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Paper short abstract

This presentation examines humanitarian organisations as meso-level brokers of welfare in crisis settings. It analyses how ethical commitments to care are translated into delivery systems governed by private-sector logics, producing tensions between survival, solidarity, and profit.

Paper long abstract

Amid shrinking state capacity and declining international assistance, humanitarian organisations increasingly act as key providers of welfare in crisis-affected settings. This paper offers a meso-level analysis of humanitarian governance, focusing on how humanitarian actors broker welfare through partnerships with private-sector actors in contexts of conflict and state fragility. Rather than treating private involvement as inherently exploitative or humanitarian action as purely altruistic, the paper conceptualises disaster capitalism as a structural tension within humanitarian welfare provision.

Drawing on an emerging body of literature on humanitarian–business collaboration and preliminary findings from a comprehensive project on the topic, the paper examines how humanitarian organisations translate ethical commitments to care and protection into delivery systems shaped by private-sector. Particular attention is paid to humanitarian programming through which welfare becomes operationalised and governed.

The analysis highlights how these meso-level arrangements reshape the meaning and practice of welfare, mediating who is included, how care is delivered, and under what conditions solidarity is enacted. By foregrounding humanitarian organisations as brokers between moral economies of care and market-oriented infrastructures, the paper contributes to debates on welfare beyond the state and offers a nuanced account of how survival, governance, and profit coexist in contemporary humanitarian contexts.