The objective of the thesis is to analyse mutual relations between the European Union and the Caribbean region, especially to study and subsequently evaluate the various levels in which these relations take place. The first chapter deals with the mutual relations of the EU and the Caribbean as a part of the ACP group of states, which represented the beginnings of their collaboration. In addition to the characteristics of the group as a whole and their common features, it addresses also specific features of different regions while trying to distinguish the Caribbean from the other two. Its main part is a legal institutional form of their relations as well as its practical form. The second chapter is the level at which the EU cooperates with the various groupings of the Caribbean. It discusses the legal institutional framework ensuring their relations, trade and development cooperation. The last, third chapter is devoted to the national level and explains how the ongoing humanitarian assistance and implementation of development programmes works thanks to participation of both, the local authorities of the Caribbean countries and the European Union.

The aim of the studies included in this thesis has been to develop the knowledge about civil and military leadership processes and the conditions for these in situations characterized by extreme environmental demands. The main part of the thesis is based upon empirical data gathered through semi-structured qualitative interviews with Swedish civil and military leaders. The studies, published in four articles, focused leadership during situations characterized by extreme environmental demands. The fourth article aimed at validating the theoretical model that was developed in study one. The thesis has pursued an integrated view in seeking to understand leadership and environment interactions during the conduct of international humanitarian aid and military peacekeeping operations. Hence it has been a matter of considering the individual leader in relation to the organisational and the external environment in order to study human adaption to meet the challenges and demands of disasters and conflicts. The results show that leadership during international humanitarian aid and military peacekeeping operations is a highly complex and demanding task. Premises for the processes involve a great number of environmental factors. In order to restore system balance within a larger system, there has to be congruence between individual appraisal of the organizational and the external environment to achieve successful task completion. Inconsistency among the environmental factors influencing leadership processes may evoke adaptional struggles characterized by both positive and negative stress responses that may affect performance and task completion. Reappraisal processes are shown to involve continuous assimilation processes of, and accommodation processes to, the environment, illustrating the shifting balances between environmental forces, organizational pressures, and individual initiative.  The findings on stress responses are in line with earlier research, demonstrating that stress reactions exhibit great similarities regardless of hierarchical level while also indicating a double-edged pattern concerning the overall development of stress reactions. However, it does seems that hierarchical differences exist with regard to moral stress, while moral stress appears to lack the double-edged pattern since no positive reactions are reported even at moderate levels of stress impact. Taken together, future civil and military leaders need education in complex person-environment interactions in order to get a holistic picture of the underlying mechanisms, thus promoting the development of their adaptive capabilities. It is suggested that this thesis can be regarded as a context-specific contribution to complex system theory by providing insight into the organizational and external environmental factors/demands that influence civil and military leadership. / Projekt 1. Räddningsverkets internationella insatser: Analys och utveckling av ledningssystemet. Projekt 2. Försvarsmakten FoT 7-område Ledarskap och stress.

Humanitarian aid can be defined as an aid and an action designed to save lives, alleviate suffering and maintain and protect human dignity during and in the aftermath of emergencies. The defining characteristics that distinguish it from other forms of foreign aid and development assistance includes so-called principles of humanitarian aid. Humanitarian policy of the EU, which includes effective programs, tools and mechanisms, is an important part of foreign relations. EU tries through financial or non-financial assistance to prevent human suffering or mitigate it. Finland has started its new humanitarian policy since the October 2012. This mentioned policy defines the key principles, objectives, programs and priorities of its humanitarian aid. In general The European Union and Finland are very active players among the international community in providing of humanitarian aid to countries that are currently in humanitarian crisis.

This dissertation explores the changing organization of work in the transnational humanitarian aid sector. I specifically examine aid localization: a sector-wide strategy to increase the role of local labor in humanitarian aid projects. What does the aid sector’s localization look like in practice? What are the effects of localization on local labor? To answer these questions, I conducted a qualitative study of aid operations in Jordan, a major global aid hub. I find that localization creates a particular structure of work in which tasks, resources, and expectations are formally and informally organized and premised upon particular meanings associated with ‘the local’ as a category. This structure subsequently creates new forms of precarious labor and challenging work conditions for national employees under the framing of humanitarian aid, and also shapes how workers make sense of their own positions within the aid labor hierarchy. These effects are indicative of the tensions and contradictions embedded in conceptualizations of ‘the local’ in the aid sector. It is these tensions and ambiguities that subsequently become sources of productivity for aid employers: a space to generate new forms and relations of work that ensure successful project outcomes. I subsequently contend that localization ruptures and reinscribes Global North-Global South inequalities through ambivalent constructions of who local workers are, and how they should and can provide value to their organizations. / 2028-11-30

This thesis conducts a comparative study of international organizations in regard to their effectiveness towards addressing humanitarian concerns in Haiti. The three case studies are the operations of the United Nations, Catholic Relief Services, and REBUILD Globally, predominantly after the January 2010 quake. The hypothesis supported in this study is that the services of smaller organizations prove to be more successful than larger NGOs, although they do not have the immense resources of organizations such as the United Nations. The independent variables are type and quantity of funding, form of humanitarian work, and duration of support. All three variables establish the degree of overall effectiveness of the organization. This topic is significant because NGOs are rising in importance and influence in the international community as the average individual can now be involved in the foreign arena. It is important to study what is truly effective in humanitarian aid rather than assuming 'the bigger the better.'

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This study demonstrates application of the demand/supply model that derives from the three failures theory to the study of partnership effectiveness, showing that effective partnership is a partnership that provides each partner with assets that help them spend fewer resources on achieving their goals than when working alone, by compensating for each other's weaknesses while maximizing their own strengths. The study uses public-private partnership (PPP) in humanitarian settings as a unique opportunity to investigate partnership as a process and contribute to a nascent collaboration theory. The study shows that factors that define effective PPP during different stages of disaster relief are similar. However, different stages of partnership require different levels of compensation mechanisms from partnership participants to ensure that both actors maximize their strengths while achieving their missions. As a result, different stages of partnership call upon different combinations and degrees of factors affecting partnership effectiveness. This research uses descriptive data and inferential analysis, based on interviews with 10 representatives of humanitarian agencies that partner with the European Commission's Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection Office. It gives scholars and practitioners of philanthropy insights into the question: "how to give?" It also provides collaboration research and public policy with guidance on how to create stronger partnerships and increase the likelihood of better collaboration outcomes as well as how to better deal with hazards in order to mitigate disaster outbreaks.

The humanitarian sector is in need to prioritize its human resources. Inadequate recruitment processes, aid workers that enter the field unprepared, failed interrelationships and team dissatisfaction leads to poorer work quality, poorer health, and a high employee turnover that are costly for the field, and negative on the side of accountability to the beneficiaries of aid. In order to address these problems the study is investigating the use of a personality type system tool developed by the researcher, the 4mpt-system (4 major personality types-system),that tentatively is constructed as a tool to be applied within human resources in the humanitarian sector to access individual preferences and character traits that would facilitate in addressing the issues mentioned above. The data is gathered via in-depth semi-structured interviews of 7 informants working in the international humanitarian sector. The first objective is to study the reliability and validity of the 4mpt-system. The second objective is to study what information that could be accessed via the 4mpt-system tool from the 7 informants participating in the study. The result of the study would demonstrate that all of the informants could be assigned to a specific temperament type via a qualitative data analyze method designed from the 4mpt-system and that the temperaments affected the informants to a large extent (from motivations and skills to organisational preferences and personal belief systems). Further, the answers of the informants matched the theoretical definitions of the traits assigned to the temperament types by Keirsey (1998) and Fisher (2009), which was a positive indication for a good validity of the 4mpt-system. By verifying the similarity between the answers of informants assigned to the same temperament type, validity was further confirmed. The results of the study supported the reliability and validity of the 4mpt -system. The type of information that could be accessed via the 4mpt-system in the study was among other the motivation for beginning in the humanitarian field, work task preferences, professional skills, problem-solving approaches, decision making processes, likes and dislikes with work and work tasks, organisational structure preference, preference for working directly in the field or working from the office, and general outlooks and personal belief systems.

In recent decades, international feminist activism and research has had significant success in pushing gender issues onto the international agenda and into global governance institutions and processes. The goal of gender equality is now widely accepted and codified in international legal instruments. While this appears to be a remarkable global success for feminism, widespread gender inequalities persist around the globe. This paradox has led scholars to question the extent to which feminist concepts and goals can retain their transformative potential when they are institutionalized in global governance institutions and processes. This thesis examines the institutionalization of feminist ideas in global governance through an analysis of how, and with what effects, gender equality norms are constructed, interpreted and applied in the global governance of refugees: a field that has thus far received little attention in the growing literature on feminism, gender and global governance. This aim is pursued through a case study of humanitarian aid practices in refugee camps in Bangladesh and Thailand. The study is based on interviews with humanitarian workers in these two contexts, and its theoretical framework is informed by postcolonial feminist theory and Foucauldian thought on power and governing. These analytical perspectives allows the thesis to capture how gender equality norms operate as governing tools, and situate the politics of gender equality in refugee camps in the context of global relations of power and marginalization. The findings of this thesis show that in the global governance of refugees, gender equality is rarely treated as a goal in its own right. The construction, interpretation and application of gender equality norms is mediated and shaped by the dominant governing projects in this field. Gender equality norms are either advocated on the basis of their usefulness as means for the efficient management of refugee situations, or as necessary components of a process of modernization and development of the regions from which refugees originate. These governing projects significantly limit the forms of social change and the forms of agency that are enabled. Nevertheless, gender equality norms do contribute to opening up new opportunities for refugee women and destabilizing local gendered relations of power, and they are appropriated and used by refugees in ways that challenge and go beyond humanitarian agendas.

This study is about the nature of nurses' decision making related to volunteering to provide humanitarian aid in a major national disaster. Additionally, it is about the lived experience of nurses who volunteered in that disaster. It is a transcendental phenomenological study using the approach of Clarke Moustakas and the purpose of the study was to describe the experiences of the nurses, their reasons for volunteering, and the impact of their experience on their lives several years later.

The object of this thesis is to focus on one of the valued-based agendas of the international relations --humanitarian aid. This topic is narrowed to the actions of non- and inter-governmental organizations. It as well contains the analysis of campaign framing of these organizations. The main task is to evaluate the success of humanitarian actions on the disaster in Haiti. The thesis includes a questionnaire that should find out how do the humanitarian organizations and their campaigns influence public opinion.