The humanitarian sector needs transnational administration, but it also needs ingenuity, agility and energy to create new forms of humanitarian action to replace the dominant practices of humanitarian bureaucracies if their pace and approach is at odds with the times. Bureaucracies also, of course, tend to develop deep vested interests in the status quo. There are important things which bureaucracies struggle to do, like making quick decisions, cooperating with one another, showing a human face and giving their employees a vibrant sense of agency and impact. Weber notes that the ‘permanence’ of bureaucracies is their great strength, while charisma often bursts into light at moments of crisis to fade again when it has changed the course of events. Bureaucracies and bureaucrats do provide important services like institutionalizing and sustaining values, creating and spreading sound policy, achieving wide coverage and scale, and giving people careers. Humanitarian action certainly needs effective administration and the well-organized allocation of resources, which a good bureaucracy provides.
The retreat of charisma from humanitarian organizations is a challenge for us all. He noted how charisma inevitably ‘retreats’ in the face of bureaucracy or becomes ‘routinized’.
The great nineteenth century German sociologist, Max Weber, wrote brilliantly and presciently about the tension between charisma and bureaucracy while the modern administrative State was being formed across Europe. Here, Hugo Slim examines the bureaucratization of humanitarian action as the single biggest change in the sector since the 1980s, identifying eight key features that characterize humanitarian bureaucracy in many such organizations today and exploring whether we can encourage simpler and more dynamic forms of humanitarian action. Last week, the incoming Director-General of the ICRC stressed the importance of reducing bureaucracy in humanitarian action.
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