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HISTORY

The 70’s and 80’s: focus on disaster response

The Steering Committee for Humanitarian Response (originally named the Licross Volags Steering Committee for Disasters) was founded in 1972 by Oxfam UK and Ireland, the League of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the World Council of Churches, the Lutheran World Federation and Catholic Relief Services. The primary reason for the establishment of this informal group was to find ways to improve coordination at the international level.

The Committee, which consisted of the chief executives of member organisations, shared information about disaster situations and carried out studies on issues of concern related to disaster preparedness and relief. It sponsored a rapid exchange information system between its members and the Office of the United Nations Disaster Relief Coordinator (UNDRO) during disasters.

Spearheading accountability in humanitarian action and promoting good practices

SCHR was the original sponsor of the “Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs in Disaster Relief” (1998) which sets ethical standards for organisations involved in humanitarian work.  SCHR and InterAction launched the Sphere project in 1997 to set minimum standards in core areas of humanitarian assistance.

SCHR members then carried out two peer reviews to see how organisations were implementing their commitments and to learn from one another. The first peer review (2003-2007) reviewed members’ progress in addressing issues of sexual exploitation and abuse of people affected by crisis. The second (2008-2010) looked into how SCHR members dealt with the issue of accountability to affected populations.

SCHR has developed a number of positions on issues of relevance for the wider humanitarian community such as breaches in humanitarian principles (1999), the implementation of the Brahimi report (2000), small arms (2001), humanitarian-military relations (2001, 2004 and 2010) and integrated missions (2004, together with ICVA).

SCHR actively engaged in the Humanitarian Reform initiated in 2005 as a standing invitee at the Inter-Agency Steering Committee (IASC). It then promoted expected outcomes of the IASC's Transformative Agenda.

More recently

In line with SCHR members' commitments to humanitarian principles and their belief in the need to be explicit about what constitutes principled humanitarian action, SCHR worked on designing and testing an approach to define and measure the application of humanitarian principles, with a focus on the principle of impartiality. The results of this work also fed into the development of the Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability (CHS) which specifies what people affected by crisis can expect from good humanitarian action and what this entails for the organisations and their staff involved in the response.  

Driven by SCHR’s vision of a future in which affected populations participate in shaping the kind of assistance they receive and their relationship with aid providers, SCHR promotes the application of the CHS as well as independent quality assurance mechanisms for NGOs which are interested in an objective assessment of their progress in implementing the CHS and / or an independent assurance of compliance with the standard, delivered in line with internationally recognised norms for certification.

Currently

SCHR Principals decided in May 2016 that their collective work over the coming years would focus on the issue of power within the humanitarian sector and how to re-balance it away from providers of assistance to people affected by crisis, building on the momentum from their conferences Humanitarian Action in 2025 and Humanitarian Leadership in 2025, the World Humanitarian Summit and the Grand Bargain.

As SCHR considers how to shift power away from those who resource and implement humanitarian assistance to those who need it, it is concentrating on a better understanding of how power structures and dynamics impact on their own organisations and their relations with others in the humanitarian eco-system: SCHR's peer review of current practices provides insights into enablers and disenablers of effective participation; its conference “Participation is Power: Keep it, Share it or Give it Away?” argues that achieving a better balance of power between those providing assistance and protection and those on the receiving end requires sustained leadership and whole-of-organisational drive.

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