Paper details

Paper authors	Max Kelly
In panel on	Humanitarian Aid Workers: Ethics, Altruism, and Best Practices
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

Volunteers provide an essential component of crisis response. Initial responses are often heavily reliant on local volunteers, and they are widely feted for their selfless role in early-stage humanitarian response. Volunteers are perceived as essential service providers, as a bridge to communities, as an ongoing resource. However, they may also be subject to negative associations, of lacking capacity, potential risks associated with local actors or be subject to very little focus at all. Most of the research on volunteers in the humanitarian space focuses on international volunteers. The question of renumeration to, support of, or enabling local volunteer crisis responders is rarely raised. This paper draws on qualitative research with local crisis and humanitarian leaders engaged in the Ukrainian, Sudanese and Syrian crises. The role of volunteers was an emergent and recurrent theme, beyond the main focus of the research, but the challenges and inequity experienced and understood by our respondents, as volunteers, and mangers of volunteers in a crisis response was striking Embedding the research in discourses of locally led responses, volunteerism and ethics, this paper argues that volunteers are an ethical issue that is currently unaddressed, and a considerable blind spot that fails many.

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