Humanitarian Planning and Localised Temporalities: The Haitian Case
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| Author | Jan Verlin |
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12978 |
Humanitarian Planning and Localised
Temporalities: The Haitian Case
Jan Verlin
Chair in Geopolitics of Risk, Ecole Normale Sup
erieure, and
Centre for the Sociology of Organisations, Sciences Po/CNRS
Abstract
This article shows, based on the Haitian crises after 2010, that international organisations (IOs) as central actors of humanitar-
ian governance in complex crises situations rely on sequenced time frames to manage the diversification and massification of
relief actors. At the same time, crisis professionals struggle to correlate their lived temporalities with this preconstructed time
model when the localised crisis shifts from an event to a permanent temporality. The article is, therefore, guided by the fol-
lowing question: How is time strategically used by IOs in humanitarian governance and what are the effects of conflicting
localised temporalities? The article argues first that different types of temporalities were associated with different groups of
aid actors after the 2010 earthquake. The prolongated humanitarian crisis resulted in the repetitive adaption of UN appeal
and funding instruments. Second, I show that the UN used planning instruments based on the disaster management cycle.
Based on its cyclical temporality, UN actors combined it with humanitarian project management tools to govern aid projects
by formalising the negotiation between the long-term aid programmes and the short-term duration of projects. I finally show
the synthesis of both forms of temporal aid governance to control the contradictions between localised and funding tempo-
ralities.
Policy Implications
•International organisations (IOs) produce contradictions when they associate funding temporalities with crisis temporalities
in order to manage actors on the ground. Based on this observation, the analysis suggests more flexible planning tools
that allow longer and adaptive funding in humanitarian crises. Project lifecycles should systematically readjust to crisis
temporalities and local actors.
•The analysis pushes IOs to further reflect on the internal contradictions and hierarchies of time when designing time man-
agement instruments. Highly abstract planning instrument tend to establish a dominant implicit temporality that does not
allow for the complexity of localised temporalities. Participatory country planning should dictate aid timeframes and not a
preplanned exist-strategy.
•By explicitly acknowledging different temporalities between headquarters and missions, IOs should distinguish between
temporalities of project and programme funding, evaluations, actors and crisis phenomena in humanitarian planning in
order to avoid contradictions and dysfunctionalities. The temporality of the localised crisis and the political temporalities
of aid programmes should be the determining factor for IOs.
•The case study emphasises that cyclical planning instruments can reproduce rigid linear temporalities when they are
determined by a single event or process. Whereas cyclical instruments enable a focus on future crises, they tend to sup-
press parallel temporalities by directing attention to their endpoint. IOs should consider models that enable the manage-
ment of parallel crisis processes.
International organisations (IOs) currently play an ever-
increasing role in the institutional ecosystems of humanitar-
ian governance (Barnett, 2013), by shaping the bureaucra-
cies crisis professionals work within and implementing
centralised standards. Most notably, the United Nations (UN)
have shown an growing interest in structuring humanitarian
aid, despite the fact that the ‘humanitarian reason’(Fassin,
2011) is a surprising latecomer to the mission of UN organi-
sations: Indeed, the first UN organisation with an exclusively
‘humanitarian’objective, the Department of Humanitarian
Affairs (DHA) under the leadership of the Secretary-General,
was only created in 1992, based on the UN Disaster Relief
Organisation founded in 1971. As early as 1998, the depart-
ment was reorganised by the Secretary-General and
renamed the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs (UN-OCHA). Today, it is once currently again currently
being reformed again. While other UN organisations, like the
United Nations Development Programme, UN peacekeeping
missions and the International Organisation of Migration
also made their humanitarian objectives more explicit, dur-
ing this period, it was not until 2005 that ‘humanitarian
reforms’introduced a general framework designed to sta-
bilise this ecosystem to the UN system. In response to the
slow humanitarian response in Darfur and the clear
©2021 Durham University and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Global Policy (2022) 12:Suppl.7 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12978
Global Policy Volume 12 . Supplement 7 . December 2021
68
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