Who is your constituency? The political engagement of humanitarian organisations

Abstract

The World Humanitarian Summit of 2016 was an attempt to elevate humanitarian organisations more completely into the international political domain. Humanitarian organisations are agencies which provide life-saving assistance to populations in times of conflict or man-made disasters and use the humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence to guide their work. However, humanitarian organisations have always been political entities which engage within the political arena that encompasses humanitarian activity and consists of component actors that include beneficiaries, host and donor governments, local communities, and humanitarian organisations themselves. How, and with whom, they engage contributes to their identity and consequently their ability to implement humanitarian activities. The appropriateness of their political engagement, and the impact of such engagement on their identity, is frequently a source of confusion and contention within humanitarian organisations, particularly when it comes to consideration of the neutrality principle. This commentary argues for the value of using the concept of constituency in analysing the political identity of a humanitarian organisation and its process of political engagement. Without proactively analysing their constituencies, humanitarians are not defining their own political identity and risk others defining it for them. It is often feared that by engaging politically, humanitarian organisations risk compromising their neutrality. This assertion, however, wrongly assumes that the principle of political neutrality must be associated with a state of political inactivity. Further, political neutrality, along with other dimensions of political identity, is not a concept that can be maintained passively but must be built and defined in every political context, both to implement the humanitarian agenda and to defend it from co-option. This process requires taking a clear stance aligned with beneficiaries and other allied constituents, building coalitions and constructive positions with them, and countering coercive constituents who act destructively towards humanitarian principles.