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In May 2016, I stood in Istanbul as head of the secretariat of the World Humanitarian Summit. It was an ambitious attempt to bring together different corners of the aid world to build a new agenda for humanitarian action.
While the summit shouldn’t be remembered as a total failure, it certainly wasn’t a success story either. Instead, it tells us important lessons about what blocks change.
The summit’s greatest achievement was framing the priorities for humanitarian reform. Its greatest weakness was that it did not address the power behind that intention. Istanbul named the problem: It created a shared understanding of what needed to change, and it affirmed localisation, participation, flexibility, efficiency, and accountability as priorities.
But the summit did not create binding consequences for failing to act. It did not address the imbalances ingrained in who controls money, who carries risk, who defines priorities, and who is accountable to people affected by crises.
Ten years later, humanitarians stand at a crossroads again, facing a funding crisis and calls for reform. Some see a way forward in the “humanitarian reset”, launched by Tom Fletcher, the emergency relief coordinator and head of the UN’s humanitarian coordination arm, OCHA. A reset is necessary. But it will only be transformative if it learns from where the summit and its follow-up processes stumbled.
From bargains to resets
The World Humanitarian Summit established the “Grand Bargain” on aid efficiency – a platform meant to move the reform promises forward, and still the most visible outcome born from Istanbul.
I served as OCHA’s representative in the Grand Bargain facilitation group. It was a guidance committee for the platform: We worked to sustain political momentum, support independent reviews, clarify priorities, and move from broad commitments to operational progress.
But the power imbalances and roadblocks were immediately obvious. The blockages were not technical, but political considerations that translated into institutional paralysis.
The Grand Bargain was formed as a voluntary compact, with no enforcement mechanism. Actors could sign up to ambitious commitments without facing real consequences if they failed to deliver.
I saw that many actors – aid agencies and donors – broadly agreed with the reform language: localisation, participation, transparency, cash, reduced reporting burdens, quality funding, and better coordination. The difficulty came when those commitments required institutions to change their own incentives, business models, or decision-making authority. Some decisions required major change at the institutional level – changes that representatives of organisations had limited power to guarantee.
The Grand Bargain was formed as a voluntary compact, with no enforcement mechanism. Actors could sign up to ambitious commitments without facing real consequences if they failed to deliver.
Take localisation as an example. Many organisations supported it in principle, but the promise to shift power to local leadership touched the core financial interests of the system. Donors and international organisations were willing to speak about local leadership, but much less willing to redistribute fiduciary, legal, security, reputational, and operational risk – and to give local actors a real role in governance.
We’ve seen how this plays out year after year: Organisations promise to hit funding targets or be better partners, but there are no repercussions for slow and sometimes non-existent progress.
That sobering lesson has stayed with me. It became even clearer during my recent assignment as deputy humanitarian coordinator for Sudan, with a focus on Darfur. There, the unresolved questions from Istanbul were visible every day: local responders carrying enormous risk without predictable support, NGOs and community networks closest to the crisis but often furthest from decision-making, international actors speaking of localisation while retaining contracting power, affected people consulted but rarely given influence.
Lessons for today
In Darfur, as in Gaza, Syria, the Sahel, Ukraine, Yemen, and elsewhere, the humanitarian challenge is not only one of efficiency, but also of power, protection, access, and political obstruction. Civilians are attacked, besieged, displaced, starved, or denied assistance as part of military and political objectives. Humanitarian reform cannot be reduced to better delivery mechanisms if it cannot also defend humanitarian space, civilian protection, and principled action.
Today’s “humanitarian reset” comes at a moment of severe funding contraction, institutional fatigue, and declining trust. Its four pillars – define, devolve, deliver, and defend – speak directly to the unfinished and undelivered agenda of Istanbul. The reset is necessary. But it will only be transformative if it changes the rules of the game, not just manages the sector’s decline.
The humanitarian reset may now be the next opportunity, but it must be stronger, bolder, and more openly debated. It cannot be a top-down exercise that contradicts the participation principles it claims to uphold.
The danger is that the reset becomes an organised way of doing less with less. Under pressure, the humanitarian system may define priorities more sharply, deliver at scale, devolve some functions, and defend principles more loudly. All of that is useful. But if the same actors still control the money, the same compliance systems push risk downward, the same coordination structures protect institutional mandates and interests, and the same affected people remain outside binding decisions, then the reset is merely optimising the existing system under austerity measures.
The reset is another test of the Grand Bargain’s commitments, from localisation to genuine participation, the use of people-centered cash assistance, multiyear planning, and flexible funding.
It must not repeat the mistakes of the World Humanitarian Summit. If the reset is to “devolve”, it must devolve decision-making, not just the implementation of tasks. If it is to “deliver”, it must reward collective outcomes, not organisational volume. If it is to “define”, it must do so transparently, with ethical criteria that affected people and local actors can challenge. If it is to “defend”, it must defend civilians, humanitarian access, and principled action not only to protect the reputation of the system.
Istanbul was a necessary beginning. The Grand Bargain kept part of that agenda alive, but it no longer sits at the centre of the reform the humanitarian system now needs.
The humanitarian reset may now be the next opportunity, but it must be stronger, bolder, and more openly debated. It cannot be a top-down exercise that contradicts the participation principles it claims to uphold. If the reset is to have legitimacy, it must be shaped with local and national actors, affected communities, NGOs, donors, and field leadership – not simply communicated to them once decisions have been made.
If it only helps the system shrink more neatly, the reset will miss the lessons of the last decade.
