Um estudo sobre a participação na avaliação de ações humanitárias: entre concepções e práticas

Abstract

In recent years, humanitarian crises have become increasingly multifactorial, resulting from a set of overlapping factors such as demographic growth, economic problems, natural and technological disasters, conflicts, climate change, among others, and of lasting over a long time. These crises demand from the humanitarian system the challenge of structuring sustainable responses in the long term and that focus on strengthening local capacities.With the increasingly present discourse of placing community and affected people at the center of humanitarian responses, especially in the idea of accountability to them, the humanitarian system, however, has been officially making commitments to improve quality and learning in humanitarian action. As a result of this, humanitarian actions have assumed participation as an idea that runs through the design, planning and implementation of a humanitarian response. But what is meant by participation in reference documents for the humanitarian system? How to enable the participation of communities and people affected by humanitarian crises, specifically in the assessment of a humanitarian response? Based on these initial questions, this dissertation carries out an analytical study on the appointment of humanitarian action to drive at the heart of the evaluation of humanitarian action, the participation of communities and people affected by humanitarian crises. It is a qualitative study, exploratory and descriptive, carried out through a bibliographic study on Humanitarian Action and a documentary study of two documents chosen to understand the relationship between Evaluation of humanitarian actions and Participation: the Guide to Evaluación de la Accion Humanitaria (ALNAP) and Essential Humanitarian Standard (CHS). An analytical study of two evaluative practices was also carried out: the “Introduction to Evaluating Humanitarian Action” course, offered by the Eval Partners initiative, and the participatory evaluation final report, commissioned out by Red Cross Equatoriana in partnership with the International Federation of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent. Regarding the interpretation of the data obtained, this research worked with the documentary analysis proposed by Cellard (2010) and with the analytical categories of Gussi (2019). As a result, I was able to identify that Humanitarian Action Assessments reproduce the technical-formal perspective, within the framework of development assessments disseminated by the OECD / DAC, and that the idea of participation, indicated in humanitarian commitments, is not the same as that which is effectively identified in the evaluative practices analyzed. Based on this, the conclusions of this study are forwarded in the form of recommendations which suggest that the debate around participation presents a unique potential for advancing the evaluation of humanitarian actions from other evaluative perspectives.