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Early Warning is one of the most important components of Disaster Risk Reduction – and one of the most successful!

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In this blog to mark the International Day of Disaster Risk Reduction (October 13), HSC Coordinator Tom Ansell dives into the role of ‘Early Warning’ systems and policies as part of Disaster Risk Reduction initiatives. They fit within greater DRR programming to make sure that people are warning in advance and can take precautions, or other measures, to prepare for an upcoming shock or hazard. The 2004 Asian Tsunami highlighted the need for more early warning systems for countries with Pacific and Indian Ocean coasts – these systems were triggered earlier this year after an 8.8 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Russia.

Photo Credit: UNDRR

Introduction – DRR on multiple levels

Managing the risks to people’s lives and livelihoods before, during and after a disaster (whatever the cause) requires looking beyond just ‘responding to a disaster’. Since the 1990’s, and the UN’s ‘International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction’, attitudes towards the disaster cycle have matured and within many emergency management agencies there is some reference to several ‘phases’ of a disaster in a ‘cycle’. For example, the Australian Emergency Management Agency refers to the ‘prevention, preparedness, response, recovery’ phases (now considered a bit old fashioned!). The ‘risk management approach’ is currently the most modern frame for disaster preparation for and responding to a disaster, which focuses on risks rather than timelines: “establish contexts, identify risks, analyse risks, assess risks, treat risks” – and repeat!

Risks are themselves a mixture of hazards/shocks (something that might cause a disaster), vulnerability (socioeconomic conditions that might exacerbate the hazard), exposure (how close people, livelihoods, etc, are to the hazard), and coping capacity (the resources and protocols in place to manage risk).

It’s all put together as the following formula:

Risk = Hazard x Vulnerability x Exposure
Coping capacity

To make a risk assessment, practitioners consider the severity of a risk, and the likelihood of it occurring, to make a compound ‘score’. Disaster Risk Management involves activities, policies, procedures and so on to mitigate risks (DRR), often by reducing vulnerabilities or exposure, or by increasing coping capacity.

So a systematic approach to DRR will approach all of these various components. It’s easy to see why knowing about a hazard early might make it easier to protect people and livelihoods. Or, in technical language: Early Warning increases coping capacity, by giving more time to prepare for a hazardous situation (by taking anticipatory action), thereby decreasing exposure! Within the humanitarian sector, programmes and interventions around this are usually referred to as Early Warning, Early Action (EWEA). Ideally, these activities should be contextual, appropriate, ‘people-centred’, community-based and/or managed, and inclusive.

What do Early Warning systems look like?

What an early warning system looks like is completely dependent on the context and hazard in question. The logic behind most early warning systems, though, is monitoring a hazard (say, a river level) and then triggering information sharing and next steps once a certain level of immediacy has been reached.

For example, the Syria Civil Defence (the White Helmets) co-developed an app-based early warning system for airstrikes, military activities, and knock-on emergencies during the Syrian civil war. A central command room processes incoming reports of, say, jets taking off from an air base, and then sends a warning via app and SMS to mobile phones in the region, with instructions to take cover. Prior to this system, early warnings of air strikes were spotted by people in watch-towers, and communicated by word of mouth and a walkie-talkie radio network, which led to delays in warning people about incoming danger. This app-based system could be used to warn of other incoming hazards, for example a particularly violent winter storm, upstream flooding, or seismic activity. The Netherlands utilizes a similar system for all manner of hazards, NL-Alert.

But whilst tech-enabled Early Warning systems have grown in the last 15 years, there are plenty of contexts where word-of-mouth, radio broadcasting, or an emergency network (the ‘telephone tree’ method) is the most effective way of getting information to people in time to evacuate, take precautions, or otherwise prepare. For example, if there is a river close to a community that periodically floods, people ‘upstream’ can monitor river levels, and spread the words to communities ‘downstream’ if there is particularly high water. This is also the case for knowledge passed down through the generations: if a particular species of animal usually leaves just before a violent storm, for example, this can serve as the ‘trigger’ to warn people.

Early Warning systems are equally useful for slow-onset disasters. An example here is part of the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) in Ethiopia, which is designed to reduce the risk of famine during poor harvests by offering cash-for-work and cash transfers for people that mainly rely on local agriculture for income and to maintain access to food. The programme is ‘activated’ when drought has been detected for a certain number of months, depending on the region.

Early Warning for Tsunami since 2004

On 26 December 2004, a large underwater earthquake off the coast of Indonesia triggered 50-metre high waves that killed over 220,000 people, as well as leaving more than 2 million people homeless in 15 countries. At the time, Indonesia was not considered an especially high-risk country for tsunami, meaning that the at the time there was little monitoring of underwater seismic activity, or sea level surface. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre was only able to find out about the impending disaster through internet news stories about devastation in Thailand (itself also unprepared for underwater earthquakes or tsunami at the time), and so couldn’t warn countries with Indian Ocean costs in time.

Following the destruction of the 2004 tsunami, national governments, UN agencies, and NGOs all put renewed efforts into reducing exposure to tsunami and oceanic hazards. At an intergovernmental level, the tsunami sped up development and adoption of the Hyogo Framework for Risk Reduction (now surpassed by the Sendai Framework). At a national level, Thailand created a multi-hazard oceanic early warning system, with tsunami detection buoys and information sharing with Indonesian, Australian, and Indian detection buoys. These signals are sent to a national coordination centre, whereupon various operating procedures are activated. A warning is then broadcast in five languages by fax, SMS, through ‘warning box’ speakers, radio relay towers, public tannoys, social media and through radio and TV warnings. The system will be developed further to give direct to mobile phone warnings in the coming decades.

Indonesia, meanwhile, has developed a network of 553 seismographs, as well as using oceanographic modelling and local hazard mapping for low-lying coastal areas. Once this network detects seismographic activity, procedures include public announcements, vertical evacuation routes, and evacuation signage.

Outside of the Pacific region, the destruction of the 2004 tsunami impelled Caribbean governments to put together the Tsunami and other Coastal Hazards Warning System for the Caribbean Sea and Adjacent Regions (ICG/CARIBE EWS), a multi-hazard coastal early warning system, and since 2011 have integrated the CARIBE WAVE exercise, which simulates a tsunami or underwater earthquake evacuation. In 2024, over 700,000 people were ‘evacuated’ during the exercise.

Unfortunately, well-functioning early warning systems are not enough to completely mitigate the risk of a large disaster, as the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami demonstrates. More than 20,000 people died during the quake and 39-metre tsunami wave, with knock-on effects including the Fukushima Daichi nuclear accident, despite Japan having a well-developed tsunami early warning system. The worth of all of this preparation work was evident this July, though. An 8.8 magnitude offshore earthquake occurred off the coast of Russian Kamchatka, triggering early warning systems and causing precautionary policies in several countries (including Japan, Indonesia, Russia, and China), including evacuations. The earthquake did cause tsunami-like waves, though did not have the same destructive force as the 2004 tsunami.

Conclusion – early warning as part of a multi-level DRR framework

Early warning systems, then, are a key part of reducing disaster risk, especially to climactic and environmental hazards. But we shouldn’t equate that with completely eradicating risks, or indeed think that early warning is the only part of risk management and reduction that should be concentrated on. Early warning systems work best as part of a full multi-level DRR framework, with training and education on detecting hazards, well-developed protocols for early action, evacuation, or other mitigation measures; and a general policy to reduce societal vulnerability through equitable policies, reducing socio-economic inequalities, and strong governance structures.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

 

About the Author

Tom Ansell

Tom Ansell is the coordinator and programme manager of The Hague Humanitarian Studies Centre, and the Coordinator of the International Humanitarian Studies Association. He has a study background in religion and conflict transformation, as well as an interest in disaster risk reduction, and science communication and societal impact of (applied) research.

 

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From the Brahmaputra to the Rhine: Tracing the Currents of Climate Mobility

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In this blog, Ranon Jahan, a researcher at the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD, Dhaka, Bangladesh) brings together his thoughts following the Environmental and Climate Mobility Network conference held in Bonn, Germany, in July of this year. Through the comparative case studies of two rivers, he considers the interlocking issues of risk, climate mobility, and disaster governance.

Photo Credit: Rawnak Jahan Khan Ranon

“Millions of them must move”: a warning first voiced by William Vogt in 1948. Seventy-six years later, we are still counting millions of displaced people each year, with the numbers only growing. On 10th July 2025, as a young researcher from Bangladesh, I shared how it occurs in my home country at the Environmental and Climate Mobility Network (ECMN 25) Conference held in Bonn, Germany. The conference draws collective understanding on climate mobility which brought together 180 participants from across the world includes 128 presentations and 6 workshops. The whole conference was the platform for the researchers, practitioners and policy makers to share their findings, methods and recommendation. It explores both challenges and possibilities of governing climate mobility. These diverse perspectives reshaped how I see my work in global platform. This blog is my reflection on those connection where global narratives align with local realities, where they miss and why accountability in climate mobility governance matters now more than ever.

Two Rivers, One Story

I began my Bonn journey standing by the Rhine River, thousands of miles away from the Brahmaputra’s eroding banks in Bangladesh. The Brahmaputra is one of the largest rivers in the world, known for its powerful current and seasonal flood in Bangladesh. During monsoon, it becomes furious, with a shifting course. It can swallow homes, schools, agricultural land and entire villages, leaving families nowhere to go. When I was standing by the Rhine and looking into the its flowing water, I felt the same pulse of uncertainty that my fieldwork has shown me back home. Back by the Brahmaputra, my conversations with local communities were filled with stories of distress and uncertainty. Standing by the Rhine during the conference, listening to others speak of their own hardships and governance challenges, I realized those conversations were not so different after all. Presenting my findings there was more than a research, it was a way of placing a local story in a global current.

The conference quickly revealed that the issues I work on are not limited to one region. Listening to different research from around the world, I realized that the struggles of climate mobility transcend borders. In the same panel where one researcher presented statistics on Assam, India, estimating the staggering yearly costs of disasters, another shared how a single flood in Germany caused damages far exceeding those figures, despite advanced structural measures. The scale may differ, but the vulnerabilities and governance challenges are interconnected.

 

Photo Credit: Rawnak Jahan Khan Ranon

Beyond Climate: The Messy Web of Governance

Over three days, it became clear to me that climate mobility is not shaped by climate change alone. Geopolitics, global conflicts, and migration governance are constantly reshaping displacement narratives and dynamics. Much of the discussion revolved around finding better governance systems for this deeply complex issue. Yet, we also confronted a harder question: as researchers, are we clarifying or complicating the concept by layering on new terminologies?

The conference was a meeting ground of questions and stories of thriving, struggling, and striving migrants from across the globe, including my own presentation on displacement risk along the Brahmaputra. But when the conversation shifted from problems to solutions, the overwhelming complexity of governance took center stage. Speeches and presentations often concluded that governance needs to be both localized and global. Yet, the connection between the two is far more tangled than it sounds, echoing what some scholars describe through the lens of glocalisation—the uneven and sometimes contradictory ways global agendas are interpreted and reworked in local contexts.

My own presentation centered on multi-actor responsibility, leadership, and power-sharing as a way to reduce vulnerability to displacement at sub-national level. Yet, in reality, both Bangladesh and elsewhere, the governance remains limited, underperforming and far from adequately accountable. But after three days of attending different sessions, the questions left unclear to me is “who is accountable, how and to what extent?” In practice, accountability often moves through layers, what governments promise on paper, how institutions interpret it, and what actually reaches people on the ground. Yet true accountability should not end with legal or policy frameworks; it must be felt in practice through transparent decisions, meaningful participation, and clear limit on what those in power. And yet, I remain unclear about how this should ultimately be realized.

Photo Credit: Douwe van Schie

From Local Currents to Global Tides

One reality struck me that policy processes, reviews, advocacy, and negotiations move far slower than the pace of displacement. By the time governance systems are being negotiated, the communities we talk about have already been uprooted. Amidst all of these thoughts, my time in Bonn was overwhelming and filled with concerns and contested ideas around climate mobility. By the end, I couldn’t point to a single, immediate global action that would secure the rights and quality of life for millions at risk.

Yet, the conference was an eye-opener, giving me a macro lens to view my work. My story from the Brahmaputra may seem small in the grand scale of global climate mobility, but it resonated alongside every other study shared in those rooms. Each case added a knot to the tangled net of mobility challenges, showing the urgent need to both untangle these knots and zooming into those knots closely.

It left me with a powerful reminder that  local stories are never just local, they are threads in the global fabric of climate mobility, and understanding them is key to creating governance that is both just and effective.

Acknowledgement

The author’s participation in the conference was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant Agreement No. 884139).

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

 

About the author:

Rawnak Jahan Khan Ranon

Rawnak Jahan Khan Ranon is a Research Officer at the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD). With a degree in Forestry, he has developed his expertise at the intersection of natural resource management and social research on climate change. His work focuses on forest management, displacement, locally led adaptation, and accountability. He continues to study how governance and adaptation affect the lives of vulnerable communities in Bangladesh.

COVID-19 | “Stay safe” conversations that illuminate the glass walls between her and me by Mausumi Chetia

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Disasters are lived in different ways by different classes of people. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the differential impacts of disasters lie in the blurred spaces between populations fortunate enough to focus on ‘productivity-during-lockdown-times’ and others who focus on ‘providing-food-for-their-children-and-having-a-home-during-lockdown-times’. For generationally disaster-prone or disaster-torn populations of India, this global pandemic is only widening the class gaps that have characterized local realities for the Indian society for centuries.

My husband and I recently witnessed thousands of daily-wage workers and families marching towards a bus terminal near our home in Delhi. From there, they would take buses to their hometowns. Many were travelling on foot, too, trying to make their way to their homes hundreds of miles away from Delhi after the entire country was placed under lockdown from 25 March. This involuntary exodus of workers from India’s many cities that has continued despite fatal consequences is an oxymoronic act that seems to oppose the social distancing measures prescribed by the WHO and related suggestions from developed nations. It is not that these workers are unwilling to keep safe—it is simply that a substantial part of India’s population, including these workers, cannot afford to do so, as has been emphasized repeatedly.

My current research looks at the everyday lives of families facing protracted displacement due to the disaster of riverbank erosion along Brahmaputra River in Assam, a state in India. The families I engage with for my research source their income from daily wages. As economic activity suddenly ceased in March, the small stream of income stopped. Consequently, many of the workers were not able to travel back to their families, as they usually would when on leave or a break period. Many male members of these families are currently trapped in the towns within Assam where they work. They were unable to travel to their homes, many miles away, not only because of the physical cost of walking or taking a bus home, but for a different set of reasons as well.

Conversations on care and health that are classes apart

Pic 11
Rita and her friends after collecting firewood for cooking from a neighbouring paddy field. February 2020

A few days after the Delhi exodus, calls from concerned families I work with increased significantly. “You should have just stayed back here with us,” Rita Saikia, a regular caller, often quips. “Come back to the village whenever you can.” Megacities like Delhi have much higher infection rates than rural places, as many of the rural inhabitants I work with recognize.

Besides the exchange of well-intended thoughts and mutual worries, these telephonic conversations are constant reminders of the class differences in the everyday lives of people that surround us, beginning with those of the researched and the researcher. Ironically, despite my power position over the families I work with for my research, they offered me what they thought I did not have in Delhi: a sense of safety they felt in the countryside. Here, thus, they were able to close the distance between the researcher and the researched. Nevertheless, the challenges that these families are facing are colossal in comparison to those I am facing, such as not being able to travel to my university in Europe or being anxious about my inability to work on my dissertation as effectively as I would have liked to from home.

Rita[1] is from one of my host families in one of the villages where I spent time conducting research. With no other choice, she has been managing the household and two children all by herself this entire period. Ajeet, her husband, is a construction worker surviving off daily wages. He is currently stuck at one of his work sites, around 100 kilometers away from his family village. For now, the family is surviving from its meagre savings. Rice has been provided by the children’s school and another one-time ration (of rice) provided by the local government. Quietly hiding away from the eyes of authorities, Rita, along with other women from her village, regularly goes to collect firewood behind their village in the dry paddy field. Refilling the cooking gas cylinder from their savings is a luxury they cannot afford right now.

Ajeet had left the family’s only mobile phone at home, so he calls his family once every three days from his co-worker’s phone. Last night, their younger child of four cried himself to sleep because his father’s call was disconnected before the child could speak to him. The mobile credit had probably run out. The older child of six years smiled and casually said to me, “you know pehi[2], Deuta[3] will not come home now even if the virus dies, but only later. He needs to bring the money home.” This understanding of the daily realities and hardships, and the acceptance of the hardships of life, contrasts sharply with how more privileged people experience the coronavirus pandemic, like any other disaster.

Amidst all of this, the annual season of extreme winds in Assam has begun. Homes of three of the research families have been battered by these winds. The families plan to complete the rebuilding process once the lockdown is relaxed, unable to do so during the lockdown. In addition, come June, the monsoon will make its appearance, inviting the annual visit of the floods, erosion of the banks of Assam’s rivers, landslides and associated socio-economic insecurities that are now compounded by those the lockdown has brought about. A slowing economy post-pandemic and consequential decrease in sources of income, along with exposure to the said disasters, will significantly push these already displaced families further to the brink of poverty.

Living through the intersections of inequalities

Poverty is both a driver and a consequence of disasters[4]. The year 2020 could become one of the most barefaced examples of this. Many socio-economically and politically insecure populations elsewhere in India and in the neighbouring countries of Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Indonesia etc. are also disaster-prone or -torn. Once the world gets back on its feet post-COVID-19, these populations are set to face increasing human insecurities in their everyday lives arising due to the pandemic and its after-effects, like the families in Assam.

A society’s many aspects are unclothed in the aftermath of a disaster[5], which continues to reinforce social inequalities[6]. Disasters, therefore, including the current pandemic, hardly manage to break the walls of class structures – political, economic, social, and so forth. If anything, they increase the height and depth of these walls – between societies within a nation, between different nations, and, most definitely, between the researcher and the researched.

Pic 1
The Brahmaputra River at the backyard of one of the families’ home (from the research). January 2020
[1] All names of research participants have been changed
[2] Assamese word for paternal aunt
[3] Assamese word for father
[4] https://www.preventionweb.net/risk/poverty-inequality
[5] Oliver-Smith, Anthony, and Susanna M. Hoffman, eds. The angry earth: disaster in anthropological perspective. Routledge, 2019.
[6] Reid, Megan. “Disasters and social inequalities.” Sociology Compass 7.11 (2013): 984-997.

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Find more articles of this series here.

Mausumi ChetiaAbout the author:

Mausumi Chetia is a PhD Researcher at the ISS. Her research looks at the everyday lives of disaster-displaced people in Assam, a northeastern state of India.

Questioning the ‘local’ in ‘localisation’: A multi-local reply by Samantha Melis

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The localisation agenda, which aims to localise funds and responsibilities to local actors in humanitarian responses, retains an ambiguous concept of ‘the local’. The inclusion of power relations at multiple local governance levels in the localisation debate is needed for a more realistic approach to locally led responses to disasters, argues Samantha Melis.

The localisation debate in humanitarian aid is not new, but it has regained momentum after the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit and the thereupon following Grand Bargain, where the commitment to direct more resources and responsibilities to local actors was a key element. However, both ‘the local’ and the action of localisation are more complex than what the policies might suggest. It is important to better understand who the local actors are and how a more locally led response is negotiated by all actors involved.

Horizontal and vertical perspectives of the local  

While the localisation agenda focuses mainly on the direction of funds and the building of local capacity, others have also emphasised the need to shift power to local actors. Granted, all these are important for changes to a system that is still mostly top-down and often excludes the voices of the local actors. However, for a more realistic view of the complexities that underly the localisation debate, the perspective of the local and the definition of what localisation means in practice needs to be further researched and contextualised.

The definition of ‘the local’ remains obscure and needs to go beyond local NGO partners. After a disaster, many different types of local responders are involved. Some might have a presence before, but others will be new and temporary, such as certain public and private sector groups, religious institutions, and other individual philanthropists. Also, in each case, civil society, and their role, will be different. Therefore, ‘the local’ varies depending on the context. Within a particular setting, these can be defined as the horizontal locals.

Localisation is usually discussed from a top-down, outsider perspective, with international actors focusing on the locality of the actors that are closer to the disaster and yet not integrated (sufficiently) of the ‘insider group’ of the international community. From a bottom-up perspective, some actors that would be considered local by the international community, such as the national government, are not always considered local by the communities. This often depends on whether they are seen as ‘part of’ or ‘outside’ their group boundaries. These are the top-down and bottom-up vertical locals.

Not one localised response, but multi-local governance

In my research on disaster response in post-conflict countries, this has direct implications for localisation. Localisation is, to a large extent, about resources and power relations, not only between the international and national, but also between different local actors on multiple levels of local governance. If the local governance levels are disconnected, or tensions exist between the horizontal and vertical locals, then localisation becomes even more challenging. These are obstacles that can only be overcome when horizontal and vertical locals are included in the debate and the relations between multiple local governance levels are better understood.

Opening up the conversation

The debate on localisation will benefit from a more layered approach, wherein the local is not only seen as one entity or as detached from the local and international perspective. Studying practical examples of locally led responses will contribute to more realistic and context-appropriate changes in current top-down humanitarian approaches. The concept of ‘the local’ and ‘localisation’ are not as clear cut as they seem to be, and adding depth to the debate opens up more questions that need answers, and continues the conversation in a more inclusive manner.

About the authors:

samanthaSamantha Melis (The Netherlands) is a PhD candidate at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), The Hague, of Erasmus University (EUR). She is currently involved in the project “When disasters meet conflict”, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Within this project, she focuses on the response to disasters in post-conflict scenarios.

 

 

Women’s Week | Challenging humanitarianism beyond gender as women and women as victims by Dorothea Hilhorst, Holly Porter and Rachel Gordon

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Problematic assumptions related to women’s position and role in humanitarian crises are unpacked in a special issue of the journal Disasters on gender, sexuality and violence. The main lesson drawn from the special issue is that aid actors should tread carefully and seriously invest in their capacity to carefully monitor the intended and unintended effects of programming on gender relations.

At the United Nations (UN) World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) in May 2016, ‘achieving greater gender equality and greater inclusivity’ was identified as one of the five key areas of humanitarian action. The WHS wanted this to be a watershed moment that would spark a shift toward systematically meeting the needs of women and girls and promoting their role as active decision-makers and leaders.

After more than four decades of discourses on ‘gender in development’ and a substantive history of evolving international law and practice on women, peace, and security, the WHS marked an important declaration that the humanitarian aid field takes gender seriously. ‘Gender’ too often has been understood as synonymous with ‘women and girls,’ neglecting questions of agency, vulnerability, and the dynamic and changing realities of gendered power relations.

The focus on sexual violence has brought significant attention to some of the challenges that many women face, but has also reproduced a generalised image of women as victims. That idea was already well-embedded in classic views of conflict that see men as aggressors and combatants and women as non-combatant victims. While this depiction is grounded in sad empirical realities, it leads to a kind of tunnel vision that only centres on the suffering of women, viewing them as the primary victims and primarily as victims. The victim discourse furnishes a rationale for providing women with direly needed assistance, and in fact, women themselves are often keen to play the role of victim to become eligible for aid, backgrounding other aspects of their identity, including their (political) agency. Nonetheless, this focus is problematic in obscuring other realities in which men and women assume different and more complex roles.

Humanitarian programmes often seek the participation of women because they (we) are considered the more caring gender. Women are often targeted for aid as a proven means to improve the wellbeing of children, foster more peaceful conditions, and prevent the misdirection of resources. In the process, international aid often aims to also structurally improve the position of women. This is why UNICEF considers engaging women in service delivery as a positive step towards promoting women’s rights, and describes it as the ‘double dividend of gender equality’.

While well-intentioned, all of these assumptions pertaining to women’s position and role in humanitarian responses have problematic aspects. These dimensions are what we aimed to unearth and explore in our new special issue of the journal Disasters on gender, sexuality and violence in humanitarian crises.[1]

What about men?

The attention on women as aid recipients drowns out the voices that are asking: ‘What about men?’ (not to mention other marginalised gender categories like LGBT communities). Men also cope with specific vulnerabilities, often related to their gender. They are much more often at the receiving end of lethal violence than women, and are frequently victims of sexual violence. When aid is channelled through women, it can lead to a situation where men’s vulnerability is forgotten, or where men feel emasculated or disenfranchised from their traditional social roles (see, for example, the contribution by Holly Ritchie to the special issue).  Such situations can have a variety of consequences, ranging from mental health problems among men to the (violent) re-assertion of men and masculinities.

Gender as relations of power

The articles in the special issue bring another layer to this discussion that all too often boxes men and women into stagnant categories. By prioritising these categorical issues that ascribe and assume particular traits as specific to men and women, debates may miss the mark regarding gender as relations of power that, like everything else, are cast into disarray during humanitarian crises. It is well-established that gender roles are interwoven with other social identity markers, and that these intersectional gender relations are, moreover, deeply ingrained in and reproduced by the working of all institutions in society, ranging from the personal between men and women to the working of cultural values, geopolitics, governance practices, and religion. In creating the special issue, we asked: how do humanitarian responses interact with these myriad aspects of gender and other interrelated social identities? And how do humanitarian responses thus affect gender relations?

Persistence and change

The special issue testifies both to the persistence of gender relations as well as their propensity to change. Julian Hopwood, Holly Porter, and Nangiro Saum found a drastic reported change in everyday gender relations in Karamoja, Northern Uganda, especially where women’s material resource bases were enhanced, but they raise questions about whether such change is enduring. The economic empowerment of women may spill over positively into other domains of life, or contrarily may undermine goodwill towards women’s positions and bring about a violent backlash against them (and against humanitarians)—or both. Likewise, well-meaning interventions can have adverse effects, as Luedke and Logan found in South Sudan, where a narrow focus on conflict-related sexual violence and recycled (although well-intentioned) responses thereto by international organisations were not only unhelpful, but also ran counter to and undermined local norms that might have protected women.

The instrumentalisation of gender

A final layer that complicates the analysis of and interventions in gender relations is that gender as an issue is often instrumentalised for different purposes. Gender has firmly become part of the high politics of international relations. More locally, an interest in the position of women can, for example, obscure attempts of a government to firm up its grip over local authorities, as Rebecca Tapscott found in another contribution to the special issue on Northern Uganda. Likewise, Hilhorst and Douma found that the responses to sexual violence in the DRC were instrumentalised for various purposes by a large range of actors.

Treading carefully

What do these different layers mean for humanitarian action, apart from standing as a reminder that paying attention to women should not result in turning a blind eye to vulnerability and agency of other gender categories? The special issue highlights the dynamic and entangled nature of gender relations, and how humanitarian and political attention to gender adds additional layers to the complexities of gender relations in crisis environments. Aid can often do lots of harm. This does not mean that gender objectives should be abandoned, but that aid actors need to tread carefully and seriously invest in their capacity to carefully monitor the intended and unintended effects of programming on gender relations.

[1] The issue is open access for the duration of 2018.

Picture credit: Kate Holt/Africa Practice

Thea

Dorothea Hilhorst is Professor of Humanitarian Aid and Reconstruction at the ISS. Her blog article ‘Emergency sexwork: should NGOs recognise transactional sex as livelihood strategy?‘ further touches on the topics discussed in this article.

Holly head shot 2

Holly Porter is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Institute of Development Policy and Management (University of Antwerp) and Conflict Research Group (Ghent University). She is also Research Fellow at the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

RG4

 

Rachel Gordon is an independent research consultant on gender and humanitarian aid, and was formerly an SLRC Researcher and the SLRC Gender Team Leader, Feinstein International Center (Tufts University)/Overseas Development Institute.