.
A second reason is that humanitarian aid allocation decisions are particularly political ones, and therefore tend to be kept under the control of bilateral donor governments. Emergencies are often, among other things, political opportunities—to strengthen bilateral relationships, bolster a donor country’s international standing or demonstrate that donor governments are in tune with public sentiment in their own countries. As one indication of this, the share of humanitarian assistance in DAC bilateral ODA doubled, from under 6% to over 12%, between 2002 and 2014. Given that its share in total ODA did not increase to the same extent, this shows that more of the overall increase was allocated bilaterally than multilaterally. Humanitarian aid is an instrument of international and domestic politics. This is hardly likely to change, so it would be fruitless to call for a substantially greater centralisation of the existing humanitarian assistance pie.
A third reason, perhaps deriving from the two above, is that donor agencies operate much the same funding mechanisms and resource allocation processes for sudden-onset crises as they do for protracted crises, so that the latter are always heavily dependent on annual allocation decisions and often short-changed owing to the demands of high-profile natural disasters. Since there are no or few general allocations for protracted crises within donor agencies’ budgets, there is no natural train of thought leading to the creation of a central fund in which such allocations might be concentrated.
Current humanitarian assistance resource allocation processes do not lend themselves to centralisation. This barrier would be overcome with a stroke of the pen if there were enough political will to satisfy the financing requirements of chronic, slow-burn humanitarian situations.