Paper details

Paper authors	Clara Egger
In panel on	Humanitarianism from below: analysing the views, values and practices of local and national aid actors
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

800? 4500? 9000? Estimations on the number of organizations involved in humanitarian action abound while nobody being able to precisely document the diversity of the sector. Existing studies claim that a very large majority of these actors are “young” organizations coming from the Global South and working only on their own countries. This paper seeks to critically examine these claims by providing evidence on the composition and diversity of the humanitarian sector. Building on an original dataset – the Humanitarian organisations dataset – compiling existing lists of humanitarian organizations, this paper especially addresses the specificities of Global South institutions, in terms of organisational structure, patterns of emergence, areas and types of activities and targeted population. Three types of Global South actors are identified, relating to diverse patterns of emergence. First, dissenters refer to institutions emerging to contest the predominance of Northern institution in humanitarian aid. Second, humanitarian institutions can emerge as a bottom-up collective action from Global South citizens: these institutions are long-established and defend specific values in humanitarianism. Last, some organisations are created out by international humanitarian organisations to make their activities more accepted in crisis-settings.

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