Abstract
Environment mainstreaming across the humanitarian operations and long-term development programs is imperative to the new way of working agreed in the World Humanitarian Summit (2016). Mainstreaming environment in Humanitarian-Development nexus is crucial to minimize the environmental impacts of humanitarian projects and to build long term resilience against environmental and climatic risks and vulnerabilities of communities. This study explores the current environmental mainstreaming strategies of humanitarian and development organizations at the institutional and operational level based on specific attributes. This study conducts the case study of leading humanitarian and development organizations, namely, WFP, IFRC, UNDP, and USAID, based on the conceptual framework on mainstreaming strategies derived from various literature. Multiple case study approach was employed based on information collected through various secondary sources and personal consultation with the organizations. The finding of this study signifies the presence of varying environmental mainstreaming practices within the studied organizations, and comparative analysis among them is also presented. Finally, this study suggests that joint contextual environmental (and climate) analysis by humanitarian and development actors and inclusion of environmental consideration in collaborative multi-year programming to minimize environmental damage in protracted crises.
Highlights
Environment is one of the main pillars of the 2030 agenda for sustainable development (UN, 2015)
World Food Program (WFP) Strategic Plan (2017-2021) sets the achievement of sustainable food systems as a strategic result indicator under one of its strategic objectives. This is to be achieved by promoting healthy ecosystems, improving land and soil quality, and enhancing adaptation capacity to climate change, extreme weather, and disasters. (WFP, 2017c)
The organizations have been prioritizing the environmental concerns in their strategic plans either to reduce environmental footprints of emergency assistance or to integrate environment along with climate change, disaster risk management, or sustainable natural resource management aspects in development cooperation
Summary
Environment is one of the main pillars of the 2030 agenda for sustainable development (UN, 2015). Recognizing the accelerating protracted nature of humanitarian crises and long-standing divide among humanitarian and development actors in the field; the New Way of Working (NWoW) was agreed on World Humanitarian Summit (2016) among the UN agencies, donors, bilateral organizations, NGOs and others to work coherently for collective outcomes in a multi-year timeframe. This humanitariandevelopment nexus approach envisions meeting the emergency needs and reducing the risk and vulnerabilities of people to meet the SDGs (OCHA, 2017). This study intends to fill the gap in the academic literature about the comparative analysis of environmental mainstreaming strategies of humanitarian and development organizations
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