Protection Mainstreaming through Valuation Practices in the United Nations

• Applicant: Dr. Holger Niemann
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 544962752

The project examines how valuation practices are redefining the promise of humanitarian protection made by the United Nations (UN). Developing the concept of ‘protection main-streaming’ and integrating research on norms and practices carried out in the field of International Relations with research on practices of valuation and evaluation in the field of sociology, the project explores new empirical and conceptual grounds for advancing International Relations. By ‘protection mainstreaming’, the project refers to a set of practices used by the UN to deliberately promote and advance a focus on protection at all levels of humanitarian action, from policy formulation to field operations. These practices came to the fore following the crisis of humanitarianism in the 1990s as the UN sought to address a fundamental dilemma: The universal scope of the humanitarian principles is often only selectively realised in practice. Field operations require humanitarian actors to make decisions about who to protect and who not to protect, given limited resources and capacities. Such triage decisions pose a normative challenge to humanitarian action. Prioritising the needs of those identified as most vulnerable (e.g. refugees, civilians, children) and tailoring humanitarian responses accordingly seemed a promising way to address this challenge. However, as wars and environmental crises exacerbate humanitarian catastrophes and the number of people in need is at an all-time high, the promise of humanitarian protection may become even more selective and triage more acceptable through such ‘protection mainstreaming’. The project posits that valuation practices are at the heart of humanitarian protection. It examines the underlying, often implicit, practices of attributing and comparing vulnerabilities and protection needs that actors use to make decisions about who deserves to be protected. The project focuses on three UN sites of ‘protection mainstreaming’: (1) the Geneva-based community of practice, which specifies the humanitarian principles through shared knowledge, norms and guidelines (the ‘hub’); (2) training and capacity-building programmes, where these standards are disseminated to and learned by humanitarian personnel (the ‘training’); and (3) field operations, where these standards are implemented by humanitarian actors on an everyday basis (the ‘field’). The project uses a mix of qualitative methods for data collection and analysis, including multi-sited ethnography, interviews and text analysis.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5870: The Promise of Security in Catastrophic Times