Humanitarian Futures Programme
The Humanitarian Futures Programme (HFP) is an independent policy research programme based at King's College London which strives to act as a catalyst within the humanitarian sector to stimulate greater interest in more strategic approaches to the changing types, dimensions and dynamics of future humanitarian crises. Through a wide-ranging programme of research, policy engagement, and technical assistance HFP promotes new ways of planning, collaborating and innovating so that organisations with humanitarian roles and responsibilities can deal with future humanitarian threats more effectively.
HFP is committed to enabling those with humanitarian responsibilities to effectively manage the potential consequences of a much more complex and uncertain future. Our aim is to support those with humanitarian responsibilities to develop the organisational structures and leadership to become more adaptive and to effectively engage and collaborate with a wide range of actors. HFP works with a range of actors to strengthen their skills to anticipate evolving and emerging threats and identify the technological, scientific, social and political innovations that will allow longer-term speculation as to what might be, as well as the capacities needed to manage widening vulnerability and increasing humanitarian demands.
HFP is part of the King’s Policy Institute, which aims to create a bridge between policy makers and King’s academic and research excellence.
The programme director is Dr. Randolph Kent, a former UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Somalia and several other East African crisis zones.
Current Projects
Science Humanitarian Dialogue
There remains tremendous potential for science and technology to better support community resilience building. Unlocking this potential is dependent on strengthening the exchange of knowledge or ‘dialogue’ between those with scientific and technological risk, directly affected people and those bodies which seek to support them, and HFP efforts have been focused on developing understanding regarding those approaches and frameworks which can best support this process.
Military Capacities for Humanitarian Action
The types, dimensions and dynamics of humanitarian crises are dramatically increasing – in some instances, exponentially. Capacities needed to prevent, prepare for and respond to such crises go well beyond the humanitarian sector as presently configured, and require a much wider range of competencies and capacities as well as human and financial resources than normally used by humanitarian actors. Bringing together international representatives from the military, the humanitarian sector, governments and the private sector through a series of thematic focus groups, key informant interviews, a 1 ½ day scenario exercise, and end of project workshop, the project will develop the knowledge base on the current and potential use of military capacities for humanitarian crisis prevention/risk reduction, preparedness and response.
FOREWARN Initiative
Facilitating Enhanced Organisational Responsiveness for Effective West African Risk Reduction: The West Africa region is vulnerable to a range of actual, emerging and potential threats. Over the coming decades, the complexities, interrelationships and dimensions of those threats will require an approach for anticipating and responding to crises that is significantly different from that of the present.
The Private Sector Challenge
Risks and Opportunities in Crisis Situations Increasingly, policy-makers and planners are inclined to look to the ‘private sector’ as a source for engaging in a range of activities that traditionally have been the responsibility of governments and international and non-governmental organisations. This trend is well established across a range of development services – from public…
Urban Futures
HFP is currently working with Save the Children International on the future of humanitarian action in urban contexts, in order to inform how a new Humanitarian Affairs Unit within SCI can harness speculative and future-oriented thinking in order to anticipate and adapt to future challenges in the urban environment.
Cash Transfer Programming
The Cash Learning Partnership (CaLP) has commissioned a HFP to undertake a study in 2013 to address the following overarching research question: Are NGOs, UN organisations, donors, governments and policy makers that implement, fund and influence emergency cash transfer programming ‘fit for the future’? The analysis will focus on the trajectory of cash programming within the evolving humanitarian sector, in parallel analysis of the capacity of NGOs, UN organisations, donors, governments, private sector agents and policy makers to enable, provide, support, monitor and guide the growth.
Assessment frameworks and organisational self-assessment tool
HFP tries to develop assessment frameworks for determining the anticipatory and adaptive capacities of humanitarian organisations. The overall assessment framework is designed for outside analysts and peer group reviews to assess individual organisations’ capacities for dealing strategically with future threats and mitigation opportunities.
One instrument is the Organisational Self Assessment Tool (OSAT), a questionnaire which asks respondents to give their personal views on future humanitarian threats, the organisation’s ability to anticipate future threats, to adapt to them, to innovate and to collaborate with new types of organisations.
Outputs and reports
- "Dimensions of Crisis: humanitarian needs by 2015", HFP, Humanitarian Futures Programme, 17 January 2007.
- "Responding to Catastrophes: US Innovation in a Vulnerable World", HFP, Kent, R. & Ratcliffe, J., March 2008.
- "The Future of Humanitarian Assistance: The Role of the United Nations", HFP, Kent, R., Dalton, M., von Hippel, K. & Maurer, R., 2004.