The humanitarian “reset” takes a step forward this week. But for many, the bigger question is: What comes next?
The principals of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee – leaders of UN agencies joined by a few NGO representatives and other observers – will meet on 17 June in Geneva to chart the next steps for what has been dubbed the “humanitarian reset”.
Billed in part as a collective answer to the sector’s Trump-deepened crisis of funding and legitimacy, the reset has mainly played out behind closed doors and in talking points penned by UN relief chief Tom Fletcher.
“We must renew,” Fletcher said in a March message floating his reset themes. “Reimagine how we work. Fight back, not for systems or institutions, but for the people we serve. Build fresh arguments and allies, locally and globally. Find new sources of funding.”
What’s missing? Wide consultation with grassroots responders, affected communities, or rank-and-file humanitarians, a public airing of ideas, and a big-picture vision for a new humanitarianism, many say. Many want to see clear steps on how old promises to localise aid or listen to communities will actually happen.
IASC meetings aren’t public or publicised. It’s not clear what precisely the principals will discuss or what they are to agree on. An agenda for the 17 June meeting describes the discussion simply as: “Agree on the vision, aspirations, and collective actions towards the Future Humanitarian System.”
One humanitarian official with knowledge of the discussions cautioned against expecting sweeping pronouncements: It was more about establishing a clear, collective direction forward, they said.
“It’s a conversation in progress: That’s what it’s likely to be,” said another official.
Observers say the actions and ideas that have been floated so far – like condensing coordination structures, or directing up to half of donor money to pooled funds – is mostly preening around the edges, rather than a deep examination or the bedrock for something more transformative.
“It would be really disappointing for us if it stays only at rhetoric level,” Yousra Semmache, senior advocacy advisor at NEAR, a network of Global South civil society organisations, said of some of the reset’s reform promises. “It’s also the question of: If this sector does not change now, then when?”
The reset process is run and overseen at the IASC principals level – essentially leaving the people who have the most power in the system with the task of reimagining it.
The IASC is a UN-led strategic coordination body. It’s not particularly representative of wider humanitarian action or even the international system itself. Its mandate is coordination and high-level guidance, not enforceable decisions for a sector with some 4,000 organisations that may collaborate, compete, or go it alone.
More significant than any decision made on 17 June, observers say, will be what comes next: how cuts are implemented, what governments say and do, whether funding caves and jeopardises the operations of entire organisations, the prospect of wider reforms, and the many discussions taking place beyond the conventional aid sector.
As the reset process nudges forward, here’s a look at some of the key questions.
Who’s left out?
The most public aspects of the “reset” are the painful cuts made inevitable by global funding declines, including the US evisceration of its aid spend.
The UN’s emergency aid coordination arm, OCHA, announced today the number-crunching from a “hyper-reprioritisation” of response plans under way for weeks: Tens of millions of people have been cut from targets that already fell well short of actual need. Response plans will now prioritise 114 million people – or only 37% of people said to need aid at the start of the year.
“This is not the time to dismantle humanitarian operations or send a signal of retreat to the government, donors, and partners.”
An early “reset” proposal was for the IASC system to scale back its focus (and in-country coordination architecture) in at least eight locations with humanitarian responses: Cameroon, Colombia, Eritrea, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Zimbabwe.
Additionally, the IASC last week discussed the possibility of “accelerated transitions” elsewhere: Chad, Mozambique, and Ukraine, according to sources familiar with the issue.
In Mozambique, dozens of local NGOs wrote a letter to the UN’s top in-country official, saying an early “phase-out” would be premature amid active conflict, and with millions affected by drought or reeling from a trio of cyclones in 2024.
“This is not the time to dismantle humanitarian operations or send a signal of retreat to the government, donors, and partners,” leaders of 61 organisations wrote.
“We were in a panic mode when we first heard about it,” said Nyararai Magudu, technical director and founder of Girl Child Rights, one of the signatories.
Deprioritising countries at the IASC level isn’t necessarily a judgement on severity. But other metrics seem to pull in conflicting directions.
Cameroon and Mozambique, for example, recently topped a list of “the world’s most neglected” displacement crises, published this month by the Norwegian Refugee Council.
Another report by the International Rescue Committee includes Chad and Mozambique among 13 countries hardest hit by aid cuts, based on metrics including vulnerability, aid dependence, and debt distress.
And the Inform index, an industry scale for assessing risk, vulnerability, and the likelihood that humanitarian intervention might be needed, ranks Mozambique among the top 17 at-risk countries (Cameroon hovers just below).
What gets sidelined?
Women-led organisations and services for survivors of gender-based violence were some of the hardest and earliest affected by this year’s aid cuts.
That’s why there’s added fear about what the “reset” process may leave behind or water down. This includes humanitarian protection – broadly, the mandate to ensure safety and rights for affected people.
A core part of the reset centres on renovating the sector’s labyrinthine coordination architecture. There’s a reset proposal to simplify the humanitarian cluster system, which divides and sub-divides coordination and responses along different themes – education, food security, health, or shelter, for example.
Among other elements, the proposal calls for clusters to be trimmed into 8 groupings (down from 11). It also calls for the protection cluster to consolidate related streams known as “areas of responsibility”. One of these streams is focused on gender-based violence.
Folding gender-based violence into the protection cluster would obscure the needs of women, girls, and survivors of gender-based violence, advocates say, warning that future response plans and programmes are less likely to include adequate GBV considerations.
Who gets a say?
Fletcher’s writings on the reset have sought to emphasise locally led humanitarian aid. But many local humanitarian leaders say they’ve had little contact with the reset process.
Magudu of Girl Child Rights, for example, said he was part of a group trying to organise an emergency meeting with the UN to discuss concerns about Mozambique.
“When we were mobilising people and organisations to come to this meeting with [the UN official], people were saying, ‘What is it? What is the meeting all about? What is this reset?’” he said.
“We lack information. There’s been no consultation and we are now trying to push to say, ‘No guys, we cannot continue like this.’”
Magudu said he understands that funding is stretched. But local humanitarian leaders must be part of the solution – which means including them in decisions about any eventual transition.
“So many organisations here, they lack information. We lack information. There’s been no consultation,” he said. “And we are now trying to push to say, ‘No guys, we cannot continue like this.’”
NEAR says some of its members had limited input in the “reset” process: Some local organisations were involved in a round of consultations.
“We are included in some ways, but we’re not getting the full picture,” said Semmache.
What’s missing are larger, systemic consultations with ground-level groups – not to mention seats at the decision-making table.
So while Fletcher is now advocating for a boost to (UN-controlled) pooled funds, for example, many local organisations are instead pushing for a range of pooled fund options, including locally and collectively governed models.
They’re also asking for the international system to keep its promises on shifting power to local aid.
“The system cannot transform itself with keeping only the same actors that have built it, because it's been built for and by international actors,” Semmache said.
Whose voices count?
Listening to communities that use aid – let alone acting on what they’re asking for – has never been the humanitarian system’s strength. The reset process has been no different.
Organisations that seek feedback from communities who use aid say people are clearly struggling with the impacts of funding cuts but haven’t been consulted on what to do.
Upinion, a Netherlands-based group that consults with affected communities, polled 600 people who use aid in Lebanon, Syria, Türkiye, and Yemen to ask about the reset process.
“People do not feel included in the way aid decisions – up to now and including this reset period – have been taken or have been shaped,” said Noor Lekkerkerker, Upinion’s CEO. “The large majority has never been included in these kinds of decisions.”
Humanitarian leaders are missing out on a valuable resource, she said: Communities can help set priorities and make tough decisions.
“I think this is counter to what a lot of people think or assume: that it will be too hard for communities to think beyond their own immediate needs. I believe that people are willing to do that – as long as they know that the engagement is not tokenistic, and [is] meaningful,” Lekkerkerker said.
“They’re also humans, and they understand that the funding is not limitless,” she added. “If anyone understands, it’s them.”
What do people want?
The reset talking points have promised to prioritise life-saving actions. They’ve also pledged to “put people facing crises first”.
But “back to basics” aid and “listening to people” are often on opposite sides of the spectrum.
“People tell us that they feel trapped in these cycles of short-term support where they're getting drip fed just enough to get them through the month,” said Sophie Tholstrup, director of policy and climate at Ground Truth Solutions, which has also researched frontline opinions on the reset, ”but not enough to put any aside, not enough to put their kids through school, not enough to do any of the stuff that would help them realise their future aspirations.”
“I really think we'll look back on this period of decision-making and just think: ‘What were we playing at?’”
“We're resigning ourselves to catching people at the moment they fall off the cliff,” she added, “rather than doing any of the stuff that stops them falling off the cliff in the first place.”
Tholstrup, like all who spoke to The New Humanitarian for this article, said she understands the difficult dilemmas facing decision-makers. But the complexity and consequences of reset choices underscores the need to listen to people affected by them.
“I do understand that prioritisation needs to happen, and not every expectation can be met. But the idea that it's a bunch of people sitting in a closed-door room in Geneva that decide what those basic things are – not the people on the front lines of crisis who are in communication with the humanitarian system every day – is absolutely absurd,” she said. “And I really think we'll look back on this period of decision-making and just think: ‘What were we playing at?’”
What’s next?
Part of the reset includes proposals to “reform and reimagine” how humanitarians work, though the ideas haven’t been publicly released.
Some who have seen the proposals, or have insight into the discussions, said they fell short of what many might be hoping for.
“Underwhelmed,” said one source, a humanitarian official.
There’s a “lack of clarity to build something new that will truly meet the purpose of the future”, an official at another organisation said.
This puts the focus on what comes next. The reset may include cost-cutting, long-needed changes to humanitarian structures, and ideas to simplify and streamline. Many observers say promises to work together, share information, and share services and costs are a welcome change of pace.
But the humanitarian reset itself must be a starting point, not an end game. “It’s just fiddling around the edges,” the humanitarian official said of the reset. “That’s not going to change things for affected people.”
That change goes beyond the humanitarian system itself.
Mergers proposed for the UN80 reform process could ram through transformations and make parts of the reset moot. Addressing debt and tax justice for distressed countries could help level historical imbalances and reset the relationship between Global South and North. The cuts to come – to programmes, budgets, and organisations themselves – could leave humanitarians who remain with tougher tasks helping communities left adrift by aid.
For local humanitarian groups – surprised by the deprioritisation talk, or sidelined in the reset – it also means looking for stability beyond today’s system.
“The changes are here, and the funding is not there. So we have to find our way: How should we better organise ourselves,” Magudu said.
“We have to start to think about, ‘Okay, in the absence of these guys, how are we going to provide humanitarian assistance?’ The needs will still continue, and we’re going to continue to be here.”
Edited by Andrew Gully.
