Humanitarian Futures Programme

The Humanitarian Futures Programme (HFP) is an action research programme based within the School of Social Science and Public Policy at King’s College London.

It attempts to help organisations with humanitarian responsibilities to prepare for future humanitarian threats. The HFP believes that these threats will be more complex and unpredictable than those of today, and that their impacts will be of an exponentially different order.[1] The HFP also focuses upon solutions with a view to helping such organisations strengthen their prevention, preparedness and response capacities. These potential solutions come from a range of sources – including the natural and social sciences, the corporate sector and the military.[2]

The HFP aims to develop a series of tools, methods and approaches to assess humanitarian organisations’ futures capacities and the potential ways to strengthen them. In addition to its partner organisations, these resources are being created with the intention of aiding the wider humanitarian community in planning for the future.[3]

The programme director is Dr. Randolph Kent, a former UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Somalia[4] and several other East African crisis zones.[5]

Contents

Programme components

The HFP has three main components designed to help organisations with humanitarian responsibilities prepare for the future.

Component 1: Participant development

Working with governments, and inter-governmental and non-governmental organisations in order to learn, develop and test ways to enhance organisational anticipatory, adaptive and collaborative capacities.

Component 2: The futures group

A forum established at the London level and in countries in which the HFP works, e.g. Central African Republic, Ecuador, the Philippines and Tajikistan, to bring the knowledge of leading social and natural scientists together and explore factors that might create humanitarian crises in the longer-term as well as ways to mitigate their impacts. The Futures Group also aims to enhance the exchange of knowledge between humanitarian policy-makers and scientists, and develop ways to ensure a more effective dialogue.[6] A pilot Futures Group for West Africa is being established in April/May 2009 as part of a collaborative project with the Economic Community of West African States.

Component 3: Innovations

The HFP aims to identify various innovative practices from a broad range of disciplines and assesses their relationship to humanitarian needs. It also tests the capacity of organisations to adopt such practices through its work with partners.[7]

Methodology

The HFP's methodology attempts to help organisations become more anticipatory, adaptive and collaborative. Its methodology is designed to test an organisation’s current capacities and identify ways to strengthen these organisational qualities.

Assessment frameworks and organisational self-assessment tool

The HFP tries to develop assessment frameworks for determining the anticipatory and adaptive capacities of humanitarian organisations. The overall assessment framework is designed for outside analysts and peer group reviews to assess individual organisations’ capacities for dealing strategically with future threats and mitigation opportunities.

One instrument is the Organisational Self Assessment Tool (OSAT), a questionnaire which asks respondents to give their personal views on future humanitarian threats, the organisation’s ability to anticipate future threats, to adapt to them, to innovate and to collaborate with new types of organisations.

Key informant interviews

The HFP team conducts individual interviews with staff from different levels of an organisation as well as surveys, which focus on three principal areas:

Futures groups

The HFP also supports organisations to continue working with the Futures groups in order to try to incorporate local scientific expertise into their policy making – strategy and related operational – agendas.

Strategic Humanitarian Action Resource Pack (SHARP)

The Strategic Humanitarian Action Resource Pack (SHARP) exercise is designed to try to help an organisation strengthen strategic planning through the use of scenarios.

The SHARP is designed to help an organisation prioritise the many issues driving change in its area of interest and develop a clear framework for forward planning.[8]

HFP partners

The HFP works with programme donors and collaborating partners.[9]

Programme donors

Donors of the programme are:

Collaborating partners

Collaborating partners are:

Outputs and reports

Notes and references

  1. ^ "Humanitarian futures team arrives in Bangui" The Humanitarian and Development Partnership Team (HDPT), 24th May 2007, accessed 9th April 2009.
  2. ^ "About the Programme", HFP, accessed 12th March 2009.
  3. ^ "HIV in Humanitarian Situations", Aids and Emergencies, accessed 12th March 2009.
  4. ^ "Somalia: Q&A with Randolph Kent" Relief Web, 2000, accessed 26th March 2009
  5. ^ "GLOBAL: Humanitarian futures (part one) - "exponential complexity"", IRIN news, 24 July 2008, accessed 26th March 2009.
  6. ^ "Why humanitarians and climate scientists don't talk" Reuters Alert Net, January 2009, accessed 26th March 2009
  7. ^ "Programme components", HFP, accessed 12th March 2009.
  8. ^ "Methodology", HFP, accessed 12th March 2009.
  9. ^ "HFP Partners", HFP, accessed 12th March 2009.
  10. ^ "The Limits of Humanitarianism" ODI Events, accessed 26th March 2009
  11. ^ "The Future of Humanitarian Action", ICVA, accessed 26th March 2009

Further reading

External links