To Address Increasing Crises, Incentivize Locally Led Surge Capacity and Prepare for Multidimensional Crisis Response

This commentary is part of a report from the CSIS Global Development Department series entitled Global Development Recommendations for the Next Administration. 

Disasters globally are on the rise, outstripping the ability of the United States and the international aid system to respond adequately to rising needs. Conflict and extreme weather-related disasters are drivers of increased humanitarian need, and yet areas of conflict are often the places in which U.S. personnel and assets are least able to respond directly and in which needs often balloon uncontrollably. This leads to a demand for localized surge capacity—the ability of a local organization to quickly increase resources, personnel, and supplies to respond to an emergency—and for greater multinational support to handle increasingly complex crises. Sudan and Gaza are two recent examples of dire humanitarian crises with a lack of U.S. footprint in the affected territories. Across these and other contexts, local actors have demonstrated resilience and ingenuity in devising ways to get aid to civilians in need through the creation of innovative approaches such as Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms and the White Helmets in Syria, both of which were nominated for Nobel Peace Prizes for their heroic efforts.

Yet these locally created institutions often struggle from a lack of funding from leading international humanitarian donors, in spite of evidence indicating that localized approaches are more cost effective, lead to more contextualized awareness of needs within communities, and are faster. And given their struggle for funding for adequate emergency response, it is even more difficult for local institutions to maintain standby capacity to rapidly scale up when a crisis escalates. Surge capacity for humanitarian action too often is considered as a global issue, with the United States and international NGOs preparing rosters of emergency experts who can fly in to respond to a crisis. And the United Nations global cluster coordination system has not lived up to the demands facing multidimensional humanitarian crises, including the Covid-19 pandemic, demonstrating the need for new approaches to humanitarian action and crisis response. 

Global Leadership for Multidimensional Crises

The United States can take action at the multilateral and bilateral levels to address these challenges. At the United Nations, the United States should champion the establishment of a UN-led Emergency Response Platform for multidimensional, complex crises. Originally proposed and widely supported in the discussions leading up to the United Nations Pact for the Future, an Emergency Response Platform would be a set of pre-agreed coordination protocols only activated in cases of extreme need, rather than a standing structure. It would be able to address a variety of complex global shocks, from a future pandemic, to an event involving a biological agent, to a global disruption in the flow of people or goods, to an outer space or black swan event. Often, the most vexing questions in the responses to multidimensional crises include: Whose responsibility is it to respond, and who has the funding, mandate, and capability to do so? This set of protocols would provide a way to understand these issues up front, setting up standing protocols that overcome the barriers often produced by a global aid system that typically works in strict silos. It could therefore provide the leadership and organization that was so devastatingly lacking during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

U.S. Leadership in Localizing National Crisis Response

The United States should also walk the talk in terms of its localization priority—an agreed humanitarian priority across both Republican- and Democratic-led administrations—and support surge capacity for local actors. This will help capacitate response by actors who are closest to crises and can respond the most quickly and cost-effectively, reducing reliance on global aid workers who need to parachute in. Local funds, such as the Shared Aid Fund for Emergency Response (SAFER) in the Philippines, should be more systematically supported through deliberate U.S. investment. This investment should be tailored to local contexts and be responsive to the types of local partners who are most responsible, capable, and appropriate. The types of local partners the United States can support may differ depending on whether there is a strong government presence in the country or specific region or if the local government is unwilling or unable to respond directly to humanitarian needs.

The United States should incentivize national humanitarian surge capacity through committing to support the creation of nationally administered pooled funds across key countries facing conflict or recurrent crises. To do so, the United States should create a Local Humanitarian Surge Fund Initiative, led by the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development, prioritizing a series of strategic investments in collaborative and nationally administered country-based pooled funds that channel direct funding to the constellation of local actors active in a response and provide support for their training and capacity building.

As with SAFER in the Philippines, due diligence can be conducted on local actors to ensure that they have sufficient controls in place to justify receiving humanitarian funds. These funds can also be collaboratively created and benefit from surges of investment from traditional U.S. humanitarian partners, such as international NGOs with expertise in grant administration for humanitarian projects. This could reverse the traditional model to allow U.S. international NGOs to be implementers, rather than holding the cards as decisionmakers over who receives funding directly. Adequate training, investment in mental health support and human resources, and a direct strategy for engaging women in humanitarian surge capacity should comprise part of the make-up of these funds. The United States should also invest in collecting an evidence base around the effectiveness of these operations and use this to open a dialogue with Congress on the imperative for and effectiveness of locally led surge funding. The United States should also use its contracting ability to set guardrails to ensure its own partners and the UN entities it funds are not building up their own humanitarian surge staff by derailing the capacity of local organizations. 

By making these investments in coordination and incentives funding, the United States can learn valuable lessons from its past investments in humanitarian assistance to meet the demands of an increasingly crisis-driven future. 

Michelle Strucke is director of the Humanitarian Agenda and the Human Rights Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.