5: Implementing

Developing common positions and policy

What does this involve? 

Across any humanitarian response there will be access constraints or operational dilemmas that require humanitarians to take a common approach to avoid creating precedents that could compromise the access environment. An HCT will often delegate the development of such context-specific positions to its technical advisory body, the HAWG.   

There are a range of issues that regularly confront humanitarians and that may require a common context-specific position. These include: 

1. The use of armed escorts
2. Requests for project information or staff’s personal information 
3. Interference in hiring processes 
4. Interference in beneficiary selection
5. Demands to pay arbitrary taxes and fees
6. Restriction on female participation in a humanitarian response

Why is it important?

Common positions help to strengthen the humanitarian community’s ability to protect the space it works in by presenting a unified front to external stakeholders that may seek to constrain humanitarian action.

Adherence also reduces the chances that partners will set negative precedents that other organisations might find hard to avoid in the future.

Some HAWG leaderships consider the development of common positions particularly important, especially in scenarios where authorities make numerous problematic demands on humanitarian partners. 

Role of co-chairs and members

Co-chairs need to be attuned to the operational environment and the issues that might require a common position, and should facilitate and lead on its drafting.

Members have if anything a more important role to play by helping to identify the issues that need attention, draft positions, give feedback and ensure an endorsed position is understood throughout their organisation and by their partners.

Guidance

Identifying the issue

An HAWG should not rely on OCHA's access monitoring framework (AMRF) and periodic HAWG meetings to identify which issues require a common position. These should be supplemented by regular monitoring of the operational environment and requests from partners, the inter-cluster coordination group (ICCG) and/or the humanitarian country team (HCT).

External bilateral meetings could also be a useful source of information and include humanitarian and political officials who regularly engage with armed actors, de-facto authorities, governments and others who influence humanitarian access. They might have valuable insights that HAWG members do not.

There should be a credible rationale for developing a common position based on clear evidence. Does the issue affect one organisation in one area or various organisations in a number of areas? The broader or more serious the impact, the stronger the rationale for a common position.

If the evidence upon which the common position is justified and based is anecdotal, this should be clearly stated.

Developing a position

One objective in developing a common position is to ensure a wide range of organisations abide by it. If time is not an issue, the co-chairs should strive to gather inputs from all HAWG members and other humanitarians, particularly national non-governmental organisations (NGOs) who are likely to be most affected by the issue but might have least access to coordination forums such as a HAWG.

If the issue is more time-sensitive, the views of organisations that are not HAWG members could be gathered through NGO forums that might have a better understanding of their members’ positions.

Input should also be sought from individuals outside the HAWG who have a good understanding of the issue or who will play an important role in signing off and implementing the common position. These might include HCT members and other coordination bodies such as local access working groups, NGO forums and the protection cluster.

A common position is unlikely to be a perfect solution for all concerned. Some form of compromise is likely to be required during its development. To help reach one, ask HAWG members to articulate what their ideal solution is, what their red lines are and what acceptable solutions lie in between.

Signing off

A clear sign-off procedure should ideally be agreed before a common position is developed. This could entail endorsement by all HAWG members or just a quorum. Organisations should be explicit either at the HAWG or the HCT about whether they are committed to the position or not.

A position should not be sent to the HCT if there is major disagreement at the HAWG level, particularly if those who disagree with it are also HCT members and will be involved in the higher-level endorsement process. Only once the HAWG membership clearly agrees on a position should the co-chairs present it to the HCT.

Promoting accountability

Securing clear endorsement of a common position is an important step towards improving accountability, but it is only one of several. HAWG members should also commit to a plan for disseminating the position within their organisations and to their partners.

They should also be actively involved in deciding how divergence from the position will be addressed. It should not be a top-down decision from the co-chairs.

Preserving institutional memory

Over the course of several months or years, an HAWG or HCT might agree to numerous common positions on access constraints and dilemmas. These issues may recur over time, but staff turnover means it can be easy to lose sight of previous positions taken. With this in mind, the co-chairs should document them rigorously.

This resource would equally serve to show new HAWG or HCT members the common positions that have been agreed to in the past and need to be maintained.

Joint operating principles

What are they? 

Joint operating principles (JOPs) provide guidance for humanitarians on how to navigate their operating environment. In essence they articulate the practical application of the humanitarian principles in a given situation. Previous examples include the following:

• North-West Syria Joint Operating Principles, June 2022
• Afghanistan Joint Operating Principles, August 2021
• Joint Operating Principles and Minimum Standards for Humanitarian Actors Working in non-Government Controlled Areas of Ukraine, December 2021

In many ways, they are a collection of common positions, existing guidance and legal frameworks that the humanitarian community is committed to adhere to create consistency in how it positions itself vis-à-vis external stakeholders. 

The development of JOPs should be seen as only the beginning of a process that will also include structured efforts to sensitise humanitarian partners on how they should be put into practice. 

Depending on where humanitarian principles are most at risk of being compromised, JOPs can be specific, focusing on a particular stakeholder or geographical area, or they can cover an entire humanitarian response. 

Why is it important?

Similarly to common positions, JOPs are important because they are intended to reduce the chance of a humanitarian stakeholder setting negative precedents for their peers.

Role of co-chairs and members

An HAWG’s leadership should be central to the consultation and drafting process. Depending on priorities they might also play a central role in sensitising the wider humanitarian community to the endorsed document. 

Members should contribute to drafts and play an active role in ensuring the endorsed JOPs are understood and adhered to by their organisations and partners. 

Guidance

Preparatory work

JOPs articulate what principled ways of working look like, therefore, it is useful to understand the wider adherence to principled humanitarian engagement across the response. More unprincipled responses or country teams transitioning from a development to a humanitarian setting are likely to need additional support to ensure humanitarian principles are promoted and protected.

That is not to say that partial adherence should be condoned, but more that it is useful to understand the situation within which the JOPs process takes place and the risks associated with them.

Mandate

Similarly to an access strategy, there should be a clear mandate from the HCT for JOPs to be drafted or updated. This should also include a mandate for implementation. Without a commitment to put JOPs into practice, the process risks becoming a “tick-box” exercise. 

As such, the mandate should be to produce both a “higher level” JOPs document and a second more detailed implementation framework that incorporates risk analysis and mitigation, monitoring and red lines. 

Consultation

• Consider forming a steering committee or taskforce to guide the JOPs process rather than just working through the HAWG. The group should be diverse in terms of types of organisation and position and levels of seniority. It should, however, be uniform in terms of its motivation to contribute to the process and its ability to facilitate the endorsement and application of the JOPs.
• Consultations should include those at the forefront of the humanitarian response who, in theory, are the most likely to be affected by the JOPs. If these stakeholders are not involved in the development process they are less likely to abide by them once the HCT has endorsed them.
• The consultation process can also be used to test whether stakeholders would be comfortable adhering to the ways of working that emerge.
• Be mindful not to make the consultation process too expansive, given the effort it requires and potential that a smaller group of well-informed organisations will know as much as a larger group.

Drafting

Though it often is, the drafting process should not be time-consuming. Many JOPs are very similar in their content because they cover access constraints that occur in many humanitarian settings. More time should be dedicated to articulating how the JOPs will be rolled out and implementation monitored, rather than the initial drafting.

Sensitisation

The HCT-endorsed JOPs should not be an end in and of themselves, but the start of a more extensive process. Commitments should be sought from HAWG members to conduct area-based workshops, ideally through existing coordination structures to roll out the document and disseminate implementation guidance. 

Humanitarian negotiations

Resolving an access constraint will at some point require negotiations between humanitarians and an external stakeholder such as a non-state armed group (NSAG), de-facto authority or government. For issues that affect a broad section of the response, a senior official such as the humanitarian coordinator (HC), Deputy HC or an OCHA head or deputy head of office is likely to lead the negotiations, depending on the seniority of their counterpart. An HC, for example, is unlikely to lead negotiations with a local NSAG commander.

What are humanitarian negotiations?

Humanitarian negotiations are intended to facilitate people’s access to assistance and protection. They should be conducted in a principled way with purely humanitarian objectives that do not legitimise or show support for any actor. 

Negotiations take place with state and non-state actors who affect humanitarian access. They also take place at a variety of levels, from facilitating access for humanitarian convoys at a checkpoint or across a frontline to high-level discussions with heads of state.

An HAWG’s role in such negotiations and that of its leadership varies from one setting to another. The co-chairs should lead negotiations at the operational level and provide input and advice for strategic negotiations led by senior officials. Talking points might also be drafted if requested and time permits.

It is more likely that an OCHA co-chair will be involved in negotiations given their UN role, but we should be careful not to assume that means an HAWG’s interests will be represented in the discussions. In such circumstances the HAWG has an important role to play in preparing the negotiations and receiving a readout afterwards to understand the required follow-up.

There are a number of activities an HAWG can engage in on the topic of collective humanitarian negotiations:

1. Direct support
2. Providing clarity
3. Encouraging accountability

This section looks at each one in turn.

Direct support

In this best-case scenario, a co-chair either takes an active part in negotiations or provides analytical, planning and engagement support to a senior negotiator such as the HC.

Guidance

In many cases, securing co-chair representation in, or support for humanitarian negotiations will come down to demonstrating the added value they can bring. This does not necessarily require significant new strands of work. If we consider the negotiations as consisting of four stages – analysis, planning, engagement and monitoring – then much of an HAWG’s core work is very relevant. For example:

1. Analysis: the co-chair should be able to provide or facilitate an in-depth understanding of the situation, constraints, key stakeholders and their motivations and interests, and humanitarian partners’ previous experiences in negotiating with certain parties. 
2. Planning: the co-chair should be able to advise on who best to engage with, and to define objectives and acceptable positions for HAWG and HCT members. 
3. Engagement: the co-chair should be well-placed to represent the views and positions of the humanitarian community, but there might be some negotiations which they are not senior enough to lead.
4. Monitoring: the co-chair and HAWG members should be well-placed to monitor how agreements are implemented at the project level by reporting adherence and violations back through the HAWG and ARMF.

The analysis and planning stages cover a lot of the work an HAWG is likely to have conducted in parts 3 and 4 of this toolkit. If it has not, a co-chair will have to rely more on the goodwill of more senior negotiators. Like many aspects of a co-chair’s work, this scenario also highlights the importance of fostering relationships with senior humanitarian staff outside the HAWG.

Providing clarity

Whether an HAWG’s leadership is directly involved in negotiations or not, it should provide its members with an overview of who in the humanitarian system is engaging with which actor on which access issue. A fictionalised example of this engagement matrix could look like the following: 

Such a matrix should cover all access constraints and issues that might be comprising adherence to the humanitarian principles. It may be that some key influencers are not being engaged with, so the exercise can also serve as a means to prompt an HC or OCHA to reflect on whether they are in touch with all relevant stakeholders.

Training resources

A HAWG’s work is often affected by humanitarian partners not having the requisite skills and experience to address access challenges themselves, whether it be negotiating with an armed actor or weighing up the cost of compromising a humanitarian principle.

It may emerge through strategy consultations that there is a need to build the capacity of HAWG members or other partners on different aspects of humanitarian access, particularly those who are heavily engaged in frontline negotiations, those unable to deliver their own training or those new to the humanitarian coordination system.

To support such efforts, NRC has made some of the training resources it uses available:

Register for NRC’s humanitarian negotiations training

NRC’s four-day training course is co-facilitated with the International NGO Safety Organisation (INSO) to equip frontline humanitarians with the skills to handle access and protection negotiations. The simulation-based activities teach participants to:

• Initiate, plan and implement humanitarian negotiation strategies
• Use communication tools and ethical influencing techniques 
• Interact effectively with difficult interlocutors 
• Resolve access dilemmas
• Lead or advise on negotiations 

The course is delivered in English, and all participants are provided with training materials, reference guides and a completion certificate at the end of the course.

What is it?

The basic concept of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is no different for HAWGs than for any other part of the humanitarian system. It is the structured and ongoing tracking of how an HAWG is progressing in its work and the impact of the activities it leads or supports.

Why is it important?

M&E serves both as a means of holding an HAWG’s leadership and members and HCT accountable for the work they have committed to, and to improve the HAWG’s future work. 

Without an M&E system in place, it becomes more difficult to hold people accountable and the HAWG is deprived of a chance to make evidence-based changes to its work. 

Role of co-chairs and members

The co-chairs should be the driving forces behind all M&E activity. Members should contribute input, but the leadership should develop the tools and approaches. 

Guidance

M&E falls into two categories. The monitoring refers to a continuous process of data collection to track how activities are being implemented. This is most likely to track the implementation of an HCT-endorsed access strategy and its associated workplan. It should also include work an HAWG is engaged in but falls outside an agreed upon workplan.

Regular HAWG meetings, comprehensive meeting notes and/or a work tracker are all useful monitoring tools. An HAWG should also look to provide the HCT with monthly or quarterly updates on the implementation of the HAWG and HCT’s access work.

The evaluation component involves a periodic assessment of the HAWG’s activities, outputs, outcomes and impact. It should be holistic in nature and not just assess whether an HAWG has completed the list of tasks set.

As a rule of thumb an evaluation should be conducted annually. This might include a survey for HAWG and HCT members and donors, focus group discussions and key informant interviews.  

If resources allow it might be useful to have someone external to the HAWG and the wider response conduct the evaluation. In designing one, it is important to avoid it becoming a critique of specific individuals. It might be easy, for example, to criticise a co-chair for the HCT’s failure to implement an access strategy, when in reality a HAWG’s leadership may have little influence on these higher-level dynamics.

It is a fine line to tread to ensure there is a mechanism in place to hold an HAWG to account while avoiding misplaced feedback, but it is a an activity that should be embraced.