This Working Paper examines the literature on regional organisations’ humanitarian priorities and activities. It examines key concepts applicable to regional organisations, offers a short review of the emergence of regional organisations’ humanitarian institutions, and addresses the activities of regional organisations in crisis-affected contexts. Given the breadth of humanitarian action, the paper focuses on assistance to refugee populations, disaster risk reduction (DRR) and conflict management, as these are often more regionally focused.
Key Findings:
- Other members of the international humanitarian community should use caution in approaching regional organisations as a coherent category of institutions with similar features. Each regional organisation is rooted in a unique historical and cultural context which influences how they view their role, how they make decisions and how they intervene (or not) in particular situations. Overarching strategies or approaches towards regional organisations as a whole are unlikely to be appropriate.
- The assumption that regional organisations will be well-intentioned and well-informed interlocutors in particular situations is not substantiated.
- Where regional organisations may have made a high degree of progress – such as DRR, climate monitoring, food security tracking and conflict early warning – the issues have generally been seen as technical. Similarly, research, capacity-building and lesson learning have been particular areas of strength for regional organisations. In contrast, they have been far less likely to engage with issues that the international community has clearly labelled as a political or legal matter.
- International frameworks which specify a role for regional bodies, which have fixed deadlines and include regular monitoring processes at the regional level, will be most likely to drive progress and follow-up.
Recommendations:
- There is a need to ensure that political factors are considered in discussions of regional organisations’ growing humanitarian role. A degree of political realism would help to temper the longstanding tendency among multilateral institutions to praise regional involvement and present it, at times, as a panacea.
- Members of the international community may have more success where they frame an issue – such as refugees – as a technical challenge bolstered by information systems and quasi-scientific standards, rather than a political or legal issue. Such a tactic has limitations, but it may provide a means of engaging regional organisations on particular issues that they may otherwise be reluctant to take up.
- ‘Progress’ must increasingly be framed in tangible rather than institutional or policy-level terms in relation to not only DRR but also humanitarian action more broadly. Policy formulation and institution-building must eventually give rise to practical action at the local, national or regional levels – most of it under the purview of national governments – if regional organisations are to become significant humanitarian actors.
