Description
Humanitarian organizations are increasingly benefiting from biometrics technology. However, there are no one-size-fits-all biometric data collection, storage, processing, sharing, and protection in humanitarian response. While an emerging body of scholarship focuses on the use of biometrics in the humanitarian context, the existing literature fails to grasp the scope and causal mechanisms of variational practices. This paper aims to explain this issue by tracing the activities of The UN Refugee Agency, the United Nations World Food Programme, The International Committee of the Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières, and World Vision International over the last decade. An initial literature review theorizes that four broad factors - principles and traditions, origins, institutional structure, and mandates and scope of action - explain differences in policies and field practices among humanitarian organizations. The second part of the paper draws on an analysis of the reports of the mentioned organizations, supplemented by semi-structured interviews with humanitarian practitioners to provide empirical analysis.
