Editorial (Humanitarian Aid on the Move No. 24)

While the ‘conventional’ aid sector¹ has never been as structured, due to the development of international standards and the professionalisation of staff and organisations, a number of changes have taken place that have raised questions about the notion of ‘aid quality’². For some, this notion has acquired a negative connotation as it has come to be perceived essentially as a means of imposing compliance with donor requirements, thus reflecting a technocratic vision of international aid and the ‘over-standardisation’ of the sector. The notion of quality has gradually become less prominent within the sector as new issues have come to the fore, such as localisation (promoting local actors during responses) and the environment. At the same time, international aid organisations, donors and (above all) local actors and populations continue to demand aid quality. We therefore need to question what it actually means and how it can be put into practice.

The number of people who require humanitarian aid in the world has never been higher than in 2022: 274 million people according to OCHA’s Global Humanitarian Overview. And yet, at the same time, humanitarian space is getting smaller, particularly due to the restrictions that many states are imposing on humanitarian action, aid actors are less safe, and there are numerous violations of international humanitarian law³.^[3] The conflict in Ukraine is a perfect illustration of this, with Russia’s instrumentalization of humanitarian corridors⁴.^[4] What is more, humanitarian space has been restricted since 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic: border closures, quarantines and other measures imposed by the majority of countries to prevent the spread of the virus suddenly restricted the activities of aid operators. At the same time, this context highlighted the many mutual aid initiatives that were developed locally⁵, raising questions about the way that international actors operate, and how they might support these local initiatives. In addition to the many calls for aid ‘localisation’, there is also a growing tendency to take environmental issues into account, which is pushing operators and donors to rethink their methods. And donor requirements continue to increase, with the demand to screen partners, and sometimes final beneficiaries, to combat money laundering and the financing of terrorism.

Though some of these changes have already been discussed at previous editions of the Autumn School on Humanitarian Aid⁶, and in the review, ‘Humanitarian Aid on the Move’, the 2022 Autumn School focused on their possible repercussions for aid quality. We therefore decided that each round table should provide an opportunity to discuss the relationship between aid quality and certain recent changes in the sector – quality & local actors, quality & the environment, quality & affected people – or to discuss the notion of aid quality in a new context such as the war in Ukraine. This edition of Humanitarian Aid on the Move is organised in the same way and aims to go further in exploring these overlapping topics.

1994 marked the beginning of the international aid sector’s reflections on quality with the Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda. Groupe URD embraced this notion and placed it at the centre of its activities from the beginning, taking part in the different initiatives that emerged during the following decades with the aim of increasing quality and accountability. In 2005, we produced the first version of the Quality and Accountability COMPASS, a method for managing the quality and accountability of international aid projects. We also produced the Participation Handbook for Humanitarian Field Workers (2009), and we co-authored the Core Humanitarian Standard (CHS) in 2014.

With Groupe URD reaching 30 years of age in 2023, representing 30 years of reflection about the sector and aid quality, our view today is that the system needs to be reformed and that we need to rethink the basic foundations of our activities. There are two main questions to be taken into account: how do we give back meaning to quality and how do we reconnect this notion with the recent changes in the sector? These are the questions that the different contributors attempt to answer in this edition’s articles and interviews.

1. Which includes donors, multilateral agencies and international NGOs, also referred to as ‘traditional’ aid actors. This is in contrast to locally rooted actors, both formal and informal, who are rarely integrated into international aid mechanisms. For more information, see: V. Léon, “Local and conventional aid actors: taking inspiration from new ways of working together”, Groupe URD, March 2022 (https://www.urd.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/rapport-localisation_GroupeURD_VL_20222.pdf).
2. According to the Core Humanitarian Standard definition, quality is defined as: “the totality of features and characteristics of humanitarian assistance that support its ability to, in time, satisfy stated or implied needs and expectations, and respect the dignity of the people it aims to assist”.
3. ICRC, “Respect du droit international humanitaire”, 29 October 2010 (https://www.icrc.org/fr/document/respect-droit-international-humanitaire).
4. Philippe Ricard and Madjid Zerrouky, “Guerre en Ukraine : les ‘‘couloirs humanitaires’’ une arme de guerre pour Vladimir Poutine”, Le Monde, 8 March 2022 (https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2022/03/08/ukraine-les-couloirs-humanitaires-une-arme-de-guerre-pour-vladimir-poutine_6116537_3210.html).
5. Groupe URD, “Local solutions to a global pandemic: the way of the future?” (Briefing note n°11), July 2020, (https://www.urd.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Note11_COVID-19_Local-solutions_EN.pdf).
6. The 2021 edition of the Autumn School focused on local solidarity, the 2020 edition on solidarity during a systemic crisis, and 2019 on the climate crisis and the aid sector.