2020 Hindsight? The Ecosystem of Humanitarian Diagnostics and Its Application to Anticipatory Action

This discussion paper aims to make sense of the eco-system of humanitarian diagnostics and the extent to which it informs anticipatory, early or rapid humanitarian action. Earlier work found a high degree of confusion about early warning, the kinds of information that are made available, the timeliness of information, and the decades-old concern about information not connecting to practical action. This paper attempts to clarify the difference between diagnostic and evaluative evidence, suggests a typology of the kinds of diagnostic evidence, summarizes the problems of linking evidence to action, and assesses the contributions of predictive analytics and machine learning to this rapidly expanding field.