Case study of three international relief agencies: Ethics, humanitarian aid and complex political emergencies.

摘要

This dissertation examines the response of three non-governmental international humanitarian agencies (NGOs) to the criticisms contained in the discourse on emergency humanitarian assistance during armed conflict. This criticism devolves down to three categories: that emergency assistance prolongs war, that it is anti-development and that agencies themselves have a variety of operational issues (such as lack of accountability). Some argue that aid militates against protection of human rights and often causes more harm than good. The "new humanitarianism," a philosophy that tries to incorporate humanitarian assistance into donor foreign policy, is one response to criticisms, but it has spawned a number of its own, including risk to the traditional humanitarian principles of independence, neutrality and impartiality.;The research focuses on changes in the three areas of policy, programming and ethical decision-making in the case agencies as a result of their experience with the humanitarian environment of the 1990's. It uses qualitative case study methods, including document review over time and semi-structured interviews with a cross-section of fifty humanitarian workers selected upon agency recommendation for role relevance. The major limitation is that findings cannot be generalized beyond these agencies, although two of them are among those that provide the preponderance of the aid delivered by international relief and development NGOs.;Findings show that by far the most serious issues for agencies at present are security and instrumentalization of aid by western donor governments. They document the emergence of potentially transformative responses such as rapid professionalization of the mainstream agencies, rights-based programming, better conflict analysis, advocacy, peace and justice programming, and merging of relief and development. They also suggest that there is a gulf between mainstream agencies and organizations having humanitarian aid as a secondary goal.;Findings demonstrate that case agencies have no systematic and widely accessible process of reflection on their experience using ethical principles and processes, although analysis of a number of decision-making narratives demonstrates that humanitarian workers usually make principled decisions consistent with the most common cognitive theories for how ethical decision-making occurs. The research analyzes selected decisions from this perspective and closes with several hypotheses and one recommendation.