What happens when humanitarians turn a critical eye to their own work? Not the work they do for communities—but the way they do it? 

Operational research is a branch of humanitarian inquiry dedicated to exactly that: investigating how aid is delivered, whether it's working, and how it can be done better. It asks hard questions. And it sits with uncomfortable answers. 

In this special episode of Humanitarian Conversations, RedR Australia CEO Dr Helen Durham is joined by three leading voices in the field—Dr Fiona Terry, Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland and long-time aid practitioner; Beth Eggleston, Co-Founder and Director of the Humanitarian Advisory Group; and Dr Josh Hallwright, RedR Australia's Director of Training and Strategy. 

Together, they draw on careers spanning some of the world's most complex crises—from the moral dilemmas facing aid workers in Myanmar's Rohingya camps, to understanding what drives armed groups to show restraint in conflict, to the political economy of aid in Somalia. 

They explore what operational research really is, why it matters, and what it looks like in practice. And they wrestle with the ethical challenges that come with asking difficult questions in high-stakes environments—and perhaps more critically, what humanitarians are obligated to do with the answers. 

Host: Dr Helen Durham 

Guests: Dr Fiona Terry, Beth Eggleston and Dr Josh Hallwright 

Producer, engineer and composer: Jill Farrar  

Producer and series host: Sally Cunningham

You can join our conversations on LinkedIn and Facebook.  

You can find out more about RedR Australia’s training courses here. 

Transcript

SALLY: Humanitarian Conversations is recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, and we acknowledge and seek to champion the continued connection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to land, waterways and skies. We also pay our respects to all First Nations, people whose communities we work in across the world. Hello and welcome to Humanitarian Conversations, a RedR Australia podcast which explores what it means to be humanitarian in today's world. I'm Sally Cunningham. In this special episode of Humanitarian Conversations, we hear from some of our sector's forward thinkers in research. Hosted by Dr Helen Durham, CEO of RedR Australia, Helen is joined by longtime aid practitioner, Fiona Terry, honorary professor at the University of Queensland; Beth Eggleston, co-founder and director of Humanitarian Advisory Group; and Dr Josh Hallwright, director of training and strategy at RedR Australia. Together, they explore operational research—what it is, why it's important, and how it's used by humanitarians to create better outcomes for communities. Sharing compelling examples from their wide ranging careers—from the moral dilemmas facing aid workers in Myanmar's Rohingya camps, to understanding what drives armed groups to show restraint in conflict, and the political economy of aid in Somalia— our speakers consider the ethical challenges humanitarians face when asking difficult questions, and perhaps more critically, what to do with the answers. So, let's hand over to Helen. 

HELEN: Well, thanks everyone. I'm really looking forward to a very exciting discussion framed around operational research. So as good researchers, I thought I'd start by asking the question, 'what is operational research?', and in particular, how does it differ from other types of research, such as academic. I'll start with you, Fiona. What's your definition, and tell us a little bit about how you think it differs. 

FIONA: Thanks, Helen, and thanks for the invitation to be here. So operational research, for me, is really research that is aimed at having an operational impact—so an evidence-informed approach to looking at issues and how we make our decisions and what sort of decisions we should be making. How it differs from academic research is that I find we can be much more multidisciplinary. We're not so stuck as academia is within the disciplinary confines. So we can still publish our research in academia, and we have in peer-reviewed journals, but I think it's a bit freer, and it's definitely about the audience. The audience is very much practitioners in the field, so it has to be written in a way that is very accessible to them. 

HELEN: Oh, great. And well, Beth and Josh, do you have anything to add in this space? 

BETH: Picking up on your point, Fi, about research being accessible, I couldn't agree more—and it's also [about being] accessible from a financial point of view. So is it behind a paywall, or is it open source? And again, as you mentioned, the language—really accessible language. We want something that people can pick up—they can really make sense of it. We're looking to provide decision makers with evidence that they can then use to, I would like to think, adaptive programming. And I personally like an infographic. I believe in info...I don't see a lot of those in academic research, but we find that it can really get across, you know, complex ideas in a way that's easy to understand. 

HELEN: Fantastic. So there's something around the methodology being a bit freer. There's something around the impact or the outcome—actually, to do something a little different than others. I mean, all research obviously has an outcome, but I'm loving this sort of framing differently. Well, to sort of move forward on that, I thought I'd turn to you, Josh, can you give an example of a piece of operational research you've done, and what did you find interesting about it? 

JOSH: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Helen. A few years ago, I was involved in a bit of research to look at community-based disaster risk management. So it's a big thread of work in a lot of NGOs and a lot of UN agencies in the humanitarian and development space, and we wanted to find out what the communities thought of this approach. And it was a fascinating piece of research we did in the Pacific, that found this approach was seen as a Western imposition. So they had a whole range of different ways to do what we would call disaster risk management, through traditional knowledge, indigenous practices and the like. But this construct was seen as an outside imposition that people—the communities—were very happy to use because it because it brought in some resources that they had some decision making power over, but the approach itself was considered an outside way of doing things that wasn't necessarily appropriate. 

HELEN: How interesting. So it was a different type of finding than I'm sure those putting it together actually accords to a lot of the other podcasts we've done with RedR Australia, which look at local knowledge, particularly in the Pacific. So that's a great example. Maybe over to you, Fi, what's a piece of research that you've done that you've really found interesting? 

FIONA: Oh, all of it I found interesting, I have to say. I have to select one, one I did recently, which was very interesting. And it was a request from the field to come and help the teams to wrestle with the moral dilemma that all humanitarians are facing that are working in the closed Rohingya camps in Rakhine State in Myanmar. There is no right or wrong solution, there's just the question of whether you should be in, and thereby being a part of this horrible system and these concentration camps, or whether you should say, No, we are not going to be part of it—we don't want to have our hands dirty. But then what happens to all the people inside? Because it's not going to be necessarily the government that's going to step in and help them. So where do you draw the line, and how do you ensure that you can be morally clear about the decisions you're making? And I really looked at some of the options, because I felt that everybody pulling out was not an option, because everybody would just die. So then, if we are staying, under what conditions should we stay? And how much can we do to try to alleviate the situation as best we can? And looking at that over the short term, were there actions that we could be taking to stay under the radar and not get in trouble with the government, but also, you know, improve the situation. And then over the longer term, what should we be trying to do to rectify this situation, and how are we feeling about it as an aid community, morally? And how should we be working together more and have a united front in this field? 

HELEN: Oh, thank you. Really, really interesting. So you move from Josh's one, which is about the practical absorption of a program, to the ethical dilemmas and surfacing those up. So thank you. Great examples. Beth, have you got something you'd like to add in? 

BETH: Yes, and I guess it draws a little on both Fi and Josh's work, which it really made me stop and reflect. I think of some of the operational research that I've loved to look at over the years—from the International Crisis Group and from Ground Truth Solutions. We did a piece of work that was looking at whose knowledge is centred when we look at humanitarian research. So when decision makers are picking up a report, who's written that? Is it a global north organisation? Is it a global south organisation? Has there been collaboration? The research team looked at the policy documents under the Grand Bargain. So, you know that impetus to really look at how we look at local leadership. And we looked at how many pieces in those particular policies were co-authored by global north and global south organisations. The answer is zero, which I did find quite confronting. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, but we also looked at even in our own research, we may be co-authoring with global south organisations, but what about our citations? Often they are tipping towards global north organisations. So it was a way of us trying to say, All right, we need to do better ourselves, but we want to ensure those who are making decisions are really getting the right evidence, and that, you know, local knowledge is being centred when decisions are being made. 

HELEN: And that goes back to the definition of operational research using different types of methodology. Because, of course, the framing of methodology will make an intrinsic difference between who has the sort of academic background to be able to do that. 

JOSH: I think, not only the methodologies and the sort of worldviews that sits behind it, but how it's presented as well. You mentioned Beth, the infographics. We're often talking about English language in the written form, which is restrictive, it's limiting. So even having it as a spoken word piece, or a piece to camera, or a podcast. 

HELEN: Exactly, well, many years ago, I was involved in doing some research about taking the normative framework of IHL [International Humanitarian Law] and talking to the Pacific and trying to make it more understandable. And I found these incredible resources, but they were through poems. They were through dances. The office at that time just got filled up with all these amazing different ways. We have a community that has oral traditions, and we're trying to reduce it down to a nice little pamphlet. So I think there is something exciting in that space. Fi, I know a very large piece of research that you were involved in was called Roots of Restraint, and I just wondered whether you wanted to talk for a minute about that because that was operational, impactful, but also a complex journey. 

FIONA: Yeah, thanks. That was a very complex journey. It was working with academics renowned in their field, and the whole purpose of it was to help the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] understand how better to influence behaviour of armed groups, depending on the operational structure of the armed group. Because we were very comfortable talking with state armed forces and even non-state armed groups—for instance, the FARC [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia], which have a very vertical hierarchical structure. But as we've seen since the 2004 report, which was called Roots of Behaviour in War, there has been a proliferation of non-state armed groups that are not organised hierarchically, vertically, they are much more horizontal, and we don't really know how to influence the behaviour, or we didn't know how to influence the behaviour of those sorts of armed groups. So that was our inquiry, and some of it lent on some of your previous research to think about, you know, what are the local factors—cultural, religious—and not just sort of rely on orders being passed down from on high, and then carrying on with it. Because we've had a lot of different projects coming out from the Roots of Restraint afterwards—different studies, and even one looking at using artificial intelligence to document patterns of violence of different armed groups in the field. Because how do you identify restraint? Restraint is the opposite of violence, but it's a counterfactual. It's something that is not obvious. So you can do that by looking at a pattern of violence over time, and look when you would predict violence to break out, and if it didn't, well then what were the factors restraining that—was it our action in the field, if we were talking about these violations having any impact on the behaviour of the armed group itself? 

HELEN: Fantastic, and maybe that will be my next round of questions, because we've already articulated that operational research aims to have a particular impact, and particularly, I would say in the field. Beth, do you have any examples where any research had an impact on changing something? 

BETH: Yes. I mean, it is really hard to make those causal links. I have a couple of examples. Can I just say before, that I so loved the Roots of Restraint research. We've used it so much in our work around protection of civilians. So there's some impact for you there. So we've done some work on greening humanitarian action. I know the Federation, the Red Cross, has led a lot of the work in this area, and we've really looked at trying to unpack not just the research, because I think a lot of us, a lot of us often know what the findings are. It's then how we craft recommendations, tools and guidance. And then I love that you've talked, Fiona, about the behavioural side. We've been trying to look at behavioural science. A couple of small things out of that research is the Fijian government have looked at some of the research there and have embedded some of that in their standard operating procedures. And also, we saw DFAT [the Australian Government's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade] sign up to the Climate and Environment Charter. So small things and maybe at the policy level. But yeah, we like to take those wins where we can. 

HELEN: Absolutely, it's very hard to capture these issues, and also not to be over optimistic about it, but also realising, even if it starts other conversations in the right places, it's really important. Josh, do you have any examples? 

JOSH: A few years ago, I led a bunch of research to pull together reports from the field in the organisation I was working for to understand how they were working with their partners in the field. And what came back was people were working in a very political way, navigating power, communicating in different ways, depending on the audience and so forth. And so I compiled and sort of collated all of that information, produced a report, and then that report ended up leading to this organisation, over the last few years, prioritising political economy, analysis, thinking and working politically doing, development in a way that is cognisant of power and power dynamics. 

HELEN: Fantastic, and that was surfaced up through the research. Great. Fiona, what's some impact that you can think of? 

FIONA: Well, I'll follow on from your example, Josh, because it was very much looking at political economy analysis. So the political economy analysis of aid going into Somalia, and really trying to question how we assess the vulnerability of people in Somalia to the armed conflict and to famine that periodically comes around. And then looking at the data from well, where are we sending our aid and on what basis? And then really challenging our thoughts—who were the people who died most in the famine on a clan basis? Because, of course, everybody in Somalia is based on clan, and there are some clans that are very strong, in particular those that left in the 70s and have a big diaspora in Europe. And so at times of great need, the diaspora comes and sends them money. And then there are some clans like the Rahanweyn or some of the minority clans and the Bantu that don't have that support. And so they are far more vulnerable at times of conflict and famine. And so it was really about shifting our focus from thinking of vulnerability only in relation to proximity to armed conflict into much more of the social structure and the political economy structure. 

HELEN: Fantastic. So that's really a different entry point on vulnerability than classifying, you know, war, gender and age. So wonderful stuff. Now let's flip it. What are some of the challenges? We want impact, but I'll start with you Beth. What are some of the challenges you think or things that stop the impact once we have quality evidence, we're really excited by it, but we can't get it through and get it used? 

BETH: I wonder how many of us, even on this podcast, have read a whole research report this week, from cover to cover. I know I haven't. It's the kind of thing I think we all wish that we had time for. And I know we spend a lot of time trying to work out, okay, if this is our work every day and we're not having the time to read this, how are we trying to make research accessible, maybe in other ways? I keep thinking, Maybe we need a humanitarian research influencer? Maybe that's you, Helen. Is it bite-size pieces? Is it videos? Is it humour? How can we be getting the message out there? My concern, on a lot of this, is I'm not seeing traditional funding channels for humanitarian research as strong as they used to be. It is heartening to see philanthropic stepping up to, you know, maybe take the risk to ask some hard questions, but I do worry there's a lot of decision makers who used to sort of fund and absorb and use humanitarian research and evidence. If that's not the case anymore, then I do feel concerned about that. 

HELEN: Josh, what do you think some of the challenges are? 

JOSH: Yeah, I think building off what you're saying Beth, the funding environment in traditional donors is restricting humanitarian research. It sometimes seems for people to be a luxury. We're in a situation now where we've got more humanitarian need than any time since the Second World War. But another avenue of funding could be university funders. And I think there are resources there around the world and here in Australia as well. But one of the big challenges in that is ethics and finding ways to work with people in very challenging circumstances that a lot of ethics committees won't sign off on—because people are vulnerable, [and] they have much greater needs than participating in humanitarian research. 

HELEN: Yeah. Great point. The ethics, the sort of the funding, and then the ecosystem. Fi, what about internally in organisations across the whole sector? What's some of your challenges? 

FIONA: Well, I'd say one of the ways we got around that challenge was we set up our own ethics review board within the ICRC, and that was fantastic. People are reluctant to challenge what they've learned and the way they've learned it. So trying to gently challenge. I find the most successful projects have been those that the question, the research question, has come from the field, so at least there's already an appetite in understanding. But if your findings are not really consistent with what they were believing, then it's a lot more challenging to try to turn it around and say, Well, look, it doesn't mean what you've been doing is wrong, but you could probably do better if you adapted it. But definitely, I think the culture towards research changed with this ethics review board that we set up. Because initially people were very reluctant. They thought about it as a control mechanism—that you're going to say, I can't do this and I can't do that. So people were trying to avoid bringing their reports until it was then said, You have to, we want to be an ethical organisation, it has to be passed through the ethics review board. And then little by little, people realised that by putting their research forward like that, they were getting all this fantastic free advice from these brilliant brains as it was mixed between practitioners and academics. And it was wonderful, and it actually strengthened the research, and it gave them more credibility, and they were then able to publish in peer-reviewed journals, because that's often a condition of peer review, is having it approved by an ethics review board. And countries like Somalia and Sri Lanka didn't have, at that time, ethics review boards, so if you did a project there, you couldn't get it published. So we resolved so many issues by setting this up, and it really changed the culture. 

HELEN: Fantastic. So what I'm hearing is it's sort of two steps with operational research. It's the piece of research itself, and all the issues involved—ethics and accessibility, and whether it's about a dilemma that is more in the moral, ethical sense, or whether it's about something of a practical nature. But then the second point really is, what I'm hearing from everyone, is the desire to then find different methodologies to make that research stick and stick somewhere and have an impact. And that to me, if I go back to the first question, I think academic research is incredibly important. I'm involved in that at Melbourne Law School and teach in the master's program there. But often academics, once they've done their piece, it's sort of it. And it was published, and it goes to maybe a conference. But I think what I'm hearing strongly is we want to carry it forward, and as strongly as the beautifully framed outcomes, is whether they're used or not. You almost need academic research to interface more closely with operational research on how to make your operational research stick. I just want to see if there's any comments on that. I think it's really been amplified, as we've discussed. 

JOSH: I think we've got a bit to learn from the evaluation space, where it's not just a tick box exercise, it's very much a learning initiative. And so designing the evaluation—designing the research—with that end use in mind, I think can be really, really valuable. 

BETH: Yeah, I couldn't agree more, Josh, I think that's key. And I think with research, what we found is that you have your research piece where you have your findings, but then taking the next step to develop perhaps guidance, then maybe practical tools, then it might be an accompaniment model walking alongside an organisation and just really trying to get that into their ways of working. 

FIONA: Oh, that's so interesting. I would say a couple of things to that. One is that one of the biggest difficulties is actually knowing if your research is being used. We don't have the resources to go and monitor how is our research being used. And it was very interesting, because ODI [Overseas Development Institute] did their own research on the Roots of Restraint and the impact of the Roots of Restraint study. And I was trying to put them in touch with people in the ICRC to find, okay, well, where are the good examples of it being used? And, you know, the irony for me was that it really was taken up on the outside, perhaps, you know, more strongly than on the inside, which I think is a phenomenon that we all might face. But the irony was that it was all about how to influence behaviour, and I was questioning, how do I influence the behaviour in my organisation to take it on board? So at the end of the day, I found that by inserting it into training courses was probably the most effective way of really getting it out there and getting people to engage with it and absorb, because I think when people sign up into a training course, they open their mind more by default, right? They're ready to learn, and that's what you need. You don't want that closed minded: 'I'm too busy in my daily work'. You need to take them out of their daily work into a space where they're able to think and reflect, and then you put these ideas in, and then they fly much better. 

HELEN: I think your training point—if I may, for a moment, do a little RedR Australia plug, because it is our podcast—one of the things I love about our training courses is that it's a virtuous circle where you get people or deployees who have been in the field. Our trainers are very, very experienced out there, and so they learn from the participants, but you're also constantly moving forward in what I call the spiral graph, you know, sort of little forward each time, but it's not a sort of static 'this is how you learn', but it's a constant evolution. 

JOSH: I was going to talk briefly just about an initiative that I was working on in a previous job that was so close to getting stood up, but then the big funding crash with our dear friend in the US and the like, didn't make it possible. It was a humanitarian research repository to have a centralised spot where all the practitioners and policymakers can have one place to go to find humanitarian research that is accessible in a whole bunch of different formats and languages, that they can just quite easily search and find it. And then you can track how it's being used, because it's in a digital format, and you can see where it goes and so forth. 

FIONA: But that's where I think, again, that the evaluation space is where we can be learning much more, because I think evaluations have to be more transparent in their findings, whereas operational research not necessarily so. A lot of my work, if I want to get into a really difficult question and the nitty gritty of things, I'm not going to be able to expose what I find on an open platform, because it could embarrass our authorities. It could embarrass the organisation. So that's where the difficulty comes in. Because, you know, sometimes we have to make it a bit bland if it goes out into the into the wide world, and there's so much more that could be said, If it stays internal, unfortunately. 

HELEN: Well, talking about things to be said, I'll start with you, Beth. What do you think the future holds in this space, and what are some topics that you'd really like to get your teeth into? 

BETH: I think, and Fiona you've touched a little bit on risk, risk appetite, not just of operational agencies, but of donors and of other parts of the ecosystem. How do we share risk? How do we understand risk, and which of those parts of the ecosystem can afford or have that risk appetite to push the envelope a little bit further? Because we need to have differing or maybe complementary risk appetites across the ecosystem. So think the risk point is a key one there. 

HELEN: Josh, what do you think is the future? And is there anything you'd love to get your teeth into. 

JOSH: I think the future is more partnerships. I think that there are plenty of opportunities to partner with university researchers, different pools of funds, different approaches, different levels of expertise that can be sort of win, win, win. Partnering with universities closer to where humanitarian crises are, as well. And then there was a bunch of research that came out of Griffith University looking at systems innovation. And one of the initiatives that they had was that more operational research in what they called the Boring Revolution. So the Boring Revolution, so looking at accounting, contracts and agreements and the legal stuff that is incredibly boring for many of us, but fundamental and often some of the biggest constraints to doing the work that we need to do.  

HELEN: Wonderful. Fi, what do you think the future holds, and what would you like to research? 

FIONA: Oh, there are so many things I'd like to research, but, you know, I'm a little bit sort of pessimistic I have to say about the future. I mean, but I was so fortunate that I started in the humanitarian field in 1991, being the dinosaur that I am. So I've surfed the wave of incredible optimism, where we felt progress was linear, where we thought that everything we would build upon to make this world better, and now we have seen such a crash that it has been so difficult to pick ourselves up again and and I think research is often thought of as not necessarily being life saving compared to the actual action, so it does tend to get cut a bit more, even though, if we do research well, it doesn't have to be so expensive, and it can really find efficiencies and find out better ways to use money. So I'm just hoping that research does continue. Personally, I would be interested in continuing to pursue this question of, how do we influence fighters and soldiers at different levels to respect IHL or norms of humanity and just act with restraint and, you know, which arguments resonate with them? Is it the appeal to the elders, to religion, to international humanitarian law, their family, their friends, their reputation as individuals? This is the sort of work I'd love to do more of. It's what we did in the Roots of Restraint. It's not easy to conduct research like that, but that's definitely, if I had my wish list, that's what I would be doing. 

HELEN: Well, we must always have wish lists as researchers, and particularly operational researchers. And I think in this current moment where you know the system's more than unstable, the system's under incredible pressure, I think having conversations like this, and hopefully our audience also will be able to understand the importance that operational research needs to be to make sure that we think clearly, make good decisions, are efficient and effective. It's not just sort of an ideological issue. It's something that's really practical. So you mentioned that you had the fortune, and I, too, as another lady of a certain age, rode that wave that said, well, there was a whole lot of opportunities, and things we were building were going to be stable and moving us forward. But what were some of the things you think that we, you know, have experienced differently since then? 

FIONA: Well, I think the competition between aid organisations throughout the 90s and 2000s was never a very good thing. It was never very healthy. And I was very much calling for us all to gather the evidence of what we could do better and work together as not for profits, as a humanitarian community. And one thing I've been shocked about in recent years is to see that not only are we just among ourselves trying to get together, but suddenly we're in competition with big conglomerates and for-profit organisations. And I could never have imagined that this would happen in an aid sector, when aid money is from the taxpayer, that there are some organisations and consortiums that are working for profit in this field, and that we suddenly have to compete with them as well. So I think our aid money could go a lot further if we stuck to funding research that was maybe with academia for sure, but definitely with not-for-profit organisations. 

HELEN: So thank you all to all the panelists. It's been a wonderful conversation, and I look forward to you know, those who listen, please write back to us or please engage, because, particularly in our RedR work, we're really looking forward to moving forward in making sure that the issues that are important to you as practitioners or those engaged in the sector come back to us and we can work on them. So thank you very much, and I look forward to continuing this conversation. 

SALLY: You've been listening to Humanitarian Conversations, a podcast by RedR Australia. You can learn more about our work at redr.org.au and we invite you to join our conversations on LinkedIn and Facebook. But don't stop there. If this has got your mind thinking about what it means to be a humanitarian, we encourage you to continue that conversation with friends and family. This episode was produced and engineered by Jill Farrar. I'm Sally Cunningham. Thanks for listening.