Principles for IHP

The collaborative principles of the partnership are the following.

Efficiency: The cooperation is driven by a wish to deliver better more efficient service to the humanitarian community. The cooperating agencies recognize that to a certain extent they are competitors. Cooperating is seen as a way of limiting and regulating this competition and avoiding duplication of efforts. In addition operations can be made more efficient through for example joint management structures and by merging and combining support packages.

Synergy: Cooperating enables the partners to provide support which they are not able to provide individually. Synergy is derived for example by one agency providing staff and another one providing equipment, or one agency providing the equipment and another agency providing the airlift.

Dual use: IHP assets serve the dual purpose of being part of the domestic disaster management system and of the preparedness for international missions. The advantage of this is that the participating countries are able to deliver assets to international operations, which would be too expensive for the individual countries to establish and maintain only for international use. At the same time the national preparedness benefits from gaining international operational experience and exposure, contributing towards the maintenance and development of the national preparedness. Autonomy: IHP has from the beginning been set up as an informal, non-binding cooperation, in recognition of the limitations of the mandate of the cooperating agencies.