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One of the most significant policy shifts in the international
humanitarian sector in the last decade has been the move to strengthen
the accountability of humanitarian agencies, and to find ways of
improving performance in humanitarian response. This policy shift
occurred against the backdrop of harsh and public criticism of the
role and performance of humanitarian agencies, particularly in the
wake of the international response to the Rwanda crisis in 1995.
Although there were some initiatives to strengthen performance before
the Rwanda crisis (in particular the formulation of the Code of
Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement
and NGOs in Disaster Relief in 1994), there was a proliferation
of initiatives after the crisis, at least partly triggered by the
seminal Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda . One
of the first of these policy initiatives after the Rwanda crisis
was the decision to launch the Sphere project, in 1996, which resulted
in the publication of a ‘Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards
for Disaster Response’ in 2000. The minimum standards covered
five different sectors:
- water supply and sanitation;
- nutrition;
- food aid;shelter and site planning; and
- health services
In each of these five sectors there was already a considerable
body of knowledge and established best practice for emergency response,
making it easier to set minimum standards.
The case study will focus on the process leading up to the decision
to launch Sphere, and the decisions around what it should contain,
in terms of the humanitarian charter and the choice of the five
sectors for setting minimum standards. It will analyse the impact
of research on those decisions. But it will not assess the impact
of Sphere in practice on the humanitarian sector – which is
the focus for the Sphere evaluation. And it will not explore the
process by which the minimum standards were arrived at, which is
too detailed for the scope of this project. However, the case study
will explore what made some agencies buy into Sphere and others
reject it.
Key Researchers
Margie Buchanan-Smith, Research Associate
Frances Stevenson, Research Fellow, HPG
James Darcy, Research Fellow, HPG
Susanne Jaspars, Research Associate
John Borton, Research Associate
Further Information:
A summary of the
study report
The full Working Paper
(Adobe Pdf 334kb)
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