Author(s)
Johanna Baché and François Grünewald
From the ruins of Beirut to the flooded regions of la Roya and Germany, from the villages under attack in the Central African Republic to the at-risk zones of the Sahel, from the outskirts of Mocoa in Colombia, devasted by a mudslide, to the villages in the regions where megafires have blazed, in all these places, citizens, elected representatives, and loosely formed groups of individuals have taken action to help their neighbours, their territory, or those who have come looking for refuge. In 2021, as was the case the year before, there have been as many crises as there have been examples of this local solidarity. Numerous reports have underlined how decisive local action has been in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic1, how primo responders and locally-led responses are often more effective in times of crisis2, and yet…
And yet, traditional humanitarian actors have a great deal of difficulty dealing with this local solidarity, which goes by many different names and includes many different types of organisation: informal mutual aid networks, organisations that are used to humanitarian standards, activist citizen-based initiatives, apolitical neighbourhood committees, Red Cross volunteers, and local private sector bodies who also want to contribute to the response. The contours of this type of solidarity are unclear, and are very different from one context to another, and from one stage of a crisis to another. What is also unclear is the humanitarian sector’s capacity to understand and support it (or its interest in doing so).
Though the debate about localisation in connection with the Grand Bargain has been useful and necessary, it has also acted as a distorting mirror. Yes, on the one hand, five years after the commitments were made, the meagre 4.7% of humanitarian funds directly allocated to local and national actors, is well below the objective of 25%. But, on the other hand, the funds injected for assistance by diasporas, local private actors, and even individuals and families to help neighbours in distress and uprooted populations, represent considerable sums, often much greater than the funds that the international aid sector is capable of mobilising. Indeed, local actors are not limited to the networks of large NGOs from the South who, justifiably, want access to humanitarian sector resources. Municipal authorities, with their elected representatives and their technical services, the little mutual aid organisations who come to life and then die, referred to rather contemptuously as ‘mushroom’ NGOs, and the informal networks who come together on WhatsApp and Facebook, are also part of this category of actors. The flocks of volunteers on the Greek islands, in Calais, Beirut and Breil-sur-Roya, the assistance provided in nearby schools to earthquake victims in Haiti and Nepal, or to the refugees and IDPs in Lebanese villages, are wonderful examples of this.
These local actors have no doubt been around for a long time (apart from those established through social networks). They are only new in that there is renewed interest in them. Their speed of response, and their capacity to provide assistance to affected people ‘here and now’ are impressive compared to the cumbersome formal system. As a result, there is a lot of misunderstanding between the humanitarian sector and these new citizen-based initiatives. In our fast-changing world, they are there to remind us, if not of the failure, at least of the difficulties that the system has in taking these forms of action into account, and in reforming itself.
At Groupe URD, we have often observed these forms of action during real-time evaluations in the field in the days and weeks after crises have begun. They highlight the need to revise the paradigms that have shaped humanitarian action for more than fifty years. This is not a new idea; we have been trying to encourage the sector to integrate itself into local solidarity ecosystems, rather than the other way around, since our work on the participation of local people in humanitarian action and our book ‘Beneficiaries or partners, the role of local populations in humanitarian action’. When we look at the image that the sector projects of itself, it clearly continues to place international actors at the centre of the response, while local organisations have to be trained in, and apply, dominant standards in order to be perceived as legitimate. In the name of good management and financial accountability, and a technical response that is compatible with our good practice guides, we appear to want to transform these local actors into clones of ourselves. In order to avoid this risk, and the feeling of being ignored, or worse, judged condescendingly, some actors prefer not to use our support and instead depend on ‘local spirit’; in other words, the solidarity and social cohesion that emerges in contexts where everything has collapsed.
New operational methods therefore need to be invented to support – without undermining – this extraordinary local solidarity, these citizen-based initiatives and these local forms of mutual aid that are often on the margins of the classic humanitarian ‘system’. This was the territory that we began to explore during the 2021 edition of the Autumn School on Humanitarian Aid. We continue along this inspiring yet tortuous path, full of enriching encounters, in this new edition of Humanitarian Aid on the Move.
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