Strategic Considerations
3.4 The Rule for Aggregation: Is the Provision of Humanitarian Assistance a Public Good?
A decisive question for understanding the nature of interaction in the provision of humanitarian assistance is whether the provision of assistance to people in need is a public good. If it were a public good, this would mean that potential donors who decide not to contribute to humanitarian financing would nevertheless profit from the provision of
assistance, but not bear any costs. The constituencies of those countries not taking part in relief operations would profit from the action taken by other countries’ government. This logic has been formalised in the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ (see e.g. Sandler, 1997). In case actors in the humanitarian community were facing a social dilemma in the form of a Prisoner’s Dilemma, individually rational behaviour would lead to suboptimal outcomes for the participants in the game, as the dominant strategy would be defection.
A variant of the Prisoner’s Dilemma lacking a dominant strategy and probably closer to the strategic situation, in which actors in the field of humanitarian assistance may find themselves is the ‘Volunteer’s Dilemma’, which Diekmann (1985) defines as a game lacking a dominant strategy, but in which the pursuit of self-interest might lead to pareto-inferior results as well.
In case one player bears costs, the other players will be able to ‘free ride’ and derive utility from the provision of the public good, whereas the volunteer only gains utility minus costs.
Assuming that there is no communication among the actors, there is no simple answer to the question of rational behaviour in a volunteer’s dilemma (Diekmann, 1986: 189). Diekmann’s experimental results show a diminishing chance of cooperative actions with a growing size of the group. This means that the chances for a donor to be active in a specific relief operation would diminish with additional potential donors.
Therefore, if humanitarian funding followed the logic of a Volunteer’s Dilemma, one would expect only a few donors to be active in a specific case and other potential donors to free ride. Also, one would expect to have a fair share of multilateral assistance on total assistance as players in a social dilemma situation will try to improve the functioning of the system by enhancing control mechanisms that ensure contributions by all players in the game. Except for being able to decide more quickly in a bilateral way of cooperation, there would be no advantage of a bilateral strategy over multilateral action as the utility the actors derive stems from the provision of humanitarian assistance itself and gains are not reserved to a specific donor.
In order to tentatively assess, which rule for aggregation best describes the strategic situation of the provision of humanitarian responses to natural disasters, I will undertake a descriptive analysis on the number of donors active per case and on the share of multilateral assistance on total assistance.
Number of Donors Active per Case
The question addressed is under which circumstances a donor becomes active. As we have seen, this decision is connected to the hypothesised rule for aggregation. Two different strategies could be followed in the strategic interaction of potential donors. Either a potential donor could refrain from making a contribution to disaster relief in case other donors have already become active. Or, in order to improve relations with close cooperation partners in international affairs, a potential donor could be encouraged to make a donation in case his fellow donors want to take part in a relief operation thus showing good will and ensuring cooperative behaviour by his counterparts.
Also, it might be interesting to look into whether a very close cooperation in several policy fields, like in the European Union, makes a change in strategic interaction. One could expect that with closer cooperation, it was to become more likely that a greater number of donors becomes active in a relief operation.
Figure 2 shows the number of OECD donors / EU donors active per case. The distribution looks very similar in overall OECD and EU donors’ participation.
Figure 2: Active Donors per Case, OECD Donors and EU Donors
Number of OECD donors active in case
24
Number of EU donors active in case
13
Source: Author’s calculations on own dataset.
Unexpectedly, the European Union’s donors seem to be less active on a bilateral basis than OECD donors in general. Whereas no activity of any OECD donor was reported for 10% of the cases, inactivity amounted to 35% for EU donors. Having provided multilateral budgets
for assistance already, which were not included in the analysis may figure among the reasons for less donor activity within the European Union. Yet, to look into this matter lies beyond the scope of this study.
The shape of the distribution makes for the supposition that with the case of humanitarian assistance in the aftermath of natural disasters, donors are facing a Volunteer’s Dilemma.
The apparent existence of a Volunteer’s Dilemma indicates that for the inactive donors, extra utility to be derived from taking part in a relief operation minus the costs they would have to bear is lower than the utility they derive from the provision of the public good of humanitarian assistance without actively taking part in it.
Although a Volunteer’s Dilemma leads to a small number of active donors per case, this does not directly imply a lower level of humanitarian financing. However, it seems to be reasonable to expect this for most of the cases. Also, the existence of a Volunteer’s Dilemma strengthens the case against donor interests leading to a disproportionate allocation of aid flows. If humanitarian funding in the wake of a natural disaster was a public good, it would not be reasonable to assume special donor’s interests to distort the allocational pattern.
The Volunteer’s Dilemma situation does not seem to be solved through an institutionalisation, which could ensure the rotation of donor activity among the members of a board. This can make case for a low level of importance governments attach to their fellow donors’ activity in disaster relief, perhaps due to the relatively low share of the national budget spent on disaster relief operations.