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CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1188-vii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
HUMANITARIAN RESPONSE TO NATURAL DISASTERS
Tuesday 18 July 2006 MR ED SCHENKENBERG VAN MIEROP Evidence heard in Public Questions 315- 355
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the International Development Committee on Tuesday 18 July 2006 Members present Malcom Bruce, in the Chair John Barrett John Battle Mr Jeremy Hunt Ann McKechin Joan Ruddock ________________ Witness: Mr Ed Schenkenberg van Mierop, Co-ordinator, International Council of Voluntary Agencies, gave evidence. Q315 Chairman: Can I welcome you and thank you very much for coming in. We are getting towards the end of our inquiry into humanitarian response to natural disasters. You are probably aware that we had Jan Egeland in yesterday and were exploring with him his role and the UN role. This is an opportunity for us to look at yourself and the Red Cross/Red Crescent and how it looks from your end of the telescope in terms of reform of this humanitarian response. First of all, what is your take on the approach that Jan Egeland and the United Nations are taking which is that "Yes, we do need to reform and upgrade but we do not want to take a completely new approach." Do you agree that that is all that is required, and how do you view your relationship with the UN in general and in the context of this reform? Do you feel that your views are being taken into account? What actions would you like the UN to take to better enable you and your member organisations to function in responding to disasters? Mr Schenkenberg van Mierop: Good morning, and thank you for inviting me. In response to your question, it is important to go back a little to the moment Jan Egeland laid out his vision for the reform process. At that stage, certainly a year ago, plans were more concrete but started sliding before that. A year and a half ago it was unclear around that time for the non-government community, probably also for the Red Cross system although I cannot speak for them, that the plan or the vision that they had in mind was something that would go broader than the UN system. The plans, as he particularly laid them out almost exactly to the day a year ago, when he particularly spoke about the cluster approach, this leadership approach, talked only about UN agencies. Within the NGO community, and also from the Red Cross side, there have been questions as to whether we are only talking about UN reform or are we talking broader. That was unclear at the time and confusing. I would say that in relation to that issue it is important to realise that whatever the UN does in terms of reforming itself it affects the NGO community because we work side by side on the ground. The moment the UN comes with a new approach in terms of response, we have to understand how it impacts on us and what it means in our relationships with the UN. This was an issue we particularly discussed with our members. Regardless of the fact whether it is UN or non-UN focussed or broader, we need to understand how we fit into it. In that sense I think within the NGO community, and I would say that goes for quite a number of our members, on a continuous basis there is the realisation we have to reform. If you take, as a bottom line, that still today at the moment we are not covering and not able to respond to all the needs on a global basis, we cannot be satisfied as humanitarian agencies. For that reason we have to continue to reform in the sense of making improvements to our response. Clearly when the UN is doing this in terms of the co-ordination of the response, then, as I said earlier, we have to see how we fit into that. The problem in that context, and it was a very important issue which was not clear to us, particularly talking around the cluster approach where they discussed presenting a new framework for co-ordination and for relationships, or whether, as it initially was presented, was just gap filling because we know in certain sectors and certain areas the response is lacking. This particularly goes, in terms of response, to Internally Displaced Persons. For obvious reasons relating to sovereignty and non-interference, the UN system has a problem there in terms of its relationship with the government, particularly if that government is the cause of the internal displacement. The UN will find itself on the other side of the fence but clearly it has to work at the same time with the government so there is immediately an issue. For years we have seen the response to IDPs, internally displaced persons, particularly lacking. The cluster leadership approach initially and very clearly was laid out as gap filling, particularly with regard to IDPs. The moment it was laid out as a framework, and that was a year ago, it was much more and I thought that created a lot of confusion: is it gap filling or a new co-ordination approach. In that context also, since the cluster approach was laid out, particularly as a UN system, again raised a question so how do we as NGOs fit into that approach or are we still just seen as implementers. I think that is an issue that is particularly important because clearly NGOs are good at doing operations. They have by far much more operational capacity than UN agencies have, and probably will ever have, but it cannot be the case that the NGOs are out in the field doing the work and the UN does co-ordination and there is no real connection between the two, particularly at the moment when a new framework is being developed. In another sense, although we are very good at implementation, we need to have a say in how this co-ordination structure is being devised. Q316 Chairman: What proportion of aid is actually provided by NGOs? The comment that Jan Egeland made yesterday when we were saying there was some criticism of the UN's response beginning with the Pakistan earthquake, he basically said yes but we are having to cover the whole field whereas other agencies can specialise here and there. In reality, nobody quite knows how much is UN and how much is delivered by your kind of member organisations. Do you feel that the UN is entitled to take that sort of lead view? From your point of view what is the main constraint on your members, is it money, is it people? What is it that rations what you can do and how you respond? Is it sometimes the lack of co-ordination between yourselves and the UN that actually wastes resources? The UN tend to say that they operate across the field whereas individual organisations can pick and mix. Mr Schenkenberg van Mierop: Jan Egeland has been using a figure in terms of how the response is divided in terms of percentages: in normal situations NGOs are doing 70 or 80 % of the work. I am not sure if that is a true picture as it is as it is quite hard to get a hold of those figures. As I said, generally if one looks at natural disasters or complex emergencies NGOs are doing the bulk of the work. The recognition there clearly is that the UN should be the interface with national governments and host governments. The UN should be responsible for creating the framework, in terms of creating the conditions with the government, in which NGOs can do their work. The UN should be leading on co-ordination and the NGOs should be engaged in operational response. That recognition is a traditional division of roles for labour, and I think that is well recognised and pretty much accepted. NGOs probably want to have a slightly bigger say in co-ordination structures in the sense that it cannot be the case that you have the NGOs out in the field in remote places engaged in operational response, and you have the UN sitting in capitals doing the co-ordination; the two need to be informed by each other. That is particularly important. When you raised the issue about the constraints, that is one of the issues that I have seen in a number of situations myself. In fact, there is not sufficient connection between the co-ordination going on at a capital level and the work done in the field, and the co-ordination going on at the lower field level. The Pakistan earthquake has been documented, for instance, that indeed there have been problems around the hubs and making the connection between the two levels. Having that operational capacity, NGOs want to be recognised for that reason and want to have more of an equal say at the table. In that context, and Jan Egeland may have talked about that yesterday, there is recognition that the present co-ordination structures we have with the UN system in terms of UN/NGO relations, particularly what is called the Inter-Agency Standing Committee, is insufficient because it is UN-centric. You have the whole range of UN agencies around the table but some of them are only remotely involved in humanitarian response. In fact, the NGO community, in that sense, although we are standing invitees as NGO consortia, and my agency, ICVA, is one of the three NGO consortia that is a standing invitee to the IASC meetings, we feel that it is largely UN-centric and in that sense it is not a co-ordination mechanism on an equal footing. Jan Egeland has recognised this limitation which we have discussed at the international level when we organised a meeting together which took place last week which in a way was quite ground breaking. For the first time it was all the heads of the most important UN agencies involved in humanitarian response and around 20 to 25 chief executives from the main major international NGOs and a quite significant number of national NGOs. It is quite striking that so many years into humanitarian response such a meeting is only happening for the first time and from that perspective it was quite ground breaking. The meeting very much came up with the recognition that co-ordination structures are at this moment too UN-centric. There are two things for that to happen: one is it should be more of a three pillar system in which each has an equal share: UN system, Red Cross, NGOs. That is something that the UN has to organise itself. I suppose it would mean a reduction in UN agencies around the co-ordination table. Who is going to decide on that? I suppose that will be a political battle. At same time, NGOs have to recognise, and that is an issue for ourselves, looking at hundreds of NGOs that are out there we have to organise ourselves. We have to make sure that we feel happy with having a number of representatives at the table that we elect, both at the international global level but also particularly at the field level. Recent studies on the tsunami, on the Pakistan earthquake, and other studies I have seen on co-ordination, particularly point to the issue that the NGO community has to organise itself better at the field level. That is something we are trying to work on with our members. Q317 Ann McKechin: Your organisation has been very critical of the Humanitarian Response Review for the reasons you have outlined: for the failure to properly regard the role of NGOs. In turn, one of your newsletters commented that only a small number of international NGOs responded to the questionnaire sent out as part of the Review. One important international NGO family refused to participate in the review at all. To what extent do the NGOs have to take some responsibility to engage in dialogue, particularly given the fact, as Jan Egeland pointed out to us yesterday, the number of NGOs is increasing enormously and it is likely to increase even further? Do you think that there is a role for NGOs in trying to better co-ordinate among themselves to make sure they have some degree of united purpose when they are engaging with the UN agencies? Mr Schenkenberg van Mierop: Certainly there is. It was actually quite difficult to mobilise the NGOs. As you know, underlying the humanitarian reform process is the Humanitarian Response Review which tried to map global capacity. I do not think they were very successful in doing that and one reason was that they immediately built in the limitation for themselves not to look at national capacity. I would say that is a flaw in that review because national capacity is often the first to respond, particularly in the case of natural disasters, so that is an issue. Then, of course, we had to explain to our members how this Review might be important and impact on their work. That goes back to the very early point, was this a reform process just for the UN system or the wider community. It was difficult at that time to mobilise our members around this issue. I think a year later that has become much easier. In preparation for this summit that took place last week, we did a send of questions around relationship of NGOs with the UN system. All the NGOs that participated in the meeting responded, and some of them very substantively. This gives us quite some further food for thought and input in terms of our policy work and so on. To your question in terms of our responsibility, very much I would say NGOs will always, and I think it is critical, maintain their independence and to a degree their autonomy vis-à-vis the UN system because that is our comparative advantage: to be able to go where the UN is not able to go for political reasons or whatever related issues. We can be outside the system in terms of trying to change it, but it is equally important to be inside and to participate in the mechanisms that exist at this moment in time. Out of that recognition, and those two are not mutually exclusive as they go very much together, you can still have that distance but at the same time participate within co-ordination and structures that exist. The distance you would use the moment UN structures become politicised. The UN humanitarian sponsors more part of a peace agenda, and I have seen situations where NGOs take a distance. Clearly NGOs recognise that they need to be inside and they have a responsibility to organise themselves. That is why at a global level we have these three consortia. I think Jan Egeland has been quite critical of us because he has said you do not represent your members and so on. It is true that the NGO community is a diverse community. Actually, and it was confirmed by the meeting last week, in the reform process it has appeared that there is a remarkable degree of convergence of the NGOs around a set of key issues and that is important to recognise. The NGOs have created the consortia in the first place so the understanding of NGOs of the need to organise themselves is inherent in the fact that the consortia exists. What is important is they try to organise themselves more in the field level. In a number of country situations you have quite effective NGO co-ordination mechanisms and in other countries they do not exist or are not effective at all. From my perspective, it is important to make sure that as NGOs we do better in coordination amongst ourselves. Particularly in countries where these NGOs co-ordination mechanisms do not exist or where they are dysfunctional, we look at the reasons for that. Why is there not enough cohesion among the NGO community to organisation ourselves? Why is it that we go it alone? I have seen a number places that, in fact, very much show that picture that NGOs do not share these assessments. It is often said in this context that the money that NGOs have available to respond to the tsunami gave them reason not to co-ordinate because they could go it alone. It is interesting before the tsunami in Indonesia NGOs also did it on their own and very separately in the sense there was total competition for scarce recourses. Indonesia is such a mixed context of humanitarian development, transition in the different parts, it is a continent in itself. It was very difficult before the tsunami to get money for humanitarian response in Indonesia. As a result of this competition, NGOs did not even share needs assessments because another NGO may steal it from you if you have identified needs somewhere. It is not necessarily the abundance of resources that is a defining issue why NGOs do not co-ordinate, it may be other reasons. In that sense what we were trying to do is clearly put this issue squarely on the table. I think NGOs do have that responsibility to coordinate. In a number of situations they have come to terms with it and they recognise it quite well. There is one additional point I would like to make on the numbers, which is a very important point for your inquiry. I would be very hesitant to extrapolate the lessons from the large scale high profile emergency situations, particularly the natural disasters we have seen in the last couple of years, with other situations. The Inter-Agency Standing Committee recently had a meeting on the Central African Republic. It turned out that there are three international NGOs in the Central African Republic at this time, whereas in terms of reports of malnutrition and so on that we receive the figures are quite alarming. You do not have an issue of too many NGOs there. There is an issue in terms of the lack of agencies. Q318 Mr Hunt: Could I ask you to put yourself in the shoes of Jan Egeland for a moment. He has an incredibly difficult job. He is a co-ordinator, he is not the boss, all these organisations do not report to him, and he is trying to co-ordinate an incredibly disparate response from lots of different organisations with their own priorities and objectives. Could I ask do you think he is doing a good job? If you were in his shoes, would you do it differently? Mr Schenkenberg van Mierop: I would start off my answer by saying it is very important that we have an emergency relief co-ordinator, and he may be leaving at the end of the year, who has a vision, is able to mobilise the system, able to create change, and to put the finger on the sore spot and say we are not doing well. There is no time for complacency; we need to move on. There is no question that is a very worthwhile asset or important aspect of him and certainly something to his credit. On your question that he is not the boss, I would say that within our membership, and probably also from our own perspective participating in the IASC, it is very important to understand that the Inter-Agency Standing Committee at a global level is for us a very important mechanism because it is a unique one. It is a unique for dialogue in order to understand how we fit and how we relate to each other. It is not a mechanism for governance or management or overseeing humanitarian response. I am not so sure that there is not a shared understanding that the Inter-Agency Standing Committee is more this mechanism for dialogue in order to find out how are we complementary to each other. I see a number of people in the UN system who believe the IASC is more a mechanism needed for management. Jan Egeland, for the UN system, is particularly going on about issues like "I need the phone number for water sanitation. If there is a problem in Darfur, I need to be able to call somebody. If there is a problem with protection of IDPs, I need a phone number for IDP protection." For the UN system that is probably valid, but for NGOs they do not necessarily work that way. We would have very much our own assessment of the needs. Q319 Mr Hunt: How would you do it differently if you do not think that he should have a phone number so he can pick up of the phone? Mr Schenkenberg van Mierop: He probably should have the phone number for the UN system but he makes it sound like he wants to also mobilise non-UN agencies that have their own way of responding. How would I do it differently? It is quite amazing that there has been a lot of talk for years, even decades, around humanitarian co-ordination but it is only since two weeks that we have a profile for the most senior job in terms of humanitarian co-ordination to field level, the humanitarian co-ordinator position, which is the equivalent of Jan Egeland at the field level. It is now two weeks that we have had a profile for what that position should be or should do. In that sense one has to recognise that there is a whole catch-up exercise to be done in terms of creating competency skills in relation to co-ordination. What would I do differently? What I would do differently, particularly in terms of the reform process, is I think the Humanitarian Response Review needs to be done again. It does not map global capacity, and in that sense it is not a problem analysis, it is not a joint statement in terms of these are the problems that we have as a humanitarian community, and that is why I mentioned humanitarian co-ordinator, whose position is only discussed now. At the field level one of the main problems with co-ordination is the lack of reliable data. What we have in terms of figures, data and reliable data is very, very poor in general. Good co-ordination starts with good information. That is in terms of the reform system for making sure that there is analysis of what are the problems, that there is more time than the couple of months that were laid out for the humanitarian response review, particularly in the UN agenda because it was part of the UN reforms in that context leading to the General Assembly summit last year. You start with good information and good problem analysis. The second is particularity around using the mechanisms that we have at the international level, but also at the field level, as mechanisms for debate and dialogue in order to know how we are complementary to each other instead of trying to use them in terms of I am going to tell you what you have to do. Jan Egeland may not have necessarily that sort of intention. I do not think he has it necessarily but at the field level there are definitely UN co-ordinators who very much have that attitude that we are going to the tell the NGOs what to do. The word debate is one that is important in the humanitarian community, how do we understand each other. The word debate is almost stricken out at the moment of the vocabulary of the UN system when it comes to humanitarian reform. Q320 Mr Hunt: Can I confirm that you think the way we could solve the problem of having more effective humanitarian response is by having more debate? Mr Schenkenberg van Mierop: I know there is the perception these people can only talk and they do not come to decisions. Q321 Mr Hunt: You are fueling that perception. Mr Schenkenberg van Mierop: I do think debate is important in the sense that there is no 'how-to-do' book in terms of humanitarian assistance. That is exactly why we have complementarity. Humanitarianism for me to a large degree is about managing dilemmas, particularly when you are working with displaced people that are on the move. Where are you going to assist and protect them? Are you going to try to rebuild their original homes, and there may be political issues around that, or are you going to try to protect and assist them on the spot? There are different ideas how you should do that in terms of humanitarian response. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for me as humanitarian co-ordinator if I had that position to say you need to do this and that. Agencies will make different decisions. Do you want to keep people in the camps or do you want to try to rebuild their original homes, which may stimulate premature returns? That is why we do need to have that debate around how we interpret, how we understand humanitarian principles which should underpin our response. If you look at co-ordination mechanisms today, there is very little attention to humanitarian principles and how we rely on them and how these principles provide our benchmarks. The third point is very much around leadership. Indeed, at the end it is very important to recognise that we also need to take decisions but these decisions have to be collective decisions. It is not that we all need to do the same, but we need to at least understand how we relate to each other. That has to be on the basis of a shared analysis and there has to be a collective decision-making process. Leadership, in that sense, is of critical importance. Q322 Mr Hunt: I want to put it to you that in an humanitarian emergency, those humanitarian co-ordinators on the ground who you said are not the ones who you find very sympathetic and often feel they can be there to give orders, is that not precisely the time where you want not debate but someone who takes decisions? If there is going to be debate, is that something you do outside the context of a humanitarian emergency so when you have the emergency you have someone who takes decisions? Mr Schenkenberg van Mierop: It is interesting the way you put it because it would seem these issues are opposite of what I am advocating, that we need now to fix the system and for that we require decisions. Absolutely true, but those decisions will only be carried forward if there is a shared understanding of the problem. For the solution to be the right solution to that particular problem, we need to have an understanding of what the problem is first of all. This has been one of the problems with the cluster approach. Is the cluster approach the solution to the problem? Maybe, maybe not. We have not analysed sufficiently what the problem is. The NGOs who are, to a large degree, expected to take these decisions forward and to implement them need to have an understanding of what is the problem. It is a problem at the moment at the field level. There is huge confusion over what the clusters are and how they should work. I have seen myself in a number of situations. Chairman: Mr Hunt will want to come back to that in a moment but Joan Ruddock has a question on where you are at the moment. Q323 Joan Ruddock: I was going to pick Mr Schenkenberg van Mierop up on something he said earlier on about the needs assessments. You gave the impression that you thought it was legitimate that every NGO should be doing its own needs assessment and the UN would do its own needs assessment. Is that the case? Mr Schenkenberg van Mierop: I hope it is legitimate that we do our own needs assessment. In a way that is where the confusion and the problem starts, that we have a different understanding of what the needs are because we have a different understanding of what we are going to do in a situation. Some are there for a very short term so they will have a particular focus on particular needs. A number of the NGOs will be there for the long-haul so they will look at the needs in a different way. It will be very hard to say for one person these are the needs. You will look at it with different lenses. In that sense it is very important that NGOs do their own needs assessment. What is critical is that we share them and do not keep them close to our chest and say nobody can touch this because I am going to present this to a donor, for example DFID. This is my recipe how I am going to do it and I will not share it with anyone else. That clearly goes contrary to what we are supposed to do. It is important that we have our own analysis but that we share that analysis and we get others to understand how we see the world. Q324 Joan Ruddock: I can understand if you are talking about some slow burn situation which is building up over a long period of time, but if you are dealing with a natural disaster which has happened very suddenly and there are huge numbers of people in very acute conditions, is this the best way to proceed? Mr Schenkenberg van Mierop: NGO A would immediately say these people need a roof on their heads if their houses have been washed away or an earthquake has destroyed them, so they need to have a house on the spot. If people could not stay in the area because the area is devastated, the people have moved somewhere else, people need to be protected there and need to have a roof above their head. NGO B would say I am going to start thinking about how to rebuild those homes. Immediately you will have a different perspective in terms of the response. We need to make sure that what NGO A does is not in contradiction with what NGO B wants to do. To give you a practical example, there have been a number of situations in which a population has been forced to move because of a natural disaster where this disaster has been quite convenient for the government because it always wanted to do economic development or develop the infrastructure in the area where the population used to live. This natural disaster, or whatever happened, was almost "convenient" for carrying out that initial plan. In those cases it becomes immediately a political issue of where you are going to rebuild those homes. The government may resist rebuilding these homes in the original place of residence because of their plans with the area. The temporary shelter for the population in which they are now may then become permanent. Then we have to define the right housing. In that sense it is very important to see the broader context of the issue from day one: what is the longer term impact of what we exactly do. Clearly people need to survive. Joan Ruddock: No-one would dispute looking at the longer term at the moment that you are also dealing with an emergency, and other people will question you about that. You spoke about UN-centric procedures but I think you are talking about NGO-centric procedures. First of all, if you have an objective analysis one would expect NGO A and NGO B to come to the same conclusion, but most importantly where are the people in this. Where are the recipients of all this largesse? Is it not for them to say where they want to live? Q325 Chairman: Is there not a danger that your NGO A says "That is what I do and so that is what we are going to do", even if it is not what the people want? Mr Schenkenberg van Mierop: I did not imply that. Clearly I might hope we are at the stage, although I recognise there are still huge issues around it, that we do needs assessments that involve the population. I took that as a given and I am sorry if you misunderstood. Q326 Joan Ruddock: I did not misunderstand you. I think you said that NGO A may wish to do this and NGO B might want to do something else which is different. I am saying if the people are involved in these needs assessments it seems rather unlikely that the people will be so divided as to suggest two contradictory proposals in terms of what they themselves want. In one community it seems rather unlikely that half the community is going to say we would like to live here and half the community would say we would like to live there. This contradiction seems to come from the NGOs rather than people on the ground. Mr Schenkenberg van Mierop: That is a very interesting point you are making. I would say that in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, particularly a natural disaster, the first reaction is we need to make sure people have a roof over their head and they are protected. Clearly that is what people want. After that people want to move back to their original places, so in that sense they are not necessarily contradictory. However, what I tried to say is there may be government or political plans interfering with the population moving back. Certainly the area needs to be economically developed, infrastructure can be built in certain areas, we can organise the area in a different way, so very much in that sense not what the people want. The question is how do the NGOs react to that. In no way do I dispute that the population would be able to express itself very well what it wants. I do know of situations where you have parts of the population that say we can go back and others say we cannot go back, and there may be political reasons for that. That is why everyone is not moving back to their original home at the same time. Q327 Joan Ruddock: You said "we the NGO community have to re-organise ourselves". You accepted that it was not just the UN, that there was a need for NGOs to organise themselves better in the field. How does that manifest itself and how willing are your organisations to do that? Mr Schenkenberg van Mierop: How it manifests itself is interesting in that I have seen a number of situations in recent years where the NGOs have very much a project-minded approach. What they are concerned about is their little project, making sure they have money for it, that there is a donor for it, that they staff on the ground, they have vehicles to move around and these vehicles keep on working. It is a very project orientated approach because that is what they are there to do. The moment you try to engage with them on the bigger picture, how do they fit in to the broader picture, they very much recognise there is a need for that. I must say that in a number of situations what I have seen is that people are so taken by the day-to-day reality, by the operational response, that they forget that broader picture. You require them to take a step back; where do they fit in. It is at that stage that they recognise there are issues to look at and there is a need for more cohesion and so on. The two situations that I have seen recently, it is interesting that in both those situations you had a UN sitting far away in the capital. Co-ordination mechanisms were, if they existed, far from what I would describe as sufficient. Also in that sense you allow the NGOs to develop the project-type of work without necessarily providing the structure for them to come together. You would think that a number of the bigger NGOs would understand they have a broader responsibility, that they need to see the bigger picture. That is why in a number of situations you do have quite effective NGO co-ordination mechanisms. In other situations they do not exist and that is why we need to come more to terms in understanding why. It may be just relating to personalities or it may be other reasons. I am not sure myself why. It is often, I am afraid, personality related at this moment in time, but if that is the case then it is very important that we look at this more from a point of view that we need a set of principles, that we may need to institutionalise more rather than having specific personalities. In the UN system there is a huge difference of personalities, and very much what I would describe as the old-style UN, very UN-type of approach, and the newer, younger, modern generation who indeed recognise that the reality is NGOs are the main implementers. Q328 Mr Hunt: You said that NGOs are not sure whether they are able to fit into the cluster system in a meaningful way or whether they are just implementers, was the phrase you used. I wanted to know what your feeling is about the cluster system. Some people say that it is the only way to get some co-ordination at ground level when you have a humanitarian disaster, other people are concerned it introduces an extra layer of bureaucracy. Again, if I could revert to my earlier question, if you were designing a system, would you design a system like the cluster system? How would you improve it if you were trying to find some ways to make that co-ordination work better? Mr Schenkenberg van Mierop: To respond to your question immediately, there are a number of issues relating to the cluster approach which should be part and parcel of general standard practice. Co-ordination, whether you call it clusters, sectors, or anything else, if we are involved in the process of joint analysis what is the situation, how do we share? We say in these assessments we do some analysis, we do some collective stocktaking, to make sure that what we do together has an impact. Of course, I have a relationship in that sense, I feel an accountability towards you in terms of that decision that we take collectively and in terms of implementing it. If I am just told what to do by a UN person, I feel less that accountability because legally NGOs are not accountable to the UN system. These are issues that should be standard practice of co-ordination anyway. The problem particularly with the clusters is that it has created confusion. In the beginning, as I said, is it co-ordination or gap filling? Part of that confusion is why do we have clusters for areas that traditionally I do not think have been gaps. Healthcare is often the best funded sector or area of response. There may be problems in part of health, but certainly health got its own cluster. Is it more to profile the UN agency or is there a real problem? Why is education, which is often overlooked in emergency situations, not a cluster? It is totally unclear. That is an issue. Then the issue of need of accountability and how that would work, we have not had the discussion within the context of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee on actually how that works. Since there is no legal formal accountability between the UN and NGOs, we need to understand what it means that we may have an informal accountability relationship. You could ask me what have you done in terms of implementing our collective decision. That is important. This issue of last resort has become now a very famous one. Clearly that was built in from the very beginning and then a number of UN agencies said that is not what we meant with last resort. If you did not mean that, you would step up to the plate if nobody else did, I do not know what last resort is? Clearly there has been confusion around that. When you see, in terms of the implementation at the field level, you get ten clusters in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, you get four in Uganda, you get seven in Somalia, including an access cluster how to realise access to Somalia, that does not match the global framework if you like. It has created a lot of confusion which is unfortunate because, as I tried to say earlier, there are a number of elements that are very important issues. Does that answer your question? Mr Hunt: You have given me a flavour of your feeling on clusters, thank you. Q329 John Battle: I want to ask you a little about funding in the CERF. The question I was originally going to ask was do you think the NGOs should get their hands on the CERF money, and I am absolutely confident your answer will be certainly, tomorrow. In the light of what you have said, you forced me to reflect a bit on the role of NGOs, their relationships not only with the UN but with governments and institutions at the local and national level. It seems to me that although you suggest it is about co-ordination and operational capacity on the ground, I think the tragedy is that very often idealism breaks down into what ends up as petty struggles for territory and power at all levels. That is the tragedy. I wonder if you could give me two arguments for and two arguments against NGOs getting their hands on CERF money. Mr Schenkenberg van Mierop: It is difficult to answer your question with two arguments for and two against because UN agencies would say NGOs do have access, although it is through us as UN agencies, but clearly we will channel the money to the NGOs. There is that whole debate: how do the UN agencies ensure that money will be channelled to the NGOs in what are transparent mechanisms so that NGOs understand decisions that are taken on allocating money that is part of the CERF to the agencies. That I think is an important issue. The other one clearly which is important, is the CERF going to be the only mechanism in terms of channelling funds. I do not think so. There is bilateral funding, there will still be the consolidated appeal process in the UN system, NGOs will get money obviously from their own constituency, private donations from the general public, so there will be many different other funding mechanisms available to NGOs or in general as well. Q330 John Battle: You do not think CERF is going to make a critical difference to improving the distribution of funds within the humanitarian sector? Mr Schenkenberg van Mierop: No. What I do hope is that it will make a critical difference in terms of forgotten, ignored, neglected crises. In that sense, it is a mechanism that would help us as the humanitarian community to ensure that more money is allocated for Katanga in the DRC or for the Central African Republic. That I would see as a very important aspect, probably the most important aspect, of the CERF. Q331 John Battle: It is a wider question but I am minded that quite often now NGOs campaign very hard, for example, against the way aid in general is distributed. They campaign hard against budget support, country to country, money given to governments rather than to projects. It happens at the local level in my own neighbourhood. NGOs in inner city Leeds want to completely bypass the government and the local council: give us the money and we will do it direct. They only trouble is they are not quite as accountable to the institutional mechanisms as are other bodies. I wonder if there is a bias against institutions, governments, UN institutions, within the NGOs that is debilitating from the point of view of not saying that institutions should remain. We want to not only reform but transform institutions. There used to be a contradiction, organise for anarchy, that misunderstood anarchy, as if anarchial syndicalism was a good tradition in the 1960s, but it did assume that you did not need any governments or institutions, that everybody at local level would organise together and love each and we would not even need the police force. The reality does not work out like that and we wonder how serious are NGOs about that whole process of governance reform, working with the local governments, national governments and international institutions, or do you think there is a bias against them in principle. Mr Schenkenberg van Mierop: I think what is important first is to recognise that the CERF, and similar mechanisms at country level, as you now have a number of common funding pools, and are not nor should be co-ordination mechanisms. There is a tendency to use them as such. I do not think this idea of what I would call co-ordination with the wallet is a very good idea; it will not solve the problem. Coordination should not be dependent on money, since there are NGOs who have their own resources, who have called for strong coordination mechanisms, while there are other NGOs that have received governmental funding who have shown that they are not inclined to coordinate. The problem in general in terms of co-ordination structures is the huge numbers and briefcase NGOs. They get their funding from other completely different sources and so on, including certain constituencies within their own towns or whatever. It is very hard, if not impossible, to avoid that. You would then go into a system of accreditation if you want to "regulate" or control these NGOs. I understand your question more in the sense of a developmental issue in terms of system reform more than one that relates to humanitarian response. In relation to my point, I do not think these funding mechanisms should be co-ordination tools in the sense of getting control over the NGOs and what they do. I think for that we have co-ordination mechanisms, but what we do want is these funding mechanisms to make sure there is funding for areas that are left out. Q332 John Barrett: If I can turn to the need to get the balance right between spending on immediate relief work and longer term reconstruction. Where do you see opportunities to improve co-ordination between NGOs, donors and those directly affected by these two strands of work to make sure that they are not running along in parallel but are working together, both to do with the immediate problem and the longer term development? Mr Schenkenberg van Mierop: That is a very difficult question and issue because clearly it relates to how short term relief relates to longer term development work. What I would say is that there is a risk in terms of providing humanitarian assistance in a development framework in the sense that development has to involve national and local authorities and so on and they may have certain political priorities, and these political priorities may run opposite to making sure that everybody receives assistance. Clearly, in terms of principles, developmental and humanitarian principles do not always go together that well and there are tensions and there are also different methodologies in terms of needs assessment and so on. Clearly, co-ordination should try to ensure that the humanitarian and developmental approaches do not run counter to each other. That is an issue that I think continues to raise confusion and problems at the field level, particularly when I think that humanitarian co-ordination is provided in that developmental framework because, as I said, governments may have certain political priorities in mind. At the same time, and I think it is very important, humanitarian actors must understand what the longer term impact is of their work. It is often said that humanitarian assistance in that sense belongs to conflict. I am personally not so sure of that in terms of what is the evidence for that. How would you measure that, whether it prolongs the conflict? It is very much around this question, which we touched on earlier, why do you build these homes for people? The interesting point there is what is called the rights based approach. When we talk about the right to housing, where indeed are we going to build this house the moment it has been washed away or devastated by an earthquake? Are we going to build it in the same spot where people may be vulnerable to future disasters or even where the government might have an economic development infrastructure programme, let us say? There are issues which both the humanitarian and the development community are still grappling with, particularly in terms of the health and housing sectors. This is an interesting point in terms of, for instance, the clusters. Shelter, indeed, is often the problem much more in the sense of these sorts of questions, if you like, the strategic, more political questions on, for instance, the number of tents. It is not necessary to have stockpiles. Yes, we had it in the Pakistani earthquake but how often does that happen? It is easy. If all the tent companies produced tents this year then we would be much better prepared probably for the next situation if that were to happen. I do not think necessarily the issue is about stockpiles. The issue is very much for me where are we going to build those homes? That is a much more difficult question to answer by both the humanitarian and the development communities who will have to come together, and is that really happening? Q333 John Barrett: A challenge for the future. Ms Johnson: Absolutely. Q334 John Battle: That is the point I am driving at. I can take you now to West Kupang where there are 56,000 people living in tents from the conflict between East Timor and Indonesia that was peacefully solved but in a sense part of the issue was that people had been there too long and now do not want to go back; the people have grown up there, but for the people that are in NGOs in that camp, and they are now there, there needs to be a conversation with the government in West Kupang at the local level, with the Indonesian Government and with the Timorese Government as well in engaging with the institutions for their development policies, and I am not confident that there is that conversation going on, as you say. Mr Schenkenberg van Mierop: Exactly. Chairman: Mr Schenkenberg, you have ably demonstrated to us that your organisation is in the business of herding cats. Clearly NGOs pop up all over the place and have their own objectives and you have to try and, I suppose, represent a disparate range of interests. Thank you for answering the questions that we have put to you. I am not sure whether this Committee is in a position to come up with any definitive answers but I am certainly sure we have demonstrated the range of the problems, so thank you very much indeed. Witness: Ms Susan Johnson, Director, National Society and Field Support Division, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), gave evidence. Q335 Chairman: Good morning and welcome to the table. Thank you for coming. Not surprisingly, the role of the IFRC has come up a lot during this inquiry and the distinctive character that it has as an organisation operating in more than 150 countries through national organisations. I wonder if you could give us your view on how your organisation sees itself in this framework? The impression we have got is that there is the UN, there are NGOs which are a very disparate group, and then there is the IFRC which is in a place of its own. It would be helpful just to start this conversation if you could give us a view of how you see yourselves. Ms Johnson: First of all, thank you very much for inviting me and the International Federation to share with you perspectives from the International Federation of Red Cross/Red Crescent. Certainly the relationship we have with DFID is an important relationship for the International Federation and our members globally, and so it is a really important opportunity for us. In terms of how we see ourselves, let me start at the community level because, of course, we are a global organisation of 185 members, 185 Red Cross and Red Crescent joined together in the International Federation. Each one of those national societies, like the British Red Cross or the Malaysian Red Crescent, is a community based organisation, or at least the best of our members are community based organisations, so how does the Red Cross or Red Crescent see itself in the community first and foremost is a critical question, because then you see that reflected at the global level. It is a little bit like the relationships we have with civil society organisations at a community level with community organisations and local government. The Red Cross certainly sees itself in a very particular place in relation on the one hand to strong, historic relationships with the governments at national and local levels but also internationally, and also strong relationships with the local community organisations. In that context at the global level we see ourselves as part of a broader international humanitarian community in which we see there being the UN system, which is the representation of governments' global interests, we see the interests of civil society organisations, international and non-governmental organisations, many of whom Ed's organisation represents, and then we see the International Red Cross, both the International Federation and the International Committee which are together as the Red Cross movement, and we think we each in our own particular way have something to contribute given our particularities in terms of humanitarian response. Q336 Chairman: What we are looking at is how the system can work better. We obviously have a form in the UN and we have had Hilary Benn giving a very definite contribution from the UK point of view. You say the relationship with DFID is particularly important to you. How do you think from your point of view DFID could improve its contribution to humanitarian response and also perhaps to the engagement between yourselves and the United Nations? Ms Johnson: That is an interesting question because I think DFID is doing quite a good job, at least from where we sit. We have a good dialogue with DFID in terms of the broader challenges that we face as an international humanitarian community. We see DFID being relatively even-handed and quite thoughtful in terms of the contributions and investments that it makes both at the policy dialogue level, for instance, in the good humanitarian donorship process, but also at the front level of funding decisions and partnerships that DFID sustains with a range of organisations, and the concern and care that DFID demonstrates day to day in assisting organisations like ourselves in terms of improving our practice. I have not come today with a recipe for something DFID should be doing differently because we are quite appreciative of DFID and we see DFID as a leader within the broader humanitarian governmental community. If you look, for instance, at the key international donor governments - western European, North American, Australian, Japanese and so on, you would see the British Government a leader in that context with a few others, for instance, spearheading the good humanitarian donorship process which in the long run we look forward to really making a difference in terms of some of the critical questions, like, for instance, a more balanced funding approach to what we call forgotten or slow onset disasters, humanitarian situations. Chairman: We will come on to the comparison between DFID and your relationship with the United Nations later. Q337 Joan Ruddock: We have been talking a lot about and looking at reform and I just wonder to what extent you think your own movement has been involved in identifying and developing those areas for reform. What has been your role in that big discussion? Ms Johnson: The big discussion being the UN humanitarian reform review process? Q338 Joan Ruddock: Indeed, and anything beyond that. I think we recognise that there may be a need to reform in many directions but certainly specifically your involvement in the UN discussions. Ms Johnson: Just on the humanitarian review process, I would like to say something to clarify that but also within the context of the Red Cross itself, and they are not necessarily the same thing. On the UN reform process, we did participate quite actively in the review process. A senior colleague from the Norwegian Red Cross was a member of the review team and we had a lot of hopes for what the review process would deliver for the broader community but most particularly for the United Nations in terms of a direction, in terms of going forward, and in some ways it did point to some elements such as the need for improvement in a number of areas, a number of which as the Federation we agree on in terms of where there is a need for improvement with regard to the gaps within the system, and including the whole question of co-ordination, but we did regret - we do regret - that the review process did not take into account national capacity whatsoever and this is a reasonably large issue for us given that we are rooted in and based on national capacity, the national capacity of Red Cross/Red Crescent. Therefore, we think it is a skewed view of how does a community respond to and engage with international assistance, and for the review to be only on how does the international community come in to respond, leaving aside the question that there are people, families, communities that are already organised in some fashion, many times very well organised, and to have that not in the picture whatsoever, we thought was a pretty big problem. It is also a problem then when you go on to, "Therefore what are you going to do?", because there has to in the "What are you going to do?" in terms of the improvement of a system the recognition that local capacity has to be taken into account. In our own view there should be further investment in strengthening local capacity because our experience is, and I am sure the experience here is, that when disasters happen and people are in need it is their neighbours, the local community, that responds, and the ability of the international community or even the national capacity to come to the rescue, to support people, is limited by all kinds of factors - logistics and whatever else, and so for that capacity of communities themselves to be organised, to have a good sense of what the risks are in their community, to have organised to mitigate or manage and respond to those risks, to be enhanced we think it needs to be invested in. In terms of our own world, Red Cross/Red Crescent, when I say we have a membership of 185 organisations that is a little bit like herding cats as well. We have our own dynamic within our own membership. We have a range of members, obviously, some quite large, quite capable, in a range of areas consistent with the mandate of Red Cross/Red Crescent, and then we have a number of members that are struggling, frankly, and have a very difficult time putting together comprehensive programming to support and engage local communities in effective ways. Within that range of membership, of course, there is a range of interests and capacities and interests in engaging in a coherent comprehensive system. In regard to that and our own internal reform process, if I can call it that, we have just come a few months ago from our most recent General Assembly in Seoul in South Korea in November, where the membership adopted our global agenda going forward which is based on the mandate of Red Cross/Red Crescent, and part of that global agenda work plan going forward is an initiative for the membership to invest quite a bit with us as a secretariat in planning, monitoring, evaluation and basically enhancing our accountability framework, our internal accountability and the accountability of our members in terms of engagement with local communities. We have quite an ambitious agenda internally in terms of trying to improve our own practice and get our own house in order, which of course is an important element in and of itself and an important element in terms of engaging with other humanitarian actors, including local and national governments. Q339 Joan Ruddock: What more do you think needs to be done? The question was asked by Mr Hunt in the last session about if you were Jan Egeland how would you do it differently? You have clearly said there is a major plank missing, so how does this get taken forward, because you are saying it is neither comprehensive nor realistic in a way from your perspective? Ms Johnson: If you will permit me I just want to go back a little bit to what I would call a conceptual framework because I think perhaps there is what I would call a conceptual misunderstanding in the sense that if you are Jan Egeland there is a lot to worry about within the UN system, but I think if you are Jan Egeland there are limits to how much you should be worrying about and taking responsibility for delivering a comprehensive humanitarian response and accountability and responsibility for the whole humanitarian system. Our view is that you have then, as I said earlier, this range of actors that are expressions of how communities choose to organise themselves, and the UN system I do not think can take responsibility and try to lead, organise, manage the civil society actors at the community level, the national level or the international level. That is what I call a conceptual misunderstanding. So if you are Jan Egeland there is lots to worry about within the UN system, and within that system how you engage then with civil society actors that are expressed internationally by organisations like ICVA and others, and there is lots to worry about in terms of how you engage effectively with the Red Cross. I think it is a misunderstanding or a misconception to think that you can do other than engage, that somehow you can manage and be accountable for and try to capture all this within or under the UN system. Joan Ruddock: That is helpful. Thank you. Q340 Mr Hunt: You mentioned the word "accountability" in your previous answer and I just wondered how the concept of accountability applies to the cluster system because, obviously, one of the most important things in a humanitarian disaster is that all the players who are active are accountable for specific elements of the mix that needs to sort out the problems as quickly as possible. Your organisation has been very involved. I think you have agreed to be the cluster convenor for emergency shelter but you have declined to be the provider of last resort. Is the cluster system the right way to go? Do you have concerns about the bureaucracy that it sometimes brings with it or do you think it is a necessary way to bring some kind of order into the chaos that inevitably happens when there is a humanitarian disaster? Ms Johnson: There are quite a few questions in there and I will do my best (a) to remember them and (b) to answer them. Can I go back to an element of the starting point, which is what is in fact the International Federation's relationship with the cluster system? I said earlier that in terms of the humanitarian response review we agreed with a number of the findings and facts. In terms of where there are some gaps in the system that is true and we do believe that there is a gap in the system around emergency shelter. We also agree that there is a gap in the system in terms of effective co-ordination, and in both those regards we felt that the International Federation has a potential to offer a strong contribution to the broader humanitarian community, both because we have a history as a group of organisations, our members, in emergency shelter and as an international federation in delivering humanitarian shelter. If you look, for instance, over the last 80 years of international appeals the International Federation has been launching and gathering support for our members in humanitarian crises. A large proportion of what we appeal for, generate funds for and direct support to our national society members for is emergency shelter work, so we have a lot of experience. We would also be the first to acknowledge that our experience has not been consolidated and that there is a lot of work to do to build up best practice in emergency shelter programming. That is one area. The other is co-ordination. Given the fact that we are an international federation of 185, and given the nature of the role of the secretariat within this membership organisation, we have a lot of experience with co-ordination, so we felt that in those two regards we can make a contribution to the international humanitarian system, if you like. We did not agree to become the cluster lead as such. We were asked the question and we said, "If what you want", you being Jan Egeland for a moment, "is more predictability, better quality, better performance, and if what you want is better performance in regard to the humanitarian community, there are things we can do that will, we believe, bring us as a community closer to that, but we are not in a position to take on the menu of responsibilities that have been defined at that point through the cluster dialogue, for instance, provider of last resort. We are not in a position to put ourselves into needing to be accountable to the ERC for the UN system. We have our own governance process, we have our own accountability processes as an international organisation, but if what you want is for us alongside you to play this role to convene the broader humanitarian community to do a better job around emergency shelter, yes, we can do that". Q341 Mr Hunt: Is there a flaw in the cluster system in that what they are looking for is cluster leads who will also become providers of last resort, but if you are trying to co-ordinate a group of organisations who know that in the end if they say no to anything you ask them to do then the buck stops with you and you have to fill the gap, that in fact you do not have the right incentives to get people co-operating together? Is that why there has been such resistance to this concept of provider of last resort? Ms Johnson: That would certainly be one of the aspects of why there would be resistance. There is also the resistance, to be frank, in terms of the dialogue that has gone on inside our own organisation and our governing board and our General Assembly where we debated and discussed this and from which there was then the mandate to carry on the discussion with ERC. There is also the question of risk. You take on the obligation of being provider of last resort with what resources? The way that humanitarian communities organise it now there is no bank account, there is no debit card that tells you that you need 5,000 tents here or emergency shelter there or that you can deliver them, and we certainly do not as a community have some sort of guarantee of resources in relation to needs because there is this very fundamental problem in that the resources are not made available in relation to actual need. The resources, both those made available by the person on the street of London or the person on the street of Lagos, are based on perceived need by the donor, not of the person who is on the street in Java or in the Central African Republic, so we have a huge humanitarian dilemma for people across the UN or the large humanitarian organisations, NGOs. Q342 Mr Hunt: You sound like you are really very supportive of the idea that there needs to be better co-ordination in terms of humanitarian response but that you do have some significant reservations about the cluster system approach and whether it is going to work in practice. Ms Johnson: I have reservations because I think it is a difficult prospect to deliver day in, day out, predictable performance of the broader humanitarian community. It is a chaotic community. There are some of us who are reasonably well organised - the UN, the Red Cross, the large humanitarian organisations, but we all know that in fact the community is very disparate and that outside of those three actors I just named there is a whole host of smaller organisations, reasonably spontaneous organisations, that also are on the scene, so when you talk about co-ordination, for instance, we are now still providing the shelter co-ordination function in the environment of the earthquake in Java. What do we mean by that? We agreed very early on to take on that role in the Java earthquake which meant that we provided a certain amount of clarity and direction in terms of the assessment process and so on. What were the needs of the community around emergency shelter? We did that in co-ordination with the other sectors. So you have a broad needs picture but we are looking at emergency shelter in particular. Then we look at what are the capacities of the different actors that have come into the local needs environment and indicated that they are interested to be part of the response. In the early days we had 45 different organisations that came forward with their expressions of capacity. If I recall correctly, there were only about 40 per cent of these organisations we had ever heard of before. So here we were in a situation where there is a group of organisations that come forward saying, "We can do X, Y and Z," and we did not know how would we validate that organisation X exists, it is legitimate, it does have the capacity; it is not some fly-by-night whatever. To be fair, some of these organisations are local organisations that are absolutely legitimate, but it is just the whole question of how do you validate that in the moment that you need to organise the response. Yes, there is quite a bit that could be and we think can be improved and we are engaged and we are trying to make our contribution in that regard, but it is not going to be one of these great linear charts where everything just goes up in a straight line. It is going to be more complicated and iterative than that. We learn as we go, individually and as a community, I think. If I could just on the back of that make one other contribution. One of the things that we do invest in a lot, and we think the community needs broadly to be investing more in, is the whole question of contingency planning. By contingency planning I do not mean just stocks, I do not mean just hardware, where you are going to keep your winterised tents and how quickly can you get them on a plane and move them, but also contingency planning in terms of broader capacities, human resource capacities and always being clear about roles and responsibilities. In our view, contingency planning has to take into account both risk, where are people reasonably predictably at risk, and therefore what do you have to be planning for, but also who has what mandates and who has what capacities, and those can be local or national or international. Having mature, adult dialogue about that is important so that when things do happen it is reasonably clear who is going to do what. Having said that, you can also find yourself in a situation that having those agreements they break down. I have just come last week from a review meeting with the American Red Cross in New Orleans. One of the experiences of the American Red Cross was they did have pre-agreements, they have got tonnes of contingency planning, not only themselves as the Red Cross but also with the national, state and local governments, but when Katrina, plus four other hurricanes, hit the southern United States last year, those agreements on behalf of local and national government were not delivering. The American Red Cross found themselves in a situation where although they had worked out all kinds of scenarios, they had done exercises and so on with local authorities and other actors, in the heat of the moment there was a failure to deliver which left the Red Cross in a situation of having to scramble and do the best it could, because of course the Red Cross is on the front-line in people's minds and on the front line practically. If the Red Cross is there in the community people are turning to the Red Cross expecting a practical, real answer. So they did the best they could but it can be very tough. Mr Hunt: Thank you. Q343 Chairman: You just mentioned your engagement in Java and we have had a tsunami in Java yesterday at the other end of the island. Are you suddenly having to reorientate to cope with that? Ms Johnson: I do not actually know how much impact that will have on how we have organised ourselves in terms of Indonesia. I think the first thing to say is that the Indonesian Red Cross is a tremendously competent organisation and has demonstrated that time and time again. In Indonesia there are, I think, about 40 or so significant disasters every year to which the Indonesian Red Cross responds. There is only a small subset of those that warrant an international appeal and international assistance coming in. We have had a long-standing presence in Indonesia working alongside the Indonesian Red Cross to build up their capacity and so on. Since the tsunami, of course, we have had a very strong presence both in Aceh and in Nia, and since the earthquake in Java we have had the operational team there working alongside the Indonesian Red Cross. This particular event yesterday, I do not know how much it will mean redeployment of any resources or a further call on reserves because we are still getting the news in in terms of the impact. Q344 Ann McKechin: The IFRC has had a very long-standing principle of independence in terms of its humanitarian response, along with other NGOs who put a very heavy weight on that and have done for a very long time but, as you say, in the context of humanitarian response, although it is a chaotic, in large part it is moving towards principles based on predictability and accountability as being more prominent in current thinking. I wonder to what extent your desire to maintain your independence can be reconciled with these principles about accountability to the beneficiaries of the aid? You mentioned the hurricane in America last year which obviously is about who was accountable to the population for providing assistance. I am not saying that was the Red Cross, but clearly people are looking to the state, to the local government, to NGOs, to the Red Cross and saying, "Who was responsible for this breakdown in communication and how can we ensure in the future that we can predict what sort of response we are going to achieve?" Ms Johnson: There are a couple of things there. Yes, absolutely it important to the International Federation to maintain independence, not because we simply want to be difficult; it is about wanting to ensure that in every context we will be understood to be acting in relation to principles and in relation to need, and not driven by some other agenda. In terms of accountability, an important aspect of the accountability is accountability to whom and about what and the question of engagement with communities and beneficiaries, and, yes, the most important accountability is to the people who are affected by the disaster or the situation and with whom you want to work in the short term and the longer term in terms of addressing the needs that they express. I would say how we do that is both in terms of how we engage them in dialogue in the heat of the moment in the disaster but also, importantly, I would like to point to the long-standing presence of the Red Cross Red Crescent in the communities. As I said earlier, I think when we are at our best we are, in fact, a locally based community organisation (that is, of the community) and so there is this inherent accountability of not being an organisation that arrives from far away. Assistance might arrive from far away to back up the capacity that is in the community and the support in the community, but when we are at our best we are engaged and rooted in the community, so the accountability is there. I think the predictability comes from a lot of the work we do around our disaster preparedness work because, again, if you want to have an effective disaster response, our experience is that that is best built and best delivered and most predictably delivered when you have invested over the long term into disaster preparedness, which is one of the areas we find most difficult because, especially since the tsunami if I can put it that way, we have seen a lot of broad governmental commitment to disaster preparedness, risk reduction, wanting to see investment and so on, but it has not yet translated dramatically into big investments to organisations at the community level or national level. Q345 Ann McKechin: If we have better contingency planning then we should have better predictability from all the parties? Ms Johnson: Contingency planning and capacity planning. Part of contingency planning is based on who has what capacity and to the extent to which it is either the Red Cross or Red Crescent organisations or other community organisations or local government. It is a little bit like the fire department. You want a fire department when there is a fire but you cannot create a fire department when there is a fire. You have to have a fire department every single day of the year, whether or not there is a fire, so the question of investing every day of the year in the fire department, in the training of the fire department, in the equipment the fire department needs, the human resources, all the aspects that it would take, that is the kind of investment it takes day in day out in thousands and thousands of communities for there to be capacity when the disaster happens and for there to be clarity about the standard operating procedures when the bell rings who is going to do what. You need that clarity at the local level, at the national level, and at the international level. Q346 John Battle: For some years the IFRC has managed what is called the Disaster Relief Emergency Fund. Ms Johnson: Thank you. Q347 John Battle: And I think DFID contributes to it as well, if I remember rightly. Ms Johnson: Yes. Q348 John Battle: There is a basic model there and then the UN comes along and sets up the CERF, which seems to be a replication of that model. What could the messages be for CERF from your experience of the Disaster Relief Emergency Fund? What is your experience of the expectations of CERF and really the key question - define the acronyms really - is what can be done to speed up the delivery and the extent of the funding to people that need it in emergencies? Ms Johnson: Thank you for even knowing about and mentioning the Disaster Relief Emergency Fund (DREF) that we have. It is a really important part of our tool-kit as an International Federation. We are just launching a review of our DREF, partly sparked by what we have seen happen with the CERF, which is to say we have had a DREF now for more than 20 years and our Disaster Response Emergency Fund is based on three things. One is quick release of funds to either our own secretariat for instance, the system in the field, or the national society in the country, so that there is a quick release of funds to get an emergency response operation up and running. That is the most important thing we do with the DREF. That is meant to be a revolving fund so we quick-release the funds, we launch an international appeal, and with those funds we replenish our DREF. There is a small percentage of our DREF which we allocate to what we call the minor emergencies with no expectation of launching an international appeal, and that has become a growing part of what we are doing with our emergency funds. That is partly why we want to conduct this review because we are thinking we need to perhaps invest more of our funds in that way. We need donor support to do that. The third part of our fund is a small contribution that can be made to disaster preparedness. We do think our DREF makes a big difference. We have seen a big difference in terms of the rapidity with which we can encourage national societies to be active in terms of response because, as we mentioned earlier, national societies come in every size, shape and colour and some of them are reasonably strapped for resources and knowing that they can have 50,000 Swiss francs or 100,000 Swiss francs can make a big difference in terms of their ability to deploy resources quickly and locally. We are worried, though, that the key character of independent Red Cross action in terms of response needs to be sustained. As it has been agreed that the CERF is going to be this much larger fund and we could imagine donor governments contributing in large sums to that fund, in our dialogue for instance with DFID and other organisations we would like to continue to encourage that there be also a balanced investment, if you like, to ensure that the Red Cross emergency response the capacity of the Red Cross has also got investment. In terms of the CERF, I think it is an important mechanism, as is ours. It does work, it makes a difference, in our experience. We ourselves do not access CERF and will not access CERF. Again, relating back to this whole question of independence, that was part of the big discussion that we have had internally around our engagement with this cluster discussion. One of the principles that our governing board set out was that that while we would be able to offer our role in terms of the co-ordination of function, that there would be a certain set of limitations and one of them is that we would never seek to put ourselves inside a UN funding mechanism and that we would not access funding through the CERF, but we can appreciate that others do. We think it is an important part of the overall toolbox, like our rapid deployment teams and our emergency response teams and so on. Q349 John Battle: But if everybody took that view in the NGO world then I am back to my organised anarchists, am I not? Everyone clamours for organisation and co-ordination but if it means that we do not get a share of it, we have got our own organisational structure anyway and our independence, and although we did ask you for co-ordination we actually do not want it in practice if it minimises in any way the grip that we have got. There is a kind of paradox in the demands sometimes. How would you answer that, that people want co-ordination but when we press to the delivery of it, however limited that might be, there is a backing off from it? Ms Johnson: I can appreciate you could see it that way. I think, though, that for us there is a consistency with how we understand ourselves within the broader humanitarian architecture in that we think, as of this moment at least, the communities have chosen to organise themselves in a range of ways, and one of the ways they choose to organise themselves is both in their civil society expression but also in support to the Red Cross/Red Crescent. They are engaged obviously with government and if you want to have - and I think that is healthy - that diversity within a community and have the different aspects of the community capable of playing their appropriate roles, then you want to have what I would call the balanced investment approach. Also for some of the reasons that Ed was referring to earlier in terms of there are places, there are times when there is not an organised local government, and it is impossible for the UN system to actually deliver. You might have a range of international humanitarian NGOs that are present or could be present, but there are certainly places where you are going to find a local Red Cross Red Crescent and you want a particular way to support that network and the capacity that network represents. Again going back to this capacity question in many, many locations the capacity actually is in the Red Cross Red Crescent. John Battle: If I may just pursue that. I do not want to diminish the role of the Red Cross and what is incredibly encouraging is to go back to Kupang to meet a young man from my own neighbourhood who is in the Red Cross who has gone out there to give his time and energy and commitment there and then back to the neighbourhood to talk about it - fantastic - in an inner city neighbourhood in Leeds, and I am really proud of that arrangement. Similarly the NGOs, the work they do, going to places that I have been to that nobody else will go near, trekking in there, getting stuck in and addressing the needs of the poor, staying in solidarity in conditions with the poor and trying to address agendas from the perspective of the poor. What I am trying to look at today is from the other end of the telescope and I am asking the question; is it possible in our world to have international co-ordinated institutions that transcend national boundaries, that sort the problems out? The more we move towards setting up the UN --- I will give a practical example. I remember being asked, "Why do you not get the UN to go into Indonesia and solve the crisis with East Timor?" The international media were demanding "get the UN in" and I had to explain that the UN did not have an army parked in a field outside New York that was going to fight its way into Indonesia. The Indonesians, if they had a problem with their "internal security", would need to invite the UN in to help sort it out, and most journalists did not understand that at all. At the moment we have got George Bush shouting down the phone or whatever can Kofi Annan sort the problems out in the Middle East. I would not want his job. So we ask the UN to sort it out and the demands are on Jan Egeland and others to sort it out, but when we come to put into position the mechanisms we do not really gather around them enough, is my view. That is where I am coming from in the comments I have made to you and to Ed. Am I asking too much of the NGO world to be more supportive of this? Q350 Chairman: And is it a fact that the Red Cross was there before the UN and that is part of the NGO culture? Ms Johnson: To believe that or for it to be true? Q351 Chairman: No, the Red Cross was there before the UN. You were doing this job before the UN turned up. Ms Johnson: Oh, you mean so we have antibodies or something built up? Q352 John Battle: That is a wonderful way of putting it. It can help make the whole body healthy. Ms Johnson: International co-ordination is important but, as I said earlier, I would not subscribe to a situation where international co-ordination means Jan Egeland is it and we are all sort of lining up. I certainly heard him also say, "Darfur happens and I want a button to push". I can understand that, I can completely understand that, but that is simply not how the world works. There is not one button to push. There is a whole series of actors in the international humanitarian community that have mandates, roles, responsibilities and capacities that have to be pulled together and I think there you have to demonstrate a certain amount of leadership and creativity and energy in terms of pulling people together in a positive way so that people want to come to the table. I say that because that is our experience with our own membership. Much as we might have discussions at our General Assemblies and so on, we cannot force our members to act in any particular way, but we do hold our members together based on best practice, based on peer learning, based on experience of how one collectively best performs. I think that is the kind of leadership that is required. It is a different kind of leadership from saying, "I have got a button to push". There was another element of what you said which I have now lost - antibodies, yes. I think that it depends on what kind of broader humanitarian community you want to sustain over the long term. Just to come back to the point, I can understand absolutely that governments want to invest and absolutely should be investing in the UN for all kinds of reasons, but I think there is a huge amount of value in investing also in the Red Cross for what it is today, built on history, and for what it can deliver over the longer term, but also in the broader humanitarian community, the NGOs, as do people on the street. There is a huge desire on the part of the person on the street to have a very personal connection with people in other communities and that very personal connection is, I think, for many people lost through big organisations and it is lost also, with all due respect, through government processes. If you are in a community in this country and you want to support in a very personal way something you are seeing on your TV screen or you have a relationship or somebody has come back from somewhere and is speaking about something, often you will find your connection can be more and can feel more real through a much smaller organisation, through a much more agile network than through your taxpayer dollars or pounds investment. You can be happy your government is doing these things but you as a citizen also want to express through your own personal choices the kind of support you want to give to an organisation or activity in another part of the world, and I think the strength of those different parts of the humanitarian community and the balances that they represent are really important for us to sustain. Q353 Chairman: You have mentioned a few times the fact that you have these organisations in 185 countries, which is a very distinctive feature of the Red Cross and it means that very often you are there when the UN or DFID or whatever is not there, and I think that was the case in the Pakistani earthquake. You were the only organisation which was actually engaged close to Kashmir. DFID have had this relationship with you, they have given you £22 million over the last few years. You have said yourself that the different organisations vary and some of them, as you put it, are struggling, so what do you do to try and support the ones that are struggling and strengthen them and how can the partnership between the Red Cross and DFID help in that process? Ms Johnson: If I can just say a few words about what we do with the national societies, a certain amount of what we offer is for all of our members, the 185, because even if you are the British Red Cross, the American Red Cross, or I am from the Canadian Red Cross, every single one of our members at some time in its history needs to reach out to other national societies for support, be that policy advice, practical support or human resources. For instance, last year, at the time of Katrina, the American Red Cross request to the International Federation was for 70 logisticians. They did not ask for financial support, although they did receive it from a number of sister national societies, but the request was for experienced logisticians to come in and help them run the logistics operation. What we do is sit down with national societies and understand their context and their needs, design and develop with them their own strategic plan, their own plan of who they want to be in their national context, what is the fact base we are dealing with, what is the analysis of the needs in this community or this nation and what is the role and responsibility of the Red Cross and Red Crescent in that context because, while there is a certain base line, if you like, depending on national governments and other actors, you can find your Red Cross/Red Crescent has different mandates in relation, for instance, to disaster funds or health care services. Some of our national societies run ambulance services and that is mandated by national authorities; in other cases not. Some other national societies run blood services, in some cases not. You sit down with a national society and say, "What are you needs, what is your own vision of where you want to be and how do we help you get from here to there?". How we help people from our national societies get from here to there is by offering technical resources, human resources (which are various) and by helping national societies partner up with each other. For instance, the British Red Cross has long term relationships with a range of national societies in Africa, in Asia, in particular, so we try to partner up national societies so that they have long term sustained support and, slowly but surely, try to build capacity over the long term based on the core sectoral areas of Red Cross action, which are disaster preparedness, disaster response, health care, including HIV/AIDS and so on, as well as principles and values work, so dissemination of our principles, anti-discrimination, social exclusion and so on. Those are the core areas of programming and we simply try to work with the organisations over the long haul. How DFID has been supporting us and continues to support us in that regard is by understanding the particular role of Red Cross/Red Crescent at the local, national and global levels and investing with us in a number of programme areas, key national societies in the south but also some of the processes we have around exactly this peer support relationship, for instance, in terms of disaster preparedness, supporting some of our learning processes to ensure that our needs assessment tools are appropriate, that we are adapting, that we are learning. There was a remark made earlier, I forget to what question, which was about the whole question of when something happens different organisations come in with their ideas of what a community might need. Sometimes we still find that our people in the field and our national societies on the ground do not always demonstrate best practice but we have to be a bit careful about thinking that communities are homogeneous and that when something happens needs can be expressed by one particular sector in a community. For instance, if we have a disaster strike a community it is really important that a needs assessment process makes the effort to speak to different elements in a community - women, men, disabled people, and, depending on the ethnic make-up in the community to have dialogues with different aspects of their community. We have too many cases where male leaders speak for a community and they actually do not really speak for the community and they miss what is really going on and what people's needs might actually be. These are the kinds of things I mean.
Chairman: I do not dare speak for my wife! Ms Johnson: These are the kinds of things that DFID has helped us with and continues to help us with in terms of making sure that we learn, we understand, we develop better tools and we do the training with our people both in terms of our own Federation international staff but also our local national society staff and volunteers so that when they do these assessments they do not do the quick and dirty. You might do quick and dirty quickly, obviously, to get a bird's eye view of what the needs are but you need to have a continuous dialogue process built up with the community to get into the more subtle, perhaps not immediately apparent, dynamics and understand them and build your response with the community with them engaged. Q354 John Barrett: When the Committee was recently in Pakistan looking at the reconstruction after the earthquake we heard how the IFRC and the military had worked together. Often the case is that the military are an access to helicopter lift capacity, they have an established structure of command and to a certain degree they are some of the best people that have disaster preparedness built into what they are doing. I was wondering what lessons could be learned from what happened out there in Pakistan as regards working along with the military and whether there are possibilities for the future elsewhere where links could be developed with the military. As you were saying earlier on, you have to invest in the fire brigade every day of the year because a disaster is going to happen. It is going to happen in other parts of the world, so should these links be developed and should there be an attempt to build disaster preparedness into the military elsewhere as a sort of insurance policy for the future? Ms Johnson: That is a very difficult question for the Red Cross. It is difficult for a couple of very particular reasons. First, it is important to remember that the Red Cross has a very particular relationship to military, based in history. The Red Cross initially was founded with a mandate to provide the medical services to military and in many countries this is still an aspect of what it means to be a Red Cross or a Red Crescent. We also do a lot of work with military around dissemination and training around international humanitarian law, so we have an ongoing dialogue and discussions with militaries at national and international levels. On the other hand we are extremely cautious about collaborating with military in terms of humanitarian response because of wanting to be absolutely clear that we are and are always seen to be neutral, independent humanitarian actors. As much as we are very attached to our principles as Red Cross/Red Crescent, we also are extremely practical and, depending on the context, our practical side will lead us to allowing ourselves to use military assets, logistics in particular, but that has to be with a huge amount of caution and, depending on the history and the context and the country, it is either more or less an issue. I was reflecting on this this morning, just reading through some of the material. At our most recent international conference we adopted a guidance note to our national societies about collaboration with military, which essentially says, "Be careful", for all the reasons I have just described. I have come, as I said earlier, from the Canadian Red Cross. I do not know if you would have noticed but a few years ago in Canada in the national capital area there was this tremendous ice storm and in the community where I live, in my own house, we were without electricity in January for two weeks. January in Ottawa can be pretty miserable even with electricity and certainly without was very miserable, and I will say that as a citizen, when the military came by about day nine, I think, to go house by house to see if people were okay, I did not have an allergic reaction to that. It was great. It would have been great if they were there with some other social actors perhaps because they were not exactly dialogue-friendly, but they were doing their thing, which was great, but we also do not have a history of conflict in my community. The military in my community is not seen as an actor that I have to be worried about when they approach my house. Q355 John Barrett: They are not seen as a threat? Ms Johnson: Exactly, but unfortunately, in many parts of the world, either at local community levels or in terms of national dynamics, that is not the case. If you are in another situation in a disaster and the military is approaching your house, the military is delivering goods to your house, not great. Red Cross side by side? Not great, so we would be very cautious about that. As I said, in terms of the practical questions, we have and we do but with extreme amounts of caution and very much contextually. Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. It has been a very helpful exchange. We very much appreciate that the International Red Cross as well as the national Red Cross and Red Crescent are absolutely essential to this whole humanitarian response and play a unique role which I think is very much appreciated. It has been very valuable to have your views on this which I hope will help us to produce a useful report which will to some extent reflect the distinctive role the Red Cross plays, so thank you very much indeed. |