on concepts and codes such as “warrior’s honour” to embed humanitarian
limitations on the brutality of war, they have come to the realisation that their own
capacity to do harm, a side-effect of their increasing power, leaves them in the
position of needing to define a code to guide themselves, in a similar self-ascribed
way.
Donors can hold them to account on their terms by withdrawing funding,
host governments can by withdrawing permissions. But those who prompted a
concern in the first place are often, by definition, not in a powerful enough position
to challenge providers, let alone ensure compliance or punish failures to comply.
There is a basic problem here that the likely relative positions of the likely actors
simply do not match up to the positions they should occupy in a standard
accountability structure, and it is hard to see how they ever truly could, as
humanitarian problems tend to arise precisely in (and often as a consequence of)
the kinds of situations in which accountability mechanisms of all kinds are
profoundly failing, and the positions of the victims and agents of succour are highly
unequal.^29
That is not to say that humanitarian accountability is necessarily entirely
unenforceable, or non-existent. There can be kinds of “surrogate” accountability.^30
Donors can, if they choose, call humanitarians to account in the name of the
recipients, on the basis of the emerging set of principles of “good humanitarian
donorship”, endorsed by most of the major donor governments and UN agencies in
Stockholm in 2003.^31 But the document they signed up to remains a statement of
intent, rather than representing a rigorous policing mechanism of any kind.^32 It
29
On the problems inequality poses for standard accountability mechanisms to work, see
Jennifer Rubenstein, "Accountability in an Unequal World", Journal of Politics 69, no. 3
(2007). 30
31 Ibid.
Good Humanitarian Donorship. Available at
http://www.goodhumanitariandonorship.org/; accessed 32 on 13 July 2010.
GHD, "Principles and Good Practice of Humanitarian Donorship", Good Humanitarian
Donorship (17 June 2003). Available at
http://www.goodhumanitariandonorship.org/background.asp; accessed on 13 July 2010.