How can academics play a bigger role in humanitarian action?
The academic community has vast potential to enhance our understanding of complex emergencies and chronic crises, contributing to evidence-based, effective humanitarian action. This potential, however, remains largely untapped. Earlier this week, academics gathered at the World Humanitarian Conference in Istanbul issued a statement outlining key issues to be addressed.
As researchers, we can draw on expanding datasets on disaster and armed violence, as well as better data on humanitarian financing. The ‘big data’ revolution, together with the availability of geo-spatial data and satellite imaging techniques offers great opportunities for complementing qualitative field research with quantitative studies. While rigorous impact evaluations in humanitarian settings are becoming more frequent, there remains much room for improvement.
Yet, better data is not good enough. Analysis must be contextualized within the complex political, economic, social and institutional dynamics at play. To achieve this, researchers need to step up efforts to conduct cross-disciplinary study, in partnership with local organizations and humanitarian agencies.
At the same time, serious ethical issues remain to be addressed: research can have a direct bearing on the security, integrity and wellbeing of people affected by crises. A lack of sensitivity for humanitarian concerns and principles can have grave consequences. We must protect the integrity and dignity of the communities where we conduct research, including key informants and local research partners.
We also need to better localize research. This means developing fair, transparent and equitable partnerships with national and local researchers in crisis-prone countries. Rather than engaging local researchers only as ‘enumerators’ to collect field data, we must develop truly collaborative partnerships, from initial research design all the way to disseminating findings and policy recommendations.
Scholarly work has long been biased by the Western, Christian heritage of modern humanitarianism. We need to pay greater attention to humanitarian expressions and principles under different religious and secular traditions. The understanding of key concepts such as vulnerability, needs, and resilience varies across disciplines, space and time. This calls for research partnerships that involve academics and practitioners from the North and the South, from East and West. At CERAH, we’re committed to achieving this through our research initiative ‘Encyclopaedia of Humanitarian Action’.
Ultimately, our mission as academics is to teach and train students and humanitarian practitioners. That notably means providing humanitarian practitioners from crisis-torn countries with skills and analytical tools that they can use to address the acute dilemmas and challenges that they face in their fieldwork. It means training aid workers to be reflexive humanitarian practitioners and strategic thinkers.
By doing so, we can effectively assist humanitarians in their daily struggle to alleviate suffering, save lives and protect the dignity of the - shamefully far too many - children, women and men caught in the midst of war and disaster.
Gilles Carbonnier is Professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, author of Humanitarian Economics and President of the board of directors of CERAH, the Centre for Education and Research in Humanitarian Action.