Emergency Gap: Humanitarian Action Critically Wounded

Good humanitarian action is not always in line with longer term development outcomes. While all actors, including specialist emergency organisations like MSF, must be mindful of the impact their operations have on local structures, services and the long term prospects, the primary focus of humanitarian action is to respond to urgent needs in the emergency phase of a crisis, within a broader global response to a much more extensive scope of challenges. If taken too far, the current quest for system-wide coherence risks turning humanitarian action into a simple instrument, and a rather clumsy one at that, at the service of a higher end: the Sustainable Development Goals.

This paper is the first of a series of analyses undertaken as part of the Emergency Gap project. This work aims to assess the growing evidence of lack of humanitarian response capacity in acute conflicts and to increase the humanitarian sector’s awareness of and engagement in conflict work.