Humanitarian reform beyond the mega-crisis

A growing part of the popular discourse in the humanitarian sector is the idea that giant crises bring transformative change. This belief can be found in studies of the system’s evolution, proposals for how to change it, and reflections on central actors’ own roles. ‘Mega-crises have the potential to trigger sector-wide humanitarian reform’, in the words of Jessica Alexander, policy editor-at-large of The New Humanitarian.

‘Crisis’ in this context has two meanings – the ‘crisis’ to which humanitarians have responded, and the ‘crisis’ provoked by their shortcomings when doing so. This combination is most clearly seen in the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, when the flight of over one million Rwandans to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) triggered a major relief effort. Technical quality was low, competition between agencies was high, and instrumentalisation of aid by génocidaires was rife. In the ‘goldfish bowl of Goma’, one aid expert wrote, the paradigm of ‘unregulated humanitarian agencies “doing good”’ came undone. An expansive and groundbreaking study known as the Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda was essential to the shared understanding that emerged from the crisis. Normative reform initiatives, many of them focused on quality and accountability, consolidated and proliferated in the following years. At least three of the most important – the Sphere Project, the founding of the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action (usually called simply ALNAP), and the Humanitarian Accountability Project – ‘stemmed directly from, or were substantially influenced by’ the Rwanda evaluation.

Ten years later, the pattern of acute and high-profile emergency, collective critique of poor performance, and system-wide change was seen again in the response to the Indian Ocean tsunami. Another major study, in the form of the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition, found that the international aid response was ‘fragmented’, that it ‘brushed aside’ local authorities and marginalised local responders, and that agencies failed on their commitments to quality standards. Drives for greater accountability, coordination and coherence followed, some of which capitalised on bodies and frameworks developed after Rwanda. Again, significant changes resulted, domestically as well as internationally – including notably the introduction of the United Nations-led ‘cluster’ system and a new funding mechanism for emergencies.

Ukraine: the current mega-crisis?

The escalation of the war in Ukraine in 2022 seemed similarly poised to trigger a self-examination in the international humanitarian sector. ‘Ukraine is today’s mega-crisis’, was the analysis in The New Humanitarian. Though there had been conflict in Ukraine since 2014, outside it had become an ‘all-but-forgotten war’. In the wake of the Russian invasion, then, most international aid organisations were ‘caught utterly flat-footed’ by the rapid and massive escalation of needs. In a matter of days, Ukraine went from being a low-priority, under-resourced humanitarian response to concentrating most of the attention of United Nations (UN) agencies, international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and their donors. Eventually, the UN-coordinated ‘flash appeal’ for the response to the Ukraine war would receive 88% of the nearly $4.3 billion that it sought for 2022 – a year when the UN’s combined appeals reached 59% of the requested total.

Turning this extraordinary volume of funds into aid projects and getting it to Ukrainian organisations that had few or no previous connections with the international aid system was always going to be challenging. Even so, these predictable difficulties became central to criticisms of the response, with narratives of collective failure soon emerging. Three months into the full-scale war, analysis by Humanitarian Outcomes found that ‘most of the money was still unused, sitting with international organisations’. Another three months later, Ukrainian NGOs issued an open letter declaring that it was ‘not the time to excuse inaction by blaming “the aid architecture”, “the system”, “managers,” or “donors”’.

At the same time, aid in Ukraine raised political and ethical questions. As described by researchers from the Humanitarian Policy Group, the situation produced:

‘a jarring clash between the narratives of solidarity that have been so ubiquitous across political discourse, media coverage and among communities across Europe, and the core principles that are used by traditional humanitarian actors to frame their operations’.

This clash also contributed to tensions with Ukrainian organisations, which called for their foreign counterparts to ‘let local civil society actors decide our priorities and how we wish to act in solidarity in this conflict’. Some observers of these dynamics expressed hope that, although it wasn’t the only place where neutrality was being challenged, ‘Ukraine may be where the power balance tips in favour of change – allowing for a broader definition of humanitarianism beyond Ukraine’s borders’.

Over two years in, however, there are few markers of a coming transformation. Despite its size and political relevance in the West, the humanitarian response to the war in Ukraine has been relatively conventional and many of the operational challenges of the response are familiar. Moreover, the aid response has been relatively unburdened by expectations that it will contribute to bringing about peace in Ukraine. While the international relief effort appears in line with Western diplomatic, economic and military support for Ukraine (for some, uncomfortably so), the strength of these other forms of support means that humanitarian aid occupies a less directly instrumental position.

Is Ukraine evolving – in the sector’s perception at least – from a ‘mega-crisis’ with the potential to catalyse change, to a large but ultimately non-disruptive response? As the war continues, and with many eyes now on other conflicts that demand the urgent attention not just of humanitarian organisations but of governments, institutions and citizens around the world, it would be premature to be definitive. Nonetheless, the emerging paradigm shift on Ukraine may reflect a deeper resistance to change within today’s humanitarian system.

Catalysts for system reform and resistance to change

In fact, Ukraine is not the only recent ‘mega-crisis’ candidate whose impacts underwhelm. In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic and related containment measures multiplied assistance and protection needs while simultaneously requiring drastic alterations to ways of working. The raft of changes forced by the pandemic – for example, to decision-making approaches, in increased flexibility of funding, and in who could access operational leadership positions – provoked optimism in some quarters that gains might be retained. At the same time, social justice movements elevated critiques of power and inequality in the aid system to never-before-seen levels. Despite all this, the 2022 State of the Humanitarian System report – the most comprehensive picture of the system’s evolving composition, concerns, strengths and weaknesses – found that progress in key areas since 2018 had been ‘mixed’, ‘partial’, and ‘slow and non-linear’, and that ‘neither COVID-19 nor system-wide reflections on decolonisation galvanised significant shifts in power’.

The crucial question is why: after multiple ‘mega-crisis’ moments, with a broadly shared diagnosis of the problems, and with concrete experience to draw from, why were opportunities not created to intervene in the system in more profound ways?

The answer may lie in who stands to ‘lose out’ in the kinds of changes called for today. With questions of power and identity explicit to these ideas, they have the potential to undermine the instrumental positions that certain institutions have occupied in relation to the system at large. Certain large organisations – above all the UN agencies, which between typically receive between 55% and 60% of tracked international humanitarian funds – have entrenched interests in resisting reforms that might relativise their role or their access to funds (whether as operational actor or intermediary). State donors would need to cede some of their control so that structures in the system can be released from their gravitational pull, to invest more in their own capacity to expand the number and type of organisations they fund, and to be less risk averse. On balance, despite some moves towards flexibility, consultation and innovation, they do not seem willing to do so.

Instead, this impasse has produced a proliferation of parallel competing reform processes. Despite their sometimes large-scale and ambitious goals, these processes are often considered to be ‘tinkering’ around the edges of what is needed. They embody the technocratic and bureaucratic culture of international governance in general, although they also reflect a genuine desire for improvement on the part of those who criticise aspects of the politics and performance of the formal humanitarian system.

Stuck at an impasse, but constantly exercising a collective desire to improve, the sector is now showing a state of reform fatigue. ‘Bored and kind of exhausted’ was how one participant described the atmosphere at the 2024 Humanitarian Xchange conference. High-profile reform conversations have become characterised by ‘shrugging resignation’ at unmet goals. Perversely, the multiple and often bureaucratic forms that aid reform takes today may be clogging the system up even further, and while joint evaluations after Rwanda and the Indian Ocean tsunami built consensus and helped to galvanise action, relevant research today may almost be too voluminous and too dispersed, creating weight but not necessarily momentum.

Thus after decades of reform initiatives, a paradox has emerged, in which humanitarian actors and commentators repeatedly evoke that the system is not ‘fit for purpose’ while the system itself is constantly reinforced even in times of increasing budgetary constraints. Alex de Waal’s observation 25 years ago still resonates with many of the complaints about ‘insufficient’ reforms today: ‘the humanitarian international appears to have an extraordinary capacity to absorb criticism, not reform itself, and yet emerge strengthened.’

What, then, will drive system reform?

If mega-crises are no longer a catalyst for change and the optimistic ambition of the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 is a distant memory, what is going to drive reform of the humanitarian system in the coming years? Climate change might provide the answer or, at least, part of it.

Although slowly and timidly, the humanitarian system is starting to engage with the immensity of the challenge posed by the climate crisis. Climate change has come to be considered the top threat facing humanitarian action and agencies have recognised an ethical obligation to address their own climate and environmental impacts. New principles and practices are demanded from ‘climate humanitarians’ in a sector under pressure to imagine pathways from the present to a different future. ‘Took us long enough to get here,’ a fictional character reflects in Malka Older’s short story about aid in 2050:

‘years, decades of advocacy and activism and chance upheaval that brought sympathy from people with power, and lots and lots of economists saying we were right about it and So… Many…. Meetings. But here we are.’

Yet it remains unclear whether the complex impacts of the climate emergency will constitute the mega-crisis that will drive reform in the coming years.

Perhaps it will, and many people in need of support will benefit from that. But even if this is the case, humanitarian organisations should not take for granted that their central role as the preferred tool of the international community to respond to crises, needs and vulnerability will remain unchanged. The ‘golden age of Westsplaining’, as one historian labelled the 1990s, has come to an end. Among other effects, the turn of Western states towards illiberalism and austerity and away from multilateralism and international norms is undermining – though not for the first time – the norms and the resource base of the international humanitarian system. This system is further, and rightly, being challenged by critiques of the inequalities, exclusions and other harms that it perpetuates. Movements that are in dialogue with it, as well as others operating in parallel, are already showing that more hope for reform may come from outside than within.

These trends move too slowly to provide the shock of the mega-crises of the past. But they should cause the dominant players of the system to take note. If they lose what still appears to be their privileged status on a global stage, perhaps only then will humanitarians understand the cost of all the missed opportunities and broken promises of the previous decades.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of H2H Network, Save the Children or any other organisation.

Eleanor Davey is an independent researcher.

Fernando Espada is Head of Humanitarian Affairs at Save the Children International.

Kim Scriven is the Director of the H2H Network.