Urban services during protracted armed conflict: A call for a better approach to assisting affected people
ICRC
02-10-2015 – Publication Ref. 4249 :: 72 pages
Pdf: https://www.icrc.org/eng/assets/files/publications/icrc-002-4249.pdf
Overview
Urbanization is constantly on the rise, with cities already absorbing more than half of the world’s population and armed conflicts increasingly being fought in urban settings. Regions facing protracted armed conflict see a steady decline in essential public services, while the relief-rehabilitation-development paradigm and funding mechanisms fail to provide a satisfactory response in these settings. Based on more than 30 years of ICRC experience in protracted armed conflict in urban settings, this report underlines the challenges, describes the characteristics and complexity of essential services, questions current paradigms and proposes new avenues to be explored to better respond to the needs of urban communities increasingly affected by these phenomena.

[From Executive Summary]
What are the main messages of this report?
1. The relief-rehabilitation-development paradigm is counterproductive in contexts of protracted armed conflict in urban areas. Experience of disaster relief and rural armed conflict has shown that it constricts planning by limiting interventions to those that are “relief” or “post-war” in nature and that may be seen as the first steps in bridging an artificial gap between conflict and development. In many current protracted armed conflict contexts, interventions in urban areas can fall far short of the mark when it comes to people’s needs.

2. A new paradigm is required in order to rise to the challenges posed by protracted armed conflict in urban areas. It must take account of the complexity of the challenges, whose origins lie in (a) the sheer scale of the challenges (infrastructure is so complex in large cities that the restoration of parts of it can immediately benefit several hundred thousand people but the option is often too costly for municipalities and humanitarian agencies that are geared to more traditional emergency responses); (b) the duration of the challenges (the people in Iraq have been living in a combination of international armed conflict (IAC) and non-international armed conflict (NIAC) for decades; (c) the multifaceted interconnectivity of the essential services; (d) cumulative and indirect impacts as well as direct impacts; (e) the politics of a highly securitized operating environment (implicitly, good relationships with local authorities are not only crucial, they are constantly changing and not without risk); (f ) the significant shortcomings resulting from gaps in evidence and analysis; (g) challenges associated with the enforcement and application of international humanitarian law (IHL); and (h) funding that does not match the duration or scale of the needs.

3. Urban services are based on interdependent people, hardware and consumables. Disruptions to essential urban services can be caused by adverse effects on any one of the components that make up the service: critical people (especially operations and maintenance staff), critical hardware (e.g. infrastructure, equipment) and critical consumables (e.g. fuel, chlorine, medicine). No one component is sufficient on its own. It is pointless having the spare parts required to repair a power substation, for instance, if the only skilled staff able to install them have fled the conflict.

4. “Urban” extends beyond the city. Some critical elements of essential services (e.g. those provided by electrical power plants, supply routes, water and wastewater treatment plants) are more often than not located outside the city limits. Very distant active combat can thus have dramatic effect on urban dwellers. In this report, we define “urban” in the context of humanitarian responses as the area within which civilians vulnerable to disruptions in essential
services reside and the network of components supporting those services.

5. Urban services are interconnected. For instance, a damaged electrical transformer can immediately shut down the supply of water to an entire neighbourhood or hospital, greatly reducing the quality of the public health service and drastically increasing the risks posed to public health and wellbeing. The set of skills required to best address such interconnectivity calls into question the silo mentality that exists all too often in municipalities and humanitarian agencies and that impedes cross-sectoral cooperation (e.g. between health, water and sanitation, energy and agriculture). Moreover, many humanitarian agencies have tended to focus historically on developing their capacity to deal with water quantity and quality issues and few, if any, have developed the necessary competences to tackle the urban infrastructural challenges associated with energy supply and wastewater treatment.

6. Services are disrupted by interconnected direct, indirect and cumulative impact. Armed conflict can disrupt any one of the three components (people, hardware and consumables) that make up a service either directly (e.g. a water tower pierced by a tank shell, chlorine shortages due to sanctions) or indirectly (e.g. critical municipal or humanitarian agency staff not showing up for work because access is unsafe). Over time, direct and indirect effects can have an incremental impact on a service, with the result that their effect is cumulative –
and much more difficult to address.

7. If not dealt with in time, “vicious cycles” may render the restoration of a service unfeasible. The accumulation of incremental impacts can lead to progressive deterioration of any service and an associated cumulative impact on people. The effect may at some point become unavoidable and the “vicious cycles” of cumulative impact on all three components (people, hardware and consumables) during protracted armed conflicts in urban areas can lead to a condition that is too technically difficult or simply too expensive to reverse. At present, most assistance is failing to achieve the objective of avoiding such cycles. The new paradigm is therefore driven by a desire to remedy that situation.

8. International humanitarian law (IHL) offers a degree of protection. However, while IHL protects all service components from the direct impact of armed conflict, there are specific challenges arising from its interpretation and application in urban warfare, in particular the extent to which IHL provides protection against the indirect or cumulative impact of hostilities on essential services. The ICRC is actively seeking to address some of these challenges, in
particular through its work on the use of explosive weapons in populated areas.

9. Insufficient research has been conducted on the impact of disruptions to urban services on people’s lives over time. One priority area is the need to gain an understanding of how disruptions to services affect people’s livelihoods, food security, human security and health. Many humanitarian agencies have programmes targeting the direct impact of these disruptions but not the indirect or cumulative impact.