doi:10.1111/disa.

12332

Humanitarian governance and

resilience building: Ethiopia in
comparative perspective
Dorothea Hilhorst Professor of Humanitarian Aid and Reconstruction,
International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the
Netherlands, Isabelle Desportes PhD candidate, International Institute of
Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and Cecile W.J.
de Milliano, PhD Disaster-response Coordinator, The Netherlands Red Cross,
the Netherlands

Humanitarian governance is usually understood according to the classic, Dunantist paradigm that
accords central importance to international humanitarian agencies. However, this is increasingly
paralleled by ‘resilience humanitarianism’ that focuses, among other things, on including national
actors in humanitarian governance. This article views humanitarian governance as emerging
through interactions between authorities, implementing agencies and communities. It is based on
interactive ethnography in five countries by Partners for Resilience (PfR). Using the Theory
of Change (ToC) tool, it analyses the various interpretations and priorities of actors involved in
humanitarian problems, solutions and programme governance. For example, PfR had a ‘software’
focus, aiming to unlock communities’ potential for resilience, whereas communities and authori-
ties preferred to receive tangible ‘hardware’ support. The findings highlight the crucial role of
local authorities in shaping humanitarian aid. This is especially pertinent in view of the inter-
national agenda to localise aid, which requires the understanding and support of national actors
in order to responsibly protect the vulnerable.

Keywords: disaster risk reduction, Ethiopia, humanitarian governance, localisation,

resilience, Theory of Change

Introduction
Humanitarian aid has long been dominated by a classical Dunantist paradigm based
on humanitarian ethics. However, in recent years, this paradigm has been paralleled
by ‘resilience humanitarianism’ (Ilcan and Rygiel, 2015; Hilhorst, 2018), which links
relief to development and focuses on local people and institutions as the first respond-
ers to crisis. Resilience humanitarianism first appeared in the domain of disaster risk
reduction (DRR) and increasingly underpins refugee care and aid in countries tran-
sitioning from conflict to peace. Classical and resilience humanitarianism differ
radically as to how interventions are (supposed to be) governed. Governance in
classical humanitarianism centres chiefly on the United Nations (UN), international
donors, and international non-governmental organisations (INGOs). Resilience
Disasters, 2019, 43(S2): S109−S131. © 2019 The Author(s). Disasters © Overseas Development Institute, 2019
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, dis-
tribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
S110  Dorothea Hilhorst, Isabelle Desportes, and Cecile W.J. de Milliano

humanitarianism, by contrast, emphasises the role of national and local authorities,

service providers from crisis-affected areas, and affected communities. To further
the debate on this new humanitarian-governance paradigm, this article explores gov-
ernance in an international programme promoting community resilience.
  This Partners for Resilience (PfR) programme was organised by five Netherlands-
based INGOs between 2011 and 2015, and implemented in nine countries. Through
a unique research collaboration evolving in the wake of the programme, Pf R and a
group of academic researchers engaged in interactive research designed and imple-
mented in close dialogue with societal partners. With interactive research, unlike action
research, researchers retain their analytical independence. In six countries (Ethiopia,
Nicaragua, Guatemala, Indonesia, Kenya, and the Philippines), researchers analysed
the programme during three- to five-month periods of qualitative fieldwork, explor-
ing the programme rationale and realities in the different countries. PfR used a model
of governance that included the Pf R partners, national and local authorities, and
the communities where the programme was implemented. Our research focused on
how the collaboration between these stakeholders was understood by the different
partners, and how it developed over time.
  Humanitarian governance can be approached very comprehensively (e.g. Barnett’s
(2013, p. 380) view of humanitarian governance as pertaining to the ‘global emer-
gence of an order geared to improve people’s wellbeing’), comprising an immense
web of domains and bodies of practice, extending to development, human rights,
peace-building, and humanitarian aid. Here, however, we focus on an everyday,
limited interpretation of humanitarian governance as governing humanitarian action.
Although this may appear to be a straightforward sub-theme, it is not. Humanitarian-
aid budgets are deployed across diverse settings and crises, and there are many differ-
ences in humanitarian governance between classical humanitarianism and resilience
humanitarianism.
  Barnett’s (2013) research agenda for humanitarian governance includes four ques-
tions that are highly relevant to the present study:

• What kind of world is being imagined and produced?

• Who governs?
• How is humanitarian governance organised and accomplished?
• By what authority do humanitarians govern, and what do they do with that
authority?

While the first two questions do not specify an actor, the last two put humanitar-
ians at the centre of the analysis. Most humanitarian-governance literature focuses
strongly on international humanitarian agencies, and most studies on humanitarian
practice take as a normative and actual point of departure the humanitarian princi-
ples and implementation-styles of large agencies such as the International Committee
of the Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières, or UN bodies. Other actors, including
national authorities and affected communities, appear in the analysis through the eyes
of these international humanitarian actors.
 Humanitarian governance and resilience building: Ethiopia in comparative perspective S111

  Starting from the idea that governance is not simply steered by these international
agencies but is also formed in practice by a number of actors including humanitarian-
service providers, governments, and local community figures, Barnett’s questions
become layered and complex. For example, the first question (‘What kind of world
is being imagined and produced?’) can be rephrased to ask what kind of world is
imagined by different humanitarian-governance actors. How are different viewpoints
negotiated, and which views gain legitimacy? What contradictions exist between the
formal view and views conveyed in everyday reality, and between agreed govern-
ance roles and real governance as it unfolds in practice? Rather than assuming that
humanitarian action is governed by humanitarian agencies, we advocate studying
humanitarian governance as an interplay between humanitarian agencies, national
authorities and affected communities (Hilhorst and Jansen, 2010).
  Given the layers and variations in governance, case studies are important for
analysing humanitarian governance in practice. This article elaborates on the Pf R
country studies, which used a similar set of questions and analytical framework. We
used the Theory of Change (ToC) tool to investigate how different stakeholders framed
DRR and how they viewed different actors’ roles in DRR. The findings provide
insight into the contradictions, possibilities, and impossibilities of humanitarian gov-
ernance which includes local actors and communities.
  This article is especially relevant in view of humanitarian sector changes heralded
during the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) of 2016. The WHS made a strong
plea for localising humanitarian aid, giving greater focus to the role of national gov-
ernments, service providers, and affected communities in the governance of humani-
tarian assistance. A major outcome of the WHS was the commitment of approximately
50 key actors to making a ‘Grand Bargain’ in order to accelerate efforts to dispense
humanitarian budgets directly to service providers in crisis-affected areas. Clearly,
governance models and analyses of humanitarian action need to become more con-
scious of these local actors.
  We incorporate findings from five of the six case studies conducted.1 To facilitate
insight into the dynamics of local humanitarian governance, we present one of these
case studies in depth, analysing the other four cases more briefly to identify common-
alities and variations in issues of local humanitarian governance. The major case
study presented here concerns Ethiopia, where all three authors participated in the
fieldwork. The first and third authors coordinated the Pf R study, including a joint
visit to Ethiopia, and the second author was the primary researcher for the Ethiopia
case study.
  We begin by detailing interactive research, followed by the presentation of Pf R’s
(partly explicit and partly implicit) ToC, which we constructed and validated based
on a review of reports and interviews. A section on Ethiopia then analyses how Pf R,
authorities, and communities each had a different view of the issues and responsi-
bilities in DRR and how this affected the programme. The next section provides
brief analyses of the other case studies, leading to the conclusion, in which a number
of cross-cutting issues and concerns are raised.
S112  Dorothea Hilhorst, Isabelle Desportes, and Cecile W.J. de Milliano

Interactive research: method and theoretical underpinning

This article originated in a request from the Pf R alliance, which was financed by
the Dutch government for five years. The partners in this alliance included the
Netherlands Red Cross, the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, Cordaid,
Wetlands International, and CARE Netherlands. The programme brought together
agencies with humanitarian, climate, DRR, land-use (ecosystem management) and
mixed humanitarian–development profiles. They wanted to develop a comprehen-
sive approach building on their different areas of expertise to enhance community
resilience in nine disaster-prone lower-income countries.2
 
This article is based on a study conducted in four phases from 2013 to 2015. The
purpose of the overall study was to assess the dynamics and relevance of an integrated
approach to building resilience. The research was designed in an interactive way,
with the phases of data collection and analysis alternating with phases of reflection
with Pf R representatives (Argyris and Schön, 1991; van der Haar, Heijmans, and
Hilhorst, 2013).
  The first phase of the study consisted of a systematic review of the key policy docu-
ments of Pf R and its country teams. Data were entered and analysed using NVivo
data-analysis software, according to a coding book developed by the researchers
and validated by Pf R. The findings of this phase were discussed in a workshop that
informed the empirical questions guiding the in-country data collection.After the
case studies, which were discussed and validated by in-country workshops, a general
analysis was conducted. This analysis was presented and discussed on various occa-
sions with Pf R partners. Pf R responded to the final report with a policy brief detail-
ing their feedback on the findings and the policy implications they distilled from
the research for incorporation in their next five-year programme cycle.3

Understanding governance
This article highlights and analyses findings pertaining to humanitarian governance
from the six-country research programme. The concept of governance came into
fashion in the 1990s, partly to clarify the layered and fragmented ways state power
is used to achieve collective purposes, and partly in response to changing ideas and
practices, with collective purposes no longer being solely the domain of the state
(Colebatch, 2009). In Europe, Rhodes (1996, p. 57) described the shift from ‘govern-
ment’ to ‘governance’, where ‘the state becomes a collection of inter-organisational
networks made up of governmental and societal actors with no sovereign actor able
to steer or regulate’.
  In development processes, the central importance accorded to states in the pursuit
of collective purposes had already been eroded since the early 1980s, when non-
governmental organisations (NGOs) came to be considered more effective and intrin-
sically more inclined to make communities and participatory development the start-
ing point of their endeavours (Edwards and Hulme, 1992, 1996). After a period of
acclaim for NGOs (at the expense of the state), it is now more common to build
 Humanitarian governance and resilience building: Ethiopia in comparative perspective S113

development on a framework of interactive governance, where the formulation,

promotion, and achievement of common objectives comes about through different
governance arrangements involving multiple types of actor, including the state and
NGOs (Torfing et al., 2012, p. 2; Howes et al., 2015; Parker, 2007). Interactive gov-
ernance has been defined as ‘the complex process through which a plurality of social
and political actors with diverging interests interact by means of mobilizing, exchang-
ing, and deploying a range of ideas, rules, and resources’ (Torfing et al., 2012, p. 2).
  In industrialised societies, the idea of governance has been used as a frame to
understand the changing roles of government; however, in humanitarian aid, gov-
ernance has rarely been analysed in relation to the state in crisis-affected countries.
‘Humanitarian governance’ is mainly used to describe how a chain of humanitarian
action comes about. Schematically, this chain starts from the international discursive
framing of humanitarian crises, moving to the deployment of public resources in
donor countries, the implementing machinery consisting of the UN and INGOs,
and finally to accountability and participatory approaches at the grassroots level. In
critical humanitarian governance studies, the grassroots level is often analysed as
instrumental in governmentality attempts, or the shaping of the humanitarian subject
according to the image of humanitarian governance (Duffield, 2014).
  Only very recently has the notion of humanitarian governance expanded to
encompass national authorities and other national institutions shaping humanitari-
anism praxis. As is often the case in this domain, the discussion has normative, opera-
tional, and empirical angles. The normative angle stems from acknowledging the
role of national authorities and aid providers in international policy discourse on aid.
This discourse is operationalised through interactive governance designs that confer
roles to different actors in aid. Interactive governance models are ‘messier’ than models
where the government imposes rules. Governance narratives acknowledge the roles
of actors inside and outside government, but also point to the blurring of roles and
responsibilities, the interdependence of these actors’ actions, and the relative unim-
portance of command and imposition (Colebatch, 2009, p. 63).
  Empirically, we need to look beyond the design of governance to questions of how
this works out in practice—what some authors refer to as ‘real’ governance (Titeca
and de Herdt, 2011). Different layers of complexity are involved in multi-actor gov-
ernance. First, the actors involved in governance arrangements represent different
types of institutions, with different normative orders and operating styles, and gov-
ernance is always negotiated and subject to multiple interpretations (Kraushaar and
Lambach, 2009; Putzel and DiJohn, 2012). Studying humanitarian governance requires
the development of an ‘antenna’ for these different interpretations and how they stag-
nate, promote, or change programmes in the course of implementation.
  Second, there is a great deal of diversity within the categories that make up gov-
ernance arrangements. NGOs are often grouped together, but they differ widely in
world-views, mandates, and operating styles. Other examples are local government
officers who perform different practices from the central state, or organised commu-
nity leaders with different views from more marginal community members. Although
S114  Dorothea Hilhorst, Isabelle Desportes, and Cecile W.J. de Milliano

this could potentially lead to infinite, and therefore impossible, levels of fine-tuning
of our understanding of humanitarian governance, it is important to be aware of
these diversities and to bring them into the analysis when they are significant. Finally,
governance always has both formal and informal dimensions, and there may be
large discrepancies and contradictions between formal and practical norms. Studies
of humanitarian governance must therefore address how norms and policies trans-
late into practice (Olivier de Sardan, 2011).

Theories of change as a methodological tool

Our research was informed by the above insights into governance, but we built an
analytical framework on applied theories which the partners of Pf R were already
familiar with. These included the characteristics of a resilient community as identified
by Twigg (2009), the Department for International Development’s (DFID) liveli-
hood characteristics (DFID, 1999) and the ‘5Cs’ framework (Keijzer et al., 2011). We
also used the notion of ToC as a methodological tool to unravel some of the complex
layers of governance. ToC, which has been introduced in development program-
ming to replace more conventional log-frames, maps how an organisation, project,
network, or group of stakeholders understand political, social, economic, and/or cul-
tural change to happen, and how they see themselves contributing to that change.
ToC aims to define all the building blocks required for the achievement of a long-
term goal. This includes the smaller outcomes needed for larger change, as well as
the interventions thought to lead to these outcomes. Importantly, a ToC also clarifies
how interventions and outcomes are understood to be linked (Anderson, 2006).
  To make our conversations with Pf R actors about the ToC useful in our explora-
tion of governance, we introduced two changes to the managerial notion of ToC.
First, we introduced the idea of ‘theories of change’ to emphasise that the authorita-
tive or formal ToC is subject to interpretation by different actors and may not be
considered legitimate by all actors. Second, we emphasised that, although a ToC
represents the story an entity tells about its context, its contribution, and itself, this
may not correspond to the ToC conveyed through the organisation’s practices. In
terms of governance theory, ToC represents formal norms and practices; it is nec-
essary to establish empirically how these relate to practical norms and practices.

Research question and fieldwork methodology

This article addresses the question of how humanitarian governance, understood as
multi-actor arrangements to deliver humanitarian services and goods, comes about
when resilience is promoted in local contexts. To make the analysis possible, we
focused this study of governance on interactions between humanitarians, authorities,
and communities.
  Knowing that different actors may work through different logics and have different
ways of framing the ‘problem of DRR and lack of resilience’, we asked how different
actors responded to Pf R’s ToC. What did they identify as the main humanitarian
 Humanitarian governance and resilience building: Ethiopia in comparative perspective S115

problem? What objective did they want to attain? How, by whom, when, and where
could this be achieved? In the initial phase of the Pf R programme, we observed
that Pf R actors tended to distinguish sharply between so-called hardware approaches
(i.e. predominantly transfer of materials and tangible field-activities) and software
approaches (i.e. working on social structures and processes, and skill transfers). We
maintained this distinction in the interviews. In addition to collecting different views
on how the programme should be carried out, we also asked how the programme
worked out in practice.
  In each of the country studies, national-level actors were first interviewed—
individually, through focus-groups and in workshops. In dialogue with the research
participants, the researchers then identified multiple case studies to investigate the
alliance in action at the local level, where government officials, community members,
and NGO staff members running the field operations were approached. The sub-
country cases varied to some extent: they usually comprised geographical areas, but
there were also several specific activities and campaigns selected for investigation.

Data gathering
Data gathering in the five countries largely followed the same pattern. Here, we elab-
orate solely the process for Ethiopia, where the four case-study sites were widely
scattered across the country. As Figure 1 shows, the case study sites were selected to
represent different implementing partners, agro-ecological zone types (the Borena,
Afar, and Dire Dawa lowlands, with different forms of agro-pastoralism, and the
farmed highlands around Ibnat in the Amhara region), timespans of Pf R implemen-
tation (inception in 2009, 2011, and 2013), and activities.

Figure 1. Map of PfR implementation sites and case-study sites in Ethiopia

Source: modified from Desportes (2015, p. 20).

S116  Dorothea Hilhorst, Isabelle Desportes, and Cecile W.J. de Milliano

  In all these sites, field staff, community members, and government officials from
the kebeles (lowest-level governance) and woredas (district governance-level) were
asked about their framing of the problem, interpretation of their role and the roles of
others, and perceptions of the programme. In-country NGO staff members facili-
tated the fieldwork logistics, but, as much as possible, the interviews were one-on-one,
without the presence of NGO or government observers. The federal government’s
perspective could not be directly included in 2014, but we also draw upon an inter-
view with a federal government official conducted by the second author in 2017 as
part of another humanitarian governance research project.
  Secondary sources such as project-monitoring reports, local risk assessments, action
plans, and environmental impact-assessments were also analysed to gain a full under-
standing of the programme rationales and the practicalities of its implementation.

PfR’s ToC
Pf R did not have a ready-made ToC, but it did have many policy ideas about how
the programme should work, with building blocks, working principles, and objec-
tives. Based on a content-analysis of reports and a workshop with the Netherlands-
based alliance coordinators, we constructed and validated the following ToC as the
principal storyline of the alliance:

1) Communities face major and multiple disaster risks.

2) Reducing these risks requires strengthening community resilience, and therefore
communities should be central in the programme.
3) To reduce people’s vulnerability to the impact of hazards, it is important that they
can anticipate, respond to, adapt to, and transform disaster risk.
4) Enhancing livelihood opportunities is important and should be part of risk-
reduction activities.
5) To reduce the root causes of disaster risk, ecosystem management and restoration
(EMR), and climate change adaptation (CCA) need to be integrated into DRR.
6) A successful integration of DRR, CCA, and EMR requires working across dif-
ferent geographical areas and timescales.
7) The integration of different approaches to working towards community resilience
requires strengthening the collaboration between multiple stakeholders across sectors.
8) Because ‘disasters’ usually result from processes beyond the locality of manifesta-
tion, they require solutions that are not in the hands of communities alone, so it is
important to involve stakeholders at different societal levels, including the govern-
ment and research institutions.
9) Because of the complexity of the problem and the programme there is a strong need
to be adaptive.

  This ToC shows that multi-actor governance is a central element of PfR’s approach.
Starting from the understanding that supporting the resilience of communities requires
 Humanitarian governance and resilience building: Ethiopia in comparative perspective S117

Table 1. Overview of respondents and data collection methods, Ethiopia

Method and respondent category Number

Semi-structured interviews with alliance partners 8

Semi-structured interviews with implementing partners 7

Informal discussions with community members, most often at project sites 47

Focus-group discussions (n = 16) with community members in seven kebeles 129

Semi-structured interviews with kebele government officials 9

Semi-structured interviews with woreda government officials 18

Semi-structured interviews with regional government officials 1

Semi-structured interviews with external stakeholders (e.g. university staff, in-country consult- 6
ants and NGO facilitators)

Observation at the Ethiopian Red Cross Society’s ‘Enhancing system and community resilience’ 5
panel discussion (16/08/2014), key stakeholders (e.g. UN official)

Total 230

Source: modified from Desportes (2015, p. 26).

a comprehensive approach, the alliance wants to strengthen collaboration between

multiple stakeholders across sectors. The alliance also emphasises that this multi-
stakeholder collaboration must happen at different societal levels. This ToC was con-
structed and validated with the Pf R steering-groups before the start of the fieldwork,
and hence could be used as input for the country studies.

Findings from Ethiopia

In Ethiopia, Pf R was carried out from 2011 to 2015 by an alliance comprising the
Ethiopian branches of Cordaid and CARE, the Ethiopian Red Cross Society, and
five local partners4 (hereafter referred to as ‘implementing partners’, in contrast to
the ‘alliance partners’). Wetlands International and the Red Cross Red Crescent
Climate Centre provided technical advice and training from their regional centres.
In addition to policy and advocacy activities to disseminate lessons learned and facili-
tate project take-over, the Pf R partners carried out various activities in their nine
project implementation sites, as summarised in Table 2.
  Before detailing how community and government members aligned or did not
align with Pf R’s ToC, it is useful to describe the broader country context. As far as
relations between the government, communities, and NGOs in Ethiopia are con-
cerned, development and humanitarian endeavours are largely government-led.
This has been the case since the implementation of large-scale environmental res-
toration programmes in the 1980s, where community members were ‘put to work’
restoring their ‘overused’ and ‘degraded’ environment, following the neo-Malthusian
S118  Dorothea Hilhorst, Isabelle Desportes, and Cecile W.J. de Milliano

Table 2. PfR Ethiopia categories of interventions

Intervention Examples

1. Ecosystem management and restoration Rangeland rehabilitation through enclosures, hillside rehabilitation
through terracing, soil and water conservation with soil band and
check dams

2. Livelihood diversification Setting up savings and loan associations; cooperatives producing aloe
vera soap, honey or energy-saving stoves; distributing goats or chickens;
providing irrigation infrastructure such as ponds, dams, canals, or drip
irrigation; distributing seed and farming tools

3. Establishing and strengthening • Committees responsible for managing disaster risk in their kebele,
community institutions with some also acting as local early-warning committees
• Committees managing specific PfR interventions (e.g. an irrigation
committee)
• Environmental school clubs

4. Training • Theoretical and practical skill transfer, for instance concerning farm-
ing, meteorological forecasts, and accounting (including specific
capacity training for the newly established community institutions)
• Training in the form of exchanges between (implementing) partners,
government officials, and communities, with joint risk assessment
and development of action plans

Source: Desportes, 2015, p. 24.

narrative deconstructed by Hoben (1996). This large-scale government-engineered

development approach conforms to the high-modernist approach of Ethiopian state-
building, which strongly asserts state sovereignty and ‘control over natural resources
and the people that use them’ (Fantini and Puddu, 2016, pp. 97–98). State control
is also asserted over continually diminishing numbers of civil-society organisations
and NGOs, largely viewed by the government as a parallel and inefficient resource-
provision system (Vaughan and Tronvoll, 2003). NGOs’ ‘recurring difficulties in
negotiating presence, access, and operational space’ (del Valle and Healy, 2013, p. 189)
were exacerbated following the contested 2005 elections and the added administra-
tive restrictions of the 2009 Charities and Societies proclamation (Carruth, 2016;
Corbet et al., 2017; International Centre for Non-Profit Law, 2012). However, to
some extent, international donors and NGOs have adjusted to government control.
As Hoben (1996, p. 197) noted, ‘the humanitarian, community, and environmental
emphases’ of large-scale modernist environmental programmes made them ‘live with,
and even appreciate, the top-down and even authoritarian way’ in which the gov-
ernment controls them.

Diverging ToCs
Table 3 summarises the major ToC building blocks (problem definition, description
of the goal, and specifics of ‘how’, ‘who’, ‘when’, and ‘where’ to attain that goal) by
three major kinds of actor types (PfR staff, government, and communities), although
internal variations did of course occur.
 Humanitarian governance and resilience building: Ethiopia in comparative perspective S119

Table 3. Major ToC building blocks by actor type

ToC building block PfR staff Government Communities

Problem statement • Hazards • Hazards • Lack of resources and

• Degraded ecosystem • Environmental opportunities
and various pressures degradation • Hazards and rain
on it • Lack of financial dependency
• Lack of agency resources
(aid dependency) • Communities’ poor
mindsets

Goal • Resilience • Decreased need for • Livelihoods protected

(i.e. livelihoods pro- emergency aid, stable and growing sustainably
tected and growing livelihoods
sustainably)

Solutions: What/how • Empowerment predomi- • Hardware especially • Hardware support

nantly via software, but (no excessive meddling • Increased practical
also hardware in local structures) knowledge and skills
• Creating an enabling
environment (advocacy,
commitment, structures,
plans)
• Environmental
restoration

Solutions: Who • Community-driven • Communities’ labour • NGOs

• Government-supported (not necessarily ideas) • Government
• NGOs (following govern-
ment approach)
• Government

Solutions: When/Where • Short-term • Short- and long-term • Short-term

• Wider landscape (not bound to political • Community-centred
term)
• Engaging supra-local
governance levels • Locally centred

Source: modified from Hilhorst et al. (2015).

Problem definition
Table 3 highlights some similarities but also many differences in ToC perspectives.
Although all actors mentioned the strenuous environment and recurrent droughts as
major problems, PfR staff members emphasised a combination of environmental fac-
tors and attitude-problems at sites with a long history of NGO presence. Government
officials stressed the problem of dependency, whereas community members spoke
mainly of acute poverty and difficulty surviving in a degraded environment.

Goal definition
Definition of the overall Pf R programme goal varied among staff members, with
a more basic form given by field staff (e.g. reducing poverty or reducing the impact
of natural hazards on livelihoods) and more holistic representations from the Addis
S120  Dorothea Hilhorst, Isabelle Desportes, and Cecile W.J. de Milliano

Ababa-based office staff. In its most detailed form, the desired goal is a resilient com-
munity characterised by ‘embedded’ and sustainable livelihoods. Embeddedness echoes
the EMR component. As one staff member explained, it means that ‘livelihoods must
be grounded in people’s environment in such a way that the surrounding resources
are sufficient to support them’.5 Sustainability was viewed mainly in relation to CCA,
with viable livelihoods in the long term, resisting climatic variability. DRR, CCA,
and EMR are thus integrated in Pf R’s ToC and linked to livelihoods.
  Community understanding was often similar to that of Pf R staff, as reflected in
this statement from a male community member in Ibnat (1 October 2014):

The aim is to alleviate the risks which acted on us previously, such as soil erosion and flood
and drought. The project enables [us] to retain our wealth, our livelihood.

  Although government officials also aimed for stable livelihoods, they stressed that
this would lessen the need for emergency relief. Their understanding was far less
integrated than the view of Pf R. They tended to conceptualise change in sectoral
terms, such as objectives for agriculture or irrigation, matching the government’s
sectoral organisation.

Solutions: how
In explaining how resilience could be achieved, Ethiopian PfR staff members mainly
emphasised the roles of the community. A community first needed to be empow-
ered through participatory risk assessments and action plans, as well as by software
activities such as training and the formation of community committees. An empow-
ered community was presented as aware of its environment and how it could act
within it. In their focus on communities, alliance partners emphasised the develop-
ment of social institutions over providing material assistance. Several staff interviews
made it clear that their agencies believed institutional development was key for food
security because it would unlock resources available in the community—notably
local knowledge. Staff members from agencies with a more humanitarian background
departed slightly from this dominant understanding, giving more space to hardware
support for community activities.
  Whereas the Pf R partners emphasised the strengthening of community institu-
tions as a precondition for resilience, the government and communities stressed the
importance of the provision of material support. This difference was apparent in
interviews, leading to discussion on programme implementation. For example, a
woreda government official from a Borena cooperative office complained that Pf R
did not release funds for a qualified external accountant for the savings group, as is
done by other NGOs in the area.6 Pf R wanted community members to learn this
activity themselves in order to be independent in the long term.7
 
There were also commonalities in the ToCs. In the Pf R approach, empowered
communities to regain and fortify a natural asset base via community-based natural
 Humanitarian governance and resilience building: Ethiopia in comparative perspective S121

soil and water conservation activities. This clearly resonated with the federal gov-
ernment’s strong focus on environmental resource management in recent decades.8
Communities’ appreciation for this environmental approach differed depending on
how long they had been involved, increasing over time. A community which had
worked with this approach since 2009 had seen more tangible results, including in
terms of livelihoods, than had one where Pf R began more recently.
  Although there was significant agreement about the steps required, ideas on how
these should translate into practice differed radically. All parties, for example, agreed
that livelihoods should be diversified to improve resistance to shocks and stresses.
In the case of pastoralist communities, however, government policies tended to be
geared towards (forced) resettlement into consolidated centres, which could become
centres of livelihood activities. These communities were mostly opposed to this
idea, instead favouring alternative options supporting livestock-rearing and small-
scale diversification. PfR staff members emphasised the need to respect communities’
choices and traditional ways of living. The Pf R implementing partners were more
diverse in their attitudes towards pastoralism, with some leaning towards govern-
ment policies and others towards the communities’ perspective, as well as engaging
more openly with parallel pastoralist traditional governance systems. In practice, the
programme took on different shapes in different areas, depending mainly on the local
implementing partner and their relationship with the government. Some local imple-
menting partners could in fact be classified as ‘government-oriented NGOs’, acting
as a local arm of the government.

Solutions: who
Ideas about who should play the lead role on the path towards resilience aligned
closely with the actors’ preferred path. According to Ethiopian Pf R staff, empowered
communities should take the driving seat in building resilience. This was considered
effective (grounded in local context), efficient (involving locals from the start increases
community acceptance), sustainable (built on local structures), and cost-effective.
  Moreover, Pf R aimed to move away from competition among agencies ‘working
in silos’ to reach their objectives towards partnership and learning. On a wall in a
Borena DRR community group office set up by Pf R, a poster (Figure 2) unpacked
the ‘big shift’ deemed necessary to implement the programme. Instead of dominat-
ing and teaching, programme staff should facilitate. They should not extract but
empower, preferably with visual means rather than by sending messages. Relations
should be open, and people should think about the community.
  A striking difference in the ToCs is how government officials did not see commu-
nities as key in the bottom-up identification of needs, but rather as the lowest level of
a top-down governance model and a workforce to implement activities. Interviews
with local woreda and kebele government officials indicated that, rather than listening
to the communities’ views, these officials saw working with the communities as an
opportunity to teach them how to implement (government) development programmes.
S122  Dorothea Hilhorst, Isabelle Desportes, and Cecile W.J. de Milliano

Figure 2. ‘Big shift’ within which PfR is embedded

Source: Desportes 2015, p. 42.

Several government officials in Dewe and Ibnat highlighted that the role of com-
munity committees was not to take decisions, but to ‘provide information’.
  Having been subject to top-down governance structures for decades, community
members had internalised the government perspective, looking towards governments
and NGOs to provide necessary material support.

Solutions: when and where

Whereas local government actors and community members saw the programme as
a local, time-bound endeavour, Pf R members wanted the resilience-building expe-
riences to extend beyond the end of the programme and to spread to other areas to
achieve longer-term, larger-scale change. This is why advocacy was one of the alli-
ance’s strategic objectives.
Still, we observed variation in the entry-point to advocacy among Pf R staff mem-
bers. The Netherlands-based Pf R partners often explained advocacy using rights-
based jargon, but Ethiopian partners were very careful not to frame advocacy in
political terms. Pf R Ethiopia maintained an apolitical profile by refraining from
advocacy beyond bringing practical community needs to the government’s attention.
Community members such as the pastoral networks were likewise trained to pro-
pose their own solutions and advocate for their needs with local authorities. The
Ethiopian Red Cross Society was especially cautious not to jeopardise its auxiliary
position with the government. One staff member explained (22 September 2014) its
approach as follows:
 Humanitarian governance and resilience building: Ethiopia in comparative perspective S123

The government is fine with us establishing committees. Most did not know this approach
before. When we teach about it, they are happy, appreciate the philosophy behind it. It fails
only if it is associated with politics. We need to focus on practical problem-solving [. . .]
It is invisible politics.

Theory versus practice

Despite Pf R’s strong discourse on communities being in the driving seat, the poster
shown in Figure 2 hints at a different reality. The handwritten poster reflects the
isolated and impoverished environment in Ethiopia’s southern periphery. However,
in a community where people speak Oromifaa, the poster was written in English. This
raises the question of how its message might be translated into practice, and also
illustrates the governance relations in the programme.
  On the one hand, the programme employed a participatory approach, placing a
premium on decision-making in the community. The following attitude expressed
by an Ibnat resident (1 October 2014) was not unusual:

We don’t believe the Red Cross will continue with us. It will leave us. But it gave us the
capacity, the knowledge, technical, materials, in order to handle things. We acknowledge
it with good mood. We have a committee in place, a water management system. We did
the activities without payment until now. We can continue.

  On the other hand, communities might have different priorities from those facili-
tated by Pf R. The communities often expressed a preference for hardware support,
but Pf R seemed to actually occupy the driving seat, working to make communities
‘ready’ to internalise Pf R’s emphasis on soft interventions geared towards institutions
and training.
  Over the course of the programme, it also became apparent that government
buy-in was lower than Pf R assumed. Although the government shared Pf R’s con-
viction that communities were important, they saw communities as the end-line of
sectoral development programmes, and NGOs as resource-providers and facilitators
for those programmes. A federal government official reflected on community-based
early-warning systems (9 June 2017), which were also implemented as part of the
Pf R programme (with efforts to link early-warning committees with government
offices):

[NGOs] can feed us [with ideas], but they should use the common platforms. For instance,
I would love to have one strong early-warning system in the country. International NGOs
get resources to do their own community-based early-warning systems, etc. Funders love
that. But I tell them not to do that, to go with us. So we can create one strong system.
They invite me to workshops, but I do not go.

 Although kebele and woreda government officials tolerated the community commit-
tees, this did not change the government’s approach to resilience. The committees
S124  Dorothea Hilhorst, Isabelle Desportes, and Cecile W.J. de Milliano

remained isolated, with no official legal basis, and unable to advocate for government
services. This hampered the scaling-up and sustainability of the approach. Although
the committees and the participatory style of Pf R were appreciated, tangible out-
comes were lacking; the knowledge and value of the Pf R approach did not reach
the regional government, so no non-NGO funds or efforts supported the new struc-
tures or follow-up on activities. A former Pf R staff member who visited the Borena
Pf R site in 2017 shared the unsurprising news that the local committees had stopped
operating after the programme ended, as did their facilitation and support of the
communities.

Findings on resilience building: comparative case studies

In this section, we compare the findings on Ethiopia with findings from four other
case studies. The comparison focuses on the PfR objectives to (i) unlock community
potential, and (ii) advance the capacity of community institutions to advocate for gov-
ernment or NGO support to fulfil needs that were beyond community resources.
We also bring into the comparison Pf R’s focus on software components, such as the
formation of local planning committees and awareness-raising activities, to increase
community ownership of the programme. Although the set-up of the programme
across countries was similar, there were differences in how it played out in the gov-
ernance constellation of implementing agencies, government, and communities, and
in the challenges encountered.

Nicaragua (based on Strauch, 2015)

There were many similarities between Pf R Nicaragua and Pf R Ethiopia. Nicaragua
has a very different history, with civil society strongly engaging with and politicis-
ing processes of DRR (Morales Carbonell and van der Haar, 2017). Nonetheless,
where Pf R operated in Nicaragua, the space for civil society to express views and
engage in political debate was shrinking. This may have been specific to these geo-
graphical areas, as they had long been affected by drought and had an extended aid
history. The government displayed a paternalistic approach towards communities,
and state actors and Pf R staff were convinced that the population suffered from
‘dependency syndrome’. Both the government and Pf R considered communities’
passive attitude the major obstacle to resilience. This strengthened the emphasis on
software approaches for behavioural change.
  The programme focused on identifying good CCA and DRR practices based
on indigenous knowledge and strengthening these with scientific knowledge. Pf R
activities had many positive impacts in communities; however, as in Ethiopia, the
potential for achieving structural, transformative change was uncertain because com-
munity initiatives were rarely scaled up. This could be attributed to fragility and a
lack of autonomy in local Nicaraguan committees, which were government-imposed
structures affiliated with the governing party. Possibilities for a bottom-up policy
 Humanitarian governance and resilience building: Ethiopia in comparative perspective S125

and advocacy approach were limited, as political instability and a fragile social fabric
added to uncertainty and restricted space for policy-implementation.

Guatemala (based on Dávila Bustamente, 2015)

Pf R Guatemala was implemented in five risk-prone departments which have had
high aid density since the end of the civil war in 1996, usually in the form of human-
itarian handout programmes. Perhaps this was why communities were initially highly
averse to Pf R’s software components. Some communities demanded material sup-
port from Pf R and refused to participate in a project without such a component.
Paradoxically, by refusing to adopt the Pf R approach that put community institu-
tions in the driving seat in the programme, the Guatemalan communities steered the
programme more compared with the Ethiopian communities which followed the
Pf R model. The refusal to participate in participatory development can be a strong
token of self-determination (see Cooke and Kothari, 2001).
  An in-country survey (n = 145) indicated that residents valued the impact of mate-
rial support to households and communities most, followed by improved social ties,
environmental restoration and knowledge about integrated risk management. Among
the different project approaches of implementing partners, ‘bio-rights projects’ stood
out in terms of community appreciation. In these initiatives, community groups
received micro-credit loans and training tailored to projects they devised themselves.
The groups repaid their loans by engaging in ecosystem-based risk-reduction meas-
ures. The projects thus combined community empowerment, material transfers, and
environmental and livelihood improvements.
  Guatemala was the only case where policy and advocacy efforts were fruitful at
national level. The Pf R programme resulted in a strategic inter-institutional agenda
to align the plans and actions of key government actors. The NGOs’ previous advo-
cacy experience in the country made the success of this programme-component
possible. Very early in the programme, the partners developed a roadmap for national-
level advocacy.

Indonesia (based on Srikandini, 2015)

In Indonesia, PfR had a different trajectory. It was implemented during major national
DRR reform: Indonesia doubled its national DRR budget and created district-level
multi-stakeholder DRR forums. The conditions thus seemed very favourable for PfR
to influence policy and practice towards a comprehensive DRR approach grounded
in environmental management, CCA, and development. However, this potential was
not realised because the Pf R partners were never able—nor did they even aim—to
align their approaches. The Indonesian PfR partners lacked the Guatemalan partners’
experience in planning and performing advocacy, and preferred to continue their
community programmes as usual. The lack of alignment among Pf R partners was
partly related to the country’s size and its multitude of islands, and was not dealt with
through monthly meetings or exchange visits, as was the case in Ethiopia.
S126  Dorothea Hilhorst, Isabelle Desportes, and Cecile W.J. de Milliano

  The programme was also not integrated at implementation level, but projects
in the 37 Indonesian Pf R implementation villages usually addressed one or more
components of Pf R, depending on the expertise of the implementing partner.
Implementers seemed to treat Pf R primarily as a funding opportunity to implement
their own programmes. However, during the Pf R implementation, a common
emphasis on local-level advocacy and training emerged, where community members
approached the local government (facilitated by Pf R) to present their DRR-related
needs. However, these local advocacy skills did not result in increased responsiveness
by the local government, and the increased national-level DRR budget did not
trickle down to the local level. As in Ethiopia, local government officials who, influ-
enced by PfR, became sympathetic to local DRR needs felt incapable of meeting these
needs because they had no budget for DRR.

Kenya (based on Faling, 2015)

Pf R Kenya was implemented in 13 (semi-)arid areas along the Ewaso Nyiro River
in Isiolo County. As in Ethiopia, Pf R initially focused on community-level capacity-
development rather than material assistance. Instead of forming new committees,
the programme relied on existing community development committees established
under a previous World Bank programme implemented to streamline and coordinate
different aid initiatives in the region. Frequent exchange visits took place between
the communities.
  A Kenyan field staff member described the project as follows:

PfR is only a project. But the way it is implemented is very sustainable. The seed has been
planted and the communities are appreciating the approach. Initiatives are increasingly
coming from community members themselves.

  The programme coincided with extensive national policy reforms aiming for
decentralisation and improved coordination among the various bodies involved in
DRR. As in Indonesia, Pf R used this as an entry-point to advocate for community-
based integrated risk management. Conditions in Kenya were more favourable for
a networked type of governance, but this also led to particular challenges: working
through existing community-organisations reinforced existing power-relations and
reduced Pf R’s leverage in the implementation-process.
  Beyond the community, an umbrella organisation linking several civil-society
organisations in Kenya was an effective medium for advocacy. The network organ-
ised a 250-kilometre camel march to challenge the national and county governments
on the negative environmental and social impacts of a mega-dam that was planned
upstream. The civil-society organisations also managed to engage private companies,
the local and national media, and some elements of the government in supporting the
Ewaso Ngiro River communities’ cause. This would have been unthinkable in the
authoritarian Ethiopian governance context a few hundred kilometres to the north.
Humanitarian governance, in the Kenyan case, developed into a strong alliance between
Pf R and communities in their effort to mobilise the state.
 Humanitarian governance and resilience building: Ethiopia in comparative perspective S127

Discussion
Humanitarian governance is often treated as a single reality, seen from the point of
view of international humanitarian actors. This article has viewed governance as
emerging through interaction among international and national, state, and non-state
actors. We have analysed governance primarily as the interplay between the state,
implementing agencies, and communities.
  More specifically, we explored humanitarian governance in the scenario of
resilience-building programmes. As the cases demonstrate, this type of scenario is
far removed from the high-conflict aid scenario that usually informs discussions on
humanitarian governance. Nonetheless, in view of the turn to DRR and the pro-
motion of resilience in addressing natural disasters (see, for example, the Hyogo
and Sendai Frameworks for Action of 2005 and 2015, respectively (United Nations
International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR), 2005, 2015), this scenario
represents a widespread and substantial body of practice in the humanitarian domain
(Kelman, 2017).
  It is important to recognise that the multiple actors involved in governance have
different understandings of the aims and rules of operation. In this research, we
developed a tool based on theories of change as an entry-point for our enquiry. ToC
language enhanced the interactive nature of the research and enabled dialogue with
Pf R stakeholders who were already familiar with the ToC jargon. Although govern-
ance issues varied greatly across the countries, a number of striking patterns appeared.
  Grounded in five in-depth country case studies of a large programme to enhance
resilience and DRR (Hilhorst et al., 2015), this article revealed one major finding.
Actors in the Pf R agencies, local authorities, and communities often had different
interpretations of the ToC and different priorities concerning its implementation.
PfR activities tended to have a strong ‘software’ focus, aiming to unlock communities’
potential to become more resilient, but communities—and often local authorities—
preferred to receive more immediate, local and tangible ‘hardware’ support. This
difference was especially pronounced at the beginning of the programme. One way
of framing this issue is to see the aid organisations in the Pf R alliance as having
changed their approach to resilience humanitarianism, whereas the local actors pre-
ferred more classic forms of handout humanitarianism (Hilhorst, 2018 ). Clarifying
and bridging differences in objectives and expectations are thus pivotal parts of the
humanitarian-governance agenda.
  The findings paint a mixed picture of the power and normative rationale of inter-
vening agencies to shape programming. In the context of intervention, a programme
like PfR may be experienced as imposing its ideology, even when that ideology places
communities’ views at the centre. In several countries, community members expressed
a different preference for addressing their resilience, and implementing and national
partners felt that the programme was organised in a top-down fashion by the national
or international headquarters, respectively. However, Pf R’s power to shape the pro-
gramme to achieve its objectives seemed limited in many ways. Pf R seemed a coher-
ent programme on paper, but, in the complexity of the intervention, there was an
S128  Dorothea Hilhorst, Isabelle Desportes, and Cecile W.J. de Milliano

abundance of different attitudes to the approach. The Dutch agencies, their in-country
national counterparts, the authorities, and communities each brought their own
ideas and interests to the programme implementation. Unsurprisingly, Pf R struggled
to realise its mandate amid the messiness of multi-actor humanitarian governance,
where the programme was subject to local realities, interests, and collaborations.
  The findings highlight the importance of analysing the different ways governing
actors view the programme. Particularly striking are the findings about governments.
Programmes like Pf R tend to allot a critical role to the government as a key actor
which could turn DRR into a sustainable, structured, and scaled-up endeavour, if
government actors can be convinced to ‘see the light’. Across the countries studied,
we found many factors cautioning against an optimistic take on this. Despite appar-
ent buy-in on a ToC giving central importance to communities, in practice the
Ethiopian government had a very different understanding compared with that of the
Pf R partners. These differences ultimately prevented the scaling-up of an integrated
approach to DRR. For various reasons, including high turnover in local government
in the Philippines, a local Indonesian government that had hardly any budget and
was therefore ‘sitting on a dry desk’ (Therkildsen and Tidemand, 2007, p. 8), and
a lack of coordinated planning in Nicaragua, it was rare that individual government
actors ‘seeing the light’ would result in changing actual governance practice.
  Pf R’s experience provides several ideas on how programmes aiming to realise
resilience can deal with these situations. One chosen strategy was to seek convergence
with other policy agendas or national thematic priorities, such as ongoing policy
reforms. Another strategy was to carefully explore the room for manoeuvre to posi-
tion the programme within existing governance traditions, navigating the prevailing
realities to achieve some of Pf R’s goals. Finally, the duration of the programme could
be extended, so that different actors might implement, internalise or adapt the hoped-
for changes over a longer period of time.
  The findings remind us that, in humanitarian programming, a localisation agenda
requires investing in understanding, negotiating, and supporting national actors to
responsibly implement humanitarian programming for vulnerable people. When
we reformulate the final conclusion from the point of view of the governments in
the research, the findings remind us that intervening agencies should avoid setting
unrealistic objectives that would require great changes in existing priorities and
historically grown styles of governance. Reformulating the same conclusion from the
point of view of the communities studied, we are reminded that outsiders intervening
on behalf of communities should start listening to those communities if they want
to achieve sustainable results.

Acknowledgments
We sincerely thank the Partners for Resilience (PfR) for their openness in this research,
with special thanks to our Pf R liaison Raimond Duijsens. We also acknowledge the
contribution of our fellow researchers on Pf R: Marijn Faling, Lisa Strauch, Yvonne
 Humanitarian governance and resilience building: Ethiopia in comparative perspective S129

Leung, Mariana Dávila Bustamente and Annisa Srikandini. This article was made pos-
sible through a Vici grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research
(NWO), grant number 453-14-013.

Correspondence
Dorothea Hilhorst, International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University
Rotterdam, Kortenaerkade 12, 2518 AX Den Haag, Netherlands.
Telephone: +31 70 426 0460; e-mail: [email protected]

Endnotes
1
We did not include findings from the Philippines, as the Pf R programme there focused mainly on
urban areas and would unduly skew governance comparisons (see Leung, 2015).
2
The organisations worked in Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mali, Nicaragua, the
Philippines, and Uganda together with 74 implementing partner organisations. See http://www.
partnersforresilience.nl for more information.
3
See the full policy brief (Hilhorst, de Milliano, and Strauch, 2015) and the alliance feedback report
at http://www.rug.nl/research/globalisation-studies-groningen/projects/partners-for-resilience.
4
The Agency for Cooperation and Research in Development, Action for Development, Ethiopian
Catholic Secretariat, Dire Dawa Community-Based Disaster Risk Reduction Association, and
Support for Sustainable Development.
5
Interview, field staff, 29 September 2014.
6
Interview, 1 August 2014.
7
Interview, 12 September 2014.
8
For example, the Climate Resilient Green Economy initiative launched in 2011 linked to the five-
year Growth and Transformation Plans, but also the new Disaster Risk Management policy endorsed
in 2013 (Federal Democratic Government of Ethiopia, 2013).

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