Humanitarian observatories: insights for reforming humanitarianism from below.

Abstract

In the last few decades, there has been a marked turn to "humanitarianism from below" in thinking about and organizing humanitarian action, which is among other expressed in the localization agenda of humanitarian action. In the last years, there have been many initiatives to strengthen national actors as well as initiatives that are directed to organization, advocacy, and collective action. This paper theoretically positions the role of national and local service providers in the humanitarian arena and politics of knowledge production and then presents a specific initiative of humanitarian observatories in three countries. The paper brings out a number of issues relevant for other initiatives aiming to strengthen the role of national and local actors, namely that humanitarians are not the only relevant actors to deal with humanitarian crises, that context matters, the importance of agenda-setting, and the importance of sideways interaction between observatories in different crisis-affected regions.