by Adelina Kamal & Marc DuBois
Forced and insufficient, the United Nations-led humanitarian reset nonetheless offers a coherent response to the financial crisis so painfully disrupting the sector. Or does it?
As part of ODI Global and NEAR’s Advisory Panel on the Future of Humanitarian Action, we have come to a different conclusion: that the crisis affecting humanitarian action is primarily one of legitimacy, of its moral and political rather than commercial currency.
The legitimacy at stake is in the eyes of both the societies paying for much of aid programming and (especially) the communities receiving it. Our panel believes that humanitarians have spent decades talking proudly of principles that they have often failed to honour. But they have not been listening.
We lay out three pathways to reimagining humanitarian action to address this legitimacy challenge:
- Champion an updated interpretation of the principle of humanity.
- Centre justice and equity in the narrative of humanitarian response.
- Counter the protracted exceptionalism that mis-applies emergency mindsets and actions over decades of multi-dimensional crisis.
[The full blog is published on the ODI Global website and was written in partnership with Adelina Kamal, another panel member. 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.]
Thanks for sharing. I hope you don’t mind some critique.
I am not convinced that humanitarian aid is facing a crisis of legitimacy. It seems to misread what is largely a geopolitical and material shift as an internal moral failure. Declining support is taken as evidence of lost legitimacy, when it may instead reflect changing state priorities under nationalism, fiscal constraint, and strategic competition (reallocating resources toward domestic pressures: aging population, defense etc). I am not sure where the evidence is for a loss of social legitimacy?
The argument also collapses different forms of legitimacy. A drop in political support is treated as a loss of moral legitimacy, which doesn’t necessarily follow. At the same time, the framing leans heavily on a critical social justice lens, where structural inequities are taken to invalidate the system itself – effectively raising expectations from saving lives to resolving global injustice.
The critique of ‘permanent emergency mode’ also feels misplaced. The persistence of humanitarian action reflects the persistence of protracted crises, not a conceptual failure of the system.
More concerning is the strategic implication: if humanitarianism is framed as fundamentally illegitimate, this may inadvertently justify withdrawal – especially in an already shifting political landscape. This is where critiques from the extreme left and right meet (which I have written about elsewhere).
In short, this analysis over-internalises the causes of the crisis and over-moralises the system’s shortcomings. The more plausible drivers are external. While we can’t control them, focusing critique and reform internally will not address the underlying problem.
I don’t mind the critique at all. You raise some important points. Before anything more substantive from me, I will allow others to comment. Read: let me think about that!