US aid has been fed to the woodchipper. The internationally funded humanitarian system faces an extinction-level shock. The UN’s relief chief has signalled the need for an urgent re-prioritisation, a “reset”, and a “calculated retreat”.
But there’s nothing calculated about the way things are going.
Those who remain at the helm of a depleted system have a duty of care to those who depend on humanitarian aid to avoid the worst impacts – and to help steer international humanitarianism to a more sustainable future.
But the humanitarian system’s leaders – notably the IASC principals, which mainly include the heads of UN agencies and big NGOs – are compromised by incentives to preserve their own organisations. They’re too entrenched in the system to be able to think beyond what is already familiar or to push beyond what the status quo will allow.
Early ideas for change are modest but generally positive. The larger problem is not simply what’s being proposed but who is being asked to deliver them. The leadership needed to navigate this crisis will have to come from elsewhere.
Where we’re headed
The humanitarian system was heavily exposed to the USAID cuts. Newly announced rollbacks from European donors have yet to bite, but the impacts on crisis-affected people are already brutal.
They are likely to worsen as cuts to development funding are felt and heavily aid-dependent governments face budgetary shocks.
If we let this play out – with the task of renewal left to humanitarian incumbents – then cuts and organisational survival adaptations will leave us with a poorly functioning vestige stripped of responsive capabilities.
Funding will not follow value. Organisations will compete to survive, contorting themselves to the preferences of funders. UN agencies will out-compete nimbler and more cost-efficient frontline organisations.
How we got here
Over the past 20 years, a relatively benign funding and policy environment enabled huge growth in the scope, complexity, and footprint of the humanitarian system. But all was not well even before today’s funding shock.
The system was already failing to deliver humanitarian diplomacy, protection, and lifesaving assistance in the most difficult places – most notably now in Sudan and Gaza.
The “rules-based international order” and the values that underpin it are crumbling, and states are no longer willing to stand up for the rights of the victims of war. Statements from humanitarian leaders mean little without the weight of UN member states behind them.
Humanitarian organisations, meanwhile, are heavily compromised by their reliance on funding from member states. Their on-the-ground presence is influenced in part by where funding is available, instead of solely where needs are greatest. And they voluntarily self-censor, losing legitimacy among those they serve as well as their own staff.
The problem with reforms
Despite many rounds of reform, the humanitarian system has not succeeded in becoming more accountable, more responsive, more efficient, and better led. In fact, reform has become part of the problem.
Unlike a business, the system does not have to respond to market signals and feedback from customers, since our customers have nowhere else to go. Instead, organisations are accountable upwards, to funders and governing bodies, all of whom benefit from growth and centralised power. Donors become attached to “establishment” aid agencies and UN bodies, which reinforces a spiral of oligarchy, market dominance, and a huge barrier to entry.
Reforms that threaten the balance of power and control of resources are quickly neutralised. What we have gained instead is more bureaucratic drag. Even the 2011 Transformative Agenda reforms noted with concern that the cluster coordination system, introduced in a round of reforms in 2005, had become “overly process-driven” and was “perceived to potentially undermine rather than enable delivery”.
Unlike a business, the system does not have to respond to market signals and feedback from customers, since our customers have nowhere else to go.
On 11 March, the UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher tasked the IASC principals with a to-do list of changes in today’s new financial reality. Proposals include a shift towards funding local actors, responding with cash, streamlining the cluster system, and pooling to finance common services. These are all welcome. The trouble is, they have already been resisted by the international humanitarian players that stood to lose the most.
Demands to shift power and resources to local and national actors, which emerged from the radically inclusive consultations that preceded 2016’s World Humanitarian Summit, have since been heavily co-opted by the international system. The “participation revolution”, which called to include people who use aid in decision-making, has had little impact since there is no real requirement to respond to feedback. And while cash programming has seen a substantial scale-up, it has been adopted as a technical modality – its transformative potential to reshape the system squashed.
How to avoid collapse
Despite the system’s well-known illnesses, humanitarian action cannot be allowed to collapse. Too many people, forgotten and trapped in refugee camps and in terrible wars, cannot survive without it and have no time to find a plan B. And the world needs crisis response capabilities perhaps more than ever.
We need to work quickly to avoid the worst impacts of funding cuts on crisis-affected people, to undertake a rapid triage and restructure of the system, and to bring forth a new purpose and legitimacy for humanitarianism.
To imagine something new, we need to open a civil and inclusive dialogue on the ethical foundations of humanitarianism, how to distribute power, and how to agree on our respective comparative advantages and functions.
The radical consultation of the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit demonstrated the power of opening dialogue spaces to let in creative voices and energy. This time, we must also find ways for crisis-affected people to shape the discussion.
Here are some starting points:
- Include affected people in the big re-prioritisation: The “participation revolution” calls for people who receive aid to be included in making the decisions that affect their lives. Fletcher has tasked the emergency directors’ group, comprising senior humanitarian officials from IASC members, with drafting “a clear prioritisation plan… for saving as many lives as we can with the resources we have”. However, there’s no sign of how the views of affected communities might be included – and no indication that this will be anything other than a technical exercise.
- Establish an independent functional review of the system: We need to decide what to keep, what could go, and what could be merged – fast. An independent group, not compromised by institutional preservation incentives, should be commissioned to examine how core functions of the system could be organised to more effectively deliver principled assistance and protection. This cannot be a talking shop: It must have a work plan identifying critical functions to review and a timeline for delivery. It must quickly issue proposals for public review, challenge, and iteration.
- Convene a coalition of “high ambition” funders: Donors have real power to drive change. They have the power to allow organisations to re-allocate funds, to de-fund what no longer serves, and to direct funding to what will move us forward. But this can only work effectively if their priorities are aligned and coordinated.
- Start an inclusive dialogue to envision a new humanitarianism: Traditional humanitarian principles, norms, and institutions no longer serve a much more diverse set of humanitarian actors who operate in a new generation of crises and rapidly changing global political and economic forces.
The fundamental changes needed today are too important to leave to a conclave who have been remarkably effective at preserving power, resources, and control through successive rounds of reform.
The system needs to be cracked open to allow scrutiny and challenge as new reforms are pitched and shaped. Voices from outside the centres of power must influence the “humanitarian reset”.
