Goal and Rationale
The shape of humanitarian crises is evolving, with climate change and globalization set to have a profound impact upon community vulnerability. If they are to meet the challenges of the next two decades, humanitarian agencies will also need to evolve and change the way they work. The Humanitarian Horizons research seeks to understand the impact that climate change, globalization, demographics, and changing dynamics within the humanitarian sector will have on future crises and organizations’ responses to them. The research then goes on to examine the core challenges impacting agencies’ ability to anticipate and prepare for these crises.
Background
Tufts/FIC’s 2004 Ambiguity and Change report spelled out some of the predicted big drivers of the humanitarian environment over a ten-year period. It focused on environmental changes, urbanization, migration, and HIV/AIDS as well as changes within humanitarian agencies. It was underwritten by a grouping of operational international non-governmental humanitarian agencies, the Inter-Agency Working Group (IWG).
While agencies, their senior management, and boards found the report a useful tool for thinking and planning for the near future, it was neither sufficiently comprehensive nor explicit when it came to the practical ‘so what?’ questions for agencies at the operational level. Humanitarian Horizons aims to fill that gap.
Overview
The project has one abiding objective, which is to better inform the humanitarian community (writ large) in preparing for the complexities and uncertainties of the future by enabling it to enhance its anticipatory and adaptive capacities.
The project begins with an analysis of three external drivers – climate change, globalization, and demographic changes – affecting the humanitarian environment in the next twenty years, with a particular emphasis on varying impacts on different types of communities and livelihoods. Also included is an analysis of key internal drivers likely to influence the capacities of humanitarian organizations in the future. These analyses were then supplemented with the operational perspectives and anticipations of the IWG agencies, both from HQ and field levels, in order to identify the challenges most relevant to the humanitarian community, and appropriate avenues for change and preparation in the coming years.
Outputs
It was intended that the very methodology and interactive processes of the Humanitarian Horizons project will be regarded as an important output for those who have been project participants. Thus a key output is a change in agency thinking and planning capacity based upon what was learned through interaction over the course of the project.
The four individual analyses as described above were published as research papers in November 2009, and have been incorporated into a final Humanitarian Horizons document published in January 2010. Being aware of many other change processes going on in the humanitarian system, and other coalitions for change, it is critical that this project’s outputs be widely disseminated and openly shared with other change programs. They should benefit from our work and we need to benefit from their insights.
Publications
- Humanitarian Horizons: A Practitioners’ Guide to the Future
This Practitioners’ Guide to the Future serves as the culmination of the Humanitarian Horizons project, commissioned by the members of the Inter-Agency Working Group and implemented jointly by the Feinstein International Center (FIC) and the Humanitarian Futures Programme (HFP) of King’s College, London. The Guide merges the projections of global change highlighted by four earlier research papers, with the futures perspectives of operational agencies. The result is an attempt to help humanitarian aid agencies look a generation into the future to begin making the necessary changes now to their thinking and organization, to ensure that they continue to deliver the right assistance and protection to the right people in the right ways.
- The Future of Globalization and its Humanitarian Impacts
More than simply an economic phenomenon, globalization is a multi-faceted and dynamic process with implications for future migration and mobility, technological expansion, and worldwide social inequality. With an eye on the many possible futures of globalization, the authors of this paper consider the likely consequences of each for the humanitarian community.
- Future of the Humanitarian System: Impacts of Internal Changes
Not only affected by the trends and events that occur within the world in which it operates, the humanitarian system is equally affected by those developments and trends that take place inside the organizations and networks comprising the system. In this paper, John Borton describes these internal dynamics – including the conflation of “humanitarian” and “development”, shrinking humanitarian space, and issues of accountability – and creates a picture of future humanitarian response in light of these changes.
- Climate Change and its Humanitarian Impacts
Global climate change will have inevitable consequences and implications for the humanitarian community. Although specific outcomes are unclear, it is certain that the world will experience significant transformations in the next 20 years, and that currently vulnerable populations will be among those most affected. Researchers from the Stockholm Environment Institute, as the authors of this paper, describe the current state of climate information, and the expected human and physical consequences for which humanitarian organizations must be prepared to address in the next two decades.
- Demographic Trends and their Humanitarian Impacts
Expected demographic trends of the future include unprecedented population growth, the majority of which will occur in developing countries, and which will lead to a “demographic crisis” in Sub-Saharan Africa. The humanitarian implications of this growth, and its regional disparities, will be manifold, as described by researcher Carl Haub, of the Population Reference Bureau.
Impact
We are seeking primarily to inform the boards and senior management of the seven participating NGOs of the IWG. Through workshops, briefing notes, and discussion prompted by this project, we hope to offer them tools that will allow them to develop more appropriate responses to the crises of the future.
Collaboration
This program involves three key sets of collaboration. First, the research was implemented jointly between Tufts/FIC and the Humanitarian Futures Programme at King’s College, London. Second, the researchers worked closely with the seven NGO members of the IWG to incorporate their operational perspectives, and to disseminate the research outputs. And thirdly, recognized experts from outside these institutions were commissioned to conduct the analyses of the drivers of change.