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Since World War II, the United States has played a leading role in development assistance in both volume of funds and role. Though the largest bilateral development agency, USAID is somewhat of an outlier in modes of operation, scope and nature of activities, and place within government. This chapter examines the development and character of U.S. foreign assistance. Like others, the United States provides foreign aid for multiple reasons – to relieve suffering and promote long-term economic and social development, to gain favor with allies, to open markets, to help ensure national security. Security and diplomacy do play a large role in U.S. foreign aid, even in basic education. In the context of U.S. internal politics, both humanitarian/development and diplomatic/security rationales have been necessary to sustain public and government support for foreign aid. Still neither rationale has prevailed; the budget is split nearly in half. The need for a humanitarian rationale may be characteristic of U.S. foreign assistance along with the emphasis on democracy. Yet these programs have sometimes been distorted by the diplomatic rationale and the security needs of the state. Many of these tensions and the constant need to justify foreign aid likely derive from the perennial periodic isolationist thread of U.S. politics, the particular adversarial institutions of U.S. policymaking, and the transparency which leaves these processes open. Even so, U.S. development assistance has played a prominent role in the trajectory of international development post-World War II, and has worked to address many of the great challenges of the times.

Effective competence-based management (CBM) requires in the first instance an ability to identify an organization’s competences and the sources of those competences. Identifying competences can be especially challenging in the context of not-for-profit organizations, which have often been characterized as being “different” from for-profit organizations. In this paper we argue that not-for-profit organizations have fundamentally the same systemic requirements for survival and success as for-profit organizations – and therefore that not-for-profits ought to be amenable to competence identification and analysis through use of CBM concepts and theory in essentially the same way as for-profit organizations. We support this basic proposition through a case study of competence identification and analysis in a humanitarian relief organization (HRO), an increasingly important kind of not-for-profit organization.

Achieving localisation (the transfer of control to local actors) has proven extremely challenging in the development sector, and the humanitarian sector appears to be facing equal challenges. This chapter seeks to engage with that struggle and examine why this lesson has been so difficult to learn. Drawing on conference workshops and 10 key informant interviews, this paper examines the obstacles and opportunities for localisation, seeking to understand what makes it so hard for those who hold disproportionate power in humanitarian encounters to hand over power. The authors found a clear sense of localisation being a process rather than an outcome; optimism that momentum is slowly gathering towards this process, and a clear sense of the steps required to fully achieve it. Examining practitioners’ perspectives in this way adds an important voice to discussions of humanitarian practice.

This study explores how thinking infrastructures can orchestrate collective sensemaking in unstable and socially contested environments, such as large-scale humanitarian crises. In particular, drawing from recent interest in the role of artifacts and infrastructures in sensemaking processes, the study examines the evaluative underpinnings of prospective sensemaking as groups attempt to develop novel understandings about a desired but ambiguous set of future conditions. To explore these theoretical concerns, a detailed case study of the unfolding challenges of managing a large-scale humanitarian crisis response was conducted. This study offers two contributions. Firstly, it develops a theorization of the process through which performance evaluation systems can serve as thinking infrastructures in the collaborative development of new understandings in unstable environments. Secondly, this study sheds light on the practices that support prospective sensemaking through specific features of thinking infrastructures, and unpacks how prospective and retrospective forms of sensemaking may interact in such processes.

The purpose of this essay is to survey the ethical guidelines Red Cross personnel use to determine the appropriate course of action when faced with morally dilemmatic situations, such as whether or not to accept private donations to fund humanitarian operations.

A review of the principles which buttress and guide all Red Cross action is presented along with two case studies – one in which the Solomon Islands Red Cross Society refused money from a controversial mining company, which could have been used to assist flood victims, and the other in which the Nigerian Red Cross Society accepted money from oil companies that have been historically ethically-challenged – which illustrate the necessity of contextual analysis in making these decisions.

The principles upon which all Red Cross actions are based – humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence – provide the guidelines by which to evaluate whether or not to accept private, corporate donations. The Red Cross principles-based ethics allows for seemingly contradictory decisions to be reached in different countries and contexts, but in manners which are ethically coherent and transparent.

This paper sets the foundation for future research into what guides humanitarian organizations as they carry out their life-sustaining operations. Organizations which use such ethical principles to determine the appropriateness of their actions should benefit from transparently demonstrating this.

Case studies from recent disasters demonstrate the value of using ethical guidelines to evaluate donor suitability. This rigor and transparency benefits not only the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations, but most importantly those rendered vulnerable by disaster around the world.

Education in Emergencies (EiE) as a subfield of Comparative and International Education (CIE) has played a vital role in advocating for the world’s most vulnerable people with a focus on short-term responses to specific events like conflict and natural disasters that often occur in the Global South. However, recent events, like the protests exposing structural racial and gender inequality, the COVID-19 pandemic, and multiple global “slow” conflicts, have revealed a different nature of modern emergencies where issues, which are often considered important but not urgent, can quickly become emergencies under the right circumstances or have in fact always been so. Accordingly, in this chapter, we reimagine a broader framework for EiE which includes long-term, systemic, and universal challenges that affect both the Global North and South. The chapter includes a historical review of EiE as a subfield within CIE along with evidence of new forms of modern emergencies in the United States, Bolivia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Myanmar, and Syria that build toward a broader framework of EiE intended for both CIE scholars and practitioners.

International humanitarian assistance usually arrives quickly following a catastrophic disaster, although it may be slower to remote locations. The international community has developed guidelines to reduce the social and cultural intrusiveness of the aid, assuring that local priorities are followed and the aid facilitates long-term recovery. However, the aid missions are under pressure to act quickly and withdraw because of the expense of operations, and thus, they are less sensitive to local culture and priorities than they might be. This chapter looks at the political context of international humanitarian assistance, including the Hyogo and Sendai Frameworks and humanitarian standards, and the experience in several catastrophic disaster responses in Asia. Levels of satisfaction with recovery, particularly housing recovery, were related to the affected communities’ participation in the decision-making process. Humanitarian aid standards also encourage attention to issues of security, displaced populations, equity in the distribution of aid, the safety of women and children, and other disaster impacts.

The aim of this research is to study the implications of the human resources management practices on corruption in humanitarian aid as the phenomenon is under-researched (Akbar & Vujic, 2014; Melo & Quinn, 2015) and considered to be a hot topic since the determinants of corruption from an individual perspective have been scarcely discussed in the non-profit sector (Epperly & Lee, 2015; Mohiuddin & Dulay, 2015).

This research adopts grounded theory as a method and builds upon long experience in the humanitarian aid sector to generate theory from field observations and from 30 interviews conducted with respondents working in humanitarian organisations. The data collected from interviews was compared to observations data, leading the way to validating and expanding the findings.

The findings of this study are related to human resources administration weaknesses which appear to be directly linked to corruption in humanitarian aid. These weaknesses include issues in relation to Terms of Reference and organisational charts, irregularities in staff selection procedures, the short-termism of contracts, poor talent management, a lack of ethics awareness and mismanaged cultural diversity.

This study suffers from a few limitations pertaining to the sensitivity of the context, confidentiality issues, retrospection in some cases and possible bias resulting from staff frustration. These were dealt with through ensuring interviewees' utmost anonymity in publishing the results and through cross-checking answers of respondents from within the same organisation.

This research proposes a corruption preventive model which serves as a tool driving better human resources practices in humanitarian aid, and highlights the dangerous impact of corruption and raises awareness among humanitarian aid managers and workers about the importance of preventing it so that more vulnerable people are reached and that the donated money fulfils its intended target. The chapter brings value to research on humanitarian aid as it considers the corruption phenomenon with new lenses; focusing on individuals rather than on systems thus opening new horizons of study away from the traditional stream of research on service delivery.