Designed as a response to crisis, the humanitarian aid sector now finds itself at the heart of one.
Steep, immediate cuts to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) budget join significant (though less deliberately sudden) cuts to foreign aid budgets by the United Kingdom (UK) government, as well as those by France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and others, sending a shock wave through the sector. These cuts, especially their suddenness, have and will continue to trigger devastation, not randomly but precisely in the (often Global Majority) countries where people are subject to violence and destitution, as they have been throughout the centuries.
Yet within (and outside) the sector, a paradoxically optimistic minority cast this sectoral crisis as an opportunity for much- and long-needed change. UK foreign secretary David Lammy has championed ‘a long overdue conversation about the future architecture of aid’. Podcasts bubble with talk of a ‘humanitarian reset’. Moving well beyond the pragmatics of adjustment, conversations also call for a transformation of the sector’s relationship to societies and people in crisis. People seek to reimagine the global politics governing aid and to vanquish the enduring influence of the sector’s neocolonial history. To that end, the Advisory Panel on the Future of Humanitarian Action was created to help navigate and surmount the crisis by providing strategic analysis and reflection to the donor community and wider sector. …
[The full blog is published on the ODI Global website, CLICK HERE for the rest of the article. It is part of my work as a member of a joint advisory panel set up by ODI and the NEAR network in response to the crisis in aid funding. Our assignment is to advise major government donors on the future of aid and shape the discussions to come. Our sights are set on the big picture — the changes we want to see — and not the downsizing forced by the cuts.]
I enjoyed reading your piece ‘Leopard spots and the problem of change: crisis in the humanitarian sector’ which rings well with much of my own research and thinking on the issues. The resistance to change is deeply rooted in the institutional identity and the outdated, prescriptive nature of its discourse. The solution I present complements your call for a change in the ecosystem that shifts control of the narrative and recognises a less arrogant, less simplistic, less exclusive discourse around the humanitarian identity but one that is not unfamiliar to the levers of power in the sector. This will mean recognising and reifying a space of humanitarian interaction with politics and power that is familiar and less threatening than the (failed) attempts to create a place for independent humanitarian ombudsman you mention in your piece.
My conclusion is that it is a reformed space for discourse rather than the construction of some form of institutional function with self-referring prescriptions and rules for accountability that will have the trust across the broadest platform of stakeholders in the humanitarian environment. This place of engagement with politics and power — a space of cooperation and challenge — is familiar to anyone who has worked in emergency response, and with a shared history across religions and cultures, so what might appear as a radical change is not so radical after all!
Here are links to some of the pieces of my own that present these arguments:
Redirecting the Revolution, IFRC Solferino Academy (April 2025) https://solferinoacademy.com/redirecting-the-revolution/
An Ordinary Humanitarian Society: Trust and Solidarity in Contexts of Confrontation, Public Anthropologist (August 2025) https://publicanthropologist.cmi.no/2025/08/20/an-ordinary-humanitarian-society-trust-and-solidarity-in-contexts-of-confrontation/
Resetting the Moral Compass, Global Policy (August 2025) https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/26/08/2025/resetting-moral-compass
However, the failure of principal actors in the sector to identify established and unestablished power for breaches of humanitarian law direct towards a more confrontational approach voiced by many authorities in the sector. Until an unequivocal moral stance regarding the abuser and the abused is clearly taken by leading humanitarian institutions such as the United Nations and the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, then this liminal ‘third way’ is not the solution. Many in the humanitarian sector are echoing the public outrage but the institutional guidance is lagging behind. Discretion has an important role in acts of diplomacy but when the humanitarian goal of access to save lives is refused then maintaining silence to abuse is seen as transactional self-interest.