What’s the Emergency? How Recipient Governments Shape Donor Aid Allocation

• In Event: The Politics of Disaster Response: COVID-19 and Beyond

Abstract

Faced with natural disasters, governments decide if and how to provide aid to people in need. Classifying a given event as a humanitarian emergency not only galvanizes a domestic response from domestic but can also spurs foreign donors to offer humanitarian aid. Conversely, delays in acknowledging an emergency can lead to unnecessary suffering and prevent donors from offering aid. I argue that governments are more likely to classify fast-onset events as emergencies compared to slow-onset events because responding to fast-onset events helps them to appear competent whereas responding to slow-onset events reveals incompetence. Contrary to past research on humanitarian aid allocation, I argue that recipient governments’ policy choices influence donors’ decisions to provide humanitarian aid. I test my theory using a global dataset of emergency events from 1989-2018 and data on humanitarian aid allocation from USAID Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance. Consistent with my theoretical expectations, I show that recipient governments are more likely to classify events as humanitarian emergencies when they are fast-onset compared to slow-onset events. I further find that donors are more likely to provide aid after host governments classify an event as an emergency. These results suggest that recipient government policy choices play a meaningful but overlooked role in donors’ humanitarian aid allocation decisions.

Author

• Allison Namias Grossman, Stanford University