The politics and spaces of public-private partnerships in humanitarian tech innovations

Abstract

The past decade has seen a growing engagement of tech companies in conflict settings to develop multifaceted technological innovations, including digital biometric identification to register refugees, commercial drones to deliver cargo, and big data-fuelled algorithms to predict the spread of crises. Humanitarian technology has been largely acclaimed as a way of making aid more effective and of triggering a paradigm shift in humanitarian governance by putting crisis-affected communities in what is claimed to be the driving seat of aid programmes. Critics are however wary about the negative impacts these innovations have on humanitarian practices and crisis-affected population. This paper contributes to this debate by assessing whether technological innovations fundamentally alter the politics and spaces of humanitarian governance. To do so, it analyses the way public private partnerships (PPPs) mediate between the interests of the various stakeholders of tech experiments and distribute power among them. Drawing upon the exploratory analysis of 22 tech projects in crisis settings, a typology of PPPs is formalised based on the way they distribute power and resources among their stakeholders. The results show that only one type of PPPs - community-based digital humanitarianism – has the potential of increasing the ownership of crisis-affected communities over aid programmes and localising projects in so-called Global South societies. The two other types – technologising the humanitarian business and externalising the lab to crisis settings – appear as a continuation of neo-colonial practices with a digital touch.