Paper details

Paper authors	Dualta Roughneen
In panel on	More than (Buzz)Words: Participation in Humanitarian Practice
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

http://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/63560
http://www.cambridgescholars.com/humanitarian-subsidiarity
The world is changing. The nature of humanitarian action is changing.
The scale of humanitarian need seems to be growing. The first World
Humanitarian Summit (WHS) was held in 2016 with a clear understanding that there is a need to put disaster-affected populations at the centre of humanitarian action. Yet, despite the discourse, there has been little, in terms of practical outcomes, regarding how the international humanitarian aid architecture can change to make this abstract ideal a reality.
Humanitarian principles have underpinned humanitarian aid for decades, and are highly valued and generally respected. Yet, with the changing context, as well as an increasingly people-centred approach to humanitarian aid, both instrumentally but also intrinsically, there is a strong case for the aid architecture to adopt a new humanitarian principle: subsidiarity, meaning recognising that in humanitarian response, local populations can and should be best placed to make decisions and take action, and that the humanitarian system should be designed to support this in the first instance, and only to take action and make decisions at a higher level when this can be justified by a humanitarian imperative and the exigencies of the context. Subsidiarity is a long-standing idea, linked in time to Catholic Social Theory, the politics of the European Union (EU), and the International Criminal Court (ICC). It is possible that it may be resisted as a principle of humanitarian aid because of these connotations. It may be rejected because it is a little-understood idea outside its particular uses.
Elaborating what subsidiarity may mean for humanitarian aid requires
little beyond a Catholic understanding of subsidiarity:
A community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but
rather should support it in case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the
common good.

The particular idiosyncrasies of humanitarian aid, as it is manifest in the
global humanitarian architecture, including asymmetrical power relations and humanitarian exceptionalism, in an increasingly interconnected world, render the need for a new paradigm to underpin the approach more urgent. There is no reason to reject subsidiarity as a right-thinking approach to any endeavour, as it respects and promotes human agency, but whether it is a concept that ought to have the weight of a humanitarian principle is more difficult to demonstrate.

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