The Funding Cliff: Power, Prioritization, and Systemic Injustice in Global Humanitarian Response

• Florence School of Transnational Governance

The STG Talks, held weekly at the Florence School of Transnational Governance, serve as a space for discussion for the entire EUI community. Led by the Policy Leader Fellows, the Talks are a place for informal learning and exchange on global issues affecting different areas of policymaking.

In 2025, over 300 million people in crisis-hit countries will face life-threatening humanitarian emergencies due to protracted conflicts, climate-related disasters and mass displacement, affecting over 123 million refugees and internally displaced persons. Around one in every five children in the world are living in or fleeing from conflict zones. Women and girls are too often the worst hit, amid inadequate health care and an epidemic of gender-based violence. Despite escalating needs, international humanitarian assistance has failed to keep pace with demand. Significant budget reductions by major donors, including the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Canada, have created a funding cliff that forces humanitarian agencies into difficult prioritisation decisions, leaving millions of crisis-affected populations with inadequate support.

This STG Talk examines humanitarian caseload data and funding allocation patterns across 79 crisis-affected countries to identify what factors and parameters influence donor decisionmaking under severe resource constraints. Through a comprehensive analysis of population in need, funding flows, protection risks, food insecurity data, humanitarian access constraints, and political violence cases, this study reveals critical gaps between need and response. By adopting a critical analytical framework that scrutinise the humanitarian system's inherent power asymmetries, this research explores the tension between ethical imperatives of impartiality and needs-based assistance, geopolitical conditionality, and operational effectiveness. The findings illustrate how systemic inequities and epistemic injustice shape resource allocation and offer insights into the gap between humanitarian principles and practice in an increasingly constrained funding environment.

Speakers:

• Umutcan Yuksel, Policy Leader Fellow, STG
• Kristin Fabbe, Full-time Professor, STG
• Christopher Hopwood, Policy Leader Fellow, STG
• Amanda Bisong, Policy Leader Fellow, STG

This event will be held in hybrid format.