Everything is perfect in Venuzuela

Keywords

No Thumbnail Available

Issue Date

2021-07-14

Language

en

Document type

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Title

ISSN

Volume

Issue

Startpage

Endpage

DOI

Abstract

Despite the urgent needs of disaster-affected populations, their governments sometimes reject humanitarian assistance. There has been research on why governments reject humanitarian assistance in general, that is, for a humanitarian crisis as a whole. The research has, however, not explained why within one humanitarian crisis some assistance offers are accepted while others are rejected. This research paper aims to fill that gap in the literature by providing a case study of the decisions of the disaster-affected government of Venezuela in its humanitarian crisis in 2019-2020. It proposes the theory that the legitimacy a government enjoys with regards to handling the disaster determines the outcome of aid rejection/acceptance. It is hypothesized that that legitimacy is most impacted by the government’s level of domestic disaster response (X1) and the level of ‘aid looting’ (X2). By focusing on these domestic factors, this research includes the often-neglected recipient government’s perspective. The research finds that the disaster-affected government’s concern for legitimacy is the prime driver of the decision to accept or reject assistance. Furthermore, following the method of difference, strong support was found that the level of domestic disaster response and aid looting are the variables that determine the level of legitimacy and thus the outcome of (delayed) acceptance/rejection of humanitarian assistance offers for different disasters within a humanitarian crisis.

Description

Citation

Supervisor

Faculty

Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen