Humanitarian Governance Experiments: Explaining Aid at its Leading Edge

• In Event: The Politics of Non-State Governance and Control in Fragile States

Abstract

Studies of humanitarian governance assume stability of response to conflict and crisis. However, in the wake of 9/11 and the Arab Uprisings, service-delivery international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) began novel operations and used new means to address needs in the Middle East, extending their control over populations into traditional state-governed space. This article examines why there is variation in the timing and scope of, what I call, humanitarian governance experiments: moments of deliberate and intentional change to rule-making or service-delivery that are potentially disruptive of INGO response to crisis or conflict. These constitute a new governance claims by non-state actors. Drawing on 9-months of political ethnography amongst INGOs operating in Lebanon and Jordan, over 120 interviews with INGO staff, and review of organizational documents, this article shows that experiments emerge: first, when changes to an INGO’s security or funding environment threaten organizational survival; and second, when delegation and bottom-up information channels allow field-based aid workers to prime an organization to try something new when under threat.

Author

• Emily K.M. Scott, University of Toronto