Paper details

Paper authors	Eilidh Kennedy
In panel on	The agency of aid recipients
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

In a normal market the consumer can choose the products that best serve their needs. While in the humanitarian sector, aid recipients are seen as “beneficiaries” who are given little or no say over the goods and services they receive. What if recipients had a greater say in how aid is managed and used? This report will focus on changing approaches to aid management and practice, and the relationship between aid recipients and aid actors, particularly with regard to recipients’ roles in decision making processes.

The aid paradigm is undergoing a fundamental transformation. Throughout much of human history, giving cash was the standard way of aiding those in need. Beginning in 15th Century Europe, however, poverty began to be viewed as the result of personal failings or ignorance of the poor. Under this logic, providing the poor with cash would only serve “to encourage the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy,” as exemplified by Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth (1889). It was seen as the responsibility of the rich to decide for the poor how they could best be helped. This philosophical perspective has persisted and shaped the foundation of how modern aid is managed: aid actors have tended to believe that they know best what aid is needed to meet the needs of recipients.

However, a new school of thought has been challenging this paternalistic approach to aid. Based on Schultz’s “efficient but poor” hypothesis, supporters argue that the poor make rational economic decisions to improve their condition with the resources available to them. Under this logic, aid would be better managed by providing the recipients with greater decision making in the goods and services procured to meet their needs, as well as in the overall design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of aid programs. Such thinking has already resulted in changes in the sector through, for example, the increased use of participatory approaches, efforts to improve accountability to affected populations, commitments to scale up cash-based assistance, greater decentralization of management structures, and calls for localization. Goal 6 of the Grand Bargain also codifies this new approach to aid, in the signatories’ commitment to “a participation revolution: include people receiving aid in making the decisions which affect their lives.” Yet, despite these trends towards reshaping aid management to empower aid recipients, there are also many structural inertias that have prevented meaningful change from taking place.

If actualized, the reconceptualization of aid to truly place people at the center will have profound impacts across the sector. The changes that result will have a great impact on the relationships between donors, NGOs, UN agencies, national governments and aid recipients. As recipients gain a greater role in decision making, this transition will affect the dynamics of the humanitarian ecosystem and every actor within it. NGOs, in particular, will have to re-examine their role and operations in the humanitarian ecosystem.

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