Paper details

Paper authors	Dualta Roughneen
In panel on	The agency of aid recipients
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.

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