Unpacking Next Generation Humanitarian Architecture

By Nudhara Yusuf, Mohammed Shahrukh, and Maddy Petersen, The Stimson Center

In his follow up from the Our Common Agenda, UN Secretary-General António Guterres published a policy brief elaborating on a proposal for an Emergency Platform to strengthen the international response to complex global shocks. This comes at a time where Joyce Msuysa, Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Deputy Relief Coordinator, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), reminds us “the idea that we have entered an age of permanent crisis, that humanity is lurching from one global disaster to another without drawing breath, is rapidly gaining ground.” COVID-19, the global food crisis, and the earthquakes in Syria and Türkiye are a few recent examples of such complex shocks.

Per the Secretary-General, the Emergency Platform would not be an institution, but rather an intergovernmentally agreed mechanism to launch a set of protocols during a global shock to provide swift, agile, and coordinated responses by convening relevant stakeholders. This coordination mechanisms that leverages the convening power of the Secretary-General seems to be a necessary addition to the UN’s response architecture, but it does raise several questions, including how this fits into the wider UN and humanitarian systems, and even what constitutes “global,” “shock,” or “complex,” in a world that calls for a “next generation” response capacity.

Fifteen months out from the 2024 Summit of the Future, the Stimson Center’s inaugural Global Governance Innovation Report (GGIR 2023) sheds light on intersecting complexities in the global governance architecture. It offers a comprehensive roadmap for course correction in a divided world embattled by violent conflict, fragility, hyper-nationalism, refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs), pandemics, climate change-fueled crises, unchecked proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI), and growing tools of cyber-warfare.

This year’s theme of ‘Redefining Approaches to Peace, Security and Humanitarian Action’ leverages two new global assessment tools: a Global Governance Index (GGI); and the Global Governance Survey (GGS). They measure individual nations’ promotion and management of global public goods and reveal their citizens’ attitudes toward both prevailing multilateral commitments and a hopeful, normative agenda for progressive global change in the future. With an initial focus on only twelve major UN Member States, the GGI and GGS study the Group of 7 (G7) and the BRICS countries (Brazil, the Russian Federation, India, China, and South Africa), embodying 51% of the world’s population and 70% of its gross domestic product (GDP).

The index ranks Germany, the UK, and Canada as the top three for socioeconomic development and pandemic response, based on their earmarked contributions to: GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance; and the UN Development Programme (UNDP), both as a percentage of a country’s GDP. The survey reveals that 69% of the populations in the countries polled feel that COVID-19 was handled well, while only 32% believe the same for combating global poverty.

The GGI and GGS work at a granular level to quantify a global architecture in quagmire, for which the GGIR offers a fine-tuned analysis drawing upon their rich datasets, with a set of concrete recommendations flowing from the analysis.

A next-generation humanitarian architecture

GGIR 2023 highlights complex humanitarian challenges worldwide, exacerbated by the changing nature of conflict, the lack of collaborative programme design with local actors, and inadequate preparedness by the international community.

Building on the Secretary-General’s proposal for an Emergency Platform, the report:

Considers how such a platform could be a self-learning mechanism through concrete knowledge management strategies and disaggregated data collection, increasing its efficiency and capacity with each use of the Emergency Platform protocol;
Outlines debates around activation and deactivation with the support of taskforces and sunset clauses, including why an “automatic trigger” would not serve the purposes of a platform that aims to tackle uncertainty, and how to mitigate the risks of politicization around a centrally-convened body; and
Cautions against, and discusses ways to overcome, the direct and indirect Global North biases around what constitutes a “global shock.”

In addition, a humanitarian architecture suited to the increasingly intertwined, frequent, and uncertain nature of crises and shocks should consider turbocharging the localization agenda and revisiting the OCHA cluster system.

The report recommends bolstering the Grand Bargain 2.0 – a renewed attempt at restructuring the design of humanitarian response, coming off the back of the Grand Bargain outcome of the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit – through creative financing models. Building on ideas introduced in the High-Level Advisory Board for Effective Multilateralism’s (HLAB) report, GGIR 2023 explores the potential role of the private sector in increasing the quantity and quality of funds for local and regional organizations. Additionally, the authors consider how marginal adjustments to the OCHA cluster system could both relieve pressure on strained institutions, as well as accelerate the empowerment of local actors in the humanitarian space.

The report also calls for anticipatory governance for refugees and displaced persons through a Multilateral Vulnerability Index (MVI). While the UN has mobilized around the call from small island developing States (SIDS) for an MVI, especially in the context of financing for development, GGIR 2023 looks at the potential applications of an MVI in humanitarian anticipatory action. In facilitating tailored courses of action in response to the growing numbers of vulnerable internally displaced persons and refugees, an MVI (as an outcome of the Summit of the Future) would inform both the Emergency Platform Protocols and the Inter-Agency Standing Committee in resource allocation decisions.

The report places emphasis on early warning and early action, whether that be through a proposed Emergency Platform, as highlighted above, or through a New Civilian Response Capability to prevent the escalation of violent outbreaks so as to close divides across the humanitarian, peace, and security nexus and work to enhance collective security worldwide. Moreover, GGIR 2023 explores how disarmament can boost conditions for applying conflict management tools in the peace toolbox, which can, in turn, enhance how the global humanitarian architecture functions. At the same time, it notes, a lack of adequate financing results in competition between humanitarian initiatives and peacebuilding efforts can reveal how fissures across the nexus can inhibit the success of both projects.

Understanding how humanitarianism, peace, and security intersect is critical to ushering in next generation policy innovations that will come to define the new landscape shaping the UN’s collective security architecture and New Agenda for Peace, to be deliberated upon in the run-up to the Summit of the Future in 2024.