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NORGLOBAL2-Norge - global partner

Do no harm: Ethical humanitarian innovation and digital bodies

Alternative title: Do no harm: Ethical humanitarian innovation and digital bodies

Awarded: NOK 5.6 mill.

Digital initiatives aimed towards 'fixing' the humanitarian system, making it better and more secure, also create risk and harm for vulnerable individuals and communities. During the project period, ‘Do No Harm: Ethical Humanitarian Innovation and Digital Bodies’, contributed significantly to the international conversation around humanitarian digital ethics, humanitarian innovation, and the calibration of digital risk and harm in the sector. The pandemic had a profound transformative impact on the project: • The pandemic was differently handled by different governments. The project participants had to face distinct challenges within their own country and with respect to the ability to travel and engage. While the project team was able to do conceptual work together online, the lack of opportunity to engage face to face was keenly felt. • The opportunities for travelling, collecting data, and engaging with partners – or inviting stakeholders – was also constrained. • At the same time, the sector went through a rapid digital transformation which could not have been foreseen at the start of the project. The uptake of ICT tools, the shift to remote work and eventually, the arrival of generative AI greatly transformed the humanitarian space. Yet, project participants also perceived this shift as an opportunity and spent significant time pinning down the specific nature of this transformation. Through scholar-practitioner collaborations on papers, standard setting instrument and popular science pieces; participation in capacity building activities and trainings; by taking on roles as ethics advisors and evaluators; and through input to humanitarian strategic planning researchers helped pushing both the debate on the digital transformation of aid, and the practices of the sector forward. Focusing on contributing to the humanitarian studies field, the project has produced groundbreaking research published in key journals in the field, while also coining new analytical concepts. To that end, the inter and multi-disciplinary thrust of the project has been highly advantageous. • The project has investigated the digital transformation of aid as a form of ‘humanitarian extractivism’. This entails a concern with how practices of data extraction shift power towards states, the private sector, and humanitarians; on how digitization entails a dematerialization of aid – from ‘things’ to data flows – and also how digitization practices intertwine with experimental and untested approaches. • The humanitarian extractivism concept also includes the notion of the digital body and how acquiring a digital body through registration and sharing of sensitive personal data has become required for obtaining legal protection and material aid. Attendant to this concept is for example ‘digital dead body management’, gendered aspects of the digital body and the extractive interplay between EdTech and children’s digital bodies. • The project has helped further the understanding of data practices in the sector, including the nuts and bolts of data sharing between organizations and how biometric data travels from aid operations to use by military and security forces. • The project has examined humanitarian technologies such as drones, wearables, biometrics, blockchain and generative AI through the lens of responsible innovation. • The project provides analysis of what it means for specific issue areas to be digitally transformed, whether it entails ‘technologizing’ the struggle against sexual violence in war or how humanitarian communications are fundamentally changed through generative AI. • Finally, the project has investigated concepts of risk and harm in relation to cyber security: enormous databases holding ever more humanitarian data radically centralize vulnerability, while this vulnerability is also infinite, according to the logic that decisions to collect and systematize data also produces targets.

The project had a specific normative agenda, namely to further ethical humanitarian innovation and also to produce studies of innovation policy and humanitarian programming. While the pandemic curtailed data collection the project succeeded to shape conversations in the field. Some of the partners projected for this project folded or the initiatives ended. However we have managed to recruit new collaborators throughout the project period.

How does innovation in the domain of humanitarian ICTs and digitization shape and challenge humanitarian action and its contribution to the SDGs? The growing import of ICTs and data generate new ethical questions for humanitarians. The use of mobiles, biometric devices, wearables or drones to collect information about beneficiaries, and new partnerships with the private sector, increasingly shape emergency responses. Humanitarians and policy makers have not fully identified or grappled with the emergent ethical challenges with respect to how new technologies produce data about beneficiaries (such as digital templates of fingerprints and the iris, or real-time information about bodily functions) and the distribution of aid (information apps, blockchain, wearables). Challenges arise from technology implementation in emergency contexts, cybersecurity threats, profit motifs, experimental practices and the securitization of humanitarian data. This multi-disciplinary, qualitative project provides a conceptual and empirical basis for addressing these questions, incorporating a responsible research and innovation perspective. The objective is to engage all stakeholders (researchers, policymakers, and operational actors) in a conversation about how ethical humanitarian innovation can contribute to realize the SDGs in an accountable manner. The project is developed around four work packages on: (1) The place of data and digital bodies in humanitarian operations (2) Transformations of aid: market logic and intimate tracking (3) The humanitarian digitization-security nexus (4) Ethical humanitarian innovation: critical lessons for SDGs and policy WP1-3 will produce 7 empirical case studies. Project partners include PRIO, University of Manchester (HCRI), University of Copenhagen and the START Network labs. The project team and advisory board consist of leading humanitarian technology and innovation scholars and practitioners, with broad field and policy experience.

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NORGLOBAL2-Norge - global partner