Great. Everyone, welcome. Thank you, guys. Soon.
Convenor of the Ulster Humanitarian Group, Pat Elect gives me great pleasure today to introduce our two speakers.
And it's a great time for this. I mean, guys, we're very lucky to have them both.
Philips coming from the trade as is coming from rich graves.
So that's good. The topic we want to look at today and this continues our series,
This Time on Ethical Dimensions of humanitarian action, is the whole question of humanitarian accountability.
And for those of you that are not familiar, even less than you are,
the last 25 years of humanitarian work has seen a gradual growth in sharing of
the business into what people are calling a profession now of various kinds.
In that process, we've seen the the the movement,
the humanitarian organisations trying to self-regulate yourselves through the code
of conduct of the Red Cross and through the emergence of the service standards,
very technical standards on different areas of food, health, shelter protection,
which is trying to sort of put their house in order so that everybody is doing the same kind of
levels of humanitarian work in terms of quality aligned with the same kind of values of humanity,
impartiality. And I'm very keen that we understand how that is working.
And we've got two real experts today. We've got Amnesty's going to talk to us about NGO accountability.
That is has a Ph.D. from LSC, which I've been looking at, which is very important on this issue of NGO accountability and NGO as moral agency.
And she's going to talk in particular about her experience of evaluating NGOs from her
role as senior researcher on NGO accountability at the One World Trust in London.
So this is going to start for about 20 minutes and then Philip is going to look at the other end, and Philip produces this every year,
which is calling the OECD government donors to account for the humanitarian quality of their aid.
So Philip will be talking about government taking the accountability in line with that same principles of management quality.
It's a great pleasure base here and it's a community 20 minutes you might think is trying to fill it and then have questions I have to ask.
Thank you so much, Hugo, for inviting me. And thank you to everyone for attending today.
I'm looking forward to this discussion and to Philip's talk as well.
So I'm going to talk today about accountability as respect.
And there's kind of two components to my talk. The first part is very sort of theoretical and conceptual.
I'm going to talk about four main approaches to defining accountability.
I'm going to point out some limitations of the first three and argue for a fourth,
which I call it ability is respect, a moral appraisal, accountability.
And then the second part of my talk is going to look more at the practical side of these issues,
trying to pull out some examples from the Disasters Emergency Committee,
Accountability Frameworks and the annual assessment process to highlight what accountability is respect might look like for some communitarian ideas.
So kind of two caveats to begin with. One is that while I work for the World Trust in the practical examples pulled at the end,
or from my role on our team, providing that external validation to the DCI on their accountability assessments.
My views here are not identical as the One World Trust view.
So there's a difference between the company line of my line and also that I'm focussed particularly on non-governmental organisations.
I know some of you might be more familiar with or have a background with other types of actor in humanitarian work.
My kind of angle on this is through the NGO perspective.
You can start off with talking about what is NGO accountability, why is it valuable?
And then go into these three specific examples with disaster affected persons donors,
and then also end with hopefully something that will tie in to what Philip is currently working on.
And that's these collective accountability initiatives and self-regulatory schemes amongst NGOs.
Okay. So starting off with what is accountability?
So accountability is is a hotly contested concept.
There's a lot of arguments over how to define it.
It's essentially a type of responsibility that we have in virtue of other obligations that we have towards others.
And I think that's kind of a source of the confusion about accountability.
So it's on a second level or a dual level obligation that only kicks in if we already have a prior obligation to another agent.
So I'm accountable to you for running over your foot maliciously with my car
because I had a prior obligation not to cause grievous bodily harm to you.
But I'm not necessarily accountable to you for eating cake for breakfast every
day of the week because I have no prior obligation not to do that to you.
And so we have to have a prior obligation, I think, in a number of cases.
Accountability can then become confused or switched around with these other prior obligations.
So as an example, sometimes you see in these codes of conduct organisations sign up to codes, of conduct of accountability.
And one of the lines that they sign up to is, is to ascribe to certain principles or values such as social justice or equality.
And I think it's important to try and highlight that living up to those values is a separate obligation from being accountable.
You might be accountable for how well you live up to those values,
but fulfilling values of social justice and equality does not discharge your accountability obligation.
So I think in order to understand different ways of defining the accountability,
we can focus on the fact that it's a relational notion and we can look at how different
approaches characterise or conceptualise that relationship of accountability.
And they can do so by answering three main questions.
One is what is the normative starting point for that relationship between the two actors,
the actor who is owed an account, and the actor who is expected to be accountable?
The prior or immediate obligation that triggers the accountability obligation,
the motivations of the agent who is expected to be accountable, why accountability is needed in virtue of their motivations.
And then the answers to these three questions contribute to an overall understanding of the function and the value.
So. I'm going to go through three of these that I think have certain limitations.
The main one, probably the most popular, dominant one that comes from the private sector is the principal agent approach to accountability.
Some of you may have heard of this before. I mean, the principle agent approach to accountability.
You have a principal that provides resources to an agent in order that the agent uses those resources to act in the principal's best interests.
So that's the normative starting point for the relationship.
The agent is then obliged to use those resources in the way that the principal has specified.
But principal agent's accountability model says the problem is that agents will be opportunistic who want to do other things with that,
with that funding, with that resource.
So this triggers the obligation of accountability to agents needs to show to the principal how they've spent their resources.
And the function of accountability is to constrain the agent's opportunism and
ensure that the resources have been spent in the way specified by the principal.
So the definition of accountability that you often see that comes out of this framework is that to be
accountable means to provide an account to another actor and to face sanctions if performance has not met,
shared or pre-established expectations. And that's pretty standard definition of accountability that comes out of this again,
in terms of limitations of thinking about this through the specific lens of NGOs.
Right. There's been a lot of criticisms of applying this framework to NGOs.
One of the big criticisms is that it focuses NGO accountability on the donor relationship, which is quite clear.
Why? Because that's the main actor from which ventures receive resources, financial resources and people have criticised,
you know, it just focuses all of NGO accountability around the relationship to the donor.
We should be looking at other relationships that NGOs have here and I agree with that.
But I also think moreover,
it doesn't even accurately describe the donor NGO relationship because something that it misses out on is that prior stage where,
you know, I know many NGOs might wish it were the case, but a lot of them, a lot of donors just don't go around dropping money into their laps.
Right. The NGO has to go to the donor, articulate an identity, make an argument, show them a proposal, show them a plan.
They have to make certain claims, in other words. And in exchange for those claims, they get the resources.
I think that's a key component to that relationship that gets dropped out of the principal agent framework.
So we should try to capture that more accurate.
A second approach to accountability itself from the political sector has its main sort of indicators, the democratic stakeholder accountability model.
And here you have a political actor that has an impact or is empowered to take an authoritative decision over a stakeholder.
That's the normative starting point. The immediate obligation, then, is to exercise this power in a way that's justifiable to the stakeholder.
But the motivations of the political actor may be susceptible to other intervening pressures.
And therefore,
accountability is brought about to ensure that the political actor sufficiently represents the stakeholders interests in that exercise of power.
And this is the one that the One World Trust uses in our assessment of global institutions and organisations,
saying if you have an impact on certain parties, then you have these obligations of accountability.
And I think that's important when we're looking at global institutions.
In a lot of organisations, but for NGOs specifically, I still think we can do a bit better because this model both does too little and too much.
So it does too little in the sense that what a lot of stakeholders, NGO stakeholders want from NGOs is not to have their own views represented,
but to have the NGO represent its own expertise in the field when it acts right.
The NGO is enlisted by those other stakeholders in some cases to use its expertise to drive its projects, not to represent the views of others.
And in other cases it's a bit too much.
I don't think a lot of humanitarian NGOs should really be accountable to the militias who they may have a negative impact on through their actions.
And so it's a bit too much on either side. But the focus on justification and the need for justification was important.
So then we can try multiparty social actor accountability.
And this model was proposed by David Brown specifically for NGO is to try and highlight the collaborative nature in which NGOs work.
So in this model, you have two equal social actors who choose to join together in a joint collaboration on shared values and goals.
The immediate obligation is to continue to continue to honour and work towards those shared values or goals.
That's the basis for the relationships existence. But other agent centred interests might intervene.
So each social actor may have other interests or preferences that pertain only to them
that could come into conflict with that shared enterprise and drive them away from it.
And so the function of accountability in this case is to ensure that all parties
continue to deliver on their shared values and to maintain the collaboration.
So a common definition of accountability here is to demonstrate this continued commitment and to face an exit sanction.
If you don't continue to demonstrate that commitment.
So the sanction here is little bit weaker than the other two and it's an exit.
One of the social actors is forced out of the collaboration.
I think this gets much closer to the mark, but it still doesn't really capture the entirety of NGOs accountability,
relationships, because not all of the collaborations the NGO engages in is one with all other social actors of equal standing,
in which both parties contribute something of a very similar nature to that collaboration that works for some of their relationships, but not all.
So we have some elements of truth in each of these initial three accounts.
So you have the transfer of resources, which I do think is important from the principal agents approach.
You have the focus on justification from the democratic stakeholder approach,
and then you have this collaborative aspect for the multiparty social actor approach.
So here's a way of trying to capture a more holistic approach to ensure accountability for moral appraisal accountability.
Here we have an NGO and a potential collaborator that can be any type of other actor.
That NGO makes a certain claim to the collaborator that can be a normative claim
about certain values that that NGO identifies with principles of neutrality,
of impartiality, of humanity. They make the claim to the collaborator and as a result, where it can be a descriptive claim.
Know if you provide £10, we will be able to save this child's life.
We have to do X, Y and Z in this environment and expect these outcomes and a response that clean
collaborators can provide any number of voluntary assets to that NGO privilege,
support, resources and access.
And which here about this model is that these are the the essential components that allow the NGO to exist as an agent or as an actor in the world.
Without receiving that voluntary support and collaboration from other actors,
the NGO would only have its claims and would be impotent as an actor in the role.
So that's kind of the key aspect of this relationship.
It's an enormous starting point is that the NGO engages other parties to voluntarily cooperate with it through these claims and arguments,
and that elicits an obligation to maintain a fidelity to those claims and descriptions of value to maintain coherence with those claims.
And so the motivation here on differing from the previous three approaches to accountability isn't that the motivation
of the NGO is to shy away from its immediate obligation and therefore accountability is needed to assure compliance,
but rather that an NGO should attempt to live up to its identity as a social actor and be
motivated to live up to its identity as a social actor by fulfilling its immediate obligations.
So accountability should be something that it wants to,
because fulfilling its obligations of accountability allows it to realise its identity as a social
actor or social actor that embodies and structures its relationships in a way that embodies respect.
And the reason why accountability is respect is positioned as a moral prism.
Accountability is because the way in which an organisation is allowed to maintain fidelity to its claims and descriptions of values by checking
in with all of its relevant collaborators in ensuring that it's behaving in a way that has past certain conditions of moral appraisal by those.
Okay. So accountability under this account is defined as a structured relationship between two agents in which the accountable
fulfils its obligation to ensure that the other party is in a position where it can critically appraise its actions.
It gives an account for that set of actions and recognises the collaborators
determination of whether their standards have been met and provides an engaged response.
So there's no mention of sanctions here because the idea is supposed to be that
you fulfil your accountability by engaging in a particular type of relationship,
not by facing the threat of sanctions or compliance.
If you if you don't obey the standards that are expected of you.
It's that critical engagement itself. Okay.
So that was sort of part one, accountability as respect.
And then trying to look at a couple of practical examples where NGOs are pursuing these opportunities
for deeper critical engagement with other collaborators and other parties that they work with.
So just to give you some brief background, very brief background to this part of the work that I've done at the World Trust is to serve as
an external validator for the Disasters Emergency Committee Accountability Framework Assessment.
So the Disasters Emergency Committee is made up of 14 leading humanitarian aid NGOs agencies because the British Red
Cross is and technically an NGO and these organisations sign up to an accountability framework on an annual basis.
They carry out self-assessments against this accountability framework,
which consists of 21 best practice standards for ways of working as they're called.
And then we test the sample of those ways of working, so they fill out their self-assessment against all 21.
We receive those assessments. We pick five and we tell them to collect evidence on those five sample ways of working for two sample countries.
So the poor countries that we sampled last year were Kenya,
Pakistan and Ethiopia in each agency had to submit evidence against two out of those three.
So agencies provide evidence for the sample, and then we discuss their self-assessments and discuss the evidence in a peer validation workshop.
And quite excitingly, this year saw the first published published version of the report, which is on the DSE website.
It's not terribly deep on context, but we're hoping it is a good first step and will provide context for this year.
So kind of watch that space for this year's report as well.
So a couple of examples of of standards that we looked at this year.
One or two of them actually pertained to accountability to beneficiaries or disaster affected populations.
One of those was the straightforward participation requirement.
So we're working 3.3 states that disaster affected populations participate in program assessment, design, imitation and evaluation.
And one of the strengths that we saw in the agencies for this way of working
was a lot of innovation and originality at the policy and framework level.
So a lot of organisations really define their own path to how they want to engage with disaster affected populations.
And I think that diversity is actually a benefit because it reflects on kind of what accountability is, respect is getting at,
which is that each agency really thinks about its own identity as an agency
and what that means for its relationship with disaster affected populations.
So it's not just a one size fits all approach.
And so we have a lot of strong policy,
but we saw that a lot of aid agencies reported some difficulties in seeing those policies and frameworks implemented
on the ground and finding sufficient evidence to just show that those policies are being implemented on the ground.
A lot of them felt that it was occurring in ad hoc or informal settings, but not appearing in forms.
So one of the one of the objections, however,
that came up from some agency staff was whether or not this kind of requirement or expectation is actually justified for humanitarian organisations.
And this is what I kind of called the burning house objection, because people seem to use the same kind of example over and over again.
And the objection is, you know, if my house is on fire.
I don't want to fill out a feedback form saying that I think you did a good job providing me with tea and a blanket.
I just want the T and blanket. Right. And so why are you having us do this sort of stuff with our beneficiaries, with disaster affected populations?
And I think that's kind of an extreme case.
It's not entirely an accurate reflection of what's actually going on between humanitarian workers and the people that they're.
Providing services too. For one, they do have some type of early interactions when you're doing routine needs assessments.
And I know that because they've submitted the documents that reflect this needs assessments where
they're just collecting basic descriptive data on the people that they're going to run projects with.
I think it's there's there's potential room to include more questions or just ad hoc
conversations that are occur between aid workers and disaster affected persons.
During those encounters, those face to face encounters. But really more importantly,
what it also comes down to is the relationship between the humanitarian and the development components or teams within the same organisation,
because in many cases it's not as if the humanitarian worker just comes on the scene and meets a
disaster affected person who's never had any contact of correspondence with their organisation.
So usually it needs to actually be improved. Is relationships and communications between the humanitarian and development sections with within
the same organisation or with larger organisations that are part of an international family,
it's communicating within that family better. The other standard that we looked at for under accountability to beneficiaries was.
Standard that pertains to complaints. So this was changed recently to reflect the change in the HAP standards.
They have standards were revised in 2010.
And the novel thing about that standard is that it's requiring not it's required agencies not to simply set up
complaints mechanisms and offer disaster affected persons the opportunity to complain about their activities,
but that they're actually required to consult and prove that they've consulted with disaster affected populations in designing
that complaints mechanism so that they can make sure that they know it's designed in a way that the people can actually use.
And I was, you know, very happily,
very happy to see that many agencies are able to submit strong pieces of evidence showing that they were doing this,
because I thought it was quite a tough standard.
And I also think that the design component of this standard really touches on that part one note of accountability as respect,
which is ensuring really meaningful opportunities for critical praise on ensuring that the format or the opportunities
for critical appraisal that you're offering are tailored to the specific needs of the person that you're engaging with.
Another standard that we looked at was value for money,
which has been quite a big and controversial issue in UK aid I've seen over the past couple of years.
So this was way of working. 1.3 Programme design and procurement processes maximise value for money, that is,
they balance quality, cost and timeliness at each phase of the response.
So we saw that for many agencies these considerations are being undertaken, but they're occurring still in silos.
And the place where we saw the strongest evidence that these different considerations
are being balanced together to show how an organisation is maximising
the value for every pound that it puts into its work was actually created the procurement level procurement process rather than programme design.
And that's really where a lot of agencies want to be heading.
We saw that a lot of agencies are following, following the lead of the Department for International Development on this,
who's really kind of kickstarted value for money in the UK, in UK aid environment,
environment, and they have their own kind of equation and definition.
But there is also some innovators who are really trying to articulate, you know,
take this as an opportunity to really reflect and think what is the value of what we do as NGOs as opposed to other types of humanitarian actors.
And so the discussion in some of the workshops revolved around why.
Why should we be doing this instead of the military? Why does the UK just send the military in to deliver humanitarian aid?
What is the the special kind of value that we offer as humanitarian INGOs?
And a number of them are including disaster affected populations in these discussions, which I thought was close, was quite interesting.
So I think, you know, I think some agencies and a lot of people also who don't work for NGOs might look at value
for money and think this is a pretty standard example of principle and accountability.
You're essentially being asked to line up your outcomes with a monetary unit,
usually ascribing value the monetary value to each of your outcomes on that seems quite principle agent,
but really when you look at difference definition, it encompasses these different concepts of effectiveness,
efficiency and even now equity or equality, which if it has been brought into the mix.
So I think it actually offers an opportunity for NGOs to engage in a more substantive conversation.
And again, this is what the moral appraisal approach to accountability is,
trying to get at a more substantive conversation of the purpose and meaning of the humanitarian collaboration that they engage in with their donor,
to try and think about what is the value of what they're doing and articulate that on a stronger footing to their donors.
And then I'll just kind of close with a point about the nature of these collective accountability initiatives in general, I think.
You know, such as the Disasters Emergency Committee Accountability Framework, but also, you know, the Joint Standards Initiative,
which comprises half and sphere and people in aid and CGI, which Philip is now working with these humanitarian collective agents.
Collective accountability schemes tend to focus on compliance with agreed standards.
And while the individual standards, such as a couple of the examples that I've highlighted,
can really push NGOs on their relationships with key state stakeholders.
I have just, I guess, a question about the kind of relationships that occur within those initiatives and within those schemes,
because it does seem to still be focussed heavily on compliance and providing evidence and verification to one another,
rather than opening up the space of more honest,
critical dialogue between agencies on their shared projects and on whom there's a shared project of humanitarianism, more broadly speaking.
So while ensuring compliance with agreed standards is very valuable,
I think we can question the depth and the quality of the horizontal accountability relationships that they provide,
and I don't really have an answer to that,
just to kind of think about whether or not maybe those are just dual functions that can't both be satisfied within the same scheme.
And you need to kind of have that kind of discussion outside of those collective
accountability schemes and then focus simply on compliance with standards.
But then I would argue we might not be able to call that accountability a certain type of accountability that you're looking at there.
Okay, great. Thank you very much. I'm sorry. Another time.
Thank you for getting on. That's awfully good theoretical and practical stuff, and I think this is helping us to really try to fit it.
Yeah, well, if you get this been she's pretty thin, it's been working.
You might have sex with more than two years now, starting initially with you when you became in Central America.
And then we get cross movement in in hurricanes in Central America.
And then I think to Geneva, the last few years he's been at Tara in Madrid,
as I said, inventing and consolidating the means of coping Danas to account.
And you'll just moving to SCA from standing committee series steering events and response in Geneva to
investigate how you might certify humanitarians Tuesday night and use meeting for mental health as well.
Good. Thank you. I'm not using any PowerPoints.
Is it possible to contribute? Yeah. Just a quick question.
How many of you have actually seen this report? A few of you.
So not many. I would having just left it at that.
It still feels after five years and so very much kind of my daily Davos view, but there's a lot of interesting material there.
If you're interested in humanitarian, how well the humanitarian sector in general is responding to crises like Somalia or Sudan, Pakistan.
And the focus is on donors in the relationship and the role of donor governments, in particular,
to making sure that administration responses are more effective and more accountable, particularly to the populations that we intend to serve.
So I encourage you to look for that and and find, I think,
not just information about donors as funders, but also donors as players within the overall sector.
And some of the big challenges that this sector is facing challenges around, for example,
how do we more effectively link relief to recovery, to long term development?
How do we avoid failures like the Horn of Africa famine, where there's good evidence that there's increasing humanitarian needs,
and what preventive and anticipatory approaches might have minimised the loss of life and human suffering.
So I encourage you to look at that. Speaking about ethics, I guess, for Dara, where we got into the issue of why looking at donors,
because most of the initiatives in the sector have come out of the concerns of humanitarian organisations,
that our sense that we're not living up to the claims to use your your presentation,
the claims that we make that we're there to help people who are vulnerable and affected by disasters, crisis.
We're there to provide aid in an impartial, non-discriminatory way.
We're there to support there. And in fact, a lot of these initiatives that come out of that sense of unease that we're not living up to those claims,
we're not meeting our own commitments. And so there's, I think, a lot of dilemmas that humanitarians face every day.
How do we do that? How do we balance all these competing demands on us? And how do we make these choices?
What kind of choices do we make that will allow us to live up to our claims and to have I
like this idea of relationship because it's something that I've been dealing with a lot, too.
How do we make sure that the quality of this relationship that we have as an
organisation and with effective populations and the other stakeholders and supporters,
allows us to achieve our mission.
So there's a lot of choices involved and I think many of the things that we've heard already this morning about code of conduct or more recently.
It takes around sexual exploitation and abuse of power.
All of these things are reflections of our own level of dissatisfaction about us
living up to those some of those ethical standards that we all claim to adhere to.
So these codes come up and they evolve because mainly because of a failure on their part to live up to
those those claims and to those commitments to failures in Rwanda and the Balkans and the tsunami,
Indian Ocean tsunami have all led to pushing us to try to do better.
One of the things that when I started its work was to try to evaluate how effectively were humanitarian
organisations living up to their claims and how effectively they were actually meeting up,
meeting their mission, humanitarian mission of of preventing in the region who is suffering.
So we did a lot of evaluation work.
And in the Indian Ocean tsunami, we specifically looked at the mutual funding relationship and the role of donor governments.
And we found that donor governments.
I think a hugely important role at shaping the way that humanitarian organisations work,
affecting the choices that they could make at the operational level about how they were going to carry out their work,
how they were going to interact with affected populations.
And and that was an important component that nobody had really looked at in great detail, a lot of work around.
You had to follow severe standards that's trying to be to the best quality programs that we can.
Let's try to be more accountable.
But nobody's really looking at the nature of the relationship of the donors that fund and allow humanitarian organisations to do that work.
So that's where the idea of the Humanitarian Response Index came out.
When we wanted to look at how how doing his part to play part of that accountability
relationship the obvious the first question came to us well how do we measure that?
How do we measure the quality of the support that they're giving to humanitarian organisations?
What can we use as a way to to try to assess that and that?
The tool that we decided to use at the time was a declaration called the Good Humanitarian Donation Principles back in 2003.
A group of, I think, enlightened donor governments, agents, agencies, and more importantly,
a group of enlightened individuals within those donor government humanitarian agencies said, we have to take responsibility.
We have to take certain responsibility for the outcomes of humanitarian actions.
And you know, the old saying, you pay, you pay the piper, you get to pay here.
The tune is essentially, I think, the rest of the realisation by some of these donors that we have a responsibility and we have some
commitments and accountability not just to the partners that we fund but also to affected communities.
Because from the donors perspective, whether it's deferred or RS aid or Swiss cooperation,
all of them make that same claim of the shared vision and shared objectives, preventing and alleviating human suffering.
So donors, by making that claim, some of them thought that they have a responsibility to demonstrate and live up to that.
So the Good Samaritan leadership principle set out 23 different principles where donor governments
committed to things like making sure that aid is is non-discriminatory in proportion to needs.
It doesn't say you work over here in this country or you were over there with that group of people that says we will
provide aid resources in ways that allow humanitarian organisations to fulfil their pledge about impartiality,
neutrality, about independence. So their humanitarian principles are included in the Good Humanitarian Japan declaration.
There's also lots of more operational issues around.
We will provide money on time so that agencies can get to the resources on the ground and to actually carry out programs.
We will not impose conditions on aid that would hamper the ability of organisations to do that work.
Bunch of other different things like that. So for us at DHARA, it was a really interesting thing to say.
This is what you said you're going to do as donors, this is what you said,
or how you will manage the relationship with aid agencies and for what purpose,
for what end to help affected populations in the most effective way possible.
So it became, for us, a really good framework from which to start to develop indicators about.
To what extent we're doing the government's actually living up to those commitments.
We developed indicators of framework and then we developed a research process to look at how in
practice the donors were doing that in specific cases like in Kenya or in Somalia or Pakistan or Haiti.
We did that by talking to humanitarian agencies at the field level about the
nature of the relationship that they have with the donors that from their work.
But the quality of that and how well donors actually facilitated or impeded
them from doing humanitarian action that was principle based and effective.
We also took a look at policy and we looked at funding patterns.
We looked at a whole bunch of different indicators to come up with an assessment.
That essentially compares to 23 of the major overseas impact governments against
the GST principles to say well who's doing better and who's not doing so,
who's better at, for example, maintaining commitment to neutrality, impartiality,
who's better at supporting accountability towards affected populations and develop a comparative ranking on this?
So we've done that for five years. And now that I've stepped aside from that a bit.
I wanted to share some reflections about how well I think the experience of it has been about making donors more accountable.
The first thing to say is, is that.
Donors when they talk about good humanitarian nutrition principles, I'll say that we all support this, our government support this.
And we we apply these good standards consistently.
So where's the evidence for that? And there is no evidence.
There's no external evaluations, for the most part, that look specifically about how donor governments are applying those standards.
And donors will say, well, we use self-regulation, we do peer reviews, we talk to our partners.
And if that was the case, you would expect to see noticeable improvements amongst donors in terms of applying change to principles.
And in fact, what we have seen in our observation after five years of this is that, in fact,
many of those principles are gradually being eroded and discarded, ignored and overlooked by donor governments.
So self-regulation by in and of itself is an interesting process, can help learning.
But there was no incentive, we felt,
to keep donors to constantly push for improvements and to constantly hold themselves up against those commitments and say, how well are we doing?
So it's it was important for us as governor to have some external independent
review of donors and to try to use that as an impetus to promote a more equitable,
more responsible and more comfortable relationship of donors with the other parts of that
relationship with the partners they fund and with the communities that they claim to be serving.
DFID will always say, We're helping the people of Pakistan. They're providing some funding,
but it's usually the British Red Cross or Save the Children or others actually doing the direct relationship with affected communities.
But because they make that claim, we felt it was important that they're held up to some external scrutiny.
The problem that we found was.
That our theory of change was that by holding them up to to external scrutiny, by holding them up to some indicators of good practice,
ones that they've already agreed to, there will be an incentive for donors to look at their scores,
to look at their ranking, and to make some improvements.
And in fact, many of the donors that we've talked to, the governments you talk to, have said that this is a perverse motivation.
It's a perverse incentive. We don't we don't want to be reviewed.
What's your literature? Legitimacy as a as an NGO, as an independent actor, to be reviewing us.
So discredit the external evaluation with the first kind of response.
You know, who who authorised who gave you permission to do this?
Who gave you the authority to do this? And my argument to do it to an undercover survivor who gave anyone an NGO or a government or
anyone else to say that you are legitimate when you're undertaking some humanitarian action.
But governance and legitimacy was one of the big concerns.
Sweep Because we are not considered legitimate. It was an easy opportunity to undermine the work that I was doing and to discredit the findings.
So. That was brought.
I guess one of the lessons is how do you get buy in from the stakeholders on any type of accountability
system that allows you to have the rigour that you need to make sure that there is a credible process,
that there's legitimacy in the results, and yet not lose sight of the fact that you have to step back and do some kind of assessment.
If you're too closely linked, which is, I think actually the case in the humanitarian sector,
there's a there's a bias in that relationship that sometimes makes it really difficult for you to look at those hard truths.
So getting by in was one of the lessons that I think we've come to after five years of doing this,
but finding the balance between getting a sense of legitimacy from donors credibility on this and
at the same time not losing that independence to be able to see to see those types of things.
Another lesson. I guess being targeting our theory of change is that if you if you look at the funding flow,
if you can influence and ensure that principles of good humanitarian principles and good
practices are part of that relationship between donors and the agencies they fund,
then that should also have. And a spinoff effect at the actual programming level.
I think it's a reasonable assumption. I actually do think that that's an important and and an important component to look at.
But what we discovered as well is that five years of doing this and in a sense, we were preaching to the converted when I said enlightened people,
it was an it really was enlightened people within donor government agencies who came up with a good community and ownership principles.
And over the course of five years, in talking to many donor representatives, whether as a devout or Aussie or you or any of them,
they are absolutely genuinely committed to maintaining humanitarian principles.
And so and some of them just to keep it in perspective.
Humanitarian departments compared to, let's say, development departments within donor government agencies, there are minuscule minority.
And so when we start saying you should be doing better than this and this and this,
I think a lot of it felt personally attacked in the sense that we're trying our very best.
We actually believe in our community humanitarian principles, but we're not the ones who ultimately make the decisions.
So another lesson for us is who do you target? Where do we want the change to happen?
And I guess after doing this for a while,
come to the realisation that maybe this is not the place where we should be focusing our energy and our attention.
Maybe it should be with the general public so that the public doesn't put pressure on our government to have
a knee jerk reaction to Haiti or Pakistan while ignoring massive humanitarian needs in a place like Chad.
Maybe it's with parliaments to make sure that next time it's not Andrew Mitchell anymore.
Is it to see some sort of new person? Yeah. So next time the Secretary of State or the Minister of External Affairs is questioned in Parliament that
all parliamentarians know that there's a real reason why these principles to have good practices there.
We don't have the answer to that yet,
but I think one of our conclusions is that if you're going to try to do some kind of accountability scheme and you're trying to get for change,
behaviours and practices have to be really clear about who and where you're going to focus and target those actions.
Another kind of lesson learned is when we started this 2007 edition was actually done by economists, two economists from the World Economic Forum.
And they came up with a very robust statistical model that said this and this.
These types of things can show how donors are doing.
And for those of us who are not economists and not statisticians, we have good understanding of how that works.
But our sense was, wait a second, this is not this is going to go over terribly within the humanitarian sector.
Humanitarians, they don't understand the suffering. They don't want to know the stuff.
They don't have theory. They want to know about practical issues, about how we're going to make this response more effective,
how we're going to be provide a better quality and more durable solutions to the situations faced by by vulnerable populations.
And so we move very quickly away from a very theoretical base to one where we tried to get a more practical methodology.
I spent a lot of time at the field level talking to hundreds and thousands of of representatives of humanitarian
organisations about the nature and the quality of that relationship so that we could start to feedback.
And going back to kind of that fourth option kind of feedback or the third option feedback, that information.
Begin to put information on the table that would help to facilitate a better and more effective relationship.
But then we ran into the dilemma of, are you doing this as a kind of independent,
impartial research project with the research results that you just put out there?
Or are you doing this for advocacy purposes, trying to raise awareness of issues, trying to push for change?
And that's a huge dilemma, in fact.
And you can get kind of accused sometimes of trying to mis represent or distort your research findings to fit an advocacy message.
Or you can say your advocacy message don't match the evidence.
One are the evidence, which is often the case in the financial sector runs contrary to what people's common sense understanding is.
My former boss used to say, I have a great relationship with David.
He helped me out wonderfully in Democratic Republic of the Congo.
And I said, You know, I can understand why they're ranked number eight.
They should be number one. If you talk to David, I think they would feel the same.
But sometimes the evidence that we've brought out of the ground,
contrary to what people's perceptions are about the relationship that they had with donors.
And so it's really difficult to find that balance as well.
So that's another lesson.
We've got three of them that so far finding legitimacy, credibility,
targeting specifically the type or the people or the organisations where you want to effect change of behaviours.
Balancing between kind of evidence based on the one hand and advocacy on the other.
And I guess the, the, the, the last kind of lesson of this was.
When we started this was I had the feeling, as I said to it,
that nobody was looking at the relationship and the accountability of responsibilities between funders and humanitarian organisations.
And so we thought we were adding some value to the sector by doing this and adding to some value to the work that other
organisations are already doing around the relationship between humanitarian organisations and affected communities.
And I think the lesson learned for us though is that you need to look at the whole parts of that relationship.
You have to look at all those multiple stakeholders and talk about those mutual responsibilities
and mutual accountability if you're going to have an effective framework for accountability.
So in the next phase of the HRA, that's something we're going to look at.
More precisely, how can we also then get affected communities,
voices and concerns into this equation so that we have a more complete picture about what these mutual
accountabilities mean to different stakeholders and how we can how we can integrate this in a more comprehensive way.
For the first five years, we really didn't have the resources or I think, the capacity to do so.
But in the next phase, I think it will be possible to to do some interesting collaborations and have the field level and get and
hear from some of the other missing pieces or the missing part of their analysis and perspective of the HRA.
And if we get to that stage, I think it will be really interesting,
the stories that we'll hear from coming out of this and what not just about the compliance and commitments, but what are the real challenges?
What are the real issues and concerns? Know, as I said, to get people working at different and humanitarian are absolutely committed.
They face lots and lots of challenges and obstacles about who they selected,
partners in which crisis, and how do they deal with the ministers and the media as pressure?
Just like an organisation like Save the Children, Oxfam, UK or anyone else has these dilemmas to face.
I'm just I'm sure it is affected communities.
Do we want this organisation to come working with us? Is this the kind of program that we really want?
Does this meet our needs and priorities? So I hope that in the next phase of the humanitarian response events,
we'll be able to put all these pieces together in a more comprehensive picture and
help us to build those types of a framework that allows us to look at accountability,
around respectful relationships, about sharing visions and goals and move.
Yes, it's important to have a framework, and yes, it's important to kind of measure itself against those frameworks.
But I think for us, the interesting conclusion from five years actually in this is that that's really, really interesting stuff.
But it's understanding why things haven't happened, why people have found it difficult to live up to their commitments.
What are the challenges and how could we resolve them?
That's going to be the interesting story and that's going to tell us more about are we being more accountable,
as has different stakeholders in the relationship? Maybe just one final note on the right and I'll just quickly mention my to do project and.
What I think is interesting about these types of things and what's missing in the
humanitarian sector quite frequently is that we take a look in a real piecemeal fashion,
sometimes at a specific program, in a specific crisis, have lots and program in in Kenya for food distributions in Somalia.
And we often don't get the whole comprehensive picture.
And one of the things that I really liked about working on VHI is that because we visited on average about ten crises each year,
sent our teams to do field research, talked to hundreds of people.
We love to draw out lots of interesting things and commonalities across the world about where the
challenges were for the humanitarian system and maybe some ideas of where things could be improved.
And I think that in itself is a valuable lesson, but it's something I hope collectively all of us do.
We begin to look at putting these pieces together in a more comprehensive picture
and understand and debate and challenge some of those those issues as needed.
Right now, there isn't any really kind of one or one single place where you can get good quality,
the thoughtful analysis about the comprehensive issues that we're facing as a sector.
So I do I encourage you to look at that. I hope you can find it useful,
and I hope you support the next phase because I think it's going to be quite interesting to try
to to rethink our understanding about accountability and how to look at these relationships.
Just to finish. The project I'm working on now is supported by the Steering Committee for Humanitarian Response,
which is kind of an umbrella of nine of the largest humanitarian organisations like the Oxfam International Network,
the Red Cross, with my significant others. And it's it's an idea to look at whether or not we've reached a sufficient level
of maturity within the humanitarian sector to actually certify organisations,
not individuals or organisations that want or claim to be doing humanitarian work in a crisis situation.
Could it add value to the to the sector?
Would it help to provide better trust, credibility, confidence in humanitarian actors or not?
That's a question that needs to be addressed.
And if it would add value, how could it contribute to improving quality, effectiveness and accountability of actors?
It's a question mark. It's a it's more of an exploration.
But I think it's an interesting question for me to look at, because it goes back to that kind of original point that, I mean,
if we all want to act ethically and responsibly when we work in humanitarian sector,
but sometimes it's very hard to show evidence of how we're doing that.
And would certification possibly add another need to to help and to provide evidence of that?
I'm not sure of the answer, but if you're hoping that we'll get some lots of feedback and inputs from you.
So. Thank you. Thank you.