New report: Reckoning and Renewal: A Future-Ready Humanitarian System – an Independent Think Piece

Earlier this year, I worked on a think piece commissioned by the Grand Bargain Ambassadors, with Suleiman Abdullahi and Damian Lilly. The brief was to help them better understand what the humanitarian system needs to prepare for a turbulent future. We also were to help them consider the future of the Grand Bargain, which has become the principal vehicle for humanitarian reform. Unusually, they granted us complete freedom to imagine possible futures.

This is the reckoning we face:

The humanitarian system was designed for a different era; a world of greater geopolitical stability, linear crises, and steady, discretionary funding. That world no longer exists. Crises today are overlapping, protracted, and political. Decades of growth in the international humanitarian system have also seen a loss of clarity of purpose. The system’s legitimacy is also eroding, among the people it is intended to serve, those working within the system itself, and among wider citizenries and governments. A return to a situation of plentiful humanitarian funding should not be expected. Massively reduced funding will put extreme strain on the system and if a major new system-level crisis occurred tomorrow, it is unlikely that the current system would be able to respond.

Reform efforts have focused on technical adjustments without addressing the underlying political structures or economic incentives, assuming the system’s core logic was sound. It is not. The system has become supply-driven, over-complex, slow and bureaucratic and often disconnected from the needs of the people it serves. During this period of structural reckoning, there is an opportunity for a fundamental redesign of purpose, structure, and legitimacy that allows the system to meet the realities of a changing world. The Humanitarian Reset and Grand Bargain commitments, however, are insufficient for addressing the scale of the reform that needs to take place.

We imagined three scenarios and “stress tested” the existing system in these imaginary futures. Under each scenario we concluded that that the current architecture would be outpaced by new actors, funding flows, and delivery models operating outside its boundaries. What results is a more plural, fragmented, and contested humanitarian space, in which the foundational assumptions of the past decade, including predictable donor support, centralised coordination, and normative coherence can no longer be taken for granted.

We recommended five principles to guide a renewal:

Among the calls to action, several could gain from inclusive deliberative dialogue.

• Reconceptualising humanitarian action, will require reconciling divergent views on scope and ambition and charting a vision for new forms of humanitarianism, including a stronger role for humanitarians as advocates, brokers and facilitators.  To bring forth a vision and common language for a new humanitarianism needs deliberation on a vast scale, to include citizens and networks of solidarity at the margins of the international system, but who are already its future.
• Rebuilding legitimate leadership: Power must be shared, not concentrated. Leadership must be earned through accountability, moral courage, and responsiveness, not assumed by mandate, or exercised through bureaucratic power and control of resources. The proper exercise of power relies on checks, and an open channel for creativity from the margins. This means opening up to regular challenge and dialogue.
• A focus on performance and results: Greater independent scrutiny of system performance is needed, especially from crisis-affected people themselves, to identify what is and is not working, and to safeguard space for alternative models. This is not a matter of harvesting feedback; real efficiency and dynamism needs dialogue.