Bridging The Gap: A New Paradigm For Humanitarian Organizations To Transition Between Emergency Response And Post-Crisis Programmes.
by Sanja Celebic-Lukovac and Mandie Alexander-Taljaard
This thesis “Bridging the gap: a new paradigm for humanitarian organizations to transition between emergency response and post-crisis programmes” focuses on how to link emergency response and post-crisis programmes through adopting effective key transition links.
Traditionally humanitarian aid is a sequence of events that represents organizations responding to challenging and complex environments such as man-made and natural disasters. These disasters are commonly and broadly referred to as emergencies. One of the issues currently being discussed is how to bridge the “emergency response to post-crisis” programme gap, or as it is most recently referred to as the “transition” gap.
In this thesis, the transition between the delivery of humanitarian services in emergency response situations and the delivery of post-crisis programmes was explored. This thesis outlines the barriers that exist when organizations transition from emergency response to post-crisis programmes and then makes recommendations as to what links could be adopted to effectively navigate IOM Missions from one context to another.
Even though emergencies, essentially, stayed the same over time, the understanding and evolvement of organizations, and how organizations respond to these emergencies has shifted. The shifting of understanding and response to emergencies arises from efforts to understand better systems and practices that underlie emergency response and further on post-crisis programmes. One of the issues currently being discussed is how to bridge the “emergency response to post-crisis ” programme gap, or as it is most recently referred to as the “transition” gap.
For humanitarian organizations, and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), to effect, a smooth transition from emergency response to post-crisis programming, the roles, responsibilities, and strategy of the organization needs to be clarified. Humanitarian organizations need to be able to communicate their values and purpose, change the way that they see an emergency response and post-crisis as two separate operational areas, change the way they operate and do things differently than before by either implementing programmes differently or implementing new innovative programmes altogether.
In other words, the adoption of a specific Mindset, Toolset, and Skillset, as a matter of approach, that will assist Missions to assess what action should be taken and how collective capacity is analysed, in order for IOM to respond to emergencies with an approach, and through actions, that encourages development, thus effectively transition from emergency response to post-crisis activities.
If you want to learn more from this executive summary, send us an email to mashlm@usi.ch requesting the full thesis.
