Aid in Crisis? Rights-Based Approaches and Humanitarian Outcomes

The human rights framework is a cornerstone of Norwegian foreign policy, including its humanitarian policy. Humanitarian action is based on principles of neutrality and impartiality. Human rights is about justice, politics and redistribution. How do the two go together?

The humanitarian failure to respond to the 1994 Rwandan genocide and its aftermath engendered a professional and ethical crisis within humanitarianism. To make humanitarian action better, many of the players from UNICEF to Save to Children, as well as donor government like Norway, adopted strategies to shift the focus from needs to rights: only then could victims be given a voice and transformed into active participants. Humanitarianism should not be about charitable giving but about upholding the rights of beneficiaries.

Twenty years later, humanitarianism has been transformed in many ways, but not by human rights. There has been a lot of confusion about the meaning of rights-based humanitarianism, and what it actually entails for programming. Good ideas for rights-based approaches developed at the Headquarters have been difficult to implement in the field. In recent years, humanitarian actors have talked less about rights- and more about other ways of improving humanitarianism, such as the use of technology or innovation. At the same time, the Norwegian government, one of the most important humanitarian donors, continues to insist on human rights based approaches to aid.

Aiming to contribute to the development of humanitarianism as a field of study in its own and to South-South collaboration, this project seeks to describe, understand and explain how rights-based approaches (RBA) to humanitarian action shape humanitarian assistance and contribute to humanitarian outcomes at different levels, in different conflict and disaster zones.

More specifically, this project examines the use of rights based approaches to humanitarian assistance in countries and organizations that have been among the top recipients of Norwegian aid over the past decade: Colombia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Palestine, and South-Sudan as well as UN organizations and national and international NGOs. The aim is to contribute both theoretical and policy knowledge of how rights based approaches has shaped aid and how the relationship between humanitarianism and human rights will play out in the future.

This project is funded under the funding scheme for Effects of Aid (AIDEFFECT). This is a sub-program under the broad-based and action oriented program Norway – Global partner (NORGLOBAL). The project is in collaboration with researchers from Colombia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Palestine and South Sudan.