International Dialogue on Strengthening Partnership in Disaster Response: bridging national and international support: Background paper 2: Regional and International Initiatives

In the past several decades, the number and diversity of international actors involved in operations after major natural disasters has grown enormously. While international assistance organisations represent an expression of human solidarity, and an important source of aid for disaster-affected populations, they also present a growing challenge to the affected state. States need to be able to decide when international assistance is most needed and how to coordinate with and regulate it when it is deployed. International actors can sometimes deliver inappropriate relief items, and fail to coordinate with local authorities and international mechanisms, which can effectively block the ‘right’ aid getting through. These challenges have led to an overall lack of trust and confidence between government authorities and international aid actors.

To explore these questions, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), the International Council of Voluntary Agencies (ICVA) and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) are convening an International Dialogue on Strengthening Partnership in Disaster Response: Bridging national and international support (International Dialogue on Disaster Response). The Dialogue will gather a select group of representatives with overall authority for managing national disaster response and the entry of international assistance to their countries, as well as representatives from select NGOs, the Red Cross/Red Crescent, UN agencies, and regional organisations for a meeting in October 2011.

The objective is to stimulate a results-oriented discussion on:

• how affected states can best facilitate international assistance in non-conflict disasters while also ensuring adequate coordination, oversight and quality guarantees; and 
• how the international community can better support affected states to fulfil their regulatory and facilitating responsibilities.

In preparation for the Dialogue, an ‘Expert Dialogue’ of technical experts was held in June 2011. This is one of three papers commissioned for these meetings. Its purpose is to provide a summary of some of the key recent international and regional initiatives as they relate to the role and responsibility of the affected state in international disaster response, in particular how the state relates with international actors. It is hoped that this paper helps facilitate discussion by widening the shared knowledge base of participants in the Dialogue.