Humanitarian Planning and Localised Temporalities: The Haitian Case

Abstract

This article shows, based on the Haitian crises after 2010, that international organisations (IOs) as central actors of humanitarian 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 following 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 temporalities. 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 management 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 suppress parallel temporalities by directing attention to their endpoint. IOs should consider models that enable the management of parallel crisis processes.

Experiencing Time and Space within the United Nations

“…At the institutional level, experienced and perceived temporalities reveal the large variety of the UN system. The contrast might result from their mandates and professions, like the often‐mentioned difference between humanitarians whose focus is to save lives in the short‐term horizon and development workers whose aim is to reach long‐term goals (Verlin, 2021). It also emerges from their connection to world politics as seen in the example developed in introduction about the misunderstanding between UNEP in Geneva and DPKO and DFS in New York.

While UNEP in Geneva was protesting about the slow pace of DPKO in taking action to deal with the peacekeeping missions’ environmental footprint, DPKO and DFS staff in New York complained about UNEP not being able to understand their time constraints especially as a consequence of their relationship with the Security Council.

…”

Understanding International Organizations’ Headquarters as Ecosystems: The Case of Geneva

“…Thus, we share the conclusion with Kimber and Martens (2021) that temporalities are not the same in all headquarters cities. A step further would be to look at the different temporalities within one ecosystem (Verlin 2021). In addition, we have seen that the IO ecosystem in Geneva is strongly shaped by the Swiss political authorities.…”

Time and space in the study of international organizations: An introduction

“…Campos (this special issue) compares UN country teams (UNCT) in Mozambique and Vietnam shedding light on institutional change across time and space: the analysis unpacks the sequencing of IO reform implementations while assessing diverging localized outcomes across UN spaces. Verlin (this special issue) captures internal spatiotemporal dimensions of IOs’ actions by exploring humanitarian planning techniques and how its temporalities are renegotiated “on the ground” through the specific case of humanitarian action in Haiti. Based on the case of the Intergovernmental Panel of experts on Climate Change (IPCC), De Pryck (this special issue) questions the historicity of IO practices and analyzes the impact of controversies in the making of expertise across time and space.…”

“…This disparity appears particularly strongly when it comes to individuals’ participation: time and space have a significant impact on who is participating in IO undertakings, de facto leaving aside some actors who cannot afford long‐haul travels or expensive rents (Dairon & Badache, this special issue; Kimber & Maertens, this special issue), or on the contrary allowing others to join (Eckl, this special issue). A less expected repercussion lies with the success of local actors in trying to capitalize on the role of time and space: while they may sometimes gain political power and concrete influence on IOs (Campos, this special issue; Dairon & Badache, this special issue), they can also be marginalized compared to distant stakeholders, such as donors and IOs’ headquarters, which succeed in imposing their rules at a distance (Verlin, this special issue). At the level of institutions, the spatiotemporal ecosystems can affect the performance and legitimacy of IOs, potentially bringing benefits and economies of scale, or being translated into cumbersome procedures or tensions between different departments, divisions or working groups over how to perform certain tasks (Dairon & Badache, this special issue; De Pryck, this special issue; Worrall, this special issue).…”