Humanitarian Horizons: A Practitioners’ Guide to the Future

Posted on 10 March 2010

By Ellen Knickmeyer

Vastly more people needing help, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, and particularly in the slums of the world’s poorest cities. More climate crises, both slow-moving and abrupt. More military involvement in humanitarian work. More political crises of conscience for humanitarian organizations.

More of everything, really – except donors, as population growth stagnates in the wealthy countries that fund most of the world’s humanitarian efforts.

Such is the long-term forecast in Humanitarian Horizons: A Practitioners Guide to the Future. This was a project of the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University and the Humanitarian Futures Programme at King’s College, London.  It was commissioned by Catholic Relief Services, the International Rescue Committee, Mercy Corps and other leading NGOs in an attempt to identify trends that might help predict an otherwise unknowable future.

“We’re constantly focusing on the here and now, and delivering assistance today, and we very rarely look up from the workplace to see where we’re going,” says Peter Walker, director of Tufts’ Feinstein International Center and one of the creators of the Practitioners’ Guide.

Leaders of humanitarian organizations know “there’s huge change afoot, and they really do want to get a heads’ up,” Walker says. “The basic question people keep asking us is we want to know what it’s going to be like in 20 years’ time so we can plan for it.”

World-changing, one-off events of the future – the fateful next equivalent of 9/11 or the timing of the world’s next five global recessions – are of course unknowable, and unpredictable.

Instead, the Practitioners’ Guide to the Future stresses the impact of trends already underway, primarily in population growth and shifts, climate change, globalization, and evolving pressures and demands on humanitarian organizations.

Key demographic trends for the next 20 years and onward, according to the Practitioners’ Guide:

1. The developing world will experience unprecedented population growth, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
2. Unplanned growth on the fringes of the developing world’s cities will foster great clusters of populations in need.
3. Aging, stagnant or waning populations in the developed world mean wealthier governments and countries will have fewer resources to share for international humanitarian work.

For some of the world’s poorer countries, the future looks more than a little Malthusian, warns Carl Haub, senior demographer at the Washington, D.C.-based Population Reference Bureau, and author of the demographics section of the Practitioners’ Guide to the Future.
 
“Sub-Saharan Africa is going to be the demographic crisis area of the world for the next few decades,” Haub said. Infant mortality rates there have fallen far more sharply than fertility rates. As a result, absent an unforeseen change, “they’re going to have doubling and trebling of population,” Haub said.

Other predicted trends:

• Climate change will bring both sudden crises of weather and critical long-term degradation of land
• Reduced access to water and other resources will be the most complex result of climate change
• Globalization will aggravate inequalities of wealth within countries and among countries
• Military involvement in humanitarian work will increase
• Freedom of safe movement for humanitarian workers will decrease

For Walker, one take-away message from the look into the future is that humanitarian groups, increasingly tasked with keeping people alive in fragile or failed states, will face more and more challenges to their principles of independence and neutrality.

“The central message is you have to become much more nuanced to local environments,” Walker said. “You have to be programmed by context and not by standards… by evidence instead of anecdotes.”

And “a consequence of doing stuff locally is you have to understand the political consequence of your actions. It’s profoundly political just to service poverty so that people don’t die,” Walker said. “Some people say that lets a government off the hook. We have to truly understand the consequences.”

Ellen Knickmeyer is in the Master of Public Affairs/Mid-Career program at Harvard Kennedy School. She was formerly Bureau Chief for The Washington Post in Cairo and Baghdad, and West Africa Bureau Chief for The Associated Press.