[Executive summary] Promoting principled humanitarian access: The role of humanitarian access working groups in supporting humanitarian engagement with non-state armed groups and de-facto authorities
Non-state armed groups (NSAG) and de-facto authorities (DFA) play an active role in many humanitarian crises around the world and often have the power to facilitate or constrain humanitarian access by inflicting violence or imposing restrictions on people in need and humanitarian actors. Engaging and negotiating with them has become a humanitarian necessity, a task that humanitarians regularly struggle to execute effectively for numerous reasons.
As our understanding of access and engagement requirements has improved, new coordination structures have emerged to support the humanitarian community. Humanitarian access working groups (HAWG) have come to complement more long-standing formal coordination forums, like clusters and humanitarian country teams (HCTs). Despite their growing prominence in humanitarian responses, relatively little research and resources dedicated to humanitarian access has explicitly focused on their effectiveness and the challenges they face, including in relation to their role in supporting NSAG and DFA engagement.
The EU's Directorate-General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (DG-ECHO) has recognised this gap and subsequently supported initiatives to explore the topic. The DG-ECHO funded consortium "Presence, Proximity, Protection: Building capacity to safeguard humanitarian space", led by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), together with Geneva Call, Action Against Hunger (ACF), Médecins du Monde (MdM) and Handicap International (HI), has undertaken research and developed a toolkit to guide the work of HAWG NGO co-chairs. The research comprised of four country case studies examining the issues that facilitate or constrain a HAWG's ability to support the humanitarian community’s engagement with NSAGs and DFAs. This paper brings together the findings that have emerged most saliently from both the research and the toolkit’s development.
The findings across the four case studies reveal that there is often significant commonality in the issues HAWGs grapple with despite the varied nature of the contexts studied. HAWGs play an active role in shaping the humanitarian community’s positioning and engagement with NSAGs and DFAs. Their ability to serve as an effective advisory body, however, is regularly challenged by a series of "internal" constraints including the turnover of co-chairs, the lack of clarity regarding the roles and responsibilities of the co-chairs, deficient links with key decision-making bodies and officials (HCTs and humanitarian coordinators), and a lack of clarity on how HAWGs can best add value to external engagements with NSAGs and DFAs.