Impartiality – a principle that needs practice

When it comes to the core principles of humanitarian work, definitions are often recited, but what do the principles look like in action? Well, the fundamental humanitarian principle of impartiality often seems to be hiding in plain sight. Printed on agency posters, proudly proclaimed in our mission statements, deployed in negotiations with obstructive governments – impartiality is highly visible yet often missing from our internal decision-making. There, in the role for which it was designed, impartiality is readily assumed, half-applied, sidelined, or dismissed as some sort of theoretical abstraction, a concept that lives in the clouds of HQ doctrine and not in the hardscrabble reality of humanitarian operations.

In exploring impartiality with the late Sean Healy, we moved beyond the typical analysis of external challenges to the principle coming from insecurity, donor preferences, blocked access or resource constraints (staff, funding, logistics). Instead, we focused on the internal organisational dynamics of implementing the principle. This is where the sector needs to make changes and has the power to do so. What are the shortcomings in the Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) and sectoral interpretation and implementation of impartiality – and, more generally, of the core principles of humanitarian action?

Those questions are made even more difficult to answer because for something so important, the core principles are rarely evaluated or even tracked, seemingly displaced by an obsession with monitoring and hitting logframe targets. Here is a good example of the principles hiding in plain sight: ALNAP’s 429-page guide on the evaluation of humanitarian action (now being revised) briefly summarises the definitions of the principles yet offers no guidance on evaluating them. Helpful guidance for United Nations evaluations has just been published. We should question why this gap was not addressed years ago.

What does impartiality tell us to do?

As set forth by the International Committee of the Red Cross, impartiality instructs that when deciding who should receive assistance, humanitarians should make:

no discrimination as to nationality, race, religious beliefs, class or political opinions. It endeavours to relieve the suffering of individuals, being guided solely by their needs, and to give priority to the most urgent cases of distress.

The first key directive is non-discrimination, the central ethic of impartiality, which clearly draws upon the fundamental equality and dignity of all human beings. In this way, the principle functions as the operational embodiment of humanitarianism’s goal – humanity. In blunt terms, to ignore impartiality is to ignore humanity.

The second key directive of impartiality is proportionality. The logic is quite pragmatic: because no agency can cover all needs, choices need to be made in a way that values people and helps to preserve access. Who should get the available assistance? Impartiality’s inner principle of proportionality offers a fair way of setting priorities without resorting to discriminatory factors. Proportionality means that aid is allocated according to the degree of need, beginning with the most urgent cases. This means that finding people with some needs is not enough – humanitarians should be targeting those most in need.

Operationalising non-discrimination and proportionality on the ground leads to many problems. The next three subsections treat a set of pragmatic issues that stood out in our research: (1) how to identify those most in need; (2) the challenge of active non-discrimination and how that relates to tensions between specialisation, inclusivity and impartiality; and (3) proportionality – the commitment to reach those most in need.

Practical challenges to the implementation of impartiality

In reality, of course, various interests interfere with the ideal of a perfectly impartial allocation (unbiased and proportionate): the personal interests of staff, agency objectives such as meeting corporate targets for visibility or for maintaining specialised areas of expertise, dependency upon institutional donors, insufficient capacity to reach those most in need, and what Jeremy Konyndyk eloquently describes as the top-down way in which the sector ‘shapes interventions to conform to agencies’ mandates regardless of the priorities of crisis-affected populations’.

Furthermore, data that serves rigorous decision-making is scarce, and more broadly the use of data has been criticised as borderline fictitious in its quantification of need and biased in its approaches to interpreting need. Do politicians, institutional donors or aid executives trust the data tells an accurate story? Or is it more that data tells a story that decision-makers can use to defend difficult choices? An important factor here is whether operational agencies invest resources and effort into generating data and analysing it.

Even with good data, though, at the heart of allocation decisions we often find the riddle of the incommensurability of needs – a big word that means it is very difficult to compare things that are not alike, such as cholera deaths in Zimbabwe to sexual and gender-based violence in Myanmar to the destruction of civilian infrastructure and displacement in Ukraine. Which of those situations presents the ‘most urgent cases of distress’? As should be obvious, it is a lot easier to identify those most in need in the waiting room of a clinic than across an entire nation or from the global perspective.

The challenge of active non-discrimination

Humanitarians have tended to accept ‘non-discrimination’ at face-value – a superficiality that may generate its own set of victims by targeting aid based upon identity rather than need. Identity factors certainly help us understand vulnerability: this means they should often guide where we look first. But identity should not become the sole basis for drawing conclusions as to where, what and to whom we deliver assistance or protection. Each context decides that, by determining how factors such as identity and vulnerability play out in a specific location.

Research highlights the consequences when we base impartiality on assumptions about identity. For example, Barbelet, Lough and Njeri analyse the tension between the implementation of inclusive programming and impartiality, revealing how delivering aid to the generically ‘most vulnerable’ can become a proxy, replacing the identification and response to those actually most need in a specific context. Programmes that target women and girls often strengthen impartiality, but in certain contexts this focus then misses perhaps more marginalised communities, such as people with disabilities or those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or queer (LGBTQ+), or misses the elderly in an atypical context such as in Ukraine, a highly vulnerable group that is infrequently the focus of humanitarian intervention. A similar finding can be found in ALNAP’s 2018 State of the Humanitarian System report, calling out the insufficient practice of aid programming that consists of ‘predetermined activities for predetermined “vulnerable groups”’.

The problem is not specialisation but our implementation of it. Specialisation enhances impartiality, which directs aid to target and be shaped to the specific needs of people, and specialisation allows humanitarians to truly understand and respond to those needs. Yet without regard for the higher responsibility of principled action, a distinction intending to serve a vulnerable group risks becoming an adverse distinction that works against groups with greater needs. To avoid humanitarian work that ‘may be saving some lives while actively pushing behind the lives of those harder to reach, invisible and unheard’, non-discrimination requires positive effort and context-specific action rather than passive abstention.

Watering down or disregarding proportionality

While non-discrimination proves challenging, implementation of impartiality’s inner principle of proportionality raises a red flag. Studies 1: https://library.alnap.org/help-library/principled-humanitarian-programming-in-yemen-a-prisoners-dilemma 2: https://humanitarianoutcomes.org/publications/what-it-takes-principled-pragmatism-enable-access-and-quality-humanitarian-aid-insecure have shown that aid agencies often prioritise non-discrimination but shortchange, remain unaware of, or ignore proportionality. Why isn’t everybody focused on finding those most in need? There are routine compromises, such as competing values or policies, variance in the perceptions of need, difficult logistics and security, and the big business of being able to boast of high numbers of aid recipients. This leads, for example, to aid in South Sudan being crowded around centres dedicated to the protection of civilians, underserving people in even more desperate situations beyond those camps.

The larger concern lies in the visibility of and humanitarian commitment to proportionality, because reaching those most in need is more than a little difficult in today’s crises. That’s why the principle exists, as a constraint on taking the easier road. With a focus on Afghanistan, South/Central Somalia, South Sudan and Syria, research by Haver and Carter found that a ‘key feature’ in explaining why some agencies gain greater access than others is ‘focusing on the goal of reaching those most in need, rather than simply executing programmes in reachable areas’.

The crux of the problem is that delivering aid to people in need sounds like a good thing, but there is a cost to downplaying proportionality: it renders aid less effective (because it reaches people in need who are suffering less severely, or who have at least some other options) and it may serve the political interests of donors, state authorities, aid agencies and armed groups. Another issue is that where aid is not distributed on an impartial basis and explained as such, it can readily be perceived as unfair (going to those with less need, such as those who have ‘connections’), thus provoking grievances among those not receiving assistance. There is also damage to the very idea of being led by principles, because delivering aid to people with some needs normalises a lesser standard, one that often favours manageability, risk aversion, and meeting contract targets.

Putting the principles into practice

Pulling these various shortcomings together, and given their fundamentality, when it comes to the principles the practices of humanitarians create a major weakness, as it leaves a sector ‘uncertain about what to do with them in practice’ combined with ‘limited practical support’ to put them in place. To turn this situation around, the principles need greater investment.

First, the way the sector deals with its own principles is often by misunderstanding them, seeing principled action as a false binary of compliance versus non-compliance. Treating the principles as sacrosanct or inviolable (as binary propositions) – with an agency judged as principled for adherence versus unprincipled for compromise – scares people off, rendering the principles as a subject to be discussed ‘behind closed doors’. We need a new norm: deliberate and transparent compromise.

Here, language matters. As one expert explained, in her organisation the framing of the principles as regulatory – as being ‘complied with’ or ‘adhered to’ – pushed staff to think that compromising the principles amounted to breaking a standard, and thus unprincipled action. It would be better to ask how far and how intentionally the principles ‘guided’ or ‘underpinned’ the decision-making of an agency. The reality is that no organisation is 100% (or even 90%) independent, neutral or impartial, especially in today’s degraded ‘humanitarian space’. Imperfection is unavoidable and trade-offs between the principles are built into their implementation. As goals, they inspire, and as guidance they call for leadership, structured deliberation and the pragmatism of principled compromise rather than the principles being clear-line regulations.

A second critical direction for the implementation of the humanitarian principles is for agencies to stop thinking of them as something for ‘the field’. Rather, operational guidance of the principles should be matched by leadership assuring their strategic influence. Take the following example: suppose Region X is where people are most in need; INGO A targets aid delivery to people in X. But what if INGO A lacks adequate security management expertise and cannot deliver this aid? Acting without discrimination in Region Y – a less needy yet more safely accessible area – makes for an acceptable compromise, but is not the end of the story. Note where the costs fall – upon those communities of greatest need who should be but are not receiving assistance. Impartiality (and accountability) thus directs INGO A to do better in the future. In this example, the experience should spawn a strategic institutional objective to increase its security management capacity.

Final word

Poor operationalisation of the principle of impartiality erodes the humanitarian character of the relief itself. My co-author Sean and I concluded that moving forward requires a more intentional commitment to the principle, and for leadership to take compromise out of the closet and away from the principled/unprincipled binarism that stifles sharing, learning, and an evolution of the principles rooted in practice and in context. This learning cannot be ancillary to principled humanitarianism, it should be definitive – building through actions and review of action an agency’s specific approach to impartiality. That is the road to accountable, principle-driven, and reality-comprised humanitarian action.

Marc DuBois is an independent humanitarian consultant and Senior Fellow at SOAS.