In recent years, there has been a rise in efforts to integrate gender issues and promote gender equality in humanitarian action, based on growing recognition of the gendered impacts of conflict and the specific barriers that restrict access to humanitarian assistance for women, girls and marginalized groups. This has been demonstrated by a shift in emphasis to protection and the provision of gender-based violence services, as well as efforts to empower conflict-affected women and to support their livelihoods. Such commitments are reflected in the Gender in Humanitarian Action Handbook published by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) – the highest level humanitarian coordination forum of the UN system – and the IASC gender policy, which aims ‘to make gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls a core principle in humanitarian action’. The IASC handbook integrates gender issues across multiple aspects of humanitarian action, including cash-based interventions, food security, shelter, education and health. The IASC Gender Accountability Framework (2017) further bolsters these key documents through the implementation of annual reporting against a broad framework of indicators.
But while growing consciousness of feminist issues and collective action have influenced global development theory and practice since the 1970s, concerns of gender equality and women’s empowerment have not always been considered fundamental to humanitarian action in conflict contexts. In fact, in the past, humanitarian actors have questioned whether the pursuit of such goals may negatively impact the ability and capacity of agencies to access crisis-affected populations. The humanitarian principles have featured centrally in such claims; humanitarian organizations, including the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the ICRC have argued that pursuing the objectives of gender equality could create tension with the humanitarian principles, particularly neutrality and impartiality. For example, up until 2011, the ICRC’s annual report included the disclaimer that ‘in accordance with its principles of neutrality and impartiality, the ICRC does not claim to reform gender relations’.
In more recent years, however, increasing efforts have been made to be gender responsive, and even transformative, in the way humanitarian assistance is provided. UNHCR and the ICRC have since adopted policies that underscore the relevance of a gender perspective to accurately assess and design responses. In 2022, an ICRC report elaborated that:
Recent statements have similarly noted that there is ‘no such thing as gender-neutral humanitarian action’. At the same time, governments – including in Canada (2017), France (2019) and Mexico (2020) – have also begun to pursue more overtly ‘feminist’ approaches in their foreign policy.
In conflict settings, such efforts are seen in the growing emphasis on more integrated approaches that connect humanitarian, development and peace action, such as ‘triple nexus’ and women, peace and security (WPS) frameworks. Gender advocates describe the WPS framework as ‘an agenda for profound and sweeping action on gender justice within the humanitarian sector itself, and thus it is imperative for reaching crisis-affected people of all genders effectively and appropriately’. With a focus on integrated practice, the WPS framework promotes the role of humanitarian action in not simply responding to gender discrepancies in access to services and resources, but in supporting women’s roles in peacebuilding and conflict prevention. Meanwhile, advocates recognize the potential of the triple-nexus approach to support gender equality via its aims to promote resilience through connecting humanitarian action to longer-term peace and development processes.
At the same time, the ‘localization’ agenda has gained pace, pushing donors and their implementation partners to address persistent power imbalances in the relationship between international and local humanitarian actors. There are many different ways to define localization, as well as the complexities around identifying who or what is ‘local’. In this paper, the term localization refers to efforts to promote and strengthen the role of crisis-affected communities and organizations in humanitarian action. Its goals are reflected in key policy frameworks like the Grand Bargain – an agreement between donors and humanitarian organizations to improve the effectiveness of assistance – which includes targets for increasing the amount of funding going directly to local organizations. The focus on funding in the localization obligations of the Grand Bargain (workstream 2) is complemented by commitments driven towards a ‘participation revolution’ under workstream 6, which aims to support ‘systematic accountability and inclusion’ to promote the role of people receiving humanitarian resources and services in decision-making processes.
The localization agenda is central to the pursuit of gender equality in humanitarian action, particularly through its potential to support longer-term, transformative shifts in gender relations. The empowerment of marginalized conflict-affected communities, including the promotion of women and girls as leaders, is a pivotal goal of gender-transformative humanitarian action. Locally led gender programming aims to be tailored and to avoid top-down approaches that do not align with the priorities of conflict-affected women, girls and gender diverse people. Humanitarian organizations have made efforts to integrate gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls across the updated Grand Bargain 2.0 framework, endorsed by signatories in 2021. In reference to the Grand Bargain commitments, in this paper ‘inclusive’ refers to the inclusion of crisis-affected communities, especially women-led organizations, women’s rights organizations and those that represent gender-diverse people in humanitarian action.
Taken together, the gender equality and localization agendas call for an intersectional approach that recognizes and responds not only to forms of marginalization and inequity within conflict environments, but also within the humanitarian system itself.
Taken together, the gender equality and localization agendas call for an intersectional approach that recognizes and responds not only to forms of marginalization and inequity within conflict environments, but also within the humanitarian system itself. The achievement of these interlinking agendas is dependent, fundamentally, on the ability to understand and shift existing power dynamics, both in conflict settings and in humanitarian practices and systems. This research paper explores the extent to which humanitarian action can shift power in this way, while operating in accordance with humanitarian principles, particularly impartiality and neutrality.
