Context analysis
Context analysis plays a key role in enabling humanitarian actors to operate in environments characterized by complexity, instability, insecurity and (often) foreignness. The purpose of context analysis is to allow humanitarians to better understand the socio-cultural, political, economic and geographic factors that give rise to crisis and will either hamper or enable their response. A range of context analysis tools exist, yet there is a considerable critique that humanitarian action needs to be further contextualized, and that the analysis of needs is far stronger than the analysis of the political situation.