Paper details

Paper authors	Jan Říkovský
In panel on	Optimizing humanitarian needs assessment
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

Humanitarian needs assessment is a challenging exercise when every minute counts and there is a trade off between accuracy and life-saving potential. In such an environment, humanitarian workers can produce errors despite good intentions and sufficient knowledge and skills. Moreover, the effects of systematic deviations from rational decision-making often manifest themselves more strongly in situations of lack of time, high uncertainty, lack of clarity of information and complexity of problems and the time difference between benefit and effort, which are all inherent characteristics of the humanitarian work environment. This paper focuses on real humanitarian decision making, specifically in the phase of needs assessment, and the factors that influence it with respect to success of the decisions. The main objectives of this paper are to find out how the aid workers in emergency situations perceive their decision making, what situations they find most complicated, what factors they believe influence humanitarian decision-making, how they themselves describe their decision-making approach and the influence of various factors and finally which decisions and their impacts they observe in the field. From a methodological point of view, this paper is elaborated by means of qualitative research using the grounded theory method through individual interviews with relief workers. Based on the qualitative data from the interviews, the decision-making process is initially analyzed and further elaborated in detail with regard to decision-making errors, factors influencing humanitarian decision making and their values increasing the susceptibility to cognitive biases in terms of actors and situations, features of situations with potential serious impact. Eventually, specific cognitive biases that may occur in humanitarian decision-making, have been identified. This has a potential to improve the policies, tools and skills in order to optimize the humanitarian needs assessment, taking into account real decision makers.

Back