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.]