Whom Will Humanitarian Aid Serve in Future?

One should be careful with terms such as “historic”, “scandalous” and “record-breaking”, but that is difficult at a time when a humanitarian era appears to be ending in Germany. Or possibly even in Europe?

The fact that respect for humanitarian aid and its budgets, for its principles and for international humanitarian law is declining internationally is not a new process. But until recently, there were still strong breakwaters holding back the tide. The largest of these, put up by the German government, is now in danger of becoming much smaller. This raises the question: In the face of multipolar crises and growing need, what value does humanitarian aid have for European governments – aid that is politically neutral and impartial and saves millions of lives and livelihoods year after year?

A look at the facts: This fall, the German government adopted both a new strategy for German humanitarian aid as well as a budget for 2025 – the latter provides for what is indeed a historically unprecedented cut in German humanitarian aid by 53 percent to just over 1 billion euros. This means that the German humanitarian budget will plummet to a ten-year low and return to the times when Germany was still considered a humanitarian dwarf – until the Chancellor at that time, Angela Merkel, ushered in a new era in light of the influx of Syrian refugees, and the budget gradually increased to as much as 3.2 billion euros in 2022.

This era is now apparently ending in Germany – at least in budgetary terms. Parallel developments in other European countries are turning this into a trend. It began in London years ago, where the budget for international cooperation fell by around a third as part of the integration of the independent British Department for International Development (DFID) into the Foreign Office in 2020. In recent months, France, one of the leading European donors, has also announced that it will cut its spending on development and humanitarian aid by 18% by 2025, while the Netherlands will cut it by as much as two thirds by 2027. And even the former “humanitarian superpower” Sweden is cutting back and wants to focus remaining funds on efficiency and domestically relevant programs.

Where does the trend reversal come from?

But how can this rampage of cutbacks be explained? Until recently, the growing humanitarian needs worldwide were increasingly underfunded, but this was due to a comparatively slow growth in international humanitarian aid, which was unable to keep pace with the dramatic increase in suffering and the corresponding rise in global appeals for funding. Here, a marked reversal of the trend is taking place.

Partly due to pressure from donors, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is becoming more and more restrictive in its assessment of humanitarian needs and more frequently excludes measures that may be classified as “life building” rather than “life saving” from already shrinking aid plans. Despite this, funds made available are falling so rapidly that the gap between aid needs and available funds still continues to widen: As recently as September 2024, not even a third of global aid needs for 2024 had been funded. In forgotten crises, such as aid for Sudanese internally displaced persons, as little as 8.6% had been funded.

Why? Take Berlin, for example: Humanitarian actors rightly criticize the Chancellery and the Ministry of Finance for not taking a serious interest in humanitarian issues. They had, it is said, once again demanded disproportionately large cuts in the 2025 budget from the development ministry (BMZ – Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development) and, above all, from the Federal Foreign Office (AA), with the AA alone having to surrender 17% of its total budget. But that’s only part of the story. The truth is that even such measures in themselves cannot explain the disproportionate dimension of the 53% cut to the AA's humanitarian aid budget.

Of course, adjustable project funds such as those for humanitarian aid always suffer more from budget cuts than fixed costs such as personnel. But a cutback that is almost three times as large as the general reduction? This has never happened before – and cannot be explained solely by reference to the finance minister, to inflation or to rising costs for cyber security, as the AA suggests. Rather, this is a deliberate decision. Just look at the fact that the AA in 2021 had an overall budget only slightly higher than the one planned in future – and yet the ministry was able to provide more than twice as much humanitarian aid (2.14 billion euros) than planned for 2025.

Contingency funds used at will?

This raises the question of whether humanitarian aid is still important to the AA itself, which after all is led by the Green Party. Or is it just contingency funding that is used at will as means to some end?

This is confirmed by another trend that is gaining ground not only in Germany, namely in the context of an international “prioritization debate” in times of growing need and decreasing budgets. The new German humanitarian strategy, further details of which were explained when it was published at the end of September, illustrates this: The very first heading of the new strategy reads, at the express wish of the political leadership at the AA: “Humanitarian aid is a part of integrated security”. By way of comparison, the first paragraph of the old guideline, valid until 2023, still stated that German humanitarian aid served “exclusively to achieve humanitarian objectives” and was “an expression of our ethical responsibility and solidarity with people in need”.

It is true that the new strategy also names humanitarian principles and aid as parallel objectives, depending on the extent of the need. But in the strategic balancing of greatest humanitarian needs who will be the winner in future when it comes to allocating funds, for example, to strategically irrelevant South Sudan, the DR Congo or to refugee camps in distant Myanmar on the one hand – and on the other hand to crises in Ukraine, Syria or Gaza that are relevant to security, foreign or migration policy? When the strategy was published, Federal Foreign Office State Secretary Susanne Baumann made this very clear: “The budget is shrinking while humanitarian needs are increasing. (...) We therefore have to set priorities. (...) This means that we have to focus on crises that have an impact on Europe.”

Increasing politicization

In this logic, the current international prioritization debate is turning into a delicate politicization debate – in Berlin, but also in Brussels and other capitals.

In Brussels, too, there is currently a fierce debate about the role humanitarian and development policy issues should play in the new EU Commission that is in the process of being constituted. Critics fear an increasing subordination to geopolitical initiatives such as the “Global Gateway” for raw material and infrastructure partnerships. They see confirmation of their suspicions in the new profile of the future EU Commissioner Hadja Lahbib, who is set to be responsible not only for humanitarian aid and civil protection, but also for “Preparedness, Crisis Management and Equality”. A look at the long-prepared “mission letters” for the upcoming Commissioners for partnerships and the budget does not allay the fears. The words “development” and “humanitarian” hardly appear in these documents. Instead, an intensive debate has begun at EU level on whether humanitarian actors, for instance, must accept a procedure in which they have to prove that their work not incidentally, but primarily serves the interests of Europe – and not just those of people in need.

Can we expect something similar in The Hague, Stockholm, and soon Vienna? Or even Paris? With the growing influence of increasing right-wing populist forces within or on Western European governments, an approach that degrades development cooperation and humanitarian aid to an instrument of realpolitik is becoming mainstream thinking. This has been the case in Germany for some time already, as demonstrated by the new approach of the FDP (Free Democratic Party) of accepting cutbacks in humanitarian aid and instead providing it exclusively to friendly states that form part of the alliance against Russia.

This makes it clear that advocates of humanitarian principles and value-driven worldwide aid for the people in greatest need have lost the battle of the narratives for the time being. The same applies to supporters of rules that stipulate, for example, that all countries should set aside 0,7 percent of their gross national income for official development assistance (ODA). This may come as no surprise when voices are gaining the upper hand that increasingly negate international cooperation based on rules, humanitarian values or even scientific findings, such as in the climate sector. It is therefore no coincidence that the old debate about more positive narratives and more self-confident communication from the aid sector has recently flared up again. And rightly so: narratives played a major role in Germany's rise to become a leading donor of humanitarian aid. But will this be enough?

“We won't change the discourse by simply engaging in a little more lobbying by all participants and saying that we need more money once again,” says a leading EU diplomat and humanitarian expert. “The perception is that more money has not worked in all those increasingly fragile states and in the crises of the last 30 or 40 years. Why should it be any different now?”

No "business as usual"

This puts a finger in the wound of aid organizations that make it too easy for themselves by blaming donors that are too stingy, too inflexible or too political. New narratives by themselves will have no effect in an aid industry that does “business as usual”. Numerous studies criticise that between UN organisations but also between many NGOs, competition continues to beat cooperation. Despite many often self-critical efforts at reform to achieve higher efficiency and fairer partnerships, reality often lags behind intentions. At times, the interests of the organisation and humanitarian values are not in synch.

Concrete examples of this? Take the imbalance in the fundraising of charity and aid organisations in favour of comparatively overfunded aid to Ukraine. Take the commitment to implement reforms to make aid more effective and dignified by being locally led which, however, have been only partly realised in the past ten years. Because it would draw power and resources away from the Global North, such changes are being implemented rather slowly – not by all, but by many organizations in the North. Last, look at the reluctance, not least in some German aid organizations, to engage in the necessary debate about the trends regarding the politicization of humanitarian aid described above.

Despite this rather gloomy outlook, there are more positive stories: If aid actors themselves and their political allies do their homework, and if the humanitarian aid crisis described above serves as a signal for increased cooperation, then there is hope. Humanitarian donors such as Switzerland, Norway and Spain are still standing firm and sticking to their budgets. And a new era can begin as quickly as another ends. Take London, where the pendulum could swing back again with the new government in Downing Street and humanitarian budgets and a value-based approach could make a comeback – in the place where everything began.

All views expressed in the Welternährung are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view or policies of the editorial board or of Welthungerhilfe.