Corporate Engagement in Disaster Preparedness and Humanitarian Response

Project context  

For decades, companies have occupied a secondary presence in humanitarian relief, providing goods and services to dominant humanitarian actors contracting their assistance. However, recently, the business community has started to respond unconventionally to needs arising from humanitarian emergencies, offering more than just logistical support or the delivery of construction materials on a fee-basis. One new form of engagement is partnership between companies and traditional humanitarian actors to improve disaster relief services. A second change in corporate engagement is the enlarged scope of traditional work. Companies no longer merely procure the goods and services for traditional humanitarian actors, but in a number of cases appear to compete with them for humanitarian budgets.While most donors expend humanitarian funds only to non-profit organisations, certain key donors have started to contract commercial providers directly for planning and implementation of humanitarian projects. These developments have given rise to much discussion within the humanitarian community regarding the role of the private sector in humanitarian relief. Critics and supporters alike argue that the two trends depicted above, if significant and persistent, have the potential to transform the humanitarian domain and will affect humanitarian principles. In that debate, critics and supporters raise key issues, which merit further discussion. In order to equally assess both sides of the argument, it is first necessary to establish a facts-based appraisal of the trends and an independent assessment of their implications. Thus far, no comprehensive study of company engagement in humanitarian relief has been conducted.

Project objectives

This project explored the nature of private sector humanitarian activities and probed more deeply into the question of whether this engagement adds up to a substantial trend instead of merely a unique event during the Tsunami of 2004. Moreover, the project examined the many disparate approaches to corporate engagement in humanitarian action and disaster preparedness and assessed the underlying rationale and motivations for business activism. The project focused on private-public partnerships (PPP), examining the distribution of responsibilities and accountability between the respective partners, and the broader question of how "unilateral" corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives fit into the overall scheme. Additionally, the project assessed the relationship between corporate and ‘traditional’ actors in the field: Is corporate engagement complementing or (partially) replacing the activities of governmental and non-governmental actors? Are companies’ policy frameworks, codes of conduct, and approaches to humanitarian action informed by and compatible with standards and principles set in the humanitarian community?