Business and disaster response

The role of for-profit entities in humanitarian response situations raises a range of policy questions.

Much of this part of the world goes on summer holiday at this time, amid a range of confronting stories of humanitarian crisis, from Syria to South Sudan. One question is the private sector's role in preventing and responding to disasters.

This brief post offers some reading on the issue. The literature on this took off, in large part, following the 'Boxing Day' Tsunami of December 2004, given in particular the role of global logistics firms in responding to the disaster. The critical literature has a somewhat longer vintage.

The thrust of Naomi Klein's 'Shock Doctrine' (2007) is that a malevolent but mainstream strain of 'disaster capitalism' thrives on such situations.

Compare, from the same year, Binder and Witte's assessment of key trends and policy implications  in relation to business engagement in humanitarian relief.

Here now is a major report on the topic, published this month by ODI researchers.

If you prefer, see this UN news service summary of the research (here). The summary is right, I think, to focus on the pervading legacy of distrust of the private sector by humanitarian agencies and staff. It is also right to note that the search for sustainable, innovative relationships is hampered by the tendency to nominate the wrong people to front up to the private sector or aid agency (as the case may be): humanitarian groups send their fundraising officials to talk with business, while corporates assign the role to public relations officers.

If short on time, here is an op-ed media article by one of the ODI researchers.

The research tends to make insufficient distinctions between acute humanitarian emergency situations, and (longer / slower-burning) periods of post-conflict or post-disaster recovery. Many of its examples relate to situations of chronic under-development, poverty, marginalisation or vulnerability that do not amount to humanitarian emergencies. The ethical, commercial and other considerations of for-profit engagement are not the same for such settings, clearly.

Distinguishing between forms of involvement also matters: firms that respond to natural or man-made disasters (and the line between those is often blurred) may be doing so as donors, partners, contracted service-providers, pro-bono service-providers, and/or out of considerations of strategic self-interest that are not necessarily inappropriate.

Jo