By Amany Qaddour and Jason Phillips | 8 October 2026
This commentary responds to the CHS Alliance Humanitarian Accountability Report 2026.
This year’s Humanitarian Accountability Report (HAR), “Accountability under pressure”, perfectly illustrates the accountability dilemma facing the humanitarian sector at this moment. As the sector is rocked by both funding and legitimacy crises, the HAR offers a timely and comprehensive overview of the myriad headwinds blowing against the humanitarian accountability agenda. It clearly identifies pockets of progress and musters robust evidence from the CHS Alliance and the Humanitarian Quality Assurance Initiative (HQAI) on the power of independent quality assurance to move the accountability needle. Yet it starkly lays out what humanitarians like us have witnessed for decades: the persistent gap between a rhetorical commitment to strengthened accountability to affected populations (AAP) and the limited progress to achieve it in a systematic fashion. The HAR raises real questions about whether AAP is poised to move beyond a normative aspiration to a “core feature of the humanitarian system”: a status that would require AAP to be implemented at scale, across the entire aid sector, in a harmonised and truly meaningful way. It is refreshing, amongst the plethora of more optimistic “Humanitarian Reset” literature over the past two years, to see an admission of the limits of both humanitarian action and the potential for sector transformation at this time.
Upon reading the HAR we found it helpful to think about the constraints and opportunities to advance accountability at two levels, the micro and the macro. The former relates to actors and actions within the humanitarian sector itself and on the ground in crisis settings, while the latter deals with the geopolitical structures within which humanitarian action is embedded. Examining the potential for progress on AAP through both micro and macro lenses surfaces three thorny contradictions.
The first is that while the humanitarian sector is rightfully called to task for failing to live up to its accountability commitments, among those pointing their fingers are various state actors and donor governments who are contributing to the crises producing humanitarian need, undermining international humanitarian law (IHL) and actively skirting accountability for their own actions. The hypocrisy in this phenomenon begs the question as to whether there is genuine commitment to AAP, or if these tactics are a smokescreen employed in part to obscure accountability failures outside the narrow confines of the humanitarian system. AAP is further being instrumentalised as another pillar of control within a system still essentially defined by “upward” accountability from humanitarian actors to their funders.
A second contradiction arises in response to the sector’s preference for “voluntary” modalities of accountability. The HAR convincingly articulates the weaknesses of a system that to date largely “grades its own homework.” As redress, it offers numerous options to strengthen “external” or “independent” accountability: the creation of a sector-wide ombudsman; greater uptake of independent verification against the Core Humanitarian Standard (CHS); more robust investigative journalism; and the linkage of donor funding eligibility to demonstrated accountability performance standards. All these approaches, however, share a significant potential shortcoming: the absence of aid recipients themselves as agents for reform. They risk further entrenching an externalised system of “accountability for accountability” which can reinforce the very power inequities and lack of voice that AAP is meant to address.
The third contradiction lies in the sector’s extreme, rapid funding contraction. This has led humanitarian organisations to prioritise institutional survival through budget cuts and restructuring, as well as a resurgence of shortened time frames for spending emergency funding. Real community consultation, participation and partnership (and hence accountability) requires both resources and long-term engagement. It is increasingly well documented that AAP, along with other humanitarian policy priorities like gender equality, diversity, equity, inclusion or climate-sensitive operations, are seen not as “non-negotiable ways of operating” but rather as the first things to be cut to preserve front line, lifesaving, programmes. Our own experience as Board Members of HQAI provides us with a front row seat to this concerning trend, as humanitarian organisations, particularly local and national actors, increasingly struggle to secure the resources required to undergo independent third-party quality assurance against the CHS.
In light of the above dynamics some of the report’s recommendations, while hard to argue with on their own merits, warrant further reflection. For example, the call to shift power out of the hands of international intermediaries is virtually impossible in the current donor funding policy and practice climate. As many governments implement austerity measures, cut their aid bureaucracies to the bone and retreat into economic nationalism, the oligopolistic structure of the international aid system is solidifying, not eroding. The largest humanitarian donors are reinforcing the role of powerful international intermediaries, be it multilaterals such as UN OCHA or large “trusted and capable” international NGOs from their “home” countries. This is inimical to the avowed Grand Bargain goals of getting more aid, more directly, to local partners and thus warrants our collective concern. But we should not be surprised if calls for greater localisation and AAP increasingly fall on deaf ears.
Despite the clear need for more robust external accountability enforcement mechanisms there is a danger that we weaken the sector’s internal integrity by discounting the continued relevance, and need for commitment to, “voluntary” accountability. In the face of the further concentration of power in international intermediaries and the rise of impunity for breaches of international law and norms among many state actors, part of the pathway for humanitarians, and humanitarian organisations, to retain and restore their credibility is not just to call for external bodies to hold them to account, but to lean into enhanced AAP by their own volition. As lifelong humanitarians we are unwilling to let our collective selves off the accountability hook: accountability is not something that can only be imposed from the outside. Alongside efforts to strengthen external mechanisms of oversight and enforcement must be renewed calls for bolder ethical leadership within our sector. For AAP to truly assume its place as a “core feature of the humanitarian system” we must not mistake it for a tool to advance our own institutional interests and survival, but a moral imperative that contributes to the most fundamental principle of our profession: advancing human dignity.
Amany Qaddour and Jason Phillips are Members of the Board of Directors of the Humanitarian Quality Assurance Initiative (HQAI). They are writing in their personal capacity. None of the content herein should be construed as the official position of HQAI.