While the humanitarian aid sector has become highly professionalised, it also remains a fundamentally ethical sector, grounded in humanitarian principles. These include the core ethical belief that people facing life -threatening situations should receive help, regardless of their nationality, ethnicity, or religion. But living up to this ethical belief is getting a lot harder as humanitarian funding is starting to fall just when the job is getting bigger.

The belief that humanitarian assistance should be allocated based on need, and go to those who require it most, forms the bedrock of modern humanitarian action. But when resources are scarce, or insufficient to address the scale of need, this creates important ethical challenges for donors and individual agencies in deciding where to focus their efforts and put their funding.
Join our host, Alice Obrecht (Head of Research at ALNAP), for ‘A Matter of Priorities’, a new podcast series which asks humanitarians across the system, and those outside of the system, urgent questions about how we should prioritise when lives are at stake.
Topics to be addressed in the podcast:

• How are resource allocation decisions being made by donors and agencies? How are cuts to budget, at country level or at global level, handled and what are the impacts on programming and coverage?
• How are fragile and protracted settings stretching the humanitarian mandate in real and practical terms – what are the choices agencies are having to make in such contexts in terms of where to put resources, and which needs to meet?
• Where are development, peace and climate funding flows going, and how are resource allocation decisions being made in these sectors having an impact on humanitarian budgets?
• What counts as a ‘humanitarian need’? Does this concept need to be revised?
• What does a more objective and comparable approach to assessing needs look like – is the JIAF 2.0 delivering this, and what are the challenges and issues associated with this – what are the questions that the JIAF can’t answer?
• How principled are resource allocation decisions – and what other ethical frameworks or principles, other than the humanitarian principles, might we need to help us with ethical dilemmas over resource allocation?
• What role do local actors play in supporting or making resource allocation decisions? How participatory are these decisions with communities?