Principles for prioritising & allocating humanitarian needs: A discussion with Hugo Slim

In this episode of 'A Matter of Priorities,' our host Alice Obrecht continues her conversation with Hugo Slim on his work with the Norwegian Center for Humanitarian Studies. The discussion focuses on more detailed principles for prioritising and allocating humanitarian resources, such as the principle of shared responsibility. He explores how geopolitical relationships and proximity can play a crucial role in defining and meeting humanitarian needs. 

The episode also includes an updated conversation with Hugo on the aid cuts taking place in early 2025 and how they could be undertaken with an eye to improving humanitarian aid.  Hugo emphasises the need for a leaner, nationalised humanitarian framework and the importance of maintaining universal values amidst a shifting geopolitical landscape.

Guest:
Hugo Slim, Senior Research Fellow at the Las Casas Institute for Social Justice at Blackfriars Hall at the University of Oxford.

Hosts:
Alice Obrecht, Head of Research & Impact, ALNAP 

Resources

How should we define and prioritise humanitarian need? An ethics-based perspective for impact initiatives 

ALNAP’s A Matter of Priorities: a podcast on tough choices in humanitarian funding 

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Transcript

Alice Obrecht: Welcome back to Matter of Priorities. I'm your host, Alice Obrecht.

Alice Obrecht: This is part two of a two part episode with Hugo Slim on a set of papers he produced last year with the Norwegian Center for Humanitarian Studies and reach on redefining the scope of humanitarian need, a topic that is becoming ever more urgent and pressing today in 2025 due to massive funding cuts.

Alice Obrecht: In the previous episode, we heard Hugo put forward three central questions that he argues that any account of prioritisation must answer. Number one, what is a humanitarian need? Number two, how wide is the range of goods or services that humanitarian needs cover? And three, how do we prioritize across needs and populations when funding is scarce?

Alice Obrecht: We covered the first two questions in the previous episode, and we will begin this episode with Hugo's answer to the third question, followed by some challenges with his account. And finally, an updated conversation we held with Hugo in early February after the US cuts were announced.

Hugo Slim: The first thing I would say, thinking ahead of 2024, is to think of a general principle.

Hugo Slim: Of shared responsibility and the general principle that some form of selection and priority prioritisation is inevitable in anything you are doing. You're never gonna meet all needs. So selection is normal. Selection shouldn't be stigmatized. There's often no way around it. So selection is inevitable.

Hugo Slim: Prioritisation is inevitable. And the second thing is this shared responsibility. And I think it's really important for what. Donor governments and for humanitarian agencies and for affected people to understand and all governments to understand that there is a division of humanitarian labor. There's no single agency, single financier, single system that can deliver the humanitarian aid that is needed.

Hugo Slim: So we have to set, accept a moral division of labor, a geographical division of labor, and, and a sexual division of labor sometimes. I'm gonna be optimistic about that in 2024 because I'm going to say the geopolitics really helps us now, which people don't usually say at the moment, but I think it does because we have large parts of the world where there are billions of people, which are now in a sense governed by much richer, more powerful, more coherent states.

Hugo Slim: So if I look at China, where I'm sitting now actually, and India, and if I. Look at those areas which have huge numbers of people. Those two states are really very powerful, really very capable now, and they don't want, and they don't need the Western system rushing about, okay, so the division of labor is, first of all, we realise there are other really big players and we embrace that and we cooperate and find out how they're organising their response and their emergencies and et cetera.

Hugo Slim: So shared responsibility is key. And then I think if we're gonna go down my prioritisation list, what else do humanitarian do to make the most of their money? And in brutal terms, who do they count in and who do they leave out as people, as human lives? And I think urgency, which is at the heart of impartiality, the most urgent cases of distress, is still an important one.

Hugo Slim: And we can discriminate on the basis of urgency. And we can look around and say that these are the people for whom this is most urgent and we can prioritize them. I think we should add a third differential there, which is differential suffering. And I think we should start looking closely that, okay, a lot of people will be suffering in climate crisis over the next 10, 20 years.

Hugo Slim: Most people in the world will be suffering, but we can therefore try and say, that doesn't mean we have to help everybody. 'cause there's differential suffering. There are certain groups and peoples and places where the suffering is differentially worse because they are suffering more and they are less capable and the systems around them are less capable.

Hugo Slim: So use differential suffering to be really quite hard and rigorous about where you choose to invest. The other big thing that's gonna come up and is coming up already because. When you realize that we live in a long emergency and that the climate emergency is coming towards us fast, and that requires us recognizing an emergency in the present and also recognizing the future is an emergency.

Hugo Slim: So one of the big priority trade-offs we're gonna have and we're having already, is how much do we invest in protecting and future proofing communities now, which means investing in nature-based solutions, adapted housing, whatever. Not necessarily rushing around looking for the people in the most urgent need, but actually trying to future proof various communities.

Hugo Slim: I also feel, and I'm very unpopular for this, usually I feel that geographical proximity and social bonds create thicker obligations for humanitarian response. So I think. At one level, the impartiality principle in its pure sense is un morally unrealistic because you and I have greater obligations to prioritize our family, our neighbors, the community around us, and everybody in the world has that.

Hugo Slim: And we also have an obligation to prioritise people who are somehow important to us because they're allies, because they are our neighbours and we are close to them, we can reach them more easily. So I actually think it is morally justifiable to prioritise people who are geographically close to you and emotionally close to you.

Hugo Slim: And that is usually a scandal to hardcore humanitarians. But I think in this day and age, we have to accept that and people will do it. Governments, I think, have justifiable reasons for doing it, not all the time, but a lot of the time. It doesn't mean they can ignore distant needs if they are met. But they can't prioritize closer needs, and it's easier to do today because we have other great powers around the world who can do that as well in their region.

Hugo Slim: It might make more sense for China to support people in Pakistan than it does for the eu, and it might make more sense for America to focus on the Philippines than the eu. The other area we're gonna have to be quite hard about is feasibility, which always comes into ethics. So you can only really be expected to do what's.

Hugo Slim: Possible to do. So we're gonna have to make hard choices around feasible opportunities and say, look, we're gonna waste so much money if we just try and do something there. And we could spend that money easily in places where it's much easier to help people. And I'm afraid feasibility counts. It accounts always in our lives and our moral lives.

Hugo Slim: I think it's very difficult for humanitarian to talk about these kind of decisions 'cause we're trained not to.

Alice Obrecht: So to recap on Hugo's position, humanitarian needs need to be more focused on what he calls vital interests, the issues that are most integral to human survival and a minimally decent life.

Alice Obrecht: And prioritisation around this means taking a hard and honest look at who is best placed to meet these needs in any given crisis based on factors that humanitarians are not always inclined to publicly acknowledge, such as geopolitical relationships and proximity. We explored some of the potential challenges and problems with this account, beginning with whether Hugo's simplified Christmas tree as he put it, is intention with an approach that places dignity at the center of humanitarian action.

Alice Obrecht: My question is, so getting a bit more into the critical side of these issues, so you've talked about how we need to go back, pull back a bit from this optimising approach and focus more on life saving, basic life saving. One of the reasons or issues that has come up in recent years about why. There has been this push for expansion is that generally, and it depends on which stats you point to, but generally it seems that the relevance of humanitarian aid has been dropping and one of the reasons for this.

Alice Obrecht: When you do surveys, when ELAP does surveys, when Ground truth Solutions does surveys with aid recipients, one of the potential explanations for this is that humanitarian crises are lasting longer. The people who receive humanitarian assistance are more likely to have received it multiple times before or for longer periods of time, and while they appreciate and find that support really relevant for them in the first few months beyond that.

Alice Obrecht: The aid that's being provided starts to lose relevance, and what we hear, particularly from refugees and others who are trapped in prolonged or protracted displacement, is a request for more focus on education on livelihoods. I. What we hear from some humanitarian agencies who want to be receptive to this is that humanitarians aren't just about lifesaving.

Alice Obrecht: It's about preserving and respecting humanitarian dignity or human dignity. Sorry. So is your approach essentially saying we shouldn't care about dignity? That's not the humanitarian job.

Hugo Slim: No. I like dignity. I'm actually saying in the sense that if. Humanitarians focus hard on supporting health needs, social needs, survival capability, and system needs.

Hugo Slim: People will recover their dignity and, and humanitarians can't give anybody dignity. They don't dispose bestow dignity on people. People make their own dignity. And what's always striking to any of us who have worked with people who are in extreme suffering and very difficult life conditions is how they do find their dignity.

Hugo Slim: In their survival and in the agency they bring to surviving, they their people discover their dignity and keep it not humanitarians actually. But I think if you do meet those four needs in a supportive, catalytic, creative way, you will enable people to live better. And it probably is quite holistic in your words.

Hugo Slim: And that's why I'm. I am trying not to use the phrase basic needs actually. 'cause I don't want to go and say these are really basic for two reasons. First, 'cause I think if you meet them, they can create a range of good things in people's lives. But the second reason is, as I say in the paper, it's a bit strange to call them basic needs because often they're very elaborate to actually implement.

Hugo Slim: It's quite difficult doing them well. So they're quite complicated as well as. Basic. So that's what I was trying to give is a dashboard that is simpler and anyone in any moment said How we focus on, on enabling health needs to be met. How are we focusing on people's social needs? How are we focusing on supporting them in their survival capability, and are we supporting the right systems for all that?

Hugo Slim: So there's really four things you ever have to ask in a sense. So I was trying to simplify

Alice: the framework. So that was our conversation with Hugo last year. He kindly gave us his time again in recent weeks to reflect on the aid cuts facing the sector and what this means for some of his proposals and ideas on defining new boundaries for humanitarian aid.

Alice Obrecht: Here's Hugo again. Thank you so much, Hugo, for taking the time to chat with us again at this very difficult time for the sector right now, where I think the ideas we talked about from your papers last year are more important than ever before. I think one of the many things that. People are really trying to contend with right now.

Alice Obrecht: Amongst, uh, job losses amongst having to relocate families across the globe at the last minute are of course the very practical, important and painful decisions on where to be cutting in their budgets. Um, with many organizations looking at making cuts to 40%, 50%, 80% of their programming and their work.

Alice Obrecht: Obviously there's going, there's going to be a lot of things that factor into those decisions, including where they think are most likely, the places where other donors and funders might be able to step in to fill gaps. But just reflecting from an ethical perspective, based on the work you did last year and your, uh, entire career in the sector, what considerations do you think are useful for people to be bearing in mind as they make these difficult cuts?

Hugo Slim: Well, it is very hard, as you say, Alice and um. You know, it's, it's, it's interesting watching, you know, Trump, Rubio and Musk crash, the international aid system, and, you know, they've chosen to do it. They've chosen to do it in this way. Um, usually when Musk or Trump [00:13:00] sacks, lots of people from his company or, you know, crashes a company or changes it or buys it, people have terrible times.

Hugo Slim: They lose their jobs and things. But in this case, you know, they're, they're, they are bringing vibe. The death and suffering of, of many, many people around the world, as well as that, um, personal family disruption to their employees. So it is a, it is a huge, um, shock to the system. I haven't got great words of consolation to say.

Hugo Slim: The only thing I would say is I've been thinking about it, is that, of course, you know this. This international aid system, U-S-A-I-D was um, really invented after the second World War. It was invented development aid, humanitarian aid was sort of invented and consolidated after World War II in US and international policy.

Hugo Slim: U-S-A-I-D was established I think in 1967. So things are invented and then things go, and I think we've got to be used to that. I think it happens in a lot of people's lives. We will have to. Uh, do a couple of things. I think first of all, we're gonna have to try and, um, you know, make the best of, of the crash.

Hugo Slim: So people are gonna have to try and patch things up as much as they can, and that will involve prioritising, you know, basically around the most urgent cases of distress. So I would've thought life and death, medical situations, extreme, um, you know, nutritional feeding things. I think a lot of the other things that humanitarians, you know, have been doing.

Hugo Slim: Was often about managing chronic poverty anyway, not about life and death situations. So I think a lot of those will have to fall away at this point. Um, and humanitarians will have to be hardcore humanitarians again, I think. Um, and then secondly, going forward, you know, we'll see if, um. The State Department comes up with a, a much smaller, well, it will come up with a much smaller staff and let's hope it comes up with a humanitarian aid program of some kind.

Hugo Slim: I, I said, I think it's probably, you know, this is going to be a very conservative, um, government, so I think at best that. New conservative humanitarian program will be sort of Samaritan's Purse writ large. It'll be those kind of agencies that kind of, um, very sort of urgent relief response. I think those liberal agencies, I.

Hugo Slim: You know, we'll be punished like IRC and the Oxfams and people that are considered having a woke agenda at their heart, and I don't think they'll bounce back. I expect IRC will shrink. I expect some of, um, other, you know, big US NGOs will shrink. I think we're probably gonna have a more of a faith-based edge to humanitarianism going forward from the United States.

Hugo Slim: And I think the fact that. The New American approach is going to very deliberately trim down bureaucracy. So if they're serious, they're gonna have two or 300 people running the new usaid, what it won't be called that. It'll be called something else in the State department. I think they will expect. That to happen throughout the sector.

Hugo Slim: So I think one of the big ripple effects of this aid crash will be a de bureaucratising of the sector. So I think a lot of people who feel they're not touched by it yet sitting in Geneva, New York, various capitals in regional posts, they will be, because I think the new understanding of aid will be that it has a low admin.

Hugo Slim: And high output ratio. And I'm afraid in truth, we have gone the other way lately. So some of the American analysis is right. So I think we're gonna have to. Patch as best as we can for the moment, because I don't think European donors will go on funding it either. And remember, they started cuts before the Americans.

Hugo Slim: So, uh, this is not an American phenomenon. I mean, I think the sort of dreadful way, it was that very macho way. It was crashed by Musk and, and Rubio and Trump is, is very American, but it's, it's been happening for the last couple of years.

Alice Obrecht: Thank you. On the point on bureaucracy and admin, and you've been working Hugo in the sector since the nineties, you were working as an aid worker in the nineties and country.

Alice Obrecht: So you'll know that, you know, not to make a defensive bureaucracy, but the reason for a lot of that bureaucratisation over the years, one, is through donor requirements, like from agent donor agencies such as U-S-A-I-D that required more compliance, more paperwork, but also because there were. Very big missteps, perceived missteps by the humanitarian aid sector in the, uh, response to the Rwandan genocide, of course, in the nineties, responses to Darfur and to the, uh, east Asian tsunami in 2005, which is now we're reaching the 20 year anniversary of that.

Alice Obrecht: Both, all of those big scale humanitarian responses seem to highlight. The equality issues, the performance issues of having a sector that really focused on kind of quite basic core humanitarianism and didn't pay enough attention to wider impacts of, of its aid, didn't pay attention to wider issues of quality and kind of the ad, additional administrative costs it takes to deliver that.

Alice Obrecht: So what would you say to how we can avoid just turning back the dial? And going back to the system we had in the nineties.

Hugo Slim: Yeah, you are very kind Ali, because I actually started in the eighties, so I actually started in 1983 Bali. Um, anyway, I take your point that, you know, we need institutions, we need good humanitarian institutions, um, and therefore we have to find a balance between bureaucracy and professionalism.

Hugo Slim: And I think. I take your point that a lot of those sort of extra layers to humanitarian administration have come from donors and their obsession on compliance and m and e and goodness knows what. It's also come from good ethical aspirations of humanitarians to, um, you know, do better quality programming with standards and also to, you know, reduce their own terrible failures in sexual abuse and things like this.

Hugo Slim: So there's a lot of it that's there for the right reasons. But if I'm honest, there's also a lot of what the American anthropologist, whose name I've forgotten, calls bullshit jobs. There's a lot of bullshit jobs in humanitarian organizations. You know, I've sat in meetings where I'm thinking, what the hell are we all doing?

Hugo Slim: And what, you know, why are we just talking to ourselves and feeding our own processes and what on earth that has that person been hired for? It's a sort of non-issue, you know, and just because IRC have got one of those teams, we've got to have one now or whatever, whatever. So I, I think there are bullshit jobs that can go.

Hugo Slim: I think what we should focus on is having institutions, 'cause we, the good thing about institutions is they hold and develop values and we want the Red Cross, the Red Crescent, UNICEF, world Food Program, um, say the children, all these things. We want these values in international society and they are best vested in.

Hugo Slim: Good institutions, which represent them, speak up for them and act on them and encourage states to act on them. But I think we can do that much leaner. I, I do think we can go to hundreds rather than thousands in most capitals and institutions and, and things like that. You know, there's a lot of jobs that don't need to be done.

Hugo Slim: And there's a, you know, there's a. As you know, an old phrase, Parkinson's law from a very early, uh, British civil servant who was observing the expansion of the British Foreign Office actually, and he noticed it had become at its biggest, at the moment when the Empire was at its smallest. And, and this is often what happens.

Hugo Slim: 'cause you recruit more and more and then that team needs to recruit to keep a balance with your team and whatever. So yeah, let's get rid of the bullshit jobs and let's focus on professionalism, quality and getting more output than input.

Alice Obrecht: So definitely a leaner humanitarianism to come. Um, I think another feature of Secretary Rubio's approach to humanitarianism and trump's.

Alice Obrecht: Uh, the Trump administration's approach to humanitarianism is going to be much more political for sure, much more regional. And this came up in our conversation last year from your papers where you were discussing that this might be an important aspect of prioritization that you see from the donor state perspective that.

Alice Obrecht: They start to step up and prioritise their humanitarian spending base on their existing regional ties or existing political relationships with other states. So for example, Saudi Arabia should be doing more to fund and address humanitarian crises in its region than say, the US or Europe. It seems very likely we, we will be moving to that type of model.

Alice Obrecht: But obviously the, the competing concern there is that we're losing, this is the end or the death of the concept of humanitarian aid is a universal value that reflects shared humanity around the globe and instead becomes another tool in the foreign policy toolkit. So what is your thought on that? Of this, what everyone's expecting to be a much more nationalistic approach to humanitarian.

Alice Obrecht: State-based humanitarian aid, if it does continue to survive. Does that explicit tying of humanitarian aid to foreign policy interest undermine the universality of humanitarianism and what does humanitarianism even really mean as a value in that geopolitical context?

Hugo Slim: Yeah. Well, I think we need a middle way here too because I, I, I want national humanitarian aid.

Hugo Slim: I mean, I think one of the advantages we've got, I. From this crash is that when we build leaner, I hope that'll be because we're building more national, more local than we are international. So I think localization, nationalization of humanitarian capacity has got to be, uh, one of the ways to get forward, and I hope the remaining humanitarian investors like the uk, eu, Europe, others, Scandinavians, will.

Hugo Slim: Find value for money and better professionalism in, in national and locally led organisations. I don't agree that having, you know, taking your closest responsibilities seriously means that you stop being universal and stop having a universal value. I. I mean, it can, you can just become a ghastly nationalist government, and there's a high risk that President Trump's government's going to be just that persecuting and punishing its enemies, um, inside the country and outside the country and, and not really respecting universalism in any way and, and replacing it with commercialism.

Hugo Slim: I think that's a. You know, serious likelihood actually. But it needn't be that, I mean, Saudi Arabia should be investing more in its region. It's more strategic to it, it has closer, um, proximity in terms of kinship and language and relationships and geography and shared interest. So it does have a primary obligation there.

Hugo Slim: Despite universalism. It's also in a position where it can fund, um, all around the world because it is so rich. But I think. You know, I wouldn't object if European Aid is focusing, you know, mainly on Europe, but also trying to be universal at times and step into other, uh, regional emergencies and support African response and, but we are gonna have more and more climate emergencies too, so we are going to have more genuine primary obligations.

Hugo Slim: On humanitarian budgets for our own people as the British government, the German government, the Ethiopian government, the Saudi government, Indian government, Chinese government. So I think we must go to a system of, system of systems. We must, um, recognize that, you know, China has a sphere of influence in humanitarian aid.

Hugo Slim: So does Europe, so does Africa, so does the, um, the rich gov countries, et cetera. But. To ensure universalism, we need to pull those systems together into universal values, into universal, you know, global systems of humanitarian planning, response, whatever. And that's something that the UN should, should be doing and should be able to do as part of the new multilateralism.

Hugo Slim: I mean, we really need to make a new multilateralism and I think a universal system of systems on humanitarian response would do that. Pulling states together. But I. You know, I think we do have particular obligations to people closer to us that can trump distant obligations and just that kind of ethicist, I'm afraid.

Alice Obrecht: And that goes into my next question about how we kind of reframe or maybe even resell the value of humanitarianism in, in the modern era. Because what has been a constant feature of the, um, dismantling of USAID over here in the us? Um, and amongst the public is, is the widespread kind of public, um, I wouldn't say widespread, but very loud, vocal, public descent with, with foreign aid and kind of anti aid sentiments, feeling that it is this reflecting very much some of the ideas that you're articulating, but in very.

Alice Obrecht: Different ways that it is about serving and addressing the needs of fellow Americans, fellow compatriots first. And that's not limited to the us. We've seen this kind of right wing populist turn, um, which has supported nationalist, uh, governments that have been elected across Europe over the past two years.

Alice Obrecht:  So in that. Climate, you know, and you mentioned a few minutes ago how the modern humanitarian era was really born out of the World War ii, post-World War II consensus. We've seen to be definitely losing that now, moving away from that post-World War II consensus. So how do we defend a moral commitment to humanitarianism and really treating or viewing all people as, as, as equal, um, when it seems to be under consistent attack and is, is being eroded in public values in many Western countries For sure.

Hugo Slim: That's difficult, isn't it? And I think, I think we're gonna have to go and have proper discussions with people. I mean, there'll be no choice. You know, humanitarian organisations in Germany, depending on what happens on the 23rd of February, we'll have to go and talk to all sorts of different parties. So they're going to have to reach a new consensus and let's see what it is.

Hugo Slim: And you know, if they are all fascists and they just want to focus on their group, their ethnic, then we'll learn that. And we'll have to become all subversive and, you know. Rebellious and risk imprisonment and things for arguing other things and, and that it could go that way. But if not, I think we're gonna have to come to a new consensus and find a new balance, which recognizes what I said earlier, that we're gonna have greater humanitarian needs in our own countries in Europe and other rich countries.

Hugo Slim: I mean, you know, looking at the predictions for water and heat in the, in the, what's called the Middle East, I don't think they've got much hope. Um, over the next 20, 30 years. So I think they're gonna have big trouble as well. They're going to either be spending like crazy to survive or buying new countries to go and live in.

Hugo Slim: So it's, you know, it's going to be a massive new consensus. And I think although it's been done, you know, the crash has been done by America for sort of budgetary and, and sort of metro. Anti woke and bureaucracy reasons. In fact, it does give us an opportunity to design a new system for the climate emergency.

Hugo Slim: Let's hope that slowly builds, but it won't be quick and a lot of people will just leave the sector 'cause they have to and, and we'll have to work out what it is this, this sector and what it means in the 2020s and 2030s.

Alice Obrecht: Great. Well, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us, Hugo. It's very helpful to get a, a bird's eye view as usual and get a bigger perspective on these issues that feel so, um, so existential and so practical and, and, and present.

Alice Obrecht: So thank you very much. We appreciate it. It's a pleasure. Thank you for listening to a matter of priorities, a podcast by alap. For resources and links related to what we've talked about in today's episode, please check out the description. For more information on ALNAP, please visit our website, www.alnap.org.

Alice: And if you enjoyed this episode, please hit subscribe to our series wherever you get your podcasts.