merely formalises “the charity of nations”, to borrow a phrase from Smillie and
Minear.^33
The other option is for host governments to hold organisations to account.
Indeed, Matthew Winters demonstrates that aid is most effective in countries with
robust accountability mechanisms of their own.^34 But again, in practice, this is
unlikely to happen in the most extreme cases, either because the host government
is heavily dependent on resources in question, is failing, or because they simply do
not act out of concern for their citizens and have caused the problem in the first
place.
There has been a major attempt at improving, integrating and streamlining
humanitarian action, epitomised by the “cluster approach”. This UN-led
humanitarian reform initiative aims, in the context of complex inter-agency
interventions, to ensure sufficient capacity, establish predictable leadership, build
inter-agency partnerships, strengthen accountability, and improve coordination and
prioritisation in the field.^35 But high profile crises, such as the aftermath of the Haiti
earthquake, are, despite these efforts, still characterised by a scramble of NGOs
desperate to plant the flag. Some will no doubt carry out genuine life-saving action,
but there is no real way to oversee this, or for those who lose out on the ground to
call them to account.
So while the drive for accountability within humanitarianism may well have
raised the quality of the delivery of relief (a similar story could be told in the case of
development aid), the fundamental unaccountability of humanitarian action largely
remains. Stein is deeply sceptical that these issues will be resolved, arguing that
accountability in the humanitarian sector has become “constructed as outcome,
framed conceptually as a principal-agent relationship, [...] an exercise in
33
34 Smillie and Minear, The Charity of Nations.
Matthew S. Winters, "Accountability, Participation and Foreign Aid Effectiveness",
International Studies Review 35 12, no. 2 (2010).
The on-going humanitarian reform programme is detailed at Humanitarian Reform.
Available at http://www.humanitarianreform.org/; accessed on 16 August 2010. Resources
relating to the cluster approach are in the process of migrating to OneResponse. Available
at http://oneresponse.info/; accessed on 16 August 2010.