Humanitarian Principles & Frameworks

Several sets of principles guide work in both humanitarian and development contexts, including:

• the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness/Accra Agenda for Action (AAA)
• the Principles for Good International Engagement in Fragile States
• Good Humanitarian Donorship (GHD).

The GHD principles enable donors to use instruments that bypass state structures to provide assistance in countries where they might not be able to spend development aid. Some tension may lie between the GHD and Fragile States principles because emergency needs usually continue alongside the need for state-building and peace-building activities. This means balancing the humanitarian principles of neutrality and impartiality with the need to make inherently political choices about building the capacity of certain sets of actors, engaging with former combatants and security sector reform. The GHD principles state that donors will “strengthen the capacity of affected countries and local communities to cope with humanitarian crises” (which is in line with the Paris principles).

Donor coordination features in all three sets of principles but is a major challenge, particularly in emergency and post-conflict situations and where there is no agreed set of objectives for donors to coordinate around. Donors have found pooled funding mechanisms like the common humanitarian funds useful in facilitating donor coordination though the governing bodies of these mechanisms do not always involve government counterparts. But coordinating funding through a pooled mechanism is not the same as, or a substitute for, an agreed strategy and shared objectives.