Resetting humanitarian needs: A discussion with Hugo Slim

In this episode of 'A Matter of Priorities,' as the sector as a whole looks at a 'humanitarian reset,' our host Alice Obrecht delves into the definition of a humanitarian need with Hugo Slim and how these boundaries might be redefined. 

The episode features insights from Hugo Slim, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford, who discusses the need to redefine humanitarian needs through six theoretical approaches and three core questions that agencies should address. 

The conversation further explores the ethical dilemmas of prioritising short-term emergency aid over long-term recovery efforts, with practical examples such as displacement scenarios in South Sudan. The discussion underscores a shift towards focusing on vital interests and necessary programming over broader, optimal life improvements to better address urgent humanitarian crises.

Guests:
Katie Rickard, Impact Initiatives
Hugo Slim, Senior Research Fellow at the Las Casas Institute for Social Justice at Blackfriars Hall at the University of Oxford.

Hosts:
Alice Obrecht, Head of Research & Impact, ALNAP 

Resources

How should we define and prioritise humanitarian need? An ethics-based perspective for impact initiatives 

ALNAP’s A Matter of Priorities: a podcast on tough choices in humanitarian funding 

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Transcript

Alice Obrecht: Welcome to a Matter of Priorities. I'm Alice your host.

Alice Obrecht: On this podcast series, we've been exploring the significant pressures facing humanitarian aid agencies as funding for humanitarian action is. Falling. Falling at a time when crises are multiplying. We're now recording this episode after the closure of U-S-A-I-D in January of 2025, which has wiped billions of dollars off the ledger in foreign aid almost overnight, and was followed by the announcement of significant budget cuts by the Dutch and the UK shortly after.

Alice Obrecht: We are now hearing the emergency relief coordinator for the UN Tom Fletcher call for a humanitarian reset. And the sector is revisiting the definition of what is a humanitarian need and what is the role of humanitarian aid in the future. But these are not new topics, and if you've been listening to the previous episodes of this podcast, you'll know that the sector has already been engaged in this line of questioning for well over a year.

Alice Obrecht: With humanitarian country teams using a boundary setting exercise last year in the development of the humanitarian response plans to try to focus on a smaller number of targeted people. At the outset of this boundary setting exercise in 2024, we spoke with Hugo Slim, the esteemed humanitarian ethicist, who wrote two papers on the issue of prioritization and redefining humanitarian need.

Alice Obrecht: One of these papers was produced with Reach the Independent Needs Assessment and Research Organization that produces a lot of the needs assessment. Figures for humanitarian country teams. Here's Katie Rickard explaining why Reach commissioned this think piece from Hugo Slim and the kinds of prioritization challenges they see arising in crises.

Katie Rickard: It's deeply urgent right now. I think the reason why we want this to be a wider conversation and why we ask Huggos Slim to write that paper in the first place is at the moment it feels like these really ethical choices about who counts as a need, uh, what type of needs we should be prioritizing or not are being kind of delegated to this very technical sphere, um, where we're thinking about, you know, which indicators we should measure, which thresholds we should choose.

Katie Rickard: And of course, those questions are really important and technically complex. Before we get to that level, we should be first thinking kind of actually what types of need are more important than others. Should we prioritize lifesaving assistance over longer term recovery efforts? Um, and how do communities, like own perceptions of what's important, get factored into this?

Katie Rickard: And, and, and just to give you an example of kind how this plays out in, in practice. You know, recently in South Sudan we saw displacement, large scale displacement across a border. Um, most communities wanted. To stay in the, the location that they had displaced to because they perceived it to be safe. And they, and they really needed, uh, quite acute assistance, uh, to kind of prevent potential loss of life, um, for them in the new location where they had arrived.

Katie Rickard: However, there were some that were reporting that they were willing to send their children back to a location across the border that was deemed as unsafe at considerable risk to their children's lives in order to access long-term education opportunities. And this kind of poses a really difficult ethical dilemma.

Katie Rickard: Do we prioritise short term assistance? Okay, that might save some lives in the short term, but clearly populations are kind of themselves willing to put their own potential lives on the line in order to access this longer term, this longer term good. And it has implications on how we measure, um, do we measure acute malnutrition mortality rates, or in that circumstance, should we.

Katie Rickard: Should we be worrying about, uh, the quality and quantity of education services provided? Um, so these are the types of questions I think we should be having as a sector out loud, more explicitly, so that then they can inform the way that we, we measure and choose to, to assess populations and understand better their needs and their priorities and preferences.

Alice Obrecht: So these are really thorny, tricky questions and exactly the questions that are on everyone's line today. And this is why we were delighted to speak in detail with Hugo Slim on his proposals last year. Since Hugo's thinking on this is so rich and our conversation covered so many interesting areas, we have split his interview into two parts or episodes.

Alice Obrecht: In this episode, we discuss what is a humanitarian need, what are the six different approaches to defining needs that we've seen in our sector, and what are the three core questions that donors and agencies should be asking now to get a clear understanding of what humanitarian need means. In the next episode, we include a conversation we recorded with Hugo a few weeks ago to get his reflections on the US cuts and more recent developments.

Alice Obrecht: For now, here's our conversation on redefining humanitarian need based on Hugo's two papers. Yeah.

Hugo Slim: Hello Alice. Very nice to, um, talk to you. So I'm Hugo Slim and I am, um, a senior research fellow at the Las Casas Institute for Social Justice at Blackfriars Hall at the University of Oxford.

Alice Obrecht: So you write in the paper that was published by the Norwegian Center for Humanitarian Studies that, and I'm quoting here, a new approach to the definition and prioritisation of humanitarian needs is strategically urgent end quote.

Alice Obrecht: And you talk about the limitations of the current approach, which you've described quite, um. Provocatively as a Christmas tree of humanitarian need. Can you tell us what do you mean by the Christmas tree approach and why is rethinking our definition and prioritization of need important now

Hugo Slim: what, what I mean by the Christmas tree, and it's a, it's a terribly culturally, you know, centric image.

Hugo Slim: But what I mean is that it's a, a thing we keep adding more. Decorations too, if you like. So, you know, we, we know from the original sphere standards that, that sort of shelter, food, water, um, health, et cetera. And over my lifetime we've just added more and more needs to this thing. So, you know, we have extraordinary range of needs now, um, that are impact needs.

Hugo Slim: Like mental health, like education, um, like protection, which has grown enormously in protection of almost every human right. Um, in, in humanitarian thinking. And we have process needs which are added on too. So how are you gonna do this? You're gonna go this, do this with community engagement, with participation with, um, all sorts of processes, which also get an added on if you are.

Hugo Slim: You know, familiar with Christmas trees. That could be the tins, the lovely stuff that you fold around the tree, and then the needs of the sort of decorations that you, you put on it. But it's a very cluttered tree now, you know, it's got a lot of fruit on that everyone's meant to be concentrating on and trying to address.

Hugo Slim:And I suppose my concern about that is it's been a, you know, over the last 10, 20 years when there's been a lot of money in the system actually, and it's been a boom period over my lifetime, it's been possible for people just to say, right, this is now a humanitarian need. Um, and get money for it and start a new little team for it in their bureaucracy and expand it, and the whole thing becomes exponentially bigger.

Alice Obrecht: Because now of course we need technical advisors to help develop the policies around that, that need or theme. Yep. Um, your paper talks about six different approaches or theories of humanitarian need. Can you just briefly run us through those one by one?

Hugo Slim: So, yeah, so when I was writing the paper, I sort of was looking at the humanitarian sector and I was thinking, so what is their theory of needs?

Hugo Slim: And it struck me that their. They're probably using sort of a mixture of six. So the first one is basic needs theory that actually, you know, it goes back to Maslow and, um, other people that, you know, as humans, we have basic needs at the bottom of our pyramid of life, which are for sort of, you know, safety, security, food, water, shelter, and, um, social relations of some kind.

Hugo Slim: Um, so that's, that's the, the basic needs approach. Um. The second is the, is the more sort of ancient idea of, of goods that you know, to have a good life, you need certain good things. Um, and. They overlap with basic needs, but um, it includes more social things like friendships and, um, things like education.

Hugo Slim: That part of the good life is trying to, um, enrich your mind and understand, um, your place in the world, et cetera, et cetera. So the theory of human goods, but the other thing about goods is that it's being, you know, extended by. Economists in the modern era to think about public goods. So we can think about public goods from which we as individuals will benefit, like water systems, um, good government, um, you know, educational systems and ecosystem and all these things.

Hugo Slim: So we. We, we have that idea of goods, private goods, and public goods. The third idea, of course, is well known to humanitarians, particularly if they've done a master's course because it's SEN and SBAs approach to capabilities. So it's a sen and. Um, particular saying, actually, we don't just need lists of needs.

Hugo Slim: Um, that just makes everything a commodity, that you need food, you need this, you need that, and it makes, um, the process of development very commodified, makes people very passive. So his theory is that, in fact, the, the thing to develop and help people to develop is capabilities. That means taking away obstacles, um, you know, like.

Hugo Slim: Their education or poor markets or low, um, credit and finance, financial inclusion, take away those obstacles and help people develop capabilities with which they can meet their own needs. So that could be education freedom is a big thing for him that they can associate to form, um, groups and companies and businesses and these things too.

Hugo Slim: Prosper. And then the fourth one is, is rights, human rights. And in a funny way, you can think that human rights really is, um, the politicisation of those needs, goods and capabilities. So, you know, if I need food, um, I politicize that need by making to human right and agreeing a political contract with government and saying, government must help me, uh, secure my.

Hugo Slim: Um, need for food, my access to food, and the same with education and our capabilities and things. So that's. Rights, and there's a lot of right spaced humanitarian aid. And the fifth one is liberation. There's a consensus that actually what in a sense people really need to meet their needs is revolution and the finding of a just society.

Hugo Slim: And that involves liberation of consciousness and freeing a person's consciousness to understand why they're poor and that they're poor and why the system is wrong, and then leading a process of change with that new consciousness, a liberated process for people to find. A way to meet their needs and have a fairer society.

Hugo Slim: So I think probably Liberationist humanitarians are probably people who have, um, said that the system itself is flawed. The humanitarian system itself is flawed and it's run by a largely white I. Dominant, um, bourgeoisie if you like. And, um, hegemonic class of humanitarian of international humanitarians from the west.

Hugo Slim: And that system will never really help people meet their needs. It'll keep them as needy people getting supplies from humanitarians. Therefore, we need to decolonize that system and, um, you know, raise people's consciousness to resist those big international. Institutions and form their own and find their own solutions.

Hugo Slim: And then the last one is, is the sort of disaster one that comes to us through the disaster risk reduction community and the Sendai framework, which is resilience. And that's, you know, reached quite critical mass in the last few years. Um, I. And we'll go on doing. So that's the idea that what you really should be aiming for is resilience.

Hugo Slim: So you need to look what helps people being resilient, and those become critical factors and you focus on those. Um, so you know, in a simple way it might be, um, protection from hazards like storms and floods, or it may be, um, different kinds of resilience by realizing that people can only really survive if they have good.

Hugo Slim: Systems around them for health, education, et cetera. So you say you must have resilient systems, which people can draw on as they survive.

Alice Obrecht: So these are the six different normative approaches to thinking about humanitarian needs that Hugo has seen across the sector. Moving into the more practical realm, Hugo's argument is that there are three central questions that must be answered by any donor or agency that's trying to produce a practical way of defining and prioritizing humanitarian need.

Hugo Slim: I think they are. What is a distinctly humanitarian need? How wide is the range of humanitarian needs and how shall we prioritise between different needs and different people in need?

Alice Obrecht: We then asked Hugo to talk us through his answers to these three questions. So once again, starting with question number one, what is a distinctly humanitarian need?

Hugo Slim: I feel that, you know, with a lot of money and with a lot of ambition, the humanitarian sector over the last 10, 20 years has become quite utopian actually, and it's become in the jargon, very much an optimising project, which seems to. Seeks to optimize every aspect of people's lives rather than a satisficing project in which you are trying to satisfy the basic things that people need.

Hugo Slim: So I thought, um, it was important to say, right? If you're gonna call it humanitarian need, then you should take that word need seriously, and if need is in the impartiality principle, which it is that you work on need alone, then what is a need? And I actually. I tend to agree, um, that a need is rather a basic thing, and I therefore argue that a humanitarian need should be something which relates to what some philosopher call your vital interests, and vital as in life, the Vita in Italian, in Latin.

Hugo Slim: Um, you know, it's a life interest. Without that met, you will have harmed your life and risk death. So in my paper I argue that we need to go and really look seriously at the idea of needs and stick to them. So that means a humanitarian need is something that is necessary to a human life, not just beneficial.

Hugo Slim: And that's why I then make a distinction between life saving and life keeping. That humanitarians should be focusing, working with people to make sure that their life continues and that they can keep it at a certain level. They shouldn't be so much focusing on life making, which is the bigger process of.

Hugo Slim: Flourishing and, and finding ways to make life richer and richer emotionally, um, physically, economically, et cetera. So, I, I take the word need in its hard sense because I think humanitarians have to, because of the principles of humanity and impartiality, they make quite clear in humanity that their job is to protect life and health and ensure respect for the human being.

Hugo Slim: That's pretty basic. So that is really a vi vital interests and basic needs. And in the same way, when they talk about impartiality, how will they decide between people? They say we're gonna decide on need alone, especially the most, you know, serious cases of distress. So they are really working at the, um, the hard, lower end of the idea of a need.

Hugo Slim: And I think that's good. That's where they should stay. And the other reason to stay there is that they're not gonna have a lot of money in the future. They're gonna have a lot more people to try and help. So I would stick to vital interests and necessary, um, programming, not optimizing programming.

Hugo Slim: That's my sort of core commitment around what is a need.

Alice Obrecht: Okay. So according to Hugo, a humanitarian need reflects a vital interest. So let's move to question number two. How wide is the range of things that count as a vital interest? In other words, how big is the bucket?

Hugo Slim: So the next thing I tried to do was to help, um, humanitarians simplify the Christmas tree.

Hugo Slim: So instead of having endlessly incremental needs, which you add on and add on, and add on, and having this really vague, frankly incoherent approach across the sector about what is a humanitarian need, I've tried to focus down and say, well, let's talk about four areas of need. Which really hit upon those vital interests as things necessary to lifesaving and life keeping and not things that are beneficial to flourishing and life making is an optimizing project.

Hugo Slim: So the first area is health need, and this obviously focuses on bodily needs, and it does that because unless you protect the body. It will die. But it also does that because health is a basic precondition for meeting all the other needs. If you're not healthy, it's gonna be harder to meet your social needs and, um, you know, survive and find ways to become resilient.

Hugo Slim: So health is important to protect life, and it's important as a precondition. To meet all the other needs. And of course, we can then say that health is, is made good by being safe and not under attack. So safety food, clean water, shelter, sanitation. Um, and then, um, we have a [00:18:00] simple dial on the dashboard, if you like, which is health and which includes those things which create good health.

Hugo Slim: And then the second there is social need. Um, so people, you know, to to, to live a life, we need people around us. Yes, we're all individuals, but we only really can live in a community around us. So I think it's very important to identify social need as the second major. Um, humanitarian need. And again, in a sense there's sort of two types of that need.

Hugo Slim: There's that lovely, um, social sociality and you know, the Latinate word conviviality, where we live with each other, and that includes friendship and family and community, and people need that. They need to be part of a family and friends and a community to live. The second kind of social need they have is for associations of some kind that help them thrive.

Hugo Slim: And so that's businesses, um, political groupings that organize things the way they live, and cultural things that make them, um, happy and live with a certain identity. And of course, those two types of social need, um, are met today virtually and physically. So to respond to those as humanitarians and help people keep and, and, um, save that social life involves engagement.

Hugo Slim: Um, helping them engage in physical space. Um, but it also means helping them engage in virtual space in the way we so, you know, deal with each other so much now as we are in this interview, um, remotely through technology. The other thing I say that is important to remember in a social need is respect. Um, and I use this word because respect is in the principle of humanity, whereas dignity is not in the original version.

Hugo Slim: So if people feel known in a community, if they feel valued, if they know others, um, if they're actively playing a role in their cultural life and their livelihoods, um. In their educational life, et cetera, they have a sense of self-respect and they are more likely to be respected. And so for respect for the human being, which is part of the principle of humanity, um, in many ways emerges from social need being met.

Hugo Slim: The, the other thing there also is. The concept of humane treatment, which is, you know, a social treatment in a way, the way we treat each other, and in particular things like prisons and IDP camps. Humane treatment then becomes a social need, and humanitarians often have particular responsibility for humane treatment in the way they work with people.

Hugo Slim: Um, the courtesy they show them and the way they understand specific treatment for, um, people of different ages, genders, and abilities. So that's the social need bit. The third thing I pick up the idea of capabilities theory, and I say really what is the third need people have is survival capability. So here we can think about all the things they need to know.

Hugo Slim: All the things they need to know and all the things they need to be able to do and understand to survive in climate emergency in particular. Um, so elements of numeracy and literacy, um, certain skills. Um, and this gives them the capability to anticipate, reduce and adapt to climate hazards and risks. So this, for example.

Hugo Slim: Enables them to, um, contribute to early warning systems and anticipatory aid systems and to understand them and use them. So all sorts of survival capability, I think is a third big need that humanitarians should focus on. And they should just think of it like that and, and do many things to achieve, um, and help people achieve survival capability.

Hugo Slim: And then the fourth one is systems need. Because of course none of us can really, um, and this we're bare grills, I suppose. None of us can really survive without systems around us from which we draw our survival capability and we draw our resilience. In fact, and these are economic systems like markets and supply chains, but they're also, you know, by which we can make a living.

Hugo Slim: They're also infrastructure energy. Electricity, health, water, transport, communications, education, um, health and things. So we need systems. And that's why I point out very firmly that the fourth big need we have as human beings to survive are systems. And that includes the ecosystem. So a lot of things humanitarians and are doing around nature, nature-based solutions is helping people ensure an effective ecosystem around them.

Hugo Slim: Um. And that's very important. So health needs, social need, survival capability, and system need. And I think together those will save life, increase respect, and enable resilience. And so those are the sort of meta goals that we have in meeting needs. And um, I think it makes a simpler dashboard for humanitarians rather than ous blooming lines of things.

Hugo Slim: You can focus on, are we meeting, helping people to meet their health needs? Are we helping them to meet their social needs? Are we helping them to increase their survival capability? And are we supporting the system needs they have for various different systems? I think it might make life simpler.

Alice Obrecht: So do Hugo's proposed ideas for simplifying the humanitarian Christmas tree work.

Alice Obrecht: Let us know your thoughts by leaving us a comment on our social media channels, or if you want to be part of the conversation through this podcast or by writing a commentary, please reach out to us at comms@alnap.org. That's comms@alnap.org. Make sure you join us for the next episode where we explore Hugo's answer to the third question on how needs should be prioritized, as well as look at some challenges in his approach to limiting the scope of humanitarian need.

Alice Obrecht: We'll also check in with Hugo to hear how he has updated his thinking since last year in light of the massive cuts to humanitarian funding. Thank you for listening to a matter of priorities, a podcast by alap. For resources and links related to what we've talked about in today's episode, please check out the description.

Alice Obrecht: For more information on alap, please visit our website, www.alnap.org. And if you enjoyed this episode, please hit subscribe to our series wherever you get your podcasts.