Evaluation of Korea’s response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake

Abstract

This thesis seeks to develop an alternative approach for the evaluation of humanitarian aid in order to make the gaps of the current approaches smaller. To do this, the thesis applies McConnell’s framework to the case of Korea’s response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake which has been already assessed by the DAC-OECD criteria, the dominant framework in the humanitarian sector. It thus explores three different dimensions of Korea’s response: process, programme and politics, and then determines the degree of success or failure of each dimension to investigate the validity and scope conditions of McConnell’s theory to the evaluation of humanitarian aid. This study affirms that McConnell’s theory helps us to alleviate the difficulties and complexities of the humanitarian evaluation. His theory provides a broader perspective on evaluating humanitarian aid by assessing three aspects of policy in which the political dimension was relatively well understood, and easily determining the degree of success or failure through the provision of detailed criteria and a five-level continuum from success to failure: success, durable success, conflicted success, precarious cusses and failure. It is thus possible to argue that McConnell’s theory alleviates the shortcomings of existing approaches for humanitarian evaluation by widening the scope of evaluation and specifying the degree of success or failure of humanitarian aid.