The EU’s Humanitarian Aid Network, its Trends and the Derived Selection Mechanisms Behind Partnerships.
(2025) UACES Annual Conference 2025 — Location: Liverpool (1.September.2025)
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- Abstract
- This research project examines the European Union’s humanitarian aid network, its current trends and what does this tells us in terms of current state of the policy and the balance of power between actors. Considering the organizational crisis the humanitarian sector is experiencing, namely that fundings are stagnating if not decreasing alongside the increase in number of crises and complexity, partnership has become even more crucial for implementing partners in the field. This is true for institutional donors that must manage scarce fund efficiently to provide aid to alleviate suffering. This is equally true for implementing partners in the field, that for some, their financial survival depends on their partnering with institutional donors. Thus, understanding the relational ties has become increasingly important to study, academically but also societally. This article answers thus to the following questions: (1) How is the EU’s humanitarian aid network structured? (2) How does it evolve? (3) What does this entail in terms of relationship and balance of power between donors and implementing partners? Following a two-step research design, this research project will (1) use Social Network Analysis (SNA) based on 21.220 funding contracts from 2016 to 2025 to identify who are the actors in the EU humanitarian network, how do they position themselves in the latter and what are the partnering trends (project and geographically wise) occurring in the last decade. The research project will then rely on (2) a qualitative analysis based on semi-structured interviews to provide further insights on how actors decide to partner and on what basis, based on the previous findings. This project expects to encounter the following results: both donors and implementing partners select their partner based on the latter’s’ means (i.e. level or acceptance of control), rationales (i.e. political and geographical priorities) and structure (i.e. (de-)centralized administration). Moreover, implementing partners and donors both select each other considering their existent closeness in the network.
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Piron, A. (2025). The EU’s Humanitarian Aid Network, its Trends and the Derived Selection Mechanisms Behind Partnerships. UACES Annual Conference 2025, Liverpool. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/248958