Strategic Leveraging of Humanitarian Funding by Non-Traditional Donors

Recent literature has shown how member states strategically use earmarked funding as a substitute for weighted voting to exert control over IOs (Graham and Serdaru 2020). This is also the case of IOs with a humanitarian mandate: state-led Executive Boards have limited oversight on how these organisations spend their core budget. As a result, over the years traditional donors have resorted to earmarking an increasing share of total multilateral humanitarian aid. Meanwhile, the gap between humanitarian needs and available humanitarian aid has reached unprecedented highs. To make up for the funding gap and the shrinking core budget, traditional donors have repeatedly called for humanitarian IOs to broaden their donor base to include non-traditional (i.e. non-UN DAC) state donors. While earmarking is partly justified by traditional donors’ accountability to taxpayers, some fear it might deter new donors to commit. This paper investigates the extent to which growing rates of earmarking affect humanitarian IOs’ ability to broaden their donor base at a time when available resources are shrinking and humanitarian needs are skyrocketing. The findings illustrate how non-traditional donor countries are reluctant to step up their assessed contributions and their involvement in the Executive Boards of UN organizations and opt for alternative, regional channels to deliver humanitarian aid.