The Politics of Humanitarian Aid to Myanmar: Competing Strategies among Norwegian Aid Organizations

The notion that humanitarian aid should always be rights-based has become a paradigm professed across the humanitarian sector. Yet, the way rights-based approaches are defined and practiced varies from one organization to the next. This often causes tension between different organizational cultures, which are particularly evident in aid to authoritarian and repressive regimes like Myanmar. This policy brief examines three different approaches to aid and illustrates how Norwegian humanitarian actors in Myanmar have employed these in a shifting political landscape. It argues that while the different approaches have – unintentionally – contributed to a division of labor among humanitarian actors, changing donor priorities affected the ability of humanitarian organizations to operate according to their own strategic goals.