Ben Ramalingam

The humanitarian ecosystem has tended to evolve the other way around, not through trial and error, but through error and trial, so we respond to what goes wrong, we absorb the shock through public and private processes, which are often very painful, and then we return to something that's not too far removed from what we had before.

 

Tammam Aloudat  

Welcome to this special edition of the Rethinking Humanitarianism podcast in collaboration with Start Network. In this six-episode series, we explore what really drives change in the humanitarian system.

Christina Bennett  

And also what it tells us about future efforts to transform the system for the better.

Tammam Aloudat  

The humanitarian system faces a crisis of funding and legitimacy. It's at a crossroads, but not for the first time. Reform agendas come and go, yet humanitarianism evolves, whether the system is ready or not.

Christina Bennett  

So, in this episode, we're going to start out by looking at humanitarian reforms. What's changed? What hasn't? And what does all of it reveal about how change happens?

Tammam Aloudat  

In upcoming episodes, we'll explore how politics and money shape humanitarian action from the top down, and how grassroots aid shapes it from the ground up.

Christina Bennett  

We'll also dive into the ‘what-if’ scenarios. What if humanitarianism returned to its activist roots? But also the opposite – what if humanitarianism is completely co-opted by political aims?

Tammam Aloudat  

Stick around at the end of the episode where Christina and I discuss how this series comes to be, and you can be part of a future episode.

This first episode is about reform from within. It’s about the pledge of the system to reform itself, both as a result of the cuts in aid that are happening since USAID and other governments, but also to the change in circumstances. 

Christina Bennett 

Yeah, I mean, I think this is a great place to start, because what I want to know from our two guests who have had a long conversation with themselves and with the system about change is to really ask them: has the system changed in their, in their opinion, in their lifetime, in their interactions with it, and in what ways. Will our humanitarian reset, will this moment of inflection for the system, will that result in the transformation, the change that we've all been talking about for so many years? It'll be interesting to hear what they both have to say from two very, very different perspectives.

Tammam Aloudat

I had a boss in the beginning of my humanitarian career who used to end every meeting with ‘Let's go put ourselves out of work.’

Christina Bennett

Did it ever happen?

Tammam Aloudat

Of course not. But that's, that is a long-standing myth that our primary job is to put ourselves out of a job, and I don't know that this will ever happen, or if it is possible.

Christina Bennett

Yes, let's introduce our guests for the episode. Ben Ramelingham, he is the author of the 2013 book Aid on the Edge of Chaos. I've known Ben for many years, and he spent nearly 20 years writing and thinking about the complexity of the humanitarian system and what makes it shift.

Tammam Aloudat

And our second guest is Nadine Saba, who is the president of the Akkar Network for Development, a local Lebanese NGO she created to improve the lives of women and children in her native region of Akkar. Nadine also represented local NGOs in the Grand Bargain for over two years. The New Humanitarian listeners will remember Nadine from her incisive conversation with the Grand Bargain Ambassador on our Power Shift podcast. 

Christina Bennett

Okay, Ben, I was a big fan of Aid on the Edge of Chaos when you wrote it 13 years ago, and at that moment you had theorised that “aid would resemble the world of which it is part: fluid, dynamic, emergent.” Thirteen years later, sort of reflecting on what you were thinking then and where you see things now, has aid moved in that direction? And if not, what's gotten in the way?

Ben Ramalingam

Thank you, Christina. And yeah, it's great to be with you. And yes, indeed, it's a book that seems to, you know, I still get commentary and feedback on it today about the relevance of the ideas, and it does seem to have gotten more relevant over time. I guess that the core piece is that I do think the sector has moved, but perhaps not as much as we would need it to to meet the needs of those people we are meant to serve. And I want to give an explanation of as to why I think this is. You know, in the book I talk about aid as an ecosystem, and this is language which we're seeing more and more. Some people use it metaphorically, some people use it more formally. You know, the OECD recently analysed the aid system using network analysis, you know, doing all kinds of different really formal methods of understanding the aid system. What natural ecosystems do is they evolve through variation, selection, and amplification: see what's going on, the selection pressures that mean that certain things are more preferable, and those things get amplified. So that's trial and error writ large. And I think the humanitarian ecosystem has tended to evolve the other way around. We've tended to evolve not through trial and error, but through error and trial. So we respond to what goes wrong, we absorb the shock through public and private processes, which are often very painful, and then we return to something that's not too far removed from what we had before. And since 2013 there have been examples of changes that have happened that have moved away, which have been genuinely that trial and error, but I don't think they've been fundamental or deep enough to really move us so that the aid system matches the world that we're part of.

Christina Bennett 

Whether it's trial and error, error and trial, isn't this just a feedback loop of continuous improvement? Whatever is driving it, whether it's, it's driven by failure and mistake or driven by an intention to pilot and experiment, shouldn't the end result in either way be a process of constant improvement?

Ben Ramalingam

It should, but I think this is where you know, and I'm really glad that Nadine’s on the, you know, Nadine's talked a lot about the difference between the kind of the ecosystem at the high level, which is about frameworks, about tools, about methods, and the ecosystem at the grassroots level, which is about people, about relationships, about power, about dynamics, about resources. And I think we do need to rebalance the shift, so it's really focused on what's going on at the systems and the system level, where people are actually supported, rather than at the high level of abstraction where we end up having kind of endless conversations and endless meetings, but don't really move far forward enough. I'll give you a really tangible example. You know, Ebola is on everyone's minds right now. We've got really good evidence and data on how sustained community engagement, especially in contexts where we don't have a biomedical solution – we don't have a vaccine for the latest strand of Ebola that's emerged – so it has to be based on community engagement, and we know that from painful lessons from the last Ebola outbreaks in West Africa, and actually in DRC in 2018 to 2020, that we need to be able to build this through two-way dialogue, through trust, through engagement, and this has actually happened in a lot of different settings, but it tends to happen after the communities have already lost trust. It tends to happen when things have already broken. It tends to happen when we don't have any choice but to do the right thing, and then we do it. And I think, you know, that that's a very simple reality, that crisis should be led by those places to them, and the arrogance and the kind of external perspective, or the community's perspectives on external experts, was really quite striking in the last crisis, and so we really need to recognise and resource the leadership and agency in the Ebola response close to the ground rather than continuously substituting and undermining that leadership. And we have, we're not good enough at applying those lessons straight off the bat, and so my prediction is that we will get there in the current crisis, but it will be through quite a few loops of doing error and trial.

Tammam Aloudat

I really like what you're saying. My objection is usually the mildness of the language. The variation and selection and amplification, the processes that you've talked about require some stability in the environment, and the environment is unstable and my. And the system is trying to survive and adapt through what you call public and private painful processes. I mean, my question is, do they need to be that painful and complicated every single time, as if we are exposed to shock for the first time ever in this system? I mean, you say very rightly we should empower rather than substitute. Isn't the problem, in fact, that we still at the top have the ability and the authority to either empower and substitute? Is there anything fundamentally different today in this reform that promises something, an outcome that is not just exactly the same again?

Ben Ramalingam 

You know, if you look at genuine situations where power has changed, you have to ask yourself: have the powerful ever willingly given up change? There's a famous phrase [from Audre Lorde]: master's tools will not dismantle master’s house. And I'm giving that as an illustration rather than kind of a direct example – but I think it's quite important to acknowledge that people do not give up power willingly in any sector or system. You know, we're seeing this in healthcare, we're seeing it in social care, we're seeing in every area of public provision where needs are exceeding an ability to supply. And empowerment of the people that we're supposed to support is actually a critical way of solving that, you know, addressing the gap, because there are important resources, important skills and knowledge that can be realised, and systems are not good at doing that. They're not giving, good at giving up power. So I do think we can be clear and robust in our language, but let's also not pretend that the humanitarian system is unique in this. This is a human challenge and a human problem, not a humanitarian one. We can sometimes self-flagellate more in the humanitarian sector and speak ourselves up about the things we haven't done. I think we do need to look across sectors and learn from what has happened in other settings that can be really usefully employed in how we do things. 

Christina Bennett  

I want to come to you now, Nadine. The Grand Bargain was arguably the most ambitious humanitarian reform of the last decade, but I was recently at a conference where someone said it was never grand, nor was it ever a bargain. Is that your assessment, that we didn't have the right ambition from the beginning? And maybe in answering that, discuss a little bit about where you see it has brought us to today, and where it could possibly lead us to somewhere we need to go.

Nadine Saba 

You know, whenever we're implementing any project, we have some assumptions, and we build our framework and our luck frame and our work based on these assumptions, and these assumptions are mainly related to the situation where we are. And here is my question: are we at this moment in 2026 dealing with the same assumptions, the same geopolitical context, the same political will, the same public opinion about aid as it was in 2016? I don't think so. So, for me, if I want to look into where the Grand Bargain is, I believe it would be a bit unfair to say that, you know, it wasn't a bargain, and it wasn't grand. I think that within the Grand Bargain signatories, we have two, or more than two groups: we have the believers, and we have the ones that just went with the flow. I do think that there was an ambition and the will, but I'm not sure that the ones who committed to the Grand Bargain were completely and fully aware of the implications of their commitments, and this is where I question how things have moved. So, I don't think that the ambition was not there, I think that throughout those 10 years, the ambition faded through different pathways, and for different reasons, and for different factors. Now, if I want to look into the strength of the Grand Bargain, I said it before, and I will say it again: the Grand Bargain is as strong as its signatories want it to be, and at this moment it doesn't look like the signatories want the Grand Bargain to be that strong. Whenever I speak with different other local leaders, we always have this dilemma: do we still need to put energy in the Grand Bargain? Do we still want to engage? Isn't it a bit tokenistic? And when I look into this, I completely see their perspective, and at the same time I think about, you know, the price of inaction. The Grand Bargain remains one of the very few fora where all stakeholders are sitting at the same table. Now, let's not dig into the efficiency of sitting at the same table at the moment, because there is a lot of imbalance, but at least it's a place where you can still voice out the concerns and say ‘This is not working.’ Now, is it being followed up with the action that needs to be taken? I'm not always sure about that. But at least it's a fora where you can still come and say, ‘Listen, this is not good, this is not functioning, this is not being as it needs to be.’ So, ‘Grand’ Bargain or not, it was a bargain. My problem is, was it because it was at the mindset of a bargain that it did not work? I'm not sure. Did we need to do something else from the get-go? I am not sure. Because I think that the bargaining principle in it, is it the reason why it's not as successful as it needs to be? I don't know.

Christina Bennett  

So, the bargain for me back then was about this quid pro quo. You know, as you say, it's one of the only venues where all different parts of the system come together and are able to work out these really thorny issues around power, around money, around positioning, and participation, and the quid pro quo was a bit of give and take by everybody, and I think, I think that perhaps hasn't worked, and maybe for the reasons that, you know, Ben just mentioned that a master's tools cannot be used to dismantle a master's house. And you said that the Grand Bargain is only as strong, can only be as strong as the signatories allow it to be. So, would you say, then, that the signatories are keeping it deliberately weak to continue the status quo, or do you think they're just plain tired?

Nadine Saba

I believe that even within the signatories we do not have a homogeneous group. I think that even within each constituency you have different perspectives. Again, and I'll go to that sense of the believers and, you know, the followers, or the non-believers, if I may say; some of the believers in each constituency did want and believe that and wanted to happen, and some of them did not. Is it a deliberate failure? Maybe for some. Was it lip service? Maybe for some. Is it just, you know, ‘We did what we have to do, we're trying, but the system is not working. We need to amend the system,’ and then my question is: who is the system? The system is not, you know, a stranger creature that came ex nihilo. We created the system. We are the ones who created the systems. We are the ones who created the rules. We are the ones who set the policies. And we should be the ones who would be able to change it. So, whenever people are telling me or talking about the system as if it's this strange creature, I'm like, ‘Okay, and the system is who?’ So, yes, I believe that that has been a bit of lip service. There has been a bit of, ‘okay, let's see if this works.’ There has been a bit of, you know, at one point was labelled, you know, ‘the new kids on the block’, the local and national organisations to those fora, but at the same time, yes, I believe there was a lack of political will to make this happen and to get things moving. 

Ben Ramalingam

I very much agree with Nadine. I want to give an example from some of the work that I did around the time of the Grand Bargain, where I looked at partnerships between national and local actors and international organisations. And there was one particular phrase that really stood out from a INGO, a big INGO, where this senior leader said a local actor or a national actor has to be really special to tell us they want to do something a different way and get away with it. And it really kind of still stayed in my mind, because you know, across the whole thing – it was the Missed Opportunities work, which was done with the coalition of INGOs and led to what ODI then referred to as the best longitudinal kind of evidence base on localisation – and in that research we found that local actors were more effective, more efficient, they did what was more relevant, greater levels of trust, and yet there was just this attention, because essentially the incentives were not there to give up the power. Donors retain visibility and control, because they basically have allocation power. They have power over where they want to give their resources and why. There's a political role that that… and a political function and they need that for domestic political impact and domestic political accountability. INGOs and UN agencies are the intermediaries, they have power in that intermediary that is for resources, for influence, for their position. And national and local actors lack the leverage to… to say no. They have to take what's on offer. And so there is a voluntary subordination of power and agency and capability to a system that is well understood to be blunt and sometimes ineffective, but at least is the source of money that otherwise wouldn't be available. And that incentive structure runs all the way through the system. The Grand Bargain, for all of the pronouncements and the statements, and the, you know, the signatories, it did not touch that incentive system one bit. It didn't change it, in my opinion. And Nadine's point earlier on is the critical one. What is changing it right now is the fact that the resources are no longer available in the same way. We're now in a different geopolitical moment, which is marked by fragmentation, marked by great power, economic warfare essentially, and aid is fundamentally changed in that model. And in that model, there's a, there's a different window of opportunity for change, which I guess is part of the reason we're having this conversation in the first place. But what exactly is that window of opportunity, and how do we find our feet in it? I think that's the, that's the critical part in this world of shifting sounds.

Nadine Saba

It looks like, for me, that whenever we're speaking about any reform or any type of change, we're just sticking to the structures and policies, which is the surface level, whereas what we need to really tackle is the mindset and paradigm. You know, a lot of people, when you tell them about localisation, they start talking mainly about the funding, they talk about, you know, equal partnership, the ICR [Indirect Cost Recovery] cost, and for me, this is not what it is. These are the things that I can see, and I can compute and I can measure, but when we're talking about localisation, it's a paradigm shift in the way we look towards aid. And this is where I think the flaws are. And the fact that we think that if we put a guidance note or if we establish a certain rule, then change will happen. Yes, change might happen, but at the same time, throughout my work, I've seen real change happening when it is intentional. When you have people who are convinced and who want the change, and you do not need to convince them that make things happen. And here I remember my years when I was studying law, and my first year a professor came in and said: there isn't a law that has been written by a human being that cannot be turned around, or you can go around it. So even if you have a policy, even if you have a guidance, if the person implementing that is not convinced about it and does not want to make it happen, they would still have ways to go around it. So, for me, again, going back to, you know, the idea: Grand Bargain, was it grand? I think the ambition for it wasn’t to be grand. The ambition for it, at least in the eyes of the believers, to go towards the mindset. But ultimately, what we have seen is that we're thinking at the level of the structure and the policy rather than digging in terms of the mindset and the paradigm.

Ben Ramalingam

I just want to build on that, because I had a conversation with a colleague of mine who… not a colleague, an old friend from university days that works in the private sector and is senior in banking now, and we were talking about that the resources in the humanitarian sector have dropped something like 35 per cent in a year and more to follow. And he was really struck. He said, well, presumably there's lots of consolidation, loads and loads of mergers are happening. And I said I think maybe one has been announced, but actually very little in the way of mergers and acquisitions are happening to consolidate the resource space. And he said, ‘Well, you've got an irrational system, then haven't you?’

Tammam Aloudat

And I want to examine that, because a rational system assumes that the system's goal is actually the announced goal. I mean, it's a rational system to not merge if you're going to lose your job and your salary if you merge. Localisation assumes that everybody in the system has the purest intentions and interests in just delivering aid in the best possible way, and that would be a bit of oversimplification, wouldn't it? Because in essence we have a heterogeneous system that has a dogmatic, you know, way of describing itself, and ignores that we have multiple interests. And, the fact that the World Humanitarian Summit was hosted in Turkey, as Turkey was receiving at the time, the returnees from Europe, who fled in exchange for money, co-hosted by the US and the European Union – I mean, the signatories aren't judgment-free, politics-free entities, and we pretended to believe that they will do everything to honour that. It obviously didn't materialise. So to follow on what you're saying, Ben, let's agree that, you know, the incentive is not saving people's lives in emergencies only. What's the incentive, and should we be worried about incentivising people who are already benefiting from their positions in power for them to do the right thing?

Ben Ramalingam

It's a great question, but I want to take a step back. Two or three years ago, I did some work with ALNAP, and we basically were trying to understand when has – you know, those, lots and lots of different reforms, lots and lots to change processes – but when has the sector actually meaningfully shifted and changed. So our starting point wasn't, ‘Did this reform lead to change?’ Our starting point was, ‘What are the major big picture processes of evolution that we've seen, and what actually underpinned them?’ We looked at the rise of cash over, actually, over a 150 year period, because people were talking and writing about cash in the 1870s. We looked at the rise of technology. We looked at community engagement. We looked at localisation. But we also looked at lots of other sectors. We looked at how shipping changed over decades. We looked at how power stations changed. We looked at sustainability, urban, urban development. And the lesson I learned from this is that there is no incumbent system in modern, or even possibly longer term history – we'd only look to the last 50 or 60 years – that has voluntarily relinquished the financial control on which its position rests. That's just not what humans do.

Tammam Aloudat

So are we deceiving ourselves by pretending that the system will cede control?

Ben Ramalingam

I think there is an answer to this. The seeds of the answer are already within the system. We have got examples of, you know, it's a cliche now, but we've got examples of the future already working within the sector. It's just not, we're not giving the resources to that. So if you look at the ways in which, for example, Indonesia or Mozambique have placed kind of clear limits on the engagement of the international humanitarian system, and said ‘We are going to coordinate, we’ll bring in resources as needed, but we're not going to catalyse and trigger international appeals for humanitarian aid, because it doesn't help us,’ and so there's more of a nationally-led process of engaging with crises and disasters. Obviously, that's a challenge if you're talking about conflicts and fragility and situations where the government themselves may be creating the conflict, creating the vulnerability. But we've got in the modern system examples of national, accountable institutions taking on and resourcing the system differently, resourcing humanitarian aid and humanitarian action differently, and the international actors have had to adjust and adapt and work in more of a partnership model, and saying, ‘Well, okay, we're not going to have boots on the ground, we're not going to have a cluster, we're not going to have INGOs, but we still want to support in this way, and so we're going to have to find different ways of engaging,’ you know. So that's a really good example, where the domestic accountability and structures and systems exist in such a way that gives prominence to those national local actors, and they have an alternative that is genuinely empowering, and then the aid system is additive to that. Another example, you know, cash, there's a really great report from [The] CALP [Network], which is looking at the efficiency of cash versus other forms, and it turns out that cash is demonstrably, across all different settings, something like 37.5 per cent more efficient than in-kind aid. Again, if you're in the private sector, you would be buying cash big time, right,? But cash is still capped at what, 20, 22 per cent? Well, not capped, but limited to 20, 22 per cent. Efficient is not the same thing as cheap. But if we were going to be, you know, a rational system, we would do that. What is stopping us from doing it? What is stopping this thing there is that there is an allocative power that says we must give in-kind, we must give to the actors we like, must give to the INGOs we want to, and that's limiting, even in this moment, the resources that can genuinely get to the people that most need it. 

Tammam Aloudat

I mean, arguably, it has happened, right? There are many more cash-based aid programmes now, so this is a demonstrably positive change. And as Ben is saying, you know, there is a delivery rate that is high. Although Ben, I would… it depends, statistics are always interesting. ‘Ninety per cent of it reaches people’ is a very positive statement. If you say 10 per cent is overhead, it’s a much less flowery one. It depends on how do we perceive things, because the system itself absorbs 10 per cent of that, in the best case scenario, that is, that you have given. So I want to absolutely emphasise the successes, but I also don't want to glorify them in a way that neglects the other side, because there are– even the Red Cross still has massive headquarters and hundreds and hundreds of, you know, international employees that are mediators between the donor and the national society. So to go back to Nadine, why hasn't things changed from where you stand, knowing what you know now?

Nadine Saba

I'm going to be a bit like the broken recorder, but I'm going to back, going to go back to the mindset, and to the assumption, and to the paradigm. And sometimes, you know, between quote unquote, humanitarians, lack humility. We tend to believe that we know better than the people what they need, and sometimes because of that, we stick to our old habits, to our ways of business as usual, and do have some resistance to change. So putting cash as an example, we are used to provide, you know, the food boxes, we are used to provide the kits, and the value chain is there, the system is there, the procurement is there, the whole industry is there. Changing completely to cash is a bit of a disruptive agent, [for] one. Linking back to what you have been saying, Tammam, in terms of livelihoods: If we want to move to cash completely, how many jobs, or positions, or you know, businesses might be, might be lost? Third – and this is where I am asking – is there any issue of risk in here? Is it safer in our perception to provide the kits to the people than it is to provide them with the money? I remember my first encounter with cash in my own organisation. When they first talked to me about cash assistance, my first reaction was like, ‘We are not a charity, and how would we do this?’ And then, after the first and second experience, and I was talking, and it was at that moment, it was a, it was an initiative mainly for women head of households who had came from Syria to Lebanon. And then when I talked to them, it was for me a complete shift in my perspective, because most of those women were telling us ‘We have our dignity, we know what we want, we know what we need, and we go and buy it.’ But at the same time, it felt a bit awkward for me because we used to do an info session whenever we were providing the bank cards and explaining them that, you know, ‘We don't want you to buy cigarettes, we don't want you to buy, you know, whatever items, we don't want you to buy such and such,’ and at that moment I felt, I really felt a bit patronising. It's, I mean, who am I to come and tell that woman, who is 50 years old, who is like my mom – well, I'm not that young anymore – who is like my mom, to tell her, you know, ‘You buy this and don't buy that.’

Tammam Aloudat

I remember those days very well, because in the resistance to cash was an argument of ‘They will go and buy booze with it,’ and in the acceptance of cash, we're telling them not to buy booze. So the assumption about how you know people are completely without agency and will harm themselves, you know, those are people who lived in their communities forever, have constructed their own cultures and economies, but we assume that we know better. You know, I might know better than you, and Ben, and Christina about anything related to your life – I can't impose it on you. The difference is not just the knowing better, the difference is that the humanitarian sector gives people extraneous to the community the power to enact their perceptions upon the lives of others. And this in itself, even if we don't oversimplify it to jobs and salaries and programmes, and you know, international staff and stuff. I mean, it's an enormous amount of power. And I don't say that in a bad way. Every humanitarian I know working in, with communities is doing it for the best reasons and with the best they can. I'm talking here about the systemic depriving people of their agency. The question is, we will give you cash when we believe it will be best for you, and cash is only one example. 

Christina Bennett

Let's step back a little bit to the case for change, or the process of change. You, Ben, have talked about this, the steps, or the elements that are needed in order to be able to enact systemic level change. Ben, what are those three elements that are required for systemic change to take place, and then of those crises, of those solutions that may be waiting in the wings, are they the right ones, and are the conditions in place for them to actually take hold?

Ben Ramalingam  

This comes from the research which I led for ALNAP, which looks at the history of humanitarian systems change. We looked at all these different examples and looked at where change has actually happened. And the first is that different kinds of crises, both actual crises, but also crises on the sector, create threats and opportunities. And the pressure on the system basically intensifies demands and places hard limits on ways of work, and that opens up the space for new ideas that would otherwise remain on the margin. And then these ideas that are on the margin, the ones that tend to emerge are the ones where there are networks of people who've already been working away at it, and where they've been testing it, often below the radar. And these ideas lose their worth in the heat of the moment. And then those networks grow through a kind of process of diffusion of the ideas and experiences. They grow, they get spread far and wide, they change behaviours, they change attitudes, and they, in doing that, they reshape the system. So first, the crisis creates threats and opportunities, it pushes the system to an edge. Then you've got marginal approaches, which have coalitions of people that were really kind of working away at it, and then they, having got into the kind of mainstream, they then get spread. So cash is the emblematic example. You know, for 150 years, cash was resisted for all of the reasons that we've talked about. You know, there were studies published in the 1990s that said we should give people cash, we just don't trust them enough. And it was a kind of almost like a retread, a rewarmed version of that Victorian argument that poor people cannot be trusted. And you know, even talking about cash in pre-2004 was enough to get you blackballed by certain UN agencies – and the reason it changed was the tsunami happened, and suddenly the system was literally awash with cash, huge amounts of fundraising, and needed to programme it in countries where they didn't have a presence. And there was an embryonic version of CALP that was set up, and I was involved in facilitating that across three or four of the affected countries, actually getting people to learn and share their experiences, because cash had never been applied at that scale before. And a lot of lessons got shared. And straight after that emergency, Pakistan happened, so loads of the cash people went from the tsunami countries to the Pakistan earthquake, and it just kind of spread, and digitalisation happened, and got folded into that. So it kind of evolved over time. It wasn't because anyone said, "Right, let's make cash a thing.” It was a social movement, and like those social movements, you have kind of the individuals within it that really make a difference. So those four areas – localisation, resilience, innovation, adaptive leadership – you know, some of them have genuinely made a contribution. I think resilience has become more part of the way the sector operates – there's more investment. Innovation, you could argue there's more of. Localisation and adaptive management had struggled because they've really tackled the culture, trying to tackle the culture of the system. And where the system is able to kind of turn something into a technical process of change that it gets incorporated without challenging the power dynamics, it's better at doing that. The areas of localisation and adaptive leadership have done less well – you know this is my in-person experience of trying to push and nudge and encourage these changes – they've done less well because they are much more political and can't easily be turned into a technical use. So, I think that's something we just need to be aware of. And I guess I want to go back to kind of to Tamman's point earlier, you know, if you're thinking about kind of social movements, you do need the kind of Rosa Parks', the Martin Luther Kings, and the Malcolm X's all to be working together, and they don't always work together. If you think about what, you know, the kind of the idea of being co-opted, Rosa Parks being the emblematic leader that signals why change is needed, Luther King that's able to stick between the powerful and the oppressed, Malcolm X is the aggressor that is uncompromising – you need all three of them to really affect change, and I don't think—

Tammam Aloudat

That's brilliant. My question is, who's the, who's the Malcolm X of the humanitarian system? Because I see a lot of Martin Luther Kings, but I don’t see many Malcolm Xs.

Christina Bennett

And where is the energy for Malcolm Xs to emerge?

Ben Ramalingam

I do think that as a sector we've lost some of that campaigning zeal and energy. MSF, I think, still has it and is able to articulate eloquent anger about injustices. I think there are many entities that will be doing quiet work – you know, less Malcolm X, more Luther King – doing quiet work and trying to bridge the gaps. I don't think it's an either or, but I do think if we are going to especially speak to and counter the alternative narratives that are surrounding us right now, we do need to have a way of bringing, bringing the anger back. Humanitarian vulnerability is not a technical, neutral thing. It exists because of choices we are making as a society that are making some people systemically more vulnerable, and we should be angry about that, and we should be raising our voices up about it. But not every agency sees it in their mandate or their culture to do that, and not every agency will.

Tammam Aloudat

I mean, I don't want to consume the metaphor. I agree that there are rare examples, MSF being one of, you know, what you called eloquent anger. We've been talking technical talk about internal innings of the system. Nadine is sitting in Lebanon that has been being bombed for weeks on end. Do I accept the argument that it's not their mandate or culture to do everything in their power to stop the slaughter of civilians that they supposedly exist to protect? Especially when it's nearly, it's very difficult to deliver aid. Gaza is another example. Yemen is another example. When I find people want to say, you know, ‘We’re Martin Luther King,’ despite no one having articulated their dream in a very long time. Where's the accountability, when we are sitting here and talking while people are being killed wantonly? What is the accountability mechanism? And Nadine, I want to ask you, what is it that you want to see? I mean, you are sitting, hopefully as safely as you can, in a country that is being incessantly bombed. What do you want? What is it, other than people claiming their own culture and mandate as if they are scripture, that you want from them, you need from them?

 

Nadine Saba

People's needs are extremely simple: they want to live peacefully and in dignity. So you know all the jargon that we have been talking about – from the pooled funding to the systemic change, transformational change, the commitments – on the field, nobody cares about it, nobody have heard about it, nobody wants to hear about it. People want to live in peace, in their homes, being able, you know, to go plant their own orchids, you know, get pruning their own trees, and getting their own food. So I think that's, you know, within our work we did get lost on purpose, if I may say, in the intricacies of the system, while forgetting that on the ground, on the field, people don't care of all this narrative and galactic that we are talking about. And if you tell me, what do you want in Lebanon? I want this war to end. But I don't want it to end while people are staying in the schools in the collective shelters without being able to return home. One of the things that kind of sometimes hits me when I spoke about, you know, the poverty of some groups, I was told ‘Poverty is not humanitarian issue, ‘ and I will challenge and say no, it is because ultimately when you say poverty is not humanitarian issue, poverty is going to create an emergency that will become a humanitarian issue. So for me, if I want to go back to the change. If I want to go back to things, I would say we need to go a bit more simpler. We need to be more humble. We need to remember what we're doing here. And why is the narrative going against us? Okay, let's look back a bit inwards. Let's look into our own salaries, into our own payment packages, into our own, you know, conferences, work, cars that we go into the field. I mean, sometimes I've been hearing from people, the car that they come in can feed I don't know how many groups of people for I don't know how long. So I do think that we truly lack humility, and sometimes we're disconnected from the people that we are supposed to be serving. And this is where I think it kind of makes a difference. Early in the times of the Syrian crisis, we've had in one community an issue with some of the organisations working there, and I've been asked not to go into that community. I'm like, ‘No, we need to go into that community.’ And they said, ]but they've blocked the road.’ I’m like, ‘they cannot block the road on me.’ I go in my own car, in the car of my team. I don't go in a rented car where I have this big logo. I am in the community. And this is where I think that this disconnect from us and them is a breaking point for the system. It's not only the funding that is a breaking point, it's also this disconnect, because on the side of the donor and on the side of the recipient, I'm not sure that we're ranking in a very satisfactory manner on both sides. And this is where, when you're talking about the change, we're always asking others to change. Are we having a retrospective look? I am not sure.

Ben Ramalingam

Yeah, I guess I just want to come back to the point about Lebanon, and it is an absolutely shocking series of violations and of the norms that we should be operating in. I actually want to talk about my own lived experience, in response to your question, Tammam, because for me, my equivalent of what Nadine is talking about with the end of the Sri Lankan civil war. I'm a Sri Lankan refugee kid. I came to the UK age 10. My aunt actually received Red Cross cash transfers in a refugee camp in the 1990s. It's how we knew that she was still alive, it was because she was, actually, got a cash transfer and was able to buy an airmail envelope and write to us, and she wasn't able to do that when she was getting food aid. So we knew after two, three years if she was actually alive. But the end of the Sri Lankan civil war is, because it actually, unlike Gaza and Lebanon, we've got the full cycle of, you know, the government bombed with impunity, the hospitals were repeatedly hit, civilians were moved into so-called no fire and safe zones, and then they were shelled. Forty thousand people, according to the UN, were killed in the final months, but actually, some say it was much higher. The government had ordered UN international staff out and tightened media access, and the Sri Lankan government used the language of counter-terrorism, used the post-911 kind of framing, and deflected, and there was a panel of experts set up by the Secretary-General that documented credible allegations of war crimes. There was the Petrie report, I think it was, that basically said the UN had systematically failed. The humanitarian and the political pillars of the organisation pulled in different directions. The institutions have prioritised access and presence over protection and truth telling. But it also found that the humanitarian sector was not set up to deal with this kind of crisis, because what the humanitarian sector does is to raise funds and deliver programmes, and that for the most part is not there to bear witness in the way that MSF has baked into its very DNA. And so the pattern that Nadine is describing in Lebanon, you know, what is it that people, you know, the whole kind of ‘never again’ architecture of humanitarian protection, it's never really been tested in real time in a meaningful way, and a lot of good people were constrained by the system and held back, because when powerful actors and their protectors decide that they are going to violate humanitarian principles, you know, what do we do? We don't have superheroes. You might dream of arming the humanitarian sector and saying, right, let's give the Red Cross guns so that they can, they can kill the baddies and protect civilians. That's just gonna make the situation worse.

Tammam Aloudat

There's a long, there's a long way between being solidly in the corridors of power and carrying guns. There's a space in between.

Ben Ramalingam

I agree, but for the large part, we have moved away from a humanitarian sector that's actually standing up to– and the mechanisms that exist, like the ICC, and so on, they're shoved, they're limited, they're pushed into different directions. And the humanitarian sector doesn't have those mechanisms readily available. 

Nadine Saba

I think that what is prevailing now within the humanitarian sector is fear. I mean, people are fearing losing their jobs. Organisations are fearing losing their funding. And it's a cycle that goes along. You know, in French, there is this proverb that says, “qui donne, ordonne”, the one who gives money is the one who orders. And at the moment this is what, this is what we are feeling, and a lot of time local and national organisations are afraid of speaking up because of retaliation. Bigger organisations are afraid of speaking up because of losing funding, and UN agencies and INGOs and other intermediaries that, for me, I believe in my simple mindset was like these could be the buffer, this could be, you know, this guarantees of the principled action – it's not happening. And when anybody speaks about neutrality, I always say this: we are all taking money from when we say public funds are from ministries of foreign affairs, and these ministries of foreign affairs are the ones who are taking decisions on the geopolitical side. So can you really talk to me about neutrality? I think there is a fear, and there is a hypocrisy within the sector, and the way we are looking towards ourselves, and in the way we are trying to depict our action. So for me, whenever I'm thinking about change, what I believe is also needed with the humility is a bit more honesty. 

Christina Bennett

Nadine, you have just described, and Ben has just described – using your lived experiences as people living in crisis and of people professionals working in the system – you've described something that is so disconnected from reality, from what people want and need. You've described something that is so misaligned with its purpose, with its original mission and mandate. You've described something that doesn't even use the tools that it has, the norms, the principles, the motivation, the money in a way that, that it needs to in order to deliver what it repeats it says it's going to do day in and day out: save lives, alleviate suffering, promote dignity. If all of this is true, what are we doing here? Is there a role for this system that is so misaligned with what it, with its mission? It's been decades.

Nadine Saba

Two comments, if I may. The first is again the price of inaction. With all its flaws, what is the alternative? That's my first question. Second question: in my culture, and where I grew up is the there is a bit of a, of a balance between what you are expected to do versus what you are given as resources, and even if this critique seems to be harsh, but it is also because there are a lot of, there is a lot of expectations on this sector to be able to deliver where others have been failing. This is where the grievances come from. It is not frustration. Frustration is very subjective. These are grievances. It is because they are expecting from the system when everything else has failed them. And maybe it is this assumption that we have created, that we are the saviour, that we need to really look at, because we cannot. I think there need to be a bit of calibration of expectations and realism of what the sector can do and what the sector ought to do. We still have those ideals, we still have those principles, but again, going back to the courage: How many of us have the courage to live up to these values and to these ideals? Ultimately, we're all humans, and we all have our weaknesses. So the question is: will we be able to have this collective where one can kind of help the other, or we would be still fragmented? When people say, ‘what do we do afterwards,’ I'm like, we have two options: either say, you know, we're out of it, that's it, we're done, and then leave things as they are and wait to see what happens, or we say we're still part of it, but thinking also differently. Literally again, I will be pushing on humility and honesty, because I really see a tendency of us knowing better than the others, and this is for me revolting, because people have lived in their own communities for decades without us coming in, and without us coming with our rules and processes and procedures, and, you know, all those forms and applications, and you know tech-savvy employees who are trying to, you know, save the world. We cannot save the world, and we don't have the tools to save the world. Can we have any influence on political decisions that could help ease up the decisions? I'm not sure. Is this the role that we want to play again? I'm not sure. 

Ben Ramalingam

There is a connection between this conversation about ending impunity and localisation. It might seem disconnected, but actually, itt is about the costs, you know, the costs of acting in a certain way are for certain actors seen as higher than the costs of not acting. It comes back to incentives and why people behave in certain ways. And if you look at all of the channels we currently have for dealing with accountability for ending impunity, they root through powerful states that are either perpetrators or protectors of those states. So the humanitarian system has tried in different ways, you know, MSF exists because of a deep and profound division with the Red Cross about how to take on the punishable and their protectors. To my mind, it's not actually through the legal architecture and institutional architecture that we see those kinds of changes happen, but it's through public attention, mobilisation campaigns. It's much more the human rights tradition than the humanitarian one that I think we see genuine levers for change, because of all of the things that we have been kind of talked about already. The other thing that kind of comes to my mind as well is that, you know, having worked with both the Red Cross and the UN system, the calculation that's made typically is you’re choosing access over bearing witness, because, specific, to your point, being present means that we will save more lives than if we were expelled. And that's the calculus that's made time and time again. It's not like the conversation doesn't come up in the corridors of entities, but that's the calculation that– but I guess the challenge with that is that it can't become an easy fallback. It can't become a way of permitting presence without protection, because then it essentially it's complicity dressed up as pragmatism. I would add to Nadine's pieces, you know, I think we do need humility, but we also need greater levels of courage to actually call these things out when they're happening. You know, and I think we look to the local and national actors and organisations like Nadine’s, because I think that's where we're actually getting the truth telling happening. Many at the highest levels of international organisations are promoted because of their ability to administrate and manage budgets, not because of their ability to call out normative frameworks and rights-based arguments for how people should be treated, and that campaigning zeal is no longer at the top of the organisations that we are part of.

Tammam Aloudat

Christina, thank you very much for this collaboration. It's really interesting to be able to have a conversation that spans beyond one episode that addresses a topic as important as the humanitarian reform and change from multiple angles. What brought Start Network into this, and why, why did you want to have this discussion?

Christina Bennett

Thanks so much for that, Tammam. And I just have to say, it's really a privilege to be co-hosting this series with you. The New Humanitarian, as always, is on the forefront of a lot of these discussions, and at Start Network, you know, we're a change network. We're a network trying to model a different form of humanitarian action through practice. And so, in order to do that well, we're constantly thinking about how change happens. What is it that gets organisations, systems, very ingrained systems, to rethink their ways of working, to change, to make the moves it needs to make to be bold and courageous, to be able to change the way it's been working for, you know, basically the past century or more? So I'm really excited to explore all of the different aspects of how systems change, and I'm really excited to do that with you. You have a bird's eye view with everything that's going on.

Tammam Aloudat

Thank you very much, Christina. And this is, this is important because the two of us, we come from different angles. You are in an organisation that has members that deliver aid to people on the ground, and I come from a newsroom that has the function of reporting from the ground what is happening to people affected, and how is the system treating them. And I think there are different angles we look at the reform from, and that affects how we address this. In your view, what would benefit your members, and how do they perceive, from their position, the changes that are happening in our humanitarian system?

Christina Bennett

Yeah, well, I mean, if you think about the last year, year and a half, it's been a shock to the system to have the closure of USAID, and to have the loss of the $11 billion that, that system provided all of us to do the work that we do. In the last 18 months, we've seen a lot of program closures, we've seen a lot of job loss. Organisations are shrinking, some of them are closing, some of them are talking about merging. We're seeing a redrawing of the contours of our system, and doing so, like potentially putting tens of millions of people who depend on that support at risk. We did a poll last year of our members, and you know, I think 60 per cent of them were suffering this loss of this funding – not just from USAID, but from other funders in multiple ways – and losing up to 30, 40, 50 per cent of their own funding. And our local members, in particular, don't have those reserves, don't have the cash flow to be able to withstand this kind of a shock. So I think the answers that my members would be looking for is: do we expect that the system is going to make the shifts that we've all been talking about – more locally-led action, more anticipatory action, more redefining the way we work in terms of the needs on the ground and not the needs of the people who make the decisions in capital cities. And if, as a local organisation, how can they be sure that all of these commitments that we've been making for years throughout these reform agendas – the reform of the CERF in 2005, to the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016, to the Humanitarian Reset, which we have now – you know, lots and lots and lots of commitments, and no surety, and you know, even recently a rollback. So, I guess what my members want to hear, and especially the local ones, is you know: can we be sure that this is actually going to be true reform, or are we just cycling through another, another set of aspirations that we will never deliver on, and should they be looking elsewhere?

Tammam Aloudat

And that's very right, because, especially those organisations, the grassroots and local organisations, cannot afford to just dismiss what's happening, but also probably can't afford to trust it blindly, because, as you're saying, we've, we've had those conversations before, and they haven't materialised. To me, this conversation is about not falling into skepticism as a default emotion, but also being critical about what is it that has happened before, and how would it happen now. This is a difficult question, because the system is resistant to change. It is, it wants to keep itself with the, with the power hierarchies it has. 

Christina Bennett

And I think a lot of the reforms that we often talk about are those institutional reforms, those top-down reforms, whether you're talking about the World Humanitarian Summit, the arrival, you know, the prominence of cash, the Transformative Agenda, the Grand Bargain, the Humanitarian Reset. These are all reforms, institutional reforms driven by institutions and reforms from above. And what we're also seeing, though, which we can't ignore and shouldn't be ignoring, is reform from below: those grassroots and community-led reforms, those initiatives that we're seeing emerge to fill a vacuum, we're seeing emerge because they've always been there, and maybe we're just recognising them. And you know, if you look at history, you'll see that very few, or probably no modern systems have been able to reform themselves, and it's kind of antithetical to a system to put itself out of business or to change substantially. So, you know, if we look at that, is there a, is there even a chance of reforming from above, to reforming institutions, or should we be really focusing on enabling, nurturing, or even getting out of the way of those grassroots reforms, those other systems that are emerging, that should be emerging, that have always been there, but, but are being boosted by this whole situation.

Tammam Aloudat

You touch on a very important thing. Our starting point is not how the system should act to reform itself. The question here is: is it even possible to reform a system? And I don't know whether we can reach a conclusion, a definitive one, but we hopefully are going to leave people with enough questions and enough perspectives to not take the answer for granted. Because I agree with you, I'm, I'm not entirely certain that what's happening today has a priori a better chance of succeeding than what happened in 2016 with the Grand Bargain and where it's coming now. Being in the thick of it, sometimes we are tempted to try to solve every little problem as it emerges, and what we do need genuinely is to try to see the where the trajectory might take us and try to connect the dots, because you might make 100 seemingly good decisions and end up with a bad outcome if there is no bigger picture. And today, between, as you mentioned, a lot of organisations are losing funding. There is the scramble for donors, the scramble for mandates, the scramble for legitimacy, and each little decision might sound right if we do not have a bigger picture to discuss, if we're not looking at the future, if we're not looking at where should we be and what context are we operating in. 

Christina Bennett

It’s very easy, I think, Tammam, for you and I to sit on a podcast and discuss all of the trade-offs and implications of all of these decisions, these daily decisions, or these big decisions that organisations and individuals are making these days, but what is exciting to me about this podcast is that a lot of what we will be talking about is the practical implications for all, what this change might mean. Whether it's the accepting the US funding or, you know, operating alongside non-traditional humanitarian actors in a place like Gaza. What, what are the practical implications for those decisions?

To our listeners, we’d love to hear from you – If we want the system to reform itself, which are the most important levers to pull? And also, which ideas waiting in the wings should we be championed most? Thank you for joining us on this special edition of Rethinking Humanitarianism in collaboration with Start Network. 

Tammam Aloudat

This episode was hosted by Tammam Aloudat and Christina Bennett, and produced and edited by Melissa Fundira. Concept and editorial support from Irwin Loy and Kia Howson. Mixing by Tevin Sudi. If you have any questions or comments, you can email us at [email protected]. Please rate and subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcasts. Also consider becoming a member of The New Humanitarian to help us continue reporting from the hearts of crises. Go to www.thenewhumanitarian.org to find out more.