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The Grand Bargain reform pact opens a new chapter in Geneva this week with a slimmer focus, a longer name, and renewed questions for a shrinking system that struggles to change.
The 19-20 October Grand Bargain annual meeting turns a page on what’s now a decade-old package of reform promises. Born amid the ambition of 2016’s World Humanitarian Summit, which sought to sharpen and rejuvenate the global emergency aid system, the Grand Bargain has fallen from the spotlight as the humanitarian system lurches from crisis to existential crisis. Across the sector, reform and renewal have been sidelined in favour of a focus on efficiency, scale, and visibility, as wide-reaching donor aid cuts push the sector’s biggest players into survival mode.
For its detractors, the Grand Bargain has become a byword for the international humanitarian system’s roadblocks and contradictions – commitments to shift power and money run up against economic incentives that preserve the status quo.
Its proponents express a sense of ambivalence: They’re frustrated by incremental progress and sector resistance, but still see the platform as a rare inclusive space.
“It’s frustrating, the slow change,” said Nanette Antequisa, who heads Ecoweb, a non-profit in Mindanao in the Philippines, and a member of the Alliance for Empowering Partnership (A4EP), a civil society network. “But we still continue to engage in the process. Even if the change is quite slow within this very huge system, we also see some change in terms of behaviour.”
No other forum, its backers say, brings different corners of the system together on a nominally equal footing. Many of the sector’s biggest players – including UN agencies, big international NGOs, networks of local organisations and grassroots groups, and donors – have signed on to Grand Bargain commitments. At least on paper, it’s the kind of inclusivity missing from bodies such as the UN-led Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), or in country-level responses dominated by international groups.
“Some in the UN and big direct implementation INGOs are undoubtedly uncomfortable with how the Grand Bargain has become a space in which local actors can actually table agenda items, ask tough questions, and even lead processes,” said Howard Mollet, head of humanitarian policy at CAFOD and a member of the Charter 4 Change coalition.
But today’s Grand Bargain’s ambitions are colliding against forces pushing in the other direction.
Aid cuts have forced the system to shrink, and wrenched up competition for scarce funding. Many of the biggest agencies are doubling down on themselves: The cuts, an independent assessment commissioned for these meetings noted, have “altered organisational incentives, intensified competition for resources, and reinforced short-term decision-making”.
Yet wider pressures make the Grand Bargain’s goals as urgent as ever, proponents say. Crises are deepening as climate change intensifies and as international norms are flouted. Many donor governments – including some who contribute to today’s conflicts or shield those that do – are boosting defence spending while slashing aid budgets.
The number of people in need of humanitarian aid has doubled in the last decade, yet available funding has plummeted in the other direction. The UN says some 239 million people need humanitarian assistance this year, but the formal system is prioritising only a third and is likely to reach a fraction of that.
Here are a few takeaways and key points as the next phase of the Grand Bargain is thrashed out:
What’s changing
The new version of the Grand Bargain, to be formalised this week, pushes more heavily on country-level progress.
The focus is stripped back to concentrate on quality funding, localisation, and equitable partnerships. Accountability to people who use aid and gender are meant to be cross-cutting threads. It also gets a new name already squished into an obligatory acronym: the Collective Action Platform for the Grand Bargain, or CAP4GB.
Part of the push will be through expanding and formalising country-level bodies known as national reference groups, or NRGs. These groups, built on equal participation, are meant to transpose the global discussions to ground level, where promises are often lost amid the urgency and imbalances of day-to-day response.
Future annual meetings, meanwhile, are meant to be more “action-oriented” and “political”, according to framework documents describing the vision for the platform’s future.
What has the Grand Bargain done?
For all of its faults and the self-critique, the Grand Bargain has been a subtle catalyst for change that improves the system as a whole, supporters say.
Ongoing discussions on improving risk-sharing, how donors incentivise accountability, or fair overhead funding, for example, were incubated or propelled at the Grand Bargain level before finding broader buy-in from donors and the wider system, Mollet said.
It’s also been a forum where local organisations can show what’s working, including locally governed pooled funds – a model for scaling up more direct funding to grassroots groups.
“We see the progress,” said Okkar Shein, head of program for the Gender Equality Network in Myanmar, which includes more than 100 civil society groups. “We see that the Grand Bargain platform is really important for us.”
Ukrainian civil society organisations have used the Grand Bargain national reference group to push for a minimum duty of care package to protect frontline humanitarians; it now has donor backing. Attacks on aid workers hover at record highs, and the sector has long struggled to figure out how to fund equitable support up and down the system.
Ecoweb has pushed intermediary organisations – significant chunks of humanitarian funding are passed down and sub-contracted through international agencies – for fairer agreements and overhead costs by pointing to their Grand Bargain promises, Antequisa said.
“Whatever the failures of the Grand Bargain, it certainly has put localisation and local leadership at the centre of discussions. It was never like that before,” said Smruti Patel, founder of the Global Mentoring Initiative, who has worked with local and international organisations on localisation issues. “The fight we had to get it there is a big one. So I think we shouldn’t underestimate what it has been able to do.”
Frustration is growing as the sector shrinks
But signs of frustration are increasingly common, in ground-level responses or in global discussions.
In March, local NGOs in Chad suspended their participation in humanitarian country team meetings for weeks, after they were largely blocked from direct access to some $100 million available in a UN-run pooled fund.
In Bangladesh, a survey of local organisations to be shared at this week’s meetings found fewer than half had received any direct funding in 2025. UN agencies and international NGOs are taking the bulk of funding for response plans in 2026. “Local NGOs have received no funding at all,” the survey reported.
In March, local NGOs in Chad suspended their participation in humanitarian country team meetings for weeks.
Another survey of hundreds of organisations in 40 countries by A4EP and NEAR, a Global South civil society network, found that perceptions that the Grand Bargain had improved humanitarian aid are “at an all-time low”.
Funding is a common example, as numbers are stark. But more important for many local leaders – who are often used to having their capacity questioned and undermined – are issues of equity and respect.
“For me, it’s more than money. It’s about legitimacy,” said Nyararai Magudu, founder of Girl Child Rights, a Mozambican NGO.
Last year, the IASC discussed the possibility of an “accelerated transition” to scale back the emergency response in Mozambique as part of the humanitarian reset plan pushed by the UN’s emergency aid coordination arm, OCHA. More than 1.3 million people in Mozambique are either internally displaced or returnees.
Local organisations weren’t even aware of the discussions until the last minute, Magudu said.
Similarly, the strategic planning process for next year’s response, known as the Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan, is nearing its end, but local organisations have had little input, he said.
“‘Locally led’ means the local actors shape and inform. We are not informing; we are not shaping; we are not in the forefront,” said Magudu, who is also convener for a platform of 160 local organisations created as a reaction to last year’s transition scare. “Our members are being told what they can do and what they cannot do. That is not localisation.”
Cuts have lead to “fierce” competition for money
Many humanitarian leaders also describe a “battle of survival” as organisations compete for the same dwindling streams of funding – from government donors, to pooled funds controlled by OCHA, to in-country fundraising sources.
“It’s a game of survival, the way I see it,” Magudu said. “We have seen some international NGOs trying to change their faces to look like they are local actors, because they know that if they don’t do so, they will not be able to survive.”
Big agencies are chasing funding from relatively small philanthropic foundations they often overlooked before funding pressures spiked with last year’s sudden US aid cuts.
In Myanmar, international agencies have never had access to the entire country, with large swathes of territory controlled by non-state groups. The balance between local and international responses is sensitive – especially after the military junta’s 2021 coup.
“Some international actors cannot collaborate with us. They see us as competitors,” Okkar said. “Actually, we are trying to complement them. We are not trying to take all the funding resources; we simply ask that they fulfil their Grand Bargain commitments.”
A country director for an international NGO told The New Humanitarian that many of their colleagues support localisation, but last year’s US-led cuts have pushed it down the priority list.
“Everyone’s kind of fighting for their own and trying to stay relevant,” said the director, who asked not to be named as their views did not represent their organisation. “I believe international NGOs have to step back sometimes. But there's so much pressure with funding cuts, it just creates a bit of a toxic environment, where this Grand Bargain is [seen as] not as important. But I do think it's still relevant.”
Why it still matters
If the Grand Bargain ended tomorrow, what would replace it? That’s a common hypothetical question raised in its defence.
The humanitarian reset is sometimes described as a reform plan, but it is focused for the moment on short-term improvements, and led by one UN agency.
“The Grand Bargain is still a failure. But it’s a good failure. You cannot advocate from a baseless foundation.”
Power imbalances are rife in most existing forums. Where local leaders have a seat on pooled fund advisory boards or in humanitarian country team meetings, they’re often sitting across from international NGO and UN agency counterparts they call their “donors”.
While critical of the results of the last decade, Magudu also sees progress and a necessary baseline in the Grand Bargain.
“The Grand Bargain is still a failure. But it’s a good failure,” he said. “You cannot advocate from a baseless foundation. You need somewhere to build your advocacy.”
Meanwhile, crises are spiralling around the globe. As the depleted international system scales back to focus where money or access is available, it’s under-equipped or even stepping away elsewhere.
Typhoons are ravaging the Philippines “year in and year out”, Antequisa said.
The Grand Bargain, she said, recognises the inevitability of a shrinking international aid system, and the need to also help local responses stand on their own.
“Whatever gains in our development and humanitarian action it’s being wiped out, in many cases. So we see the importance of strengthening the local structures and systems,” Antequisa said. “People actually don’t want to be dependent on [aid] funding.”
Edited by Andrew Gully.
