The United Nations Humanitarian Role in a Futures Context: Institutional Challenges and Promising Opportunities

Over the past five years, considerable efforts have been made
to reform the humanitarian sector. Increasingly, however, the
relevance and effectiveness of these reforms have to be tested
against a rapidly changing humanitarian context and criteria. A
recent spate of emergencies underscores the point. The
Russian heat wave and brushfires in the summer of 2010 that
affected wheat exports and ultimately contributed to food
riots in Mozambique. the unprecedented scale of the July
2010 Pakistan floods, and the simultaneous Indonesian
tsunami, earthquake and volcano eruption. It is by no means
certain how key actors in the humanitarian sector should best
meet such future challenges, that will increasingly be
characterised by a rapid pace of change, uncertainty, and
complexity.
With this concern in mind, HFP launched the Integrated Action
Plan (IAP) in 2007. Its purpose was and continues to be to
assist the UN system to assess and test its capacities for
dealing with future humanitarian threats and opportunities.
Also, to identify measures that can help it to work in a forward
looking, strategic and streamlined manner. In so doing it has
focused on the triangular relationship between the UN’s Inter-
Agency Standing Committee Working Group, six UN Country
Teams and host governments in order to determine the extent
to which their individual and interactive capacities contributed
to the sort of strategic thinking and planning that will be
necessary to deal with longer-term threats and a changing
humanitarian landscape.