Humanitarian Futures Programme

The Humanitarian Futures Programme (HFP) is an action research programme based within the School of Social Science and Public Policy at King's College London.

It attempts to help organisations with humanitarian responsibilities to prepare for future humanitarian threats. The HFP believes that these threats will be more complex and unpredictable than those of today, and that their impacts will be of an exponentially different order.The Humanitarian and Development Partnership Team (HDPT), 24 May 2007, accessed 9 April 2009. The HFP also focuses upon solutions with a view to helping such organisations strengthen their prevention, preparedness and response capacities. These potential solutions come from a range of sources – including the natural and social sciences, the corporate sector and the military.

The HFP aims to develop a series of tools, methods and approaches to assess humanitarian organisations’ futures capacities and the potential ways to strengthen them. In addition to its partner organisations, these resources are being created with the intention of aiding the wider humanitarian community in planning for the future.

The programme director is Dr. Randolph Kent, a former UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Somalia and several other East African crisis zones.

HFP has four main programme areas designed to help organisations with humanitarian responsibilities prepare for the future.

Capacity is the central challenge for dealing with the types, dimensions and dynamics of future humanitarian crises: capacity to innovate, capacity to strengthen operational impact, capacity to anticipate potential threats and solutions. Knowing how to engage in a systematic, sustained and strategic way with a range of diverse "non-traditional humanitarian" actors is key to providing such essential futures capacities.

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