Expansion and politicization

Four global processes created new opportunity structures that foregrounded the “civilian” as an object of concern.¹¹

Geopolitical shifts associated with the end of the cold war and the demise of the Soviet Union increased the demand for humanitarian action in several ways.¹² There appeared to be more humanitarian crises than ever before.¹³ Whether in fact there were more crises or whether great powers were now willing to recognize populations at risk because their policies were no longer the immediate cause, the emergencies were on the international agenda.¹⁴ As states paid more attention to them, they linked these populations at risk to an expanding discourse of security. During the cold war the UN Security Council defined threats to peace and security as disputes between states that had become or might become militarized, conflicts involving the great powers, and general threats to global stability.¹⁵ After the cold war, and in reaction to the growing perception that domestic conflict and civil wars were leaving hundreds of thousands of people at risk, creating mass flight, and destabilizing entire regions, the Security Council authorized interventions on the grounds that these conflicts challenged regional and international security. Responding to both the post–cold war humanitarian emergencies and the growing prominence of the Security Council in this domain, the General Assembly passed a watershed resolution in 1992 that made the UN the new coordinating body for humanitarian action.¹⁶

States also warmed to the idea of humanitarian action. They were increasingly generous. Even more impressive was their increasing willingness to support operations whose stated function was to protect civilians at risk, and even to consider the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention.¹⁷

States also began to treat humanitarian action as an instrument of their strategic and foreign policy goals. Since 9/11 many states, including the United States, have viewed counterterrorism and humanitarianism as crime-fighting partners. In 2001 former Secretary of State Colin Powell told a gathering of NGOs that “just as surely as our diplomats and military, American NGOs are out there [in Afghanistan] serving and sacrificing on the frontlines of freedom. NGOs are such a force multiplier for us, such an important part of our combat team.”¹⁸ States also discovered that humanitarian action could help them avoid more costly interventions. For instance, the major powers authorized the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) to deliver humanitarian relief in Bosnia in part because they wanted to relieve the growing pressure for a military intervention. Regardless of their motives, states were providing new opportunities for humanitarian action.

The second development that propelled the encounter between politics and humanitarianism was the emergence of “complex humanitarian emergencies,” that is, a “conflict-related humanitarian disaster involving a high degree of breakdown and social dislocation and, reflecting this condition, requiring a system-wide aid response from the international community.”¹⁹

These emergencies, which seemed to be proliferating around the world, are characterized by a combustible mixture of state failure, refugee flight, militias, warrior refugees, and populations at risk from violence, disease, and hunger. Such situations created a demand for new sorts of interventions and conflict management tools. Relief agencies were attempting to distribute food, water, and medicine in war zones and were frequently forced to bargain with militias, warlords, and hoodlums for access to populations in need. In situations of extreme violence and lawlessness they lobbied foreign governments and the United Nations to consider authorizing a protection force that could double as bodyguard and relief distributor. These emergencies also attracted a range of NGOs.²⁰ Relief agencies that were delivering emergency assistance, human rights organizations aspiring to protect rights and create a rule of law, and development organizations keen to sponsor sustainable growth began to interact and to take responsibility for the same populations. The growing interaction between different kinds of agencies that hailed from different sectors encouraged a relief-rights-development linkage within a humanitarian discourse that became tied to the construction of modern, legitimate, democratic states.²¹ As international actors began to think about the causes of and solutions to these emergencies, “humanitarian” came to include a wider range of practices and goals.

A third factor contributing to politicization was the political economy of funding. Although private contributions increased, they paled in comparison to official assistance. Between 1990 and 2000, aid levels rose from 2.1 to $5.9 billion. Moreover, as a percentage of official development assistance, humanitarian aid rose from an average of 5.8 percent between 1989 and 1993 to 10.5 percent in 2000.²²

A few donors were responsible for much of this increase, and they also now comprise an oligopoly. The United States is the lead donor by a factor of three. In 1999, for instance, its outlays exceeded the total assistance of twelve large Western donors. Between 1995 and 1997 it provided 20 percent of total assistance; in the following three years its contribution rose to 30 percent. The second largest donor is the European Community Humanitarian Organization (ECHO), followed by the United Kingdom, several European countries, Canada, and Japan. Although various motives fueled this increase in giving, many states expected either something in return or evidence that their money was being well spent.

Finally, a change in the normative and legal environment also coaxed humanitarianism into the political world. State sovereignty was no longer sacrosanct; rather, it was becoming conditional on states behaving according to particular codes of conduct, honoring a “responsibility to protect” their societies, and having attributes such as the rule of law, markets, and democratic principles.²³

Their legitimacy became tied to their having the rule of law, markets, and democratic principles. These developments created a normative space for external intervention and encouraged a growing range of actors to expand their assistance activities. In some cases aid agencies were supposed to provide immediate relief during conflict situations, while in others, to eliminate the root causes of conflict and create legitimate states. Regardless of the pretext, the new normative environment greased the tracks for more wide-ranging interventions.²⁴

A flourishing human rights agenda also left its mark. The logic of relief and the logic of rights share important elements: they place the human citizen and humanity at the fore; they use the language of empowerment in attempting to help the weak; and they reject power.²⁵

That said, they also demonstrate divisions; the relief community will nearly always privilege survival over freedom, while the rights community is sometimes willing to use relief as an instrument of rights, that is, make relief conditional on the observance of human rights—a move many relief agencies view as nearly incomprehensible.²⁶ In any event, the fast-growing human rights movement pulled humanitarianism from the margins toward the center of the international policy agenda, and many relief agencies, increasingly adopting the language of rights, were glad to ride its coattails.²⁷

Growing cosmopolitanism was also a transformative factor, for it underpins humanitarianism. Cosmopolitanism maintains that each person is of equal moral worth and that in the “justification of choices one's choices one must take the prospects of everyone affected equally into account.”²⁸

The principle of impartiality presumes that all those at risk, regardless of their identity, deserve equal attention and consideration. The desire to help those who are suffering regardless of place means that borders do not define the limits of obligations. This cosmopolitan ethos, however, leads to different schools of thought in humanitarianism, schools that can be in tension.²⁹ Some humanitarians believe aid should be restricted to the victims of man-made and natural disasters; this branch emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and is most closely associated with the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC). Another branch of humanitarianism extends assistance to all those at risk and imagines eliminating the conditions that are hypothesized to render populations vulnerable.³⁰ As one aid worker wrote, “[I]n terms of the destruction of human life, what difference is there between the wartime bombing of a civilian population and the distribution of ineffective medicines during a pandemic that is killing millions of people?”³¹ If individuals are at risk because of authoritarian and repressive policies, then humanitarian organizations must be prepared to fight for human rights and democratic reforms. If individuals are at risk because of poverty and deprivation, then they must be prepared to promote development. If regional and domestic conflicts are the source of violence against individuals, then they must try their hand at conflict resolution and attempt to eliminate the underlying causes of conflict.

Variation in response

Although these changes in global politics created new openings for an expanded meaning of humanitarianism, aid agencies were not uniformly receptive. Many, including the IRC and Oxfam, were ready, willing, and able to capitalize on new openings. They saw virtue in expanding their operations to help the powerless, and instead of being satisfied to help the “well-fed dead,” they could eliminate the root causes of conflict. Other organizations made a pragmatic decision to become more political, though they were cautious about every step and mindful of possible consequences. Still others clung to their principles and resisted what they viewed as the siren of politics. The ICRC and MSF fought the international currents and stuck to their “first principles.”³²

Two factors account for much of this variance. One was the congruence between the organizational culture and these new openings. Humanitarian organizations can be sorted into two types—Dunantist and Wilsonian—according to their understanding of the relationship between politics and humanitarianism.³³

Named after Henry Dunant, the patriarch of modern humanitarianism,³⁴

Dunantist organizations define humanitarianism as the neutral, independent, and impartial provision of relief to victims of conflict and believe that humanitarianism and politics must be segregated. In general, Dunantist organizations, which are often accused of seeing themselves as the “high priests” of humanitarianism, fear that the relaxation of their founding principles or expansion of their mandate will open the floodgates to politics and endanger humanitarianism.

Wilsonian organizations, so named because they follow in the footsteps of Woodrow Wilson's belief that is was possible and desirable to transform political, economic, and cultural structures so that they liberated individuals and produced peace and progress, desire to attack the root causes that leave populations at risk. Although many of the most famous members of this camp, including Save the Children, Oxfam, and Word Vision International, originated in wartime and thus concentrated on rescuing populations at risk, they expanded into development and other activities designed to assist marginalized populations. Over time they also undertook advocacy—like a growing number of human rights organizations that also belong to this camp. Agencies involved in restoring and fostering economic livelihoods also express a Wilsonian orientation. Wilsonian organizations are certainly political, at least according to the Dunantist perspective; however, even those who have subscribed to a transformational agenda present themselves as apolitical to the extent that they claim to act according to universal values and avoid partisan politics.

Organizations' understandings of the relationship between humanitarianism and politics help to explain their response to the transformations of the 1990s. The greater the discrepancy between organizational culture and environmental pressures, the more an organization will resist change for fear of political contamination; the greater the congruence, the more it will conform because such conformity will not threaten the organization's identity. MSF and ICRC, the two best known Dunantist organizations, spent much of the 1990s unsuccessfully attempting to police the borders between humanitarianism and politics. Wilsonian organizations not only capitalized on these openings, they frequently lobbied for them. Many humanitarian international organizations such as United Nations High Committee for Reform (UNHCR) exploited these changes in sovereignty to venture carefully into domestic space while claiming that they were not being political because they shunned any involvement in partisan politics. In fact, UNHCR actively lobbied for these changes by encouraging states to embrace the humanitarian agenda on the grounds that this principled position would further international peace and security.³⁵

The gap between the moral and organizational mandate also may have contributed to the expanding purpose of humanitarian action. Organizations may have felt the need to expand in order to resolve the contradiction between their broad aspirational goals and the more narrowly circumscribed rules that limit their action.³⁶

Humanitarian organizations are empowered by moral claims or aspirations. Limited organizational structures make it impossible to fulfill these mandates, creating a reason for expansion into new areas. In attempting to relieve suffering, it is natural to aim for more than temporary relief, that is, for eliminating the conditions that produce a demand for humanitarian services.³⁷ For instance, before the 1980s UNHCR leaped into action only after populations crossed an international border. Yet many UNHCR staff bristled at these restrictions, wanting to take on a preventive role. In the 1980s UNHCR began trying to prevent refugee flows—to get at their “root causes”—and to lobby for “state responsibility.”³⁸ From there it was a small step for UNHCR to become involved in eliminating the causes of flight and ensuring that repatriated refugees stayed at home; toward that end, it began promoting human rights, the rule of law, and economic development.

Finally, resource dependence helps to explain organizations' different responses to a broader definition of humanitarian action.³⁹

Humanitarian organizations do not survive by good intentions alone. They also need resources to fund their staff and programs; these resources are controlled by others. The willingness of others to fund organizations' humanitarian activities is contingent, in part, on their perceived legitimacy and whether they are viewed as acting according to the supporting community's values.⁴⁰ Existing organizations, especially those that were culturally inclined to expand, thus had every incentive to move in directions that were directly rewarded by states. Development organizations are exemplary here. By the end of the 1980s, development as a project had become increasingly discredited. Humanitarianism handed these agencies a new function and sense of purpose; they became necessary for post-conflict reconstruction and structural prevention—central to humanitarian action and international and human security.⁴¹ Newly established organizations, some humanitarian and some less so, found it advantageous to present themselves and their activities as quintessentially humanitarian. Existing agencies also were rewarded by expanding their activities. For instance, by becoming the lead humanitarian agency, UNHCR was in a position not only to expand its responsibilities, but also to demonstrate its relevance to the very states who paid the bills.⁴²

Expansion and institutionalization

Until the 1990s, humanitarianism barely existed as a field. There were only a handful of major relief agencies, including the ICRC, International Federation of the Red Cross, MSF, and various organizations such as Save the Children and Oxfam that began as relief agencies, moved into development, and then developed an emergency response capacity (though generally not adopting the discourse of humanitarianism). Although these agencies shared broad principles, such as humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence, there was no concerted effort to establish codes of conduct and standards of behavior to regulate the field and define membership. Those who participated in relief work treated it more as a craft than as a profession because, in the main, they did not claim that their qualifications derived from specialized knowledge, doctrine, or training, and did not see this as their life's work.

Yet in the 1990s humanitarianism became a field, with regular interactions among the members, an increase in the information and knowledge that members had to consider, a greater reliance on specialized knowledge, and a collective awareness that they were involved in a common enterprise. The field was becoming rationalized, aspiring to develop: methodologies for calculating results, abstract rules to guide standardized responses, and procedures to improve efficiency and identify the best means to achieve specified ends. Humanitarian organizations were also becoming bureaucratized, developing spheres of competence, and rules to standardize responses and to drive means-ends calculations. Professionalism followed, with demands for actors who had specific knowledge, vocational qualifications that derived from specialized training, and the ability to follow fixed doctrine.⁴³

Sociological institutionalism helps to explain why humanitarianism developed in this manner. This branch of organizational theory emphasizes the “socially constructed normative worlds in which organizations exist and how the social rules, standards of appropriateness, and models of legitimacy will constitute the organization.”⁴⁴

The environment in which an organization is embedded is defined by a culture that contains acceptable models, standards of action, goals, and logics of appropriateness. Organizations are constituted by, and will be compelled to adopt, this culture for a variety of reasons—though resource requirements figure centrally. As Scott and Meyer observe, this normative environment contains the “rules and requirements to which individual organizations must conform if they are to receive support and legitimacy from the environment.”⁴⁵ In short, because organizations are rewarded for conforming to rules and legitimization principles, and punished if they do not, they tend to model themselves after organizational forms that have legitimacy.

The environment also helps to explain institutional isomorphism, that is, why particular models spread.⁴⁶

There are three mechanisms: coercive, mimetic, and normative. The first two are most relevant here. Coercive isomorphism occurs when powerful organizations, such as states, impose rules and standards on other organizations. Mimetic isomorphism largely occurs in situations of uncertainty, encouraging organizations to model themselves after others that they believe are successful. Normative isomorphism largely originates from professionalization—the attempt by members of an occupation “to define the conditions and methods of their work, to control the production of producers,”⁴⁷ and to establish the epistemic basis for their authority and the claim to occupational autonomy. In general, sociological institutionalism emphasizes how organizations, desirous of symbolic and material resources and exposed to the same environment, will tend to adopt the same organizational forms.

The institutionalization of humanitarianism was largely driven by challenges to the emerging field's legitimacy and effectiveness—challenges that emanated from donors that paid the bills and members who were experiencing a crisis of confidence in reaction to new circumstances and shortcomings. These challenges were answered by rationalizing, bureaucratizing, and professionalizing.

A major feature of the field's rationalization was the attempt to standardize relief activities.⁴⁸

In response to the influx of relief agencies that were operating according to varying standards—a situation made doubly dangerous for agencies in the context of providing relief during conflict—and the growing evidence that different populations were being differentially treated, humanitarian organizations attempted to establish professional standards and codes of conduct. Several such initiatives stand out. In 1992 the ICRC, the International Federation of the Red Cross, and the Red Crescent Society (in consultation with the Steering Committee for Humanitarian Response) began work on a ten-point code of conduct. Originally conceived as providing guidance during natural disasters, it was extended to cover conflict situations as well. The first four articles reaffirm the basic principles of the ICRC, and the last six identify “good practices” and methodology for relief operations. This document is used by various agencies guide their actions in war zones.⁴⁹ Various NGOs also assembled what came to be known as the Providence Principles, which also aimed to introduce standardized rules for delivering relief. The same desire led various NGOs to launch the SPHERE project to establish minimal standards in the areas of water, sanitation, nutrition, shelter, site planning, and health.⁵⁰ This development, in turn, led to the Humanitarian Charter, which endeavors to “achieve defined levels of service for people affected by calamity or armed conflict, and to promote the observance of Dunantist humanitarian principles.” The sheer proliferation of principles and exercises to establish codes of conduct represented an attempt to standardize the rules governing humanitarian action.⁵¹

Another feature of rationalization was the introduction of systems of accountability.⁵²

This development was pushed by donors, who began to apply “new public management” principles as they expected humanitarian organizations to provide evidence that their money was being well spent. These principles originated with the neoliberal orthodoxy of the 1980s. One of neoliberalism's goals was to reduce the state's role in the delivery of public services and, instead, to rely on commercial and voluntary organizations, which were viewed as more efficient. Because government agencies justified the shift from the public to the private and voluntary sectors on the grounds that the latter were more efficient, they introduced monitoring mechanisms to reduce the possibility of either slack or shirking.⁵³ Until the 1990s, humanitarian organizations largely escaped this public management ideology. Because humanitarian assistance was a minor part of the foreign aid budget, states did not view humanitarianism as central to their foreign policy goals, and states trusted that humanitarian agencies were efficient and effective; there was little reason for states to absorb the monitoring costs. However, once funding increased, humanitarianism became more central to security goals, and states began to question the effectiveness of humanitarian organizations, they were willing to do so.⁵⁴ Toward that end, states introduced new reporting requirements, developed new kinds of contracts, and demanded greater evidence of results.

The drive toward accountability was not completely donor-driven, for those within the sector increasingly sought greater accountability—to recipients. It was not enough to be accountable to donors for how their money was spent; it shows it also was important to be accountable to the supposed beneficiaries of their activities. Accountability, therefore, increasingly meant identifying ways to improve agencies' policies. These developments led to various system-wide initiatives, including the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action (ALNAP).⁵⁵

In addition, in 1999 various NGOs initiated the Ombudsman for Humanitarian Assistance to address their accountability to “clients.”

Emblematic of bureaucratization was the effort by humanitarian organizations to develop technologies and methodologies to calculate the effects of their policies in order to demonstrate effectiveness and identify optimal strategies. Prior to the 1990s few humanitarian organizations even thought to measure the consequences of their actions, assuming that the mere provision of assistance was evidence of their good results. Two developments shattered this blissful assumption. The first was mounting evidence that some humanitarian interventions might be causing more harm than good. Rwanda, in particular, burst the confidence of the humanitarian community.⁵⁶

In addition, donors began demanding results-based evaluations.

Measuring impact and demonstrating that humanitarian organizations are responsible for success (or failure) is a demanding methodological task. Humanitarian organizations must define “impact,” specify their goals and translate them into measurable indicators, gather data in highly fluid emergency settings, establish baseline data in order to generate a “before and after” snapshot, control for alternative explanations and variables, and construct reasonable counterfactual scenarios.⁵⁷

Nevertheless, they made considerable headway. Humanitarian organizations began to draw on epidemiological models in the health sciences and program evaluation tools of the development field. The United States pushed for creation of the Standardized Monitoring and Assessment of Relief and Nutrition (SMART). Care International's Benefits-Harms analysis, which borrows methodologies developed in the human rights field, helps relief and development organizations measure the impact of their programs on people's human rights.⁵⁸

Humanitarian organizations also moved to professionalize. Although relief workers still learn on the job, organizations increasingly draw on the health sciences and engineering, extant manuals, and specialized training programs run by private firms, NGOs, states, and academic institutions. Agencies increasingly recruit relief workers who have training in specialized fields. Although relief workers still have a high burnout rate, and most organizations have an impressive degree of staff turnover, many agencies now have full-time staff, who draw salaries with benefits packages and treat the field as a career. In addition, many premier agencies underwent a major change in their bureaucratic structure. Although operational divisions still carry tremendous prestige and influence, they increasingly compete with newly established offices dedicated to fund-raising and donor relations, staffed by those whose primary field experience derives not from refugee camps, but from marketing campaigns and pledge drives.

Power over humanitarian action

States and international institutions can now compel humanitarian agencies to act in ways counter to their interests and principles. Although states have historically vacillated in their desire to use humanitarian action to serve their interests, the 1990s were unprecedented to the extent that states attempted to impose their agendas on agencies.⁵⁹

Toward that end, states began introducing mechanisms that were intended to control their “implementing partners.” Although such control mechanisms did not necessarily compel agencies to act in ways that they believed were antagonistic to their interests or principles, frequently they did.

The most important control mechanism came from the power of the purse. Sometimes donors make transparent threats. In 2003 U.S. AID administrator Andrew Natsios told humanitarian organizations operating in Iraq that they were obliged to show the American flag if they took U.S. funding. If not, he warned, they could be replaced.⁶⁰

One NGO official captured the U.S. message in the following terms: “play the tune or ‘they'll take you out of the band.’”⁶¹

Sometimes donors use more subtle, indirect, methods, for example, by insisting that agencies submit to coordination mechanisms. Coordination can appear to be a technical exercise whose function is to improve the division of labor, increase specialization, and heighten efficiencies. Yet this coordination, like all governance activities, is a highly political exercise, defined by power. The power behind coordination has not been lost on humanitarian organizations, especially when the donors are parties to the conflict or have a vested interest in the outcome.⁶²

Most famously, NATO in Kosovo and the United States in Afghanistan insisted on coordinating humanitarian action.⁶³ Although they justified their role on the grounds that it would improve the relief effort, they had more self-interested reasons: in order to sell the war at home, the combatants wanted the favorable publicity that came with being televised delivering food to, and building shelters for, displaced populations. It also would help them win the “hearts and minds” campaign, integral to the war effort.⁶⁴ Humanitarian organizations, though, were now being coordinated by one of the parties to the conflict, compromising their neutrality and independence.⁶⁵

The bilateralization of aid and the earmarking of funds also potentially steers individual agencies, and has produced disturbing trends in the allocation of aid. Multilateral aid is technically defined as aid given to multilateral organizations and not earmarked; these organizations, therefore, have complete discretion over how the money is spent. Bilateral aid can mean the state either dictates to the multilateral organization how the money is spent or gives the money to a nonmultilateral organization such as an NGO. Earmarking means that the donor dictates where and how the assistance will be used, frequently identifying regions, countries, operations, or even projects; this is especially useful if governments have geopolitical interests or pet projects. Since the 1980s there has been a dramatic shift away from multilateral aid and toward bilateral aid and earmarking. In 1988 states directed roughly 45 percent of humanitarian assistance to UN agencies in the form of multilateral assistance. After 1994, however, the average dropped to 25 percent (and even lower in 1999 because of Kosovo).⁶⁶

Accordingly, state interests, rather than the humanitarian principle of relief based on need, increasingly drives funding decisions. For instance, of the top 50 recipients of bilateral assistance between 1996 and 1999, the states of the former Yugoslavia, Israel/Palestine, and Iraq received 50 percent of the available assistance.⁶⁷ In 2002 nearly half of all funds given by donor governments to the UN's 25 appeals for assistance went to Afghanistan.⁶⁸ If funding decisions were based solely on need, then places like Sudan, Congo, northern Uganda, and Angola would leapfrog to the top of the list.⁶⁹ In general, while there is more aid than ever before, it is controlled by fewer donors, who are more inclined to impose conditions and direct aid toward their priorities, undermining the principle of impartiality. Funding is now a several-tiered system, with the least fortunate getting the least attention.⁷⁰

Humanitarian organizations bristled at these control mechanisms. Any organization will object to encroachments on its autonomy. Yet humanitarian organizations feared not only less autonomy, but also having to compromise their humanitarian principles. The language of principal-agent theory helps explain why. States see themselves as principals that provide a temporary transfer of authority to their agents, humanitarian organizations. Yet humanitarian organizations do not see themselves as agents of states or operating with delegated authority; they see themselves as agents of humanity that operate with moral authority. The very association with states and its presumption of delegated authority, then, potentially undermines the moral authority cherished by most humanitarian organization. Indeed, if states fund humanitarian organizations in order to further their foreign policy goals, then humanitarian organizations are justifiably concerned. States' attempt to monitor and regulate humanitarian organizations almost by definition compromises their guiding principles.

Humanitarian action redefined

The new environment and the transformation of humanitarianism is also leaving its imprint on the organizational culture of humanitarian agencies, producing changes that potentially undermine the core principle of impartial relief. The transformation of humanitarianism, as already noted, includes an expansion of the practices and goals associated with humanitarian action. This logically means that many humanitarian organizations are, in other words, articulating an expanding set of goals. Goal expansion has several possible consequences. It can lead to traditional goals being displaced. Relief was formerly an end in itself, but agencies are increasingly considering its relationship to other goals. For instance, rights-based agencies have demonstrated a greater willingness to use relief in order to promote basic human rights. Not only does need cease to be unconditional, but aid organizations might now also be attempting to determine who is worthy of aid, thus acting much like the nineteenth-century relief workers interested in helping the “deserving poor.”⁷¹

There is growing anecdotal evidence, moreover, that as many agencies have increasingly emphasized advocacy, rights, and peace building, they have not maintained their capacity for emergency relief, harming their response capacity to situations like Darfur.⁷²

Bureaucratization is associated with the growing priority of base organizational interests such as survival and funding.⁷³

Reflecting on the emergence of the “Humanitarian International,” Alex de Waal argues that in the competition between “soft interests” such as performing relief well and “hard interests” such as organizational survival and prosperity, noble ideals increasingly lose.⁷⁴ Ideals are particularly threatened when agencies need to interact with new donor environments to fund their activities. States' new contract mechanisms, including short-term contracts, competitive bidding, and reporting rules, have introduced perverse incentives for agencies that care about funding as much as they do about protecting populations at risk. Humanitarian organizations might doctor their performance indicators in order to transform failure into success, compete in areas in which they do not have a comparative advantage in order to secure funding, or fail to report shortcomings or the misuse of funds by subcontractors in order to avoid jeopardizing their contracts.⁷⁵

Furthermore, because visibility can be a prerequisite for getting funding, many organizations prefer publicity to critical but very unglamourous work.⁷⁶

In the camps in Zaire following the Rwandan genocide, humanitarian groups rushed to the scene in order to show the flag and impress funders back home. Working in an orphanage photographs well and brings in revenue, but building clean latrines and sanitation systems does not—even though it is equally if not more essential for saving lives. Such a set of incentives might create market failures. De Waal posits a Gresham's Law for humanitarianism: bad humanitarian action can crowd out good action because humanitarian organizations are rewarded for being seen rather than for saving lives.⁷⁷

Evidence also points to agencies' shifting what they consider to be appropriate action, thus redefining their principles and practices. Relaxation or redefinition of neutrality and independence can introduce new rule-governed behavior that can compromise impartiality. For example, one former Oxfam official reflected that his organization had become so supportive of NATO intervention in Kosovo that it forgot that genuine impartiality demanded that Oxfam and other relief organizations should have been on both sides of the border—helping Kosovar refugees and Serbian victims of NATO bombing.⁷⁸

Humanitarian organizations also might develop new rules that potentially undermine the safety of populations. As it attempted to navigate state pressures, UNHCR altered its underlying rules and principles of action in a way that increased its propensity to put the lives of refugees at risk.⁷⁹

This transformation also can subtly alter the ethical principles and calculations used by agencies to guide their policies. Humanitarian agencies are demonstrating a shift from deontological, or duty-based, ethics to consequentialist ethics. This development is driven partly by a growing concern with the negative consequences of humanitarian action and the related desire to measure effectiveness and impact.⁸⁰

Previously humanitarian organizations were instinctively guided by deontological ethics: some actions are simply good in and of themselves regardless of their consequences. Ethical action consists of identifying these intrinsically good actions and then performing one's moral duty. The growing concern with unintended consequences, however, has contributed to an ethic of consequentialism: whether or not an action is ethical depends on the outcome. The issue for humanitarian organizations is becoming not whether aid has negative and unintended consequences—for it almost always does—but whether, on balance, it does more harm than good.⁸¹ Consequentialist reasoning requires agencies to identify the outcomes of concern—and as their goals expand, the outcome variables that must be considered expand, too. Accordingly, agencies have an incentive to consider how relief might affect development, human rights, and peace building—potentially eroding the idea that agencies should give on the basis of need and not on the basis of other goals.

The desire to measure impact and effectiveness also can abrade a central element of the humanitarian ethic: a desire to demonstrate solidarity with victims and to restore their dignity. Relief workers, in Rony Brauman's words, aspire to “remain close to people in distress and to try and relieve their suffering.”⁸²

They do so by providing not only relief, but also compassion and caring. The ethic of humanitarianism, in this respect, includes both consequentialist and duty-based ethics—it seeks to provide life-saving relief and holds that the motives matter for assuring benevolence. Yet can such nonquantifiable values as compassion be operationalized when attempting to determine the effectiveness of humanitarian action? Is it possible to quantify, for instance, the reuniting of families, the provision of burial shrouds, or the reduction of fear and anxiety among people in desperate situations?⁸³ If they are omitted from the model, the model might redefine how humanitarian agencies think about impact, downgrading basic ethical motives in favor of measurable outcomes. If the measurable variables are no longer dependent on the subjective needs of the “beneficiaries,” will they even be consulted?

Measures of effectiveness, then, and the growing reliance of agencies on rational-legal principles to generate their legitimacy, might undermine the moral authority of humanitarian organizations. If the legitimacy and value of humanitarian action is based strictly on deliverables and producing measurable outcomes—saving lives at the cheapest price—then why not hire a private agency, if available?⁸⁴

After all, the victim probably does not care if the blankets are delivered by a commercial firm or a nonprofit agency. If aid agencies are increasingly drifting toward rational-legal principles as a way of defending their legitimacy, they might not only have difficulty competing with commercial firms but also might undermine their moral authority. The presumed difference between the Wal-Marts and the World Visions is that the former does not have moral authority while the latter does. What happens, though, when humanitarian agencies increasingly base their legitimacy on their ability to measure up to standards set by modern, commercial firms? Such a development might very well undermine what makes humanitarian action distinctive.