Mapping Humanitarian Academic Capability in the UK

Humanitarian crises are becoming increasingly severe and complex. Diverse, context-specific expertise and experience is essential to develop and deliver novel, effective and sustainable solutions to address them.

The UK is one of the leading funding recipients and producers of humanitarian research and innovation. This means that significant resources are going into the UK, mostly from UK-based donors, to develop leading capacity and expertise to understand and develop innovative and evidence-based solutions for humanitarian challenges.

This comes with a critical responsibility – to ensure that the resulting expertise, capacity and knowledge are easily available and accessible to those who most need it to address global humanitarian challenges.

Yet that is not always the case. Humanitarian expertise situated within UK academia can be difficult to locate, access and deploy in the rapid timescales of a humanitarian emergency.

To help humanitarians, as well as relevant conveners and intermediaries with this process, we have supported the UK Humanitarian Innovation Hub (UKHIH) to build the Directory of Humanitarian Academic Research Centres in the UK.

Challenges in understanding the humanitarian academic landscape

It can be challenging to identify who in UK academia contributes to the humanitarian sector.

A first challenge is that of labelling. Not every research centre or individual involved in, or capable of contributing to, the humanitarian sector labels their work as ‘humanitarian’. Terms such as ‘disaster’, ‘crisis’, ‘conflict’, and ‘development’, among others, are sometimes used, complicating the search for expertise. In addition, some academics specialise in a particular subject matter that can be applied to humanitarian contexts, but this may not be at the core of how they describe their area of focus. This makes it less straightforward to understand who is in the space and how their expertise can be applied.

A second challenge is that of the fluidity of individual academics’ interests and specific projects and the ability to record and keep this up to date. Compared to other countries, most UK universities have relatively detailed profiles for individual academics, as well as associated research and interests. However, maintaining these profiles up to date is often a challenge as specialisms change and projects may quickly succeed. Another limitation is that these profiles often emphasise a curated selection of academic outputs rather than projects with a more practical application. In addition, few profiles speak to the experts’ availability or capacity to offer support, or the type of support they are able to offer.

Similarly, existing aggregate platforms such as Konfer, a UK match-making tool for connecting universities with funding and business opportunities, rely on similar sources such as university websites, ORCID and ResearchGate to generate academic profiles; therefore, they share the challenges of being able to accurately capture and present current and relevant expertise.

As a result, academics are sometimes approached about a topic outside of their specialisation and aren’t able to redirect inquiries appropriately. Networking among UK humanitarian academics varies significantly. In well-established areas such as water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH), academics often know each other on a first-name basis and can recommend who is best placed to respond to certain crises. In contrast, in less formalised humanitarian domains, there is limited awareness of peers, both within and outside of their university, who are working on similar or adjacent topics.

The implications of this lack of visibility and understanding of where specific humanitarian academic expertise lies are numerous and severe. These may include delayed humanitarian response times, suboptimal humanitarian decision-making as key actors are not able to access the latest expertise and insights, and an increased duplication of efforts as humanitarians may unknowingly replicate research or interventions that have already been conducted or proven ineffective.

A directory of UK academic expertise

One route towards better understanding and navigating the UK humanitarian academic landscape is to increase the visibility of existing centres of expertise, and build on the strategic role and understanding of intermediaries who can quickly source relevant and available expertise.

To enable this, we have supported the UKHIH with the development of a Directory of Humanitarian Academic Research Centres in the UK.

By leading with academic research centres explicitly focused on different aspects of humanitarian crises, our intention is that these will be well placed to liaise with own academics and more quickly source experts who have the right expertise and availability to respond to specific asks from diverse stakeholders experiencing humanitarian crises.

We recognise that this approach and directory has its limitations. It is currently focused on academic expertise that is directly associated with humanitarian work. But academics from other disciplines or fields such as engineering, data science, and AI are equally likely to be able to meaningfully contribute to humanitarian challenges. To allow for their future inclusion, we designed this directory as a flexible live resource which could easily scale to include diverse centres of expertise interested in contributing to the humanitarian sector.

The directory is currently focused on UK academic expertise. This starting point was chosen as it is core to the support the UKHIH is able to offer to global stakeholders, but also because the current structure of the UK humanitarian academic ecosystem is not open and accessible enough for those who are entitled to benefit from it. Together with the UKHIH, we recognise that local experts, including academics, practitioners, innovators, and connectors are uniquely positioned to work on the challenges they face. By consciously designing the directory as a resource that keeps humans in the loop as key intermediaries and facilitators, our intention is to foster nuanced conversations not only around the complexities of humanitarian challenges and the expertise required, but also about how and when it is appropriate for UK academics to contribute their knowledge. As the directory starts being used by the wider humanitarian community, we are open and interested in seeing how this could scale to increase the visibility and accessibility of local expertise.

We hope this directory will support a more connected and collaborative community of diverse stakeholders, including academics, able to come together to make their specific knowledge and experience available to those working on solving pressing humanitarian challenges.