The Journal of Humanitarian Assistance: Humanitarian Aid: Are Effectiveness and Sustainability Impossible Dreams?

Humanitarian aid represents a commitment to support vulnerable host populations that have experienced a sudden emergency, requiring ongoing assistance to maintain or improve their quality of life. Over the past 15 years the number of humanitarian agencies, private organizations, governments (taxpayers), corporations, individuals and other stakeholders have grown enormously. This group of diverse donors have differing mandates, values, goals, strategies, actors and activities, but most function under one universal humanitarian principle: to protect the vulnerable by decreasing morbidity and mortality, alleviate suffering and enhance well-being, human dignity, and quality of life. However, many stakeholders believe that humanitarian aid has been unsuccessful in delivering on these promises through lack of coordination and duplication of services. This results in a failure to meet the needs of those meant to benefit. Indeed humanitarian aid with its diverse mandates, roles, people, time lines and funding, as well as the absence of clear definitions to describe specific identities (purpose, principles), presents a chaotic and confusing image to the public, host governments and recipients, as well as ongoing challenges for agencies and aid workers. Since appreciable donor finances total billions of dollars annually, these critiques present serious credibility and survival issues to agencies that depend on donor funding in order to save and improve the lives of the vulnerable. It is for this compelling reason that it is important to deconstruct the roles of and linkages between emergency, relief and development aid, identify problems that impact effectiveness and sustainability, and also acknowledge progress and successes both past and present.