Rethinking Humanitarianism | Will big donors “smell the coffee” or get left behind?

11:35 – National interest versus humanitarianism

14:29 – “The world’s become a colder and crueller place”

17:13 – An insurgency from below

20:24 – Interest in maintaining the status quo

24:24 – “The moral argument isn’t cutting through”

33:36 – A battle for the heart of humanitarianism

38:44 – “If I controlled UK humanitarian policy…”

Colum Wilson

If you track the humanitarian discourse of the UK government over the last 25 years, you can see the way that humanitarian action by the government has converged increasingly with national interest. Now, that's not a debate. That's fact [...] and therefore you get an inherent and systemic built-in tension between national interest versus humanitarianism.

 

Tammam Aloudat 

Welcome to this special edition of the Rethinking Humanitarian podcast in collaboration with Start Network. In this 6-episode series, we explore what really drives change in the humanitarian system…

 

Christina Bennett 

And what it tells us about future efforts to transform it for the better. In this episode, we’ll explore how politics, power, and money influence humanitarian response from the top, down.

 

Tammam Aloudat

From The New Humanitarian, I’m Tammam Aloudat.

 

Christina Bennett 

And from Start Network, I’m Christina Bennett.

 

Tammam Aloudat

So, Christina, we're going to talk to someone who is both a humanitarian with a long history, but also as an insider to one of the centres of power.

 

Christina Bennett

Yeah, for me, it's going to be so interesting to hear from someone who was, or sort of had a front row seat to humanitarian policymaking and decision-making, but who is now outside of that, outside of government structures, and and possibly has some some insights and, and more freedom to to talk to us about what goes on and and how we can do things better.

 

Tammam Aloudat

When we were planning the series, we were talking about, you know, who do we talk to? And obviously one of the sides that determine where, you know, power and money goes is governments, donor governments. So this is where we're coming to today.

 

Christina Bennett

And I remember back in, and this is going to make me sound super old, but I remember back in 2025* [speaker intended to say 2005] to the reform efforts then, which was when we were refreshing the CERF, the Central Emergency Response Fund, when we were working on putting together the clusters, you know, the UK government at that time was the real driver and brain trust behind a lot of those reforms. You know, back then it was very much aligned with humanitarian values and what we wanted to do to bring more effectiveness and impact to humanitarian aid. But today, what we’ve got are politics that don't necessarily align with our values – populist politics, donor cuts, shifted norms and values that will have the same system-shaping effect as they did back then. So, what will that do to us, and you know will it force us to reevaluate our role in ways that seem counterintuitive, counterproductive to what we want to do as humanitarians? But will we be forced into that?

 

Tammam Aloudat

So, I will one up you with appearing old. I remember when, my second time going to a a big emergency was in the aftermath of that tsunami, and that was in Ache, and where the realisation that there's no coordination, and there was what came to regularly be called the humanitarian circus afterwards, was the seed of the idea of clusters that came later. And obviously, a lot of the reform is related to states in power. And as you say, at the time, at least they appeared to be interested in doing things in a principled way. Now we can argue whether they meant it or not. Our guest comes from FCDO and from the British government's humanitarian aid part, and at the time, the British government was determining the discourse about humanitarianism. If you remember, in like 2008 and nine, they came up with the idea of resilience as opposed to, you know, just response. There was talk about early warning. A lot of things that were, you know, not only given a concept but also given the resources to do so. And the assumption was that, you know, we're discussing as humanitarians with governments to inform them and to sort of guide their benevolence in the right direction. Now we can't assume that they're benevolent. Even pretending to believe that they're benevolent is not really viable anymore.

 

Christina Bennett  

You know, what we're seeing today, it's more transactional. It's more about dealmaking. You know, the ideas coming out of this are not about community resilience. They're about boards of peace that are orchestrated by those sitting very much outside those communities, and very much in positions of, of power that, that wish to, to wield that power in ways that that communities don't want or need. What we see are the sources of income coming from, from private interests that will have a really different influence on how humanitarians act and react.

 

Tammam Aloudat

And I think key to what you're saying is this deal making bit. On the face of it, it comes from this whole Trumpian, you know, ‘art of the deal’, which really isn't getting deals. We're recording now as the yet another Iran-US deal is, is falling apart. We focused on this in The New Humanitarian in the beginning of the year when we were, we talked about dealmaking replacing peacemaking. It is about finding a deal that you know you can coerce people into or convince people that it's the worst possible scenario, rather than actually finding a solution. So we're not only not finding a solution to the core causes; we're not even finding solutions to the symptoms anymore. We're just, like, trying to get a few people to agree on something and make it go away. And that's worrying because it's not holding up, like, even in the most pragmatic way. It's neither alleviating suffering or helping people as we would want, nor is it solving any of the underlying problems. And what we're going to discuss with our guests is: how did that come to be, and why are we here?

 

Christina Bennett  

And what has that trajectory looked like? It'll also be interesting for me to hear a little bit from our insider about how much influence did he have being inside government as a civil servant? You know, I get the impression that there are a lot of good, intelligent, well-meaning, you know, extraordinary people inside governments these days, but they, their influence is minimal in the face of very, very strong political interests that go against what they think is best.

 

Tammam Aloudat  

I think you're absolutely right, and I think it's an opportunity for us– for me – to say that it's often difficult to criticise the system without appearing to criticise people. And I think that's important to distinguish. Of course, many of the people who work for large organisations or for governments are humanitarians who have spent a lot of their life trying to do the right thing, and they are confronted with the systems they work in. And I hope that is one of those tensions that we'd be able to hear about from our guest.

 

Christina Bennett

Our guest this episode spent more than 20 years doing humanitarian work for one of the world's largest donor governments – the United Kingdom. Colum Wilson headed the FCDO's humanitarian department for over five years, a position he left just last year. These days, Colum works as a senior humanitarian policy advisor. He joins us from London. Colum, welcome to the podcast. 

 

Colum Wilson

Thank you.

 

Christina Bennett

First of all, you spent 20 years in government, and now you've been let out. What has it been like to engage in humanitarian policy from the outside of government, after all these years?

 

Colum Wilson

It was a massive pleasure and privilege to work inside government. However, you make a trade between influence and proximity. So, you are very, very close to the levers of power, and that's quite a heady experience, but at the same time, you lose touch with what's going on in the real world on the ground. And in that respect, it's been very refreshing to break free, let's put it that way.

 

Christina Bennett

How much influence did you actually have when you were in government? You know, there's always this feeling that we have outside of government that you, as civil servants, you know, are the ones working for us in practice every day. But how much, how much power did you have internally, and how much did the politics of the day influence what you were able to accomplish?

 

Colum Wilson

I think there's two ways to answer that question. The first is to look at it from the point of view of the ministers who, in a democracy, hold all the power. In reality, quite often they don't necessarily understand our humanitarian world at the level of detail and nuance that, if you've been in the sector for long enough, you obviously have. And that provides you with a certain degree of power because you can set the agenda for what ministers are thinking about, and you can formulate questions and answers in a way that both educates ministers, but also guides them to some extent. That's the first way of answering it. The second way of answering it is in very pragmatic terms. In the position of running the humanitarian department at FCDO, we had the job of setting the policy direction for the UK's– FCDO's humanitarian portfolio, which at its peak amounted to £1.2 billion. Now, there's lots of ifs and buts about how well that influence worked, to the extent to which we were shaping the actions of ambassadors on the ground, but in principle, that's quite a powerful role to be in.

 

Tammam Aloudat

I do understand that, and I take what you say about being close to the levers of power as a conduit for them, and you talk about educating ministers. How much is it of, is education, and how much is it, is trying to make the humanitarian need trump the policy concerns – to be kind, using my words – of ministers of the day?

 

Colum Wilson

Well, you made my job very easy, Tammam, because that's the central tension. And when we used to get new humanitarian technicians, advisers coming into DFID and then FCDO, I always used to say to them, ‘Look, you've got a certain amount of political capital. Use it wisely. Don't go into bat on every single issue because you're not going to win. You have to choose very, very carefully what it's worth making a stand on.’ And to anticipate your next question, that does mean compromise. There's a lot of compromise going on, but the trade-off is that you do get the chance to whisper in the ear of ministers: ‘From the humanitarian point of view, Minister, this doesn't make sense,’ and there is significant reputational risk if you go in that direction, for example.

 

Tammam Aloudat

So the way you're saying it, there's a tension between the humanitarian need and direction that is required, and the desire or interest or politics of the ministers. My question before the compromises: Why do the ministers, who are supposed to be overseeing the humanitarian effort, have a politics or interest that is counter to the humanitarian need of people they supposedly serve?

 

Colum Wilson 

Well, if you track the humanitarian discourse of the UK government over the last 25 years, you can see the way that humanitarian action by the government has converged increasingly with national interest. Now, that's not a debate. That's fact. If you look through the white papers, you can see the successive white papers over the last two, two and a half decades, you can see that happening. And therefore you get an inherent and systemic built-in tension between national interest versus humanitarianism. It wasn't like that in the early days of DFID, it was a much cleaner cut, but it's become harder and harder.

 

Christina Bennett 

So what I'm hearing you say, Colum, is that things have changed over the last few decades. You know, we always talked about, or we have always talked about this golden age of humanitarianism where the, the purpose of government or governments, you know, development offices aligned with what we wanted to do as humanitarians, or aligned with the humanitarian purpose and humanitarian principles, where top-down government-led humanitarianism actually worked. Would you say that there was that golden age, and that it's now changed as what I'm hearing you say? Is that the trajectory you've seen?

 

Colum Wilson

I'm not going to give you black and white on that. It's shades of grey. It's certainly darker or closer to black than it was in those days. It was the heady days of, you know, the end of history had come. The the victory of the neoliberal world order, and—

 

Tammam Aloudat 

Those were the good days?

 

Colum Wilson

In some respects, they were….

 

Tammam Aloudat

Oh god.

 

Colum Wilson

And in other respects, they weren't. But notwithstanding that, it was far easier to make a pure humanitarian argument to ministers then than it was now. And there's, a there's a, there is a metric, if you like, of this. Back in the day, in the early noughties, we used to do humanitarian and development work writ large because it was the right thing to do. Then it became the right thing to do, and in our national interest. Then it became, oh, it's in our national interest, oh, and by the way, it's also the right thing to do. So even the framing of why we did humanitarian work changed, and you could monitor it by the shifting way that that sentence was formulated.

 

Christina Bennett

You know, the system has changed a lot over these decades, Colum, that you have also said that the calculation that governments are making vis-a-vis that system have also changed. But now we're here in the middle of another reform effort, another pivotal moment, perhaps the end of humanitarian history, or another moment where we're turning a page. It's called the humanitarian reset, this latest reform effort. Is there anything that feels different about this moment compared to past existential crises of the humanitarian system, or past reform efforts?

 

Colum Wilson

Well, let me turn the question around. If you do a thought experiment and say, ‘Could we do a World Humanitarian Summit now, 10 years on from when we did the last one?’ It's quite an interesting test, because the answer that I get back when I ask that question to counterparts in other governments within my own humanitarian team in FCDO was ‘Absolutely not.’ What has changed between then and now is the world's become a colder and crueller place where realpolitik tends to trump humanitarianism, for a start. The second thing is, it's essentially a principal-agent problem, where the agencies themselves have become too large, really, to be controlled tightly by their principal supporters. They have their entities unto themselves, they're massive entities unto themselves. They are basically making the weather in the humanitarian system by what they do, and that is, to a large extent, my opinion is, beyond the control of the principal donors.

 

Tammam Aloudat  

Whose, whose control is it under? Why did they become that?

 

Colum Wilson  

Like I said, it's a principal-agent problem. They're so big, they're such monoliths that they have agency themselves, and they say, ‘Well, okay, that's all very well. Thank you very much, WFP board, but, you know, we hear what you say, but actually we're going to do this in our own way.’

 

Christina Bennett

I'm puzzled by the way you're framing this, Colum, in the sense that what you're saying is the reason why reforms aren't going through is because we have a… because the control that donor governments used to once have for them is no longer there, is no longer valid, is no longer working. But in my mind, if we were to hold a World Humanitarian Summit now, it would be a completely different configuration of invitees. I remember a blog that Duncan Green from Oxfam wrote years ago at the time of the last World Humanitarian Summit, and he talked about the temple versus the marketplace, and that the way that the system was configured was very much about the temple, about the power holders, about the institutions, the, the pillars that made it the the solid white building that it was. But really, what you saw around it was this marketplace: the ecosystem, the ideas, the energy, the people and the systems that were not the temple, but that eventually may, may tear that temple down. And I wonder if we, if we held a World Humanitarian Summit today, whether the energy for change would not come from the temple, but from that marketplace. And the fact that the temple doesn't hold the power for those principal agents that it once did isn't a bad thing because maybe it would be a groundswell versus a top-down reform that would get it to change.

 

Colum Wilson

That's exactly the way I see it. Basically, what I see now happening is a bifurcation. You've got what the system is doing and the attempts it's trying to make to self-reform, and you have what's actually happening out there in real life. And that represents the beginning of… I don't want to call it an insurgency, that's too hard a word, but people are just getting on with this. Whether it's gotong royong in Indonesia, or whether it's self-help groups in you know Sudan, Myanmar, or whatever – it's happening, and it's not waiting around for the system to move. That's the beauty of it. Now the question is, how does it play out between a centralised, top-down, state-based system, and what is, if you like, the groundwork upwards? I say that there is one other limitation. I mean, I've, I've, I've said to you my, my idea about sort of principal agent problems with the big UN agencies. There's also a problem with the principal donors as well. I mean, I have sat in enough donor coordination meetings to last me the rest of my lifetime and beyond. And I have to tell you that trying to converge donors around some even very fundamental changes, fundamental of, you know, basic ideas, I should say, is like pushing water uphill with a sharp stick. It is really, really hard. And so you have not only principal-agent problem, but you have donors not really converging around a vision of what the future should look like. That's problematic as well. But Christina, to come back to your principal idea about where the energy would be, it is out there, and, you know, perhaps the World Humanitarian Summit should not be constituted by the system; it should be constituted by civil society, and basically trying to capitalise on what I see as the beginnings of a groundswell, and starting that way up, and agenda setting that way up.

 

Tammam Aloudat

I want to go to definitions for a little bit because we keep saying ‘the system’. What's, what's the system? I mean, it's very different if we mean by the system the formal humanitarian organisations, whether that is the UN, the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement, and large NGOs, or if we say the system and we mean effectively the convergence of Western governments and their instruments – that is, money and organisations. Those are two very different machines and have different interests. I think we, we are too charitable if we separate the humanitarian system from the political interests of its donors. What's the system to you, Colum?

 

Colum Wilson  

Absolutely. I mean, I think they are separate things, but I'd say there's one thing that unites them, and that is interest in maintaining the status quo. Because if you go back to my initial contention that humanitarianism from the UK government's point of view has been converged with national interest, that is the same across all the principal bilateral donors. 

 

Tammam Aloudat  

Again, I'm sorry, I don't want to be a pain, but national interest according to whom? And at what metric? National interest now means stopping the boats in the UK. 

 

Colum Wilson

Correct. 

 

Tammam Aloudat

Is that really national interest or the political flavour of the moment? Because we call it national interest, and we sort of at some level understand that it's actually nationally beneficent to the UK. We're making an assumption that is politically motivated. Is it national interest or the political interest of the ruling party at the time?

 

Colum Wilson  

Well, yeah, okay, it's an interesting distinction. I mean, I'm basically talking national security strategy territory, but we know that the evidence for allowing so-called immigrants into the country is an economic benefit, so it flies in the face, ostensibly, of the national interest. However, it's a politically set agenda, and this is something where I think you and I would absolutely agree. One of the problems – and I would say that this was happening before the merger of DFID and FCO, but has been nailed into place with the formation of FCDO – is this subsidiarity of humanitarianism to wider interests. So, if you're an ambassador sitting out in, I don't know where, Middle East somewhere, you've got a humanitarian tool which you can play in, but it's being played in in line with UK national interests writ large, and that is a politically determined direction. That much I agree with. 

 

Tammam Aloudat  

The moment for me was Priti Patel, I think in 2015 – and that was before FCDO, that was still UK Aid – and when she said, in the line of, ‘We shouldn't do aid without trade.’ That was actually quite sobering to me. So we accept a framing whereby the donor gets to call the political shots as the basis of humanitarianism now. Because I mean, I don't want to sugarcoat stuff and pretend that, you know, the humanitarian eagerness to save lives of strangers is what moves donors when it's not. We, we just are diluting ourselves. And as you said, it's darker today, we can't afford to dilute ourselves anymore.

 

Colum Wilson  

Yeah, that's right. I mean, you know, if you, if you read the kind of analysis of the attitude of cohort of young people between, I don't know, 14 and 24 in the UK, it's quite revealing. Because what they say is ‘Yes we do give a damn about what's going on to strangers we don't know in difficult places of the world and we feel a sense of global solidarity with them. However, we're actually very, very concerned about whether we're going to have a job tomorrow,’ and there is a tension because they're outwardly focused but domestically concerned. Now, this finding it's true across a number of surveys. So what that points to is a massive tension that basically undermines the moral basis on which we do our humanitarian work, because there is a competing pressure. Now, this is not, this is not rocket science. I mean, on one level, it's blindingly obvious, but that is, you know, the rise of national populism across Europe is basically talking to the same thing. And as humanitarians, we've got to wake up, smell the coffee, and understand that concern, and then try and counter it, work with it, I'm not quite sure what it looks like. But that is-it's not going to  go away just because we think we're morally right.

 

Christina Bennett  

What should the relationship be between Western donor governments, these European governments that is, that are moving, you know, to the, to the right or, or becoming more populist in their in their intentions? What should that role be in the humanitarian enterprise? What role should they play if, if it's not a moral one? If it's not a financial one? And if it's not one that has the ability to control, as you said, the principal agents in the sector?

 

Colum Wilson  

We have to explain to nationalist populist voters that actually it is important to them that the situation in Sudan is sorted out from an economic point of view. Now, that's a very, very difficult line of argument because there's too many, there's many, many links in the change, chain. But that's where it's got to go because the moral argument isn't necessarily cutting through at the moment. I mean, there is kind of, you know, if you follow the sort of Trumpian logic, you're getting a moral argument that says, ‘Well, this is all about looking after our own people first.’ That's a moral argument as well, and that's quite a difficult one to counter. So you come back, then, to this idea of some kind of global solidarity being an important thing in its own right. And I think the only way into that is through some sort of economic argument.

 

Tammam Aloudat  

Colum, I understand what you're saying. But when you say ‘Make an economic argument,’ I mean, couldn't you argue that we you know instead of saying, ‘Oh, it's in our best economic interest to help Sudan so they wouldn't flood us’ and play into that potentially xenophobic rejectionist argument of they're only good when they are economically beneficial or when they're not there, And point at the absurdity of: No one is pissed at 15 billion extra pounds for weapons at the cost of domestic projects. Like, if I understand the news right, they have cut funding from domestic, from roads and energy projects and so on to pay for weapons. How does that fly, and a humanitarian argument doesn't?

 

Colum Wilson  

I don't have an answer. I mean, if this was easy, we probably wouldn't be sitting here having this conversation. But one thing I can say is that – I'm not, I'm going to dodge your question, Tammam, I'm going to answer it another way – is that fundamentally there is a human empathy that you can't shake off. Now, whether you dress that up as a moral argument or whatever, that is still there, and we see it in the form of, you know, self-help in response to the Venezuelan earthquake. We see it in self-organisation about community groups. All the stuff that you know, your, your work, Christina, is very heavily engaged in. So you're basically talking about something that is fundamentally human. If you talk to young people, and I have done, they say, ‘Well, there's no point. I mean, we're just sort of throwing water in the wind. There's so much humanitarian need up there. You know, it's all too difficult. We're not going to make a difference.’ What we need to do is to show that we can make a difference and that we have, we can bring back success stories. And this is the kind of bare knuckle narrative stuff that I think probably will win round at a generational level the next supporters of humanitarian aid. And that's where we need to focus our efforts.

 

Tammam Aloudat

You, and I, and Christina will remember how, when it was mostly earthquakes and tsunamis and stuff, it was easier to – and Venezuela shows that – it's somewhat easier to get people empathetic with an act of God, if you want. But we've been facing two genocides over the past three years between Sudan and Gaza, and it's heavily political and tense within the politics of the UK and the European Union. That narrative you're talking about – creating stories of success and narrative difference that gets people on board – can it be the same as humanitarianism always [has] been? Just like ‘save lives’, as if we are in a bubble? From your position of having been inside the machine of government aid, what do you see the benefits and downsides to a political versus non-political humanitarian narrative?

 

Colum Wilson

I mean, the single thing, and it's maybe a simplistic answer, is human suffering. You know, we've got to be quite careful there because the way people are portrayed as victims of a crisis, victims of a man-made or natural disaster, is problematic, and we understand that. But the problem is, or the point is, that people will still respond to that. Now, in terms of political framing, one thing I would say is that our aspiring prime minister, waiting in the wings, has turned around and said, the way that the Gaza, the government responded to the Gaza crisis was initially wrong, is quite telling. Because I think for, on one level, if you like, there was a democratic disconnect between what the people were feeling in this country and what the government was doing. So I have hope.

 

Tammam Aloudat

That's a very good point. I think there has been a pressure that yielded that statement by Andy Burnham. Although in Arabic we have a saying: ‘A mountain went into labour and gave birth to a mouse’. His statement was, you know, ‘We may have not been fast enough in calling ceasefire three years ago’ is not exactly an atonement for, you know, what has happened. It's sort of ‘Maybe possibly we were wrong’, and there was a lot of commentary about you know this is not what this is not a massive change. He didn't call it genocide. He didn't call for a boycott. He didn't stop the sales of weapons. Is that enough?

 

Colum Wilson  

Well…

 

Tammam Aloudat  

Is that a real change in your mind, or is it just rephrasing the same sort of concern and prayers? 

 

Colum Wilson  

You know, I, I would imagine that quite a few people, colleagues, really, really big-hearted humanitarians at FCDO will be turning around and going, ‘Gosh, that's a major victory that Andy Burnham has said this, all right, this is an interesting new development’. And at the end of the day, one has to take a bit of a breath and recognise that it is just words – and by the way, three years too late. But you are basically… these are tiny little bits of brick, if you like, in the normative building, the normative environment. I mean, I started life with MSF and thought all this is rubbish, all this diplomacy stuff is absolute… there's another word I'd use for it, but not on air. What I have learnt over the years, though, is that you build the normative environment word by word, and, you know, that the kind of statements that ministers come out with around Gaza, okay, they will have been hard fought every single word about that. And as a P5 member – and we can have our questions about whether it's right or wrong that we're a P5 member, etc. etc. etc… – the bottom line is that people pay attention to the UK's position, and it changes the normative environment fractionally. So, if I can respectfully suggest, don't underestimate the power of words. But you know…

 

Tammam Aloudat  

No, no, I’m not. My worry is at the, I mean, if I was a Palestinian or Sudanese, I'd contest that this is a major victory, given how slow and how late. But even in the tactical sense you've talked about, it is a change. Kier Starmer has not given anything near that. But who on earth knows? You know, you build this for 10 years, and then the next elections you have Nigel Farage and you're back to sub-zero. How much can we go incrementally, slowly building normative frameworks that an extreme right-wing politician [can] come and demolish with no regrets, as Trump did with USAID, and as potentially a, you know, a Reform UK might do with whatever is built until then?

 

Colum Wilson  

I mean, you're talking about the nature of the times and why this moment in time represents a watershed, and I'll defer to here to Christina who's seen through many, many rounds of reform from the inside of the system. But you know, in my, my recollection of previous reforms, have been that they were against a backdrop where we were increasingly doing technical shifts to the perimeter, to the edges of the humanitarian system against a backdrop that was more or less stable. Now, two things have happened that has made the last two years absolutely tumultuous. The first thing is that the international geopolitical world order has shifted in ways that even the most pessimistic foresight products that FCDO was producing at the time had not anticipated. So the shifts are mega. And the second thing is, we've got– or that includes, I should say, a move to a realism, international relations realism that is really, really stressing our humanitarian frameworks. And the second is, of course, the recognition that our system is no longer fit for purpose, set against this shifting background, and therefore this now presents a moment of time, in time where we have an opportunity, like, this is a once in a generation opportunity. The time when I left FCDO, in fact, you know, you, you blink once and the whole world melts down, but this is basically the moment that we've been waiting for for all these years.

 

Christina Bennett  

So if that's true, Colum, what you say is that we are at a major inflection point that's the one chance in a generation to make these fundamental shifts that we've all been talking about but have yet to make. You've talked about the fact that change is already happening on the ground. How then do you harness the power of governments to be able to enable that change? And do you think powerful donor governments will allow that reform to happen, or will they see a movement towards solidarity, a movement toward righting injustices as a threat to their ability to control?

 

Colum Wilson  

Yes, I think is the answer. I do see a battle for the heart of humanitarianism ahead. In fact, it's already playing out. You know, the question of solidarity is quite interesting and now being tossed around as an alternative framework to govern and shape what we support and do. But I think that you're going to end up with a rump system that is essentially the same shape as the one we have at the moment, because it won't be able to shift quickly enough or in the right direction fast enough. But it will be small. I'll come and answer your question about what governments can do in this, but around that, you're going to get alternative models: regionalised, national models that centre sovereignty at regional or national level, that centres civil society. And by the way, this is not something that's going to happen in the future. It's happening now. At the best, you could end up with a confederated sort of global system that supports humanitarianism. At worst, you could end up with a fragmentation that so shakes the normative frameworks that they cease to be meaningful. Now, question about what, if you could call them ‘traditional bilateral Western donors’ can do in this melee: I think what they have to do is to smell the coffee and work with an agility that they're going to find very, very difficult. And I would say that there are some donors, and I'd call them middle-tier Western donors, that are already moving in this direction. But I don't think the principal big donors are going to be able to move fast enough in this direction, and they're going to become a little bit of an anomaly. They're going to be left behind. The new frameworks and ways of working will be being determined out in the rural areas of Somalia, and in the rural areas of, I don't know, Bangladesh, rather than in Geneva, and London, and Washington. 

 

Tammam Aloudat

Is that a good or a bad thing?

 

Colum Wilson  

Oh, it's interesting. I hadn't thought of attaching a judgement to it, but if you put me on the spot, I think it's a good thing. Because it's, basically we are shackled to Maslow's hierarchy, our entire humanitarian system. If you actually ask people what they want, they don't talk about the bottom tier of Maslow's hierarchy, and that fundamentally is what should be guiding us. So it's a question of agency. And if you use the servicing of people's agency as a principal driver, you are already building in all sorts of tensions with the existing centres of power.

 

Tammam Aloudat

Let me ask you, when you were an FCDO, how much does a government know, or consider, or factor in, or even care about what actually people, like… How much of it is a technical, or political, or agency calculation on behalf of the people that are affected?

 

Colum Wilson  

Well, the first thing is you've got to be quite careful, and you'll forgive me for just correcting the assumption that FCDO is a single entity – it's got lots of people in it, and all those people have different perspectives. And what I can tell you is that there's a hardcore of humanitarians in there – I was fortunate, privileged enough to be one of them – that understand the way that things go. But the idea of leeching power away from the centre, from the donor control, is fundamentally going to be problematic. This is something, I'm not the first person to say this. You know you guys write about it the whole time, Christina lives the dream by transferring power out. We understand that. But fundamentally that is going to be problematic. So what you have is a lot of very, very good humanitarians who understand the technical ramifications, who understand the moral point of doing this, but are to some extent constrained by realpolitik of humanitarianism as an instrument of, if you like, power, global power.

 

Christina Bennett

We've talked about a lot of dynamics today. We've talked a lot about the history of the power of donor governments. If you were in control of the UK's humanitarian policy today, suspend disbelief, what would be the first thing you would do? 

 

Colum Wilson  

If you go into this imaginary world of views where it's decoupled from national interests, so that's the first thing to get out there, is you can set a policy frame that favours support for, if you like, all the stuff that's happening that would form ultimately a confederacy rather than a centralised system. So a way of supporting the growth, a thousand flowers blooming out there, and it comes down to a few important policy levers. One of them is cash. The cash revolution hasn't, hasn't been completed. We're only on 21 per cent or whatever it is now, and that's declining since last year. The second is moving away, wholescale, from the grant model. There's two reasons for that. One is it's no longer fit for purpose, there isn't enough money to hand out. And secondly, it is a major affront to people's dignity. So what we need to do is to start using the limited ODA that we've got to leverage other money, and insurance is a very good example of that. So I would be saying, well, you need to explain why you're responding, why you're not putting insurance frameworks in place beforehand. The third area is extensive use of the ecosystem of pooled funds, and that doesn't just mean CERF or country-based pooled funds. And I'm using the words really carefully: the ecosystem. So, feminist pooled funds, women's pooled funds, local civil, civil society pooled funds – that entire ecosystem. Obviously you’ve got to work out how the checks and balances work, etc., and that's not a small thing, you know. That's got to be reconciled with Daily Mail readers and whatnot back at home. But fundamentally, that represents a way of solving the wholesale-retail problem that is at the heart, one of the technical reasons why large scale support for localisation is quite difficult from big donors. So those, I've given you three policy levers. I would reframe the UK's humanitarian approach in those terms.

 

Christina Bennett  

You’ve painted a picture of this federated ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’ ecosystem, and there are some who think that that is the future of aid. But what we also have alongside it: some very, very powerful interests re-centralising, pulling back from this idea that there is a, there is an ecosystem and going back to funding the oligopoly that has been the humanitarian enterprise for some time. If you were the UK government now, what would you do to influence those larger and smaller donor governments to move in the direction that you've explained to us?

 

Colum Wilson  

Well, the first thing is, one of the issues that I have with FCDO – and I'm sure I don't think I'm going to upset anybody by saying this – is that FCDO, along with a lot of other top-tier bilateral donors, is risk-averse, bureaucratic, and highly path-dependent. So the first thing to do is to embrace an agility and willingness to look outside and understand what is going on across the rest of the constellation, the humanitarian ecosystem, as it's been framed out there, and understand that there are alternatives out there. The second thing I'd do – and this is something that gave me a lot of sleepless nights when I was in the previous role – was to mobilise donors around that agenda. Now that sounds easy enough, but as I said to you earlier, it was very difficult to get a coherent message out of donors because they're fractured by their own national interests. And you know, particularly with the rise of, sort of, populist governments across Europe, that's become even more intense. So you know, the German framing of humanitarianism in its recent strategy is quite interesting in that respect because it, it coasts very closely towards supporting national interest. So you've got all this problem going on. So then what you look for is new and emerging and middle-tier donors who have the agility, don't come with the geopolitical baggage necessarily, and whatnot. And I think that is the next centre of power that we need to invest in to try and mobilise towards shifting the system.

 

Tammam Aloudat  

Just for our listeners' clarity, when you talk about the middle-tier donors, are we talking about Belgium, Luxembourg, Australia, or are we talking about new donors? What should we think about when you mention that?

 

Colum Wilson  

It's a bit of both. There are some very innovative donors out there that are quite small. I mean, Swiss is one of them. Irish Aid, very very interesting what they're doing. Then there are what I'd call emerging donors. Again, it's a bit of a pejorative term, but you know countries where we used to go in and do old-style humanitarian support, like Bangladesh and Indonesia, they don't have the same frame. They don't have same framing of humanitarianism as we do. Whose humanitarianism is it anyway? But you know, can you imagine a coalition of those member states putting forward alternative models and supporting an alternative way of doing things. Yes, it represents a different centre of power, but it's either ignoring that or it's trying to support it in a constructive way. And I'd be in for the latter.

 

Christina Bennett  

This episode has been about reform from above. Do you think that reform of the system, by the system, or from its, its patrons, the donor governments, is possible or desirable? And is ultimately the future of humanitarian action better off without them? Better off without those patrons that have been the major players in the system to date? 

 

Colum Wilson  

So you can't wish them out of existence. Let me answer your first, your second question first. You can't wish them out of existence. This is why I think where we're going to end up, if we scrolled forward and imagined ourselves sitting around this table in 20 years' time, what would we see? This is this idea of kind of rump system that I mentioned before, surrounded by a kind of a constellation, if you like, of alternative centres of power that, to a greater or lesser extent, are coherent, but not necessarily. So that's the future I think where it's going to end up for pragmatic reasons, because you can't undo the structures that we've got. The power is too entrenched. But to come to your first question, then, about whether a complete reset, if I can use that word, or a complete sort of white-sheet-of-paper reform is possible: the answer is no. And by the way, getting to that new configuration that I've described is going to be heavily, heavily contested, and it's going to be fought over the whole way. If you ask me whether the system can self-reform – and this is why the question about the World Humanitarian Summit 2026 I think is relevant – I don't think it can self-reform. I think it's too embedded. I think we had a political moment in 2016. Probably wasn't a powerful enough political moment, but you wouldn't be able to get that political moment again. And I think that reflects the fact that actually the system is too heavily embedded to be able to do fundamental self-reform. It won't, it won't wish itself out of existence.

 

Christina Bennett  

So, as someone who's familiar with the system, what advice do you have for those working outside the system? Those movements that have emerged in countries like Sudan, like Myanmar, like other places that have something to give to the system, that are able to shift it from below, but that have to contend with powerful governments’ resistance to that locally-led change?

 

Colum Wilson  

Well, I mean, again, I don't have a silver bullet answer here, and it's probably stating the bleeding obvious, but it's basically not waiting for the system to catch up. Trying to influence the existing system, the one that's so embedded where we can, but in the meantime, just getting on with it. And, you know, whether that's bringing weather forecasting in the last mile to people in Sudan, or whether it's bringing microinsurance to ground level in war zones, just get on with it, and then move it to scale. And that's going to require non-traditional alignments and partnerships. Again, it's a little bit of a hackneyed phrase, and you know the Global Partnerships Conference was nominally all about that. So you know, it's with the private sector, it's with philanthropies, and it's leveraging then into these places that sometimes are not necessarily comfortable to go into. So there isn't any big revelations there, Christina, but I think it is something to do with agility, and just not hanging around, and just walking the walk as well as talking the talk, because that's the only way it's going to shift.

 

Christina Bennett  

Thanks for that, Colum. Thanks for being with us today and for taking all of our questions.

 

Colum Wilson  

And thank you very much.

 

Tammam Aloudat 

That was Colum Wilson, former head of the FCDO’s humanitarian department. Next episode, we continue our discussion on how humanitarianism is changed from the top-down, this time from the point of view of a government that traditionally receives aid.

 

Abdihakim Ainte

The aid cut could be a blessing in disguise. This could be a moment, a defining moment where countries such as Somalia to see the current challenges and turn the current challenges into an opportunity, and look them inward rather than looking outward.

 

Christina Bennett

To our listeners, we’d love to hear from you – How can humanitarian action remain values-driven in a more transactional world?

 

Tammam Aloudat 

Thank you for joining us on this special edition of Rethinking Humanitarianism in collaboration with Start Network. 

 

Christina Bennett

This episode was hosted by Tammam Aloudat and Christina Bennett, and produced and edited by Melissa Fundira. Concept and editorial support from Irwin Loy and Kia Howson. Mixing by Tevin Sudi.

 

Tammam Aloudat 

If you have any questions or comments, you can email us at [email protected]. Please rate and subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcasts. Also consider becoming a member of The New Humanitarian to help us continue reporting from the hearts of crises. Go to www.thenewhumanitarian.org to find out more.