Interdisciplinary PhD – Impact of humanitarian aid on recipient societies

The Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Economics and Business (both at the University of Groningen, NL) offer a four-year PhD scholarship within a joint interdisciplinary project led by Prof. Herman Hoen and Dr Clara Egger (IRIO, Faculty of Arts) and Prof Robert Inklaar & Dr Anna Minasyan (Global Economics and Management FEB).

The PhD candidate will join the project “A recipe for resilience or for disaster? Assessing the impact of humanitarian aid on t recipient societies” to investigate whether humanitarian aid contributes to the resilience of crisis-affected societies or on the contrary further exposes them to disasters.

The project contributes to the research hub on disaster resilience of the Rudolf Agricola School for Sustainable Development.

Project background
Over the past decades, humanitarian aid – delivered during and in the aftermath of man-made crises and disasters caused by natural hazards - has gained importance in international politics. Primarily, humanitarian aid provides crisis-affected societies with essential life-saving resources. In 2021, close to USD 31 billion was channeled to crisis locations around the world. Meanwhile, an increasing range of governments (as diverse as Algeria, China or Thailand) are dedicating specific budget lines towards this cause. This important interplay between politics and cross-country resource redistribution has sparked the interest of an increasing number of scholars across disciplines – economics and political science/ international studies – to study the drivers and impacts of humanitarian aid.

So far, the extant research has painted a gloomy picture of the effectiveness of humanitarian aid and shown that such aid is driven by political motives, often results in elite capture or corruption, and it creates rather than mitigates violence and civil conflicts. Overall media and scholarly accounts tend to show that, despite a commitment to do no harm, humanitarian aid has strong adverse effects on crisis-affected societies. Only limited evidence points towards positive externalities of humanitarian assistance, such as an increase in trust between aid providers and recipients. Hence, there is a lack of comprehensive research and understanding of the broader impacts of emergency aid on post-crisis economic recovery, political inclusiveness and stability, and conflict mitigation.

Besides contributing knowledge on the determinants of the effectiveness of humanitarian aid, this project strengthens the evidence-base of policy-makers designing humanitarian aid strategies in development cooperation ministries in the Netherlands and beyond. As the impact of climate change is likely to increase the likelihood of disasters in the future, it is urgent to gain a better understanding of the impacts of humanitarian aid on crisis-affected societies.