The Humanitarian Reset: How Will the IASC’s Decision-Making Moment Shape Its Local-Level Commitments?
Like many champions of locally led humanitarian assistance, we’ll be eagerly following the meeting of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), the United Nations’ primary humanitarian coordination forum, happening tomorrow. The UN’s chief humanitarian coordinator and head of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), “relief chief” Tom Fletcher, has called for a “humanitarian reset” as funding is set to shrink by around a third, due to widespread cuts by the United States, as well as other donors. Humanitarian crises aren’t abating, however, so the IASC, under Fletcher’s leadership, is charged with creating a humanitarian system that works smarter and more efficiently. Part of the “reset” is managerial—burden busting, breaking down silos, better integrating work across UN agencies. But another big part of the effort is a commitment to “do much more at a local level, close to the communities we serve.”
The June 17 meeting will be a decision-making moment for how these commitments will take shape. Perhaps one of the most anticipated decisions will be a determination on whether to proceed with Fletcher’s proposal to channel a third or more of humanitarian contributions through Country Based Pooled Funds (CBPFs). Such a shift would send shockwaves throughout the UN system, consolidating more funding in OCHA, which manages CBPFs, and reducing funding to a suite of other UN agencies with a humanitarian mandate---or precipitating a consolidation. Big structural reforms always face headwinds, of course, even as there are plenty of advocates for a more streamlined UN humanitarian system and for greater use of CBPFs as a way to move money quickly, with fewer transaction costs, and increased coordination. But can CBPFs also support the goal of elevating local leadership over humanitarian response? They can be inflexible; their compliance requirements can shut out most local actors; and the overhead costs they allow for local and national actors often don’t cover the full cost of operations. Furthermore, efforts to streamline, move faster, and be more efficient can compromise processes that are critical for elevating local leadership, like identifying the right local and national stakeholders, convening, listening, co-creating, and adapting. Still, with intentionality, CBPFs can be—and in some cases have been--tools for greater locally led action. Many of the Funds’ recent reform strategies focus on shifting power more locally, but there’s more to do to translate commitment and strategy into action.
How that ends up looking should, above all, reflect the perspectives and priorities of local and national actors. For example, the Network for Empowered Aid Response (NEAR) offers a powerful and constructive call to action for how IASC should shape the Humanitarian Reset.
With that context, here are some of the things we’ll be watching for on June 17 and beyond, for confirmation that IASC—and OCHA’s pooled funds—are serious about locally led humanitarian action:
Space for genuine leadership of local and national actors, at all levels. Fletcher had asked all humanitarian coordinators to report on how they would need to adapt to lower funding. As ICVA reports, some, but not all, focused on localizing the response. Moving forward, it will be helpful to see how each pooled fund co-creates their strategy jointly with local and national actors.
At the level of individual projects or investments, consistent use of a “separation of functions” analysis or “decision mapping tool” can be used jointly by donors and local and national actors to foster intentionality about identifying comparative advantages and devolving power.
More funding to local and national actors, including through local intermediaries. As NEAR notes, there is a diverse ecosystem of local and national actors, including local pooled funds, consortia of local NGOs, and regional platforms that can be capable of managing CBPF funding and can serve as intermediaries for funding to a broader range of local and national actors, as necessary. Some CBPFs have managed significant local funding; the Fund in Ukraine, for instance, channeled 45 percent of funding directly to local NGOs in 2024.
Local intermediaries are part of local networks and systems and are potentially more accountable to them; they may share similar incentives for community development and will persist in the community and in their work after donor funding ends. Our “Passing the Buck” series also estimates that local intermediaries could deliver programming between 15 and 32 percent more cost-efficiently than international intermediaries, an important consideration as aid budgets shrink. Forthcoming research from the Share Trust (to come out later this week) begins to map out a set of organizations and funds that already manage grants to a network of organizations and could potentially expand those roles with more funding.
While intermediary organizations can help channel funding to multiple recipients when a donor can’t manage many individual small grants, OCHA can also allow for highly flexible small grants, and create other types of opportunities for directly funding local entities, including microgrants to community groups via mutual aid.
A commitment to quality funding, including full coverage of local and national actors’ indirect costs. OCHA's CBPFs allow up to 7 percent "Programme Support” (i.e., indirect/overhead) costs’ for both local and international recipients. However, the Passing the Buck studies on the CBPFs in Ukraine and Nigeria found that overheads were consistently being held by UN agencies and not passed through to local partners., This inattention to overhead costs for local and national actors can kneecap organizations from being able to invest in the systems and processes that are so necessary for organizational health and sustainability—not to mention many donor compliance requirements. .
A learning agenda that explores local leadership. In implementing its commitment to devolving power to local levels, IASC has the opportunity to add new understanding about both the value of local leadership and the type and quality of processes that best enable it. Forthcoming studies from the Share Trust, for instance, are exploring how the level of agency of local and national actors over program design, implementation, and monitoring, evaluation, and learning corresponds with perceptions of program effectiveness. OCHA, like most funders, wants to do better; more efforts to understand how they can—and how much it matters—will help them to do so.