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Irish Humanitarian Summit: Reflections on subsidiarity as a humanitarian value

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Humanitarian-Assistance-Policy-2015-LARGE

By Rob Kevlihan, Kimmage DSC

Background

The Irish Humanitarian Consultative Process culminated on July 2nd last with a Summit, held in UCD, which included participation from across a wide range of actors with an interest in humanitarian action, including government, NGOs, the private sector and academia. It represented, together with the Recommendations Report presented at the Summit, the culmination of an exhaustive almost year long process and is unprecedented in the history of Irish humanitarian action. The team involved in managing this process, including Pat Gibbons and Brian Casey from UCD, are to be congratulated on a demanding job, done well, as are all those who participated in the discussions throughout the process. The recommendations from this process will be taken forward to the UN Secretary General’s World Humanitarian Summit, scheduled to be held in Istanbul in May 2016.

Critique

The report and related recommendations are both comprehensive and exhaustive, as is to be expected in any such wide ranging process where a broad consensus is sought. There is much there that is not new, but rather restates principles and positions that have long been advocated by actors involved in the Irish humanitarian scene. There is however, in my view, one important new word that the report seeks to introduce into the humanitarian lexicon – namely the concept of subsidiarity.

The Recommendations report recommends that the concept of subsidiarity be included as a core humanitarian value, and defines subsidiarity as follows: “The concept of subsidiarity states that humanitarian actions should, where possible, support the efforts of affected people to cope in times of crisis, to recover, and to build a better future. It serves as a constant reminder that humanitarian actors must respect the capacities of affected people and recognize that they are actors in their own survival and recovery. This must include men, women, boys and girls, minority groups, youth, the elderly, those with disabilities, and other members of the affected communities who may be further marginalized during a crisis”.[1]

Unpacking this a little, it is apparent that there are actually two separate but related aspects to this definition. The first is that humanitarian actors should be inclusive in responding to crises; the second is that humanitarian actors should, to the extent possible, support local capacities to respond to crisis. I would argue that both of these points are already broadly accepted as good practice in the humanitarian sector and as such are worthy of everyone’s support moving forward. Framing these concepts together through the use of the term ‘subsidiarity’ is in my view, interesting and potentially controversial and as such warrants further examination.

Defining subsidiarity

Subsidiarity, while not an everyday word, is nonetheless a term that is familiar to those who track policy debates and processes within the European Union (EU) and those (perhaps smaller number) of people who are familiar with doctrinal issues within the Catholic Church. While I cannot claim to be an expert in either of these areas, a brief on-line search highlights some interesting aspects to these definitions.

In the case of the European Union, subsidiarity is defined by Article 5 of the Treaty of the European Union, and concerns the level of intervention that is most appropriate in decision making processes. In all cases, according to this definition, the EU may only intervene if it is able to act more effectively than member states. The purpose of the subsidiary principle in the EU context is to determine when the EU is competent to legislate and to ensure that decisions are taken as close as possible to citizens.[2]

Catholic Social Teaching defines the principle in a related but perhaps slightly broader sense – that decisions should be made at the lowest level possible and at the highest level necessary, and as such represents an effort to balance and at its best navigate ‘the allocation of resources by higher levels of society to support engagement and decision making by the lower levels’.[3] 

In comparing these approaches to subsidiarity to that proposed for the humanitarian sector, two important differences are notable – the first is that for the proposed notion of humanitarian subsidiarity it is recommended that subsidiarity be a value rather than a principle, while the second is the contrast between the inclusivity and building upon local capacities of the proposed humanitarian definition with the focus on the appropriate level of decision making of EU and Catholic Church definitions. I will consider each of these in turn below.

Subsidiarity: Principle versus Value

The four core humanitarian principles of humanitarian action include humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence. These four principles, which originate from the International Red Cross and Red Crescent movement, have also been accepted internationally through resolution of the UN General Assembly, and inform work within the humanitarian sector more broadly.[4] As such they are well established and recognized as core to definitions of humanitarian actions and humanitarianism more generally, despite on-going debates about how they play out in practice.[5]

The idea of humanitarian values, is however, both less coherent and more open. While a principle is understood to imply a fundamental truth or perhaps a rule to be followed, a value is something more personal – relating to personal (or organizational) beliefs. The difference is subtle but important, and one which is not immediately apparent in discourse in the humanitarian sector. A statement of principles and values from the International Federation of the Red Cross / Red Crescent, found here: http://www.ifrc.org/what-we-do/principles-and-values/ , for example, while mentioning humanitarian values, focuses primarily upon principles and indeed, appears to conflate the two.

More generally, and perhaps surprisingly, it appears that there is no widely accepted statement of values for the sector. What can be said, however, is that there is a consensus that humanitarian values can include commitments to adhere to humanitarian principles and statements of best practice such as the Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent and NGOs in Disaster Relief (found here: http://www.ifrc.org/en/publications-and-reports/code-of-conduct/) and Sphere standards.  The humanitarian values in this respect, are the personal and / or organizational commitments to uphold these principles and standards in practice.

Semantic nuance aside, however, from a political perspective, it is fair to say that the four existing core humanitarian principles are much more widely accepted and established than the more inchoate idea of humanitarian values; a call for subsidiarity (as defined) to be ‘included as a core humanitarian value’ is therefore a considerably weaker statement than for it to be considered a humanitarian principle.

More mundanely, at least from an NGO perspective, representing ideas of inclusiveness and building on local capacities as values is also potentially weaker than existing statements that cover some of the same ground. The voluntary Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs in Disaster Relief, for example, commits signatories to principles (not values) that include attempting to build disaster response on local capacities and to finding ways to involve programme beneficiaries in the management of relief, both of which relate to subsidiarity as defined in the recommendations document.

Inclusivity / local capacity versus decision making

As alluded to above, the definition of subsidiarity included in the Recommendations Report is at variance with standard definitions of subsidiarity used in political and religious spheres. Indeed, the absence of any commitment to the principle of devolved decision making (and by extension to any commitment for appropriate devolution of power) to appropriate levels, or even of the need to accept as a principle (or even value) of humanitarian action the need to balance local, regional, national  and global levels of decision making, is worrying. It is worrying because in appropriating the term “subsidiarity” to cover what are already well established ideas of inclusion and building on local capacity, we potentially occlude further discussion of power over decision making in disaster response – particularly with respect to resource allocation decisions. This has very real and practical implications given the way in which the international humanitarian system is increasingly structured in a top down fashion – whether with respect to resource allocation mechanisms (such as globally managed Emergency Response Fund) or in terms of externally imposed co-ordination structures that can favor co-ordination between established international actors and institutions over local engagement and involvement  (such as the UN cluster system).

Suggested way forward

While it may be that the train has already left the station with respect to the Recommendations Report, it is worth noting that the consultative process by its nature and because of the diversity of views in the Irish humanitarian sector, can only present a consensus position from Ireland, rather than the consensus position from Ireland. In the spirit of continued engagement and debate on these issues, I present below some suggestions that might inform debates moving forward.

  1. Re-naming of subsidiarity: Instead of a mislabeling inclusiveness and building on local capacity as subsidiarity, call them as they are – two important but distinct principles that should underpin humanitarian action
  2. Include subsidiarity (for real): Provoke a real and substantive discussion on (real) subsidiarity - understood as an exploration and commitment to determining the appropriate levels for various decisions regarding needs and resource allocations within the humanitarian aid system and within institutions working in this system, with a particular focus on top down global processes and interfaces between the international / national / regional / local. This kind of discussion, in conjunction with commitments towards inclusiveness and building on local capacity could truly transform the way in which we all do and understand humanitarian action.
  3. Principles rather than values: Let’s aim high to begin with – rather than promoting a vague notion of humanitarian values, let’s push for some or all of these themes to be introduced as humanitarian principles; principles represent stronger statements and are more likely to have positive impacts; let’s hold the vaguer notion of humanitarian values in reserve for those that cannot attain the status of principles, but let us not pre-empt the possibility of some being accepted as principles before the next round of debate begins.

 

 

[1] UCD Centre for Humanitarian Action (2015), Recommendations from the Irish Humanitarian Consultative Process, (Dublin: UCD), p15.

[2] Eur-Lex (2010), ‘The Principle of Subsidiarity’, available at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=URISERV:ai0017 [Accessed 3 July 2015]

[3] Clarke, Meghan, (2012), ‘Subsidiarity is a Two Sided Coin’, available at: http://catholicmoraltheology.com/subsidiarity-is-a-two-sided-coin/ [Accessed 3 July 2015].

[4] See OCHA (2011), OCHA on Message: What are Humanitarian Principles?, (New York: OCHA), available at: http://www.unocha.org/about-us/publications/humanitarian-principles [Accessed 3 July 2015] for detailed definitions.         

[5] See, for example, Barnett, M & Thomas G. Weiss (2008), ‘Humanitarianism: A Brief History of the Present” in Barnett & Weiss (eds), Humanitarianism in Question, Politics, Power and Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), pp1-48 for a useful discussion of some of the controversies related to these principles, especially pp12-15.

DSAI provides a platform for dialogue for development studies research, policy and practice across multi-disciplinary perspectives. This opinion piece is published with permission of the author. Views expressed are the authors own. 

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