Over the last two days I’ve been reminded, whilst participating in the 27th ALNAP annual meeting, that a shared professional language can be a hindrance as much as a help. This is especially the case when the topic is the challenge of urban disasters, until recently largely overlooked by (and therefore fairly new territory for) development and humanitarian NGOs and donors. Your mission, should you choose to accept: find a colleague working on disaster risk reduction or development and ask about ‘resilience’ or ‘vulnerability’. Does their definition tally with yours? These artificial gaps in our approach only serve to exacerbate problems in the complex, compressed environments of cities.
Meetings like this – with over 130 NGO and government participants from across the globe – are also a good chance to get a feeling of what the aid sector has on its collective mind. Most people here have their eyes very squarely fixed on how international aid agencies urgently need to work in new and different ways with government agencies and local CSOs. The words ‘demand-driven’, ‘collaboration’, ‘information sharing’ and even ‘disengagement’ have popped up more than a few times.
Robert Piper, UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Nepal, gave an excellent keynote address on the situation in Kathmandu, Nepal. He really painted a rich picture of what it might mean to tackle the ‘wicked problem’ of urban disaster planning and response in a country with two armies, a complex political setting and ongoing development challenges. The bottom line seemed to be: the underlying issues that perpetuate vulnerability are just as important as responding to immediate disaster situations. Within cities there is also increased likelihood that multiple local actors have established their own development and/or emergency priorities and can organise effectively to resist agendas they perceive to be imposed by international agencies.
This means that, in reality, these concepts – increasing focus on disaster risk reduction and closer working with local NGOs and authorities within cities – appear to challenge some fundamental tenets of humanitarian aid. To engage fully with them, it may mean rethinking who we directly work with (affected populations), andwhen we move in (after a disaster). Is the sector ready to answer these difficult questions? Such a paradigm shift would transform aid as we know it, perhaps expanding into the remit of disaster risk management and development actors.
http://www.cdrn.org.in/show.detail.asp?id=23145
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