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Tiziana Dearing on Disaster Relief and Response

The year following hurricane Katrina generated much discussion and debate about how best to handle disaster response in the twenty-first century. Tiziana Dearing, executive director of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, looks at the best practices and management challenges of current humanitarian relief efforts.

Q: What are the most critical management challenges facing humanitarian relief organizations today?

Dearing: There are a range of management challenges, but I think three are particularly interesting. The first is age-old, and that's the challenge of funding. But it's not simply a question of getting enough money; it's a question of having donor expectations that allow you to do the work you need to do. For example, not having so much pressure to get the work done quickly if it's going to take a while, as well as making sure that you get funding that allows you to invest in preparedness as well as actual response to disasters.

Preparedness actually is the second challenge, and that has much to do with being able to invest in coordination, upfront infrastructure, and staff capable of working across institutions and organizations- the kinds of things that aren't direct delivery or response, but are important to being effective when a disaster does happen.

And the third challenge is getting local. We're learning more and more about the need to move away, to some extent, from direct delivery by big, national or global organizations and more towards providing local institutions the support they need to do the delivery themselves.

Q: What lessons were learned in relief operations following the tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and the deadly earthquake in Pakistan?

Dearing: It's interesting because some of the lessons were the same and some were different. Certainly, in hurricane Katrina, we learned that we need a coordinating body that doesn't exist. On the international level you have the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which works across different kinds of responders and provides a clearing house of information. We didn't have anything of the sort functioning well with hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and quite a bit of confusion among NGOs, FEMA, and the American Red Cross about who might even be responsible for such a thing. So, one of the lessons we certainly learned was coordination.

Plus, we can't emphasize enough this issue of local response. We learned it in the tsunami and in Pakistan and in Katrina, but honestly we've known for a long time that the early stages of response-which are rescue and relief-rely heavily on the knowledge, the physical presence, and the flexibility of local responders. But they don't get the money because they're not well-branded. They don't get the long-term support. The need to change that is an important thing we've learned.

Q: How has the "business" of relief and development changed in the last several years? We see the private sector and the military doing more in disaster relief. On the whole, is that good?

Dearing: There are some familiar business concepts that one can point to. First, we see increased competition. Certainly, in the last few years there are a lot of new entrants to the relief and humanitarian response market-both with better understanding of the military's role, with presence of for-profit corporations, such as Walmart during hurricane Katriana, but also, as we saw in the tsunami, an influx of new small responders who think they may have an innovation or who may simply care and want to be there. So we definitely see increased competition.

We also see some increased demand. Part of that is because, as the world's population grows, we have more people who can be impacted by disasters, and partly because poverty and vulnerability increasingly set people at risk for larger scale impact from a disaster when it happens. Also, in the last couple of years we have seen a series of particularly large and devastating disasters that have taxed those that respond and have created increased demand.

Q: You have written about the role of the military in disaster response, questioning the boundaries of where relief stops and military operations start. How is that playing out in disaster response and in conflict zones today?

Dearing: That's a complicated question. We certainly have come to understand the important role that the military can play in disaster response. Their command and control ability and their ability to mobilize quickly and have the equipment and people prepared to respond is an important asset. Over the last few years, however, especially since the U.S. launched the war on terror and since the war in Afghanistan began, we've seen an increased blurring of the lines between military humanitarian response as a product of military strategy, and neutral, impartial humanitarian response on the part of aid organizations. When those lines get blurred, you run the risk of reducing security-both for the people receiving aid and for those providing aid-and you create a zone in which it's confusing for people. Are they seeing impartial aid provision or some kind of military strategy? And you can imagine the complication that creates when relief work is going on in active conflict zones.

Q: Is there a significant difference in approach to responding to natural disasters and those that are man-made?

Dearing: The short answer is yes, but I think that it's important to consider that there are man-made dimensions to the tragedy that accompanies natural disasters. What I mean is: poor construction, poverty, innate vulnerability, weak governments, weak governance-all of these can dramatically increase the impact of a natural disaster. Think about the weak levees in New Orleans, or the poor construction of buildings in Gujarat, India, that were more prone to collapse during the earthquake there. So there can even be a man-made component to natural disasters.

In a conflict zone-and that's what we're talking about mostly when we talk about man-made disasters- there are fundamental differences. You get into the principles of impartiality and neutrality as well as increased concern for how to provide for the security of displaced people while trying to deliver aid to them; how you provide for the security of the food shipments and the aid provisions themselves; and how combatants and non-combatants alike distinguish between relief organizations and military bodies engaged in humanitarian aid.

Q: Is there anything you'd like to add?

Dearing: I think it's interesting to start to look at the comparative advantage between types of responders. We're certainly seeing that business, the military, and NGOs all have a role to play in disaster response. There's some tendency to circle the wagons and claim 'it should only be NGOs,' or 'maybe we should just hand it all over to the military'-something that we actually heard after Katrina. I think the better approach would be to develop a policy framework that takes advantage of what each group has to offer. For example, the command and control abilities of the military; the quick distribution channels and ability to mobilize resources in a for-profit company; the professional standards and long-term experience and network of NGOs-while recognizing the weaknesses of each responder: lack of impartiality on the military's part, for example, or the inability sometimes of NGOs to be entrepreneurial or innovative as quickly as they'd like to be. If we can find a way to take the best of what each of those responders has, and develop a policy framework, a funding approach, and a coordination approach that allows us to sequence those responders, I think we could have better impact in disasters over time.