Humanitarian partnerships: reality lags behind the rhetoric
January 2015. Just over a year after Typhoon Haiyan devastated parts of the Philippines important lessons need to be learnt about how international actors partner and work with national organisations.
The Philippines has consid- erably more local and national capacity to manage disaster response than many countries in the region. It also has a great deal of experience in dealing with disasters. Despite this, the scale and nature of the typhoon, and the storm surge it triggered, was initially overwhelming.
With the scale and frequency of disasters expected to increase globally, what President Benigno Aquino has called the ‘new normal’, the research raises important questions about the ability of partnerships to respond at scale to mega- disasters. If the international system is to meet its aspiration to place national actors at the centre of humanitarian response it still has a long way to go. The challenge for the international humanitarian system in the run-up to the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 is to see contexts like the Philippines as places where the system must make real its aspirations to cede power and resources to affected people and national organisations.
Read the article on the HPN website
Related Articles
Interview with Pedro Medrano Rojas, UN Senior Coordinator for the Cholera Response in Haiti
03/04/2015. The persistence of cholera in Haiti is mainly due to the lack of access to clean water and appropriate sanitation facilities …
Which countries are most at risk from climate change and how can we help?
03/29/2016. How to resolve that dilemma and help these places adapt to a warming world remains among the knottiest problems facing climate financing.
What role can business play in dealing with disasters?
02/24/2015. In an interconnected world, with impacts that touch upon all of society, locally and internationally, we need an “all-of-society” and “all-of-the-world” approach.
