European Humanitarian Roundtable 2016

So I have moved roles slightly and am now beginning to work more specifically within the Humanitarian sector, although I still continue to work for the Open University in development I am focussing the majority of my time with the HumanitarianLeadership Academy  which has brought about this post around the build up to the first ever World Humanitarian Summit (WHS)

Day 2 at the Royal Irish Academy - Image from @eu_echo

As the summit draws closer (May 2016), a series of roundtable debates (4 in total across Europe) organised by the European Commission and the Network on Humanitarian Action  (NOHA) are taking place in order to inform the European Union’s Policy position towards the WHS. I took part in the final event in Dublin this past week, running across 2 days (30^th – 31^st March) the event saw participants from Government, NGO’s, Academia, Funders and Responders engaging in debates which proved to be both interesting (as I continue to develop my knowledge and understanding) and highly productive.  Day 1 was a closed event developing the recommendations across 4 themes:

• Access and Subsidiarity
• Gender based violence and Resilience
• Protection in Urban settings
• Current challenges: forced and protracted displacement

I worked specifically with the group looking at recommendations relating to ‘Access and Subsidiarity ‘with much discussion around the meaning of subsidiarity as it relates to humanitarianism and access, outlined in the recommendations as:

‘Crisis-affected populations must be seen as actors in humanitarian assistance rather than as beneficiaries of aid. There is a need for inclusivity of all sections of crisis-affected population. In this respect, subsidiarity needs to be considered to include empowerment, solidarity and accountability.’


Day 2 was an open event that saw the developed recommendations presented and debated to further refine the final submission. The recommendations from this 4^th event will be published on the NOHAsite soon but you will be able to find the recommendations from events 1-3 already available.

Trying to pick highlights from any event like this, especially within a sector that has many complex interdependencies, is always difficult but there were two themes that did seem to be slightly louder than most and that was around the need to ensure gender is represented across all of the recommendations as part of an inclusive approach; and that with the changing face of crisis in terms of the increasing protracted nature means that a closer alignment of both humanitarian and development work is needed in order to achieve lasting success. This was echoed at the Bond conference earlier in the year.

NOHA live streamed day 2 of the debate which you can view on the their YouTube channel  
To see what others were saying about the debate via twitter see the Storify below: