ATHA Community Participation in Humanitarian Relief and Protection: From Principle to Reality

According to the Sphere Standards, disaster-affected populations should actively participate into the design, implementation and evaluation of humanitarian programs. Necessitating the involvement of beneficiaries is viewed as a way to lessen the inherent dependency in the aid relationship and inform the decisions of humanitarian planners and managers. However, from a practitioner's perspective, such participation of beneficiaries may become problematic in both the immediate delivery of assistance as well as the design of longer-term programs, particularly in terms of the independence of humanitarian action in times of armed conflict.