The "Global study on participation by affected populations in humanitarian aid" involved case studies during 2002 of five countries with significant humanitarian activities. This summary presents the findings of a Mission to Angola from September 25^th to November 10^th 2002 that involved a review of documents and 50 interviews in the capital, Luanda, and in the Province of Huambo where there have been a variety of different humanitarian situations and actors.

The hypotheses of the Global Study are that participation and consultation can improve the impact of humanitarian action, and are possible in humanitarian action. The Angola case study aimed to test these hypotheses by appraising the level of participation by affected populations in humanitarian aid, describing and analysing existing practices and approaches to participation and consultation in Angola and identifying important lessons. Humanitarian programmes were defined broadly. The definition includes emergency programmes (that stress rapid action) as well as programmes that aim to respond to ongoing crises with longer time-frames. Participation and consultation were defined in the study as processes in which affected populations and humanitarian actors work together to understand and strengthen preferred ways of meeting survival needs in times of stress.

Conflict in Angola lasted from 1961 to 2002, with a few periods of peace. Each phase of war in Angola has led to its own waves of displaced people and refugees. There have been periods of acute crisis in Angola (such as October 1992 to November 1994, and late 1998 to 2000). During the intervening years, normally described by Angolans as "not war but not peace", there were short-term acute crises in certain areas. But generally the crisis was a long-running, structural one with various dimensions. Vulnerability was caused by the collapse of the economy, poor services and weakened institutions.

International humanitarian aid to Angola was very limited before 1990, but has grown rapidly since. The long-running nature of the crisis, and its various dimensions, has led to a variety of different humanitarian agencies operating in Angola, with different perceptions of their relations with the affected populations. These range from agencies that perceive consultation and participation in an instrumental way (that is as possibly useful in the realisation of actions to save lives) to those who see the main objective of humanitarian programmes as increasing people’s capacity to take decisions that affect their lives. Agencies with different mandates and perceptions often work in the same area. This can produce tensions as approaches to the same situation differ. While there is a consensus that humanitarian intervention in Angola has saved many lives, there is also a debate about it. One criticism is about the form of humanitarian action during acute crises and its top-down nature. A second is that interventions designed for short-term crises continued for more than 10 years. A third criticism is that the prolonged humanitarian interventions have caused dependency, and damaged coping mechanism and community institutions. The latter two criticisms are much more common than the former.

Interviews with humanitarian actors in Angola during the Case Study suggest that there have been three different approaches to humanitarian activity in Angola. The first is a pure emergency approach that aims to respond to acute crises through actions that directly save lives. The second approach aims to respond to an ongoing crisis through actions that save lives more indirectly, supporting household and community coping strategies, protection of vulnerable groups and peace building. The third approach stresses sustainability, the development of community capacities and the development of citizenship. Examples of participation and consultation in humanitarian action in Angola will be described for each approach separately.

Few examples were found, during the fieldwork, of participation and consultation during acute crises. In such situations, the emphasis seems to have been on "delivery" through standardised programmes. Humanitarian agencies oriented to emergency actions seemed unaware of, and uncomfortable with, the discourse of participation and consultation and felt that they would have hindered quick action without adding any value. Some interviewees however, both inside and outside emergency agencies, felt that these perceptions ought to be challenged, and that many of the reasons for the low level of participation and consultation are related to agency practices and culture and not to the context. One interesting example is ICRC’s planning of emergency interventions in remote, newly-accessible areas in the north of Huambo Province. An ICRC team spends a week discussing needs in an area with various sections of the affected population, who then participate in the relief programme by improving access roads and buildings.

Interviewees from humanitarian organisations often mentioned consultation as a way to improve vulnerability assessment, which is important in an unstable social, political and security environment. In Angola, humanitarian information systems have improved greatly over the last 10 years. The Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping Unit of the World Food Programme produces an analysis of food insecurity every six months in 11 of the 18 provinces of Angola. There is, however, some recognition by those involved that this Analysis is based largely on the impressions and opinions of key informants (NGOs and government officials), and incorporates little information about the survival strategies and perceived needs of the affected populations. Save the Children (UK) has tried to do incorporate these elements through household food security assessments in Huambo and Kuito cities in 2000 and 2001, though they are expensive to carry out.

As noted above, most questioning of humanitarian action in Angola has been about the fact that humanitarian agencies continued in "emergency mode" for longer than necessary and did not take into account the patchwork of different situations in different parts of the country. The long-running Angolan crisis created a wider range of problems, but these tended to be neglected. Temporary solutions were applied over an extended time-scale and so became inappropriate responses. There are some examples of situations where consultation has proved effective in identifying hidden problems and innovative solutions.

One example is of people in Huambo Province who were displaced by a new phase of war in 1998 and lived in appalling conditions in old buildings for more than a year. When it became clear that insecurity was likely to continue, large camps for displaced people were opened. However some agencies decided to consult more deeply and found that IDPs wanted to live alongside their original community in conditions that resembled their villages, and to have access to land. Humanitarian agencies thus helped them to build temporary "new villages", which was judged to be a successful experience in relation to the larger IDP camps. The main regret by the humanitarian agencies was that they did not do this earlier. Another example is the work of certain agencies focusing on children that, through consultation, pinpointed problems of adjustment to school by IDP children and devised solutions.

Although there has been a limited culture of participation and consultation in Angola, there is a strong, minority current of opinion in Angola that considers that development efforts should focus on participation and consultation. The local NGO ADRA has the most thought-out philosophy regarding participation and consultation in a long-term, structural crisis such as Angola. ADRA is critical of humanitarian action that has intervened for long periods without giving opportunities for consultation and participation. It feels that humanitarian actors, because of their presence at the community level in many areas of the country, have an important role in rebuilding citizen – state reciprocity. ADRA has experimented with a participative method of community development involving mutual learning between ADRA teams and affected populations, so that the latter achieve a certain level of autonomy, affirmation of citizenship and improved living conditions. This involves the recovery of community forms of organisation, while introducing modernising elements, and supporting the (weak) local government structures to relate to communities.

ADRA’s view is that this approach implies people’s own social organisations being involved in the distribution of food-aid and other relief items, where possible. Some other humanitarian actors report that they leave a considerable amount of responsibility IDP camp organisation and aid distribution to IDP’s elected representatives. This is a position strongly contested by some of the emergency-oriented humanitarian organisations, who argue that distributions through social organisations encourage corruption.

This disagreement illustrates the fact that participation and consultation require an understanding by humanitarian agencies of local social organisation in each particular context. In Angola, participation is not deeply embedded in social life as it is in Andean countries, for example. Forced displacement has accentuated the disintegration of community organisations that began in the colonial era. There may be no ready-made social organisations to plug into. However personnel of humanitarian organisations who move frequently from one emergency to another may not appreciate such differences in social organisation.

Some humanitarian organisations have looked at experiences of community participation in food-aid distribution in Tanzania. These experiences have been in a context of peace and stability. Implementation of such an approach might be more difficult in Angola, where these conditions are rarely met. But where humanitarian agencies have worked with local communities and other conditions can be created the approach may be appropriate.

Thus, in conclusion, Angola has been perceived by many humanitarian agencies and donors as an emergency that required top-down, pre-defined interventions. Generally approaches have been non-consultative and non-participative. However there is a strong current of opinion that humanitarian agencies should have consulted affected populations much more quickly after the peak of acute crises, because when people were eventually consulted it resulted in programmes with completely different approaches. Furthermore critics argue that humanitarian action should have had a wider scope, strengthening the fabric of a disintegrating society, including the promotion of more generalised participation and consultation. Despite the lives saved by humanitarian action, mortality rates in Angola are exceptionally high, due to widespread poverty and inequality, and poor health services. In a long-running crisis, humanitarian agencies should not ignore the wider causes of vulnerability.

Organisations with a purely emergency mandate should not necessarily try to be involved in development or participatory projects, as they do not seem to have the necessary long-term presence or organisational culture for such approaches. But such organisations should improve their understanding of the local context and of the approaches of other organisations. Humanitarian agencies need to consider how to create more effective coordination, leave space for each other’s activities, and avoid competitive relations and specific agency agendas (such as publicity) that hinder coordination. Rapid-response emergency teams from agency HQs create particular tensions.

Humanitarian agencies that are both emergency and development agencies expressed concern that their participative approaches in development work did not carry over into emergency work, because the participative approach is not deeply rooted in the agency. Promising initiatives (such as a network of community health groups in Huambo city) tend to be lost when particular personnel leave. High staff turnover negatively affects institutional memory. Humanitarian agencies need to find ways to avoid burn-out so that key personnel can stay longer and also monitor and understand the context in which they are operating.