What the ‘reset’ reveals about the UN-led humanitarian aid system, Lila Ricart’s point of view

The dissolution of USAID and the funding crisis of the past year are hastening a transformation that had already begun: the transformation of the UN-led humanitarian aid system, the framework of which is provided by the UN agencies. With the UN announcing a ‘humanitarian reset’ and a broader reform programme (UN80) on the drawing board, there is a key question to answer: are we witnessing the end of a humanitarian model based on large organisations? … or are we present at the potential launch of a new compact with ethics as its founding principle, based also on experience and institutional memory, with more stable governance arrangements? My own job is to make preparations for emergencies, and from that vantage point I see every day the tensions, the disillusionment – and the hopes – of a sector in the process of reconstruction.

A controlled earthquake or a managed collapse?

For the first time for ages, coordination – considered the sine qua non for effective collaboration – has become an adjustment variable.

Since 24 January 2025, when Donald Trump signed executive orders brutally suspending US funding for international aid, the world’s humanitarian aid architecture has been rocking on its foundations. The entire sector has been upset, although the impact on the UN agencies has been particularly severe: I am referring to UNICEF, WFP, UNHCR, IMO and the coordinating bodies (OCHA and the IASC (Inter-Agency Standing Committee), which for well over fifty years have provided the structure for much of the international humanitarian aid system.

In the early months of 2025, the UN responded by announcing a ‘humanitarian reset’. Tom Fletcher, the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, issued, on 11 March, a letter addressed to members of the IASC, announcing the creation of working groups tasked with prioritising some programmes and/or geographical regions. This letter was more than a straightforward letter about practical planning: issuing it was a political act, a public acknowledgement by the humanitarian aid system that its current format is no longer sustainable.[1]

A particularly symbolic development is the proposal that the scope and aims of humanitarian cooperation be reduced in at least eight countries, including Iraq, Pakistan and Zimbabwe. The New Humanitarian, in an analytical piece published in June, recalled that one possible ‘reset’ scenario consists precisely of cutting back the current humanitarian coordination architecture and limiting the scope of humanitarian intervention in several regions.[2]

In other words: for the first time for ages, coordination – considered the sine qua non for effective collaboration – has become an adjustment variable. This does not mean that the system is putting an end to all clusters everywhere. But it does mean that the coordination model that was envisaged back in 2005 – with its promise of universal coverage, a normative mandate and a sort of federalisation of participating organisations – now arouses deep scepticism.

At the same time, there is another, more extensive work in progress that affects the UN as an institution: UN80. Launched as an initiative to make the UN ‘more flexible, better integrated, better adapted to needs’ in a climate of budgetary constraint, UN80 throws open the door to drastic reorganisation,[3] by means of mergers and structural change.[4]

There is an important distinction to be made here: the ‘reset’ is first and foremost about the humanitarian aid sector (prioritisation, coordination and organisation of assistance). UN80 is about reforming the UN in a wider sense, but it could have major implications for the humanitarian aid sector, especially if what is on the table includes mergers of agencies and organisations or the consolidation of mandates.[5]

The question that presents itself is not simply ‘how to make do with less’, but ‘what future is there for the UN-led humanitarian aid system when its legitimacy, its funding and its organising structures are all simultaneously undermined?’.

The legacy of a colossus: why the UN-led humanitarian aid system is now vulnerable

I realise, nonetheless, that the UN-led humanitarian aid system is not simply a bureaucratic colossus. It is the custodian of institutional memory and a shared heritage that includes best practice, procedures for coordination, platforms, tools and accumulated experience and knowledge.

To grasp the importance of what is happening, we need to consider what the UN-led humanitarian aid system has become: not just a collection of agencies, but an architecture that resumes coordination, funding, normative authority, standards, tools, processes and procedures, across the whole sector.

The UN has progressively come to fulfil three functions in the humanitarian aid system:

• A political and normative function (principles, mandates, legitimacy).
• A coordination function (OCHA, IASC, clusters, inter-agency standards).
• An operational function (implementation, logistics, direct aid).

This cumulation of functions or mandates has generated real strength in some areas, but at the same time it has led to structural weaknesses: when the UN’s legitimacy is contested, or its resources collapse, the entire system is out of kilter, because it relies on a unique institutional framework.

ALNAP’s report, The State of the Humanitarian Aid System, which gives an account of the system’s advantages and disadvantages over the long term, emphasises the tension between coordination, effectiveness and size. It highlights the difficulty of maintaining links between different levels of decision-making and reality in-country or in the field; and the risk that accountability and standardisation tend to put humanitarian assistance in a straitjacket at the expense of staying relevant.[6]

In my view, this straitjacket of management practices is responsible for an excess of reporting mechanisms and indicators which seem to imply that everything is in order but in fact ends up leading progressively to a state of disconnect. This happens not only within the UN and its agencies – you find it everywhere in the sector – but it takes a distinctive form when it is institutionalised in agencies where the in-house culture already puts a premium on conformity and on technical approaches.

We see the same sort of outlook in the typical UN humanitarian staffer. I believe that the career paths on offer, the highly attractive salaries together with relative mobility in-house tend to suit staff who are very competent technical professionals, but who have less of the grounding that comes from long-term familiarity with and understanding of the field. This is not a moral judgement: the situation is a structural consequence of a system where incentives and rewards tend to accrue to progress up through the ranks, rather than to effectiveness in the field.

ODI reminds us that the continuing imbalance of power in the humanitarian sector – especially in the case of partnerships and funding mechanisms – is still a major brake on greater localisation and genuine redistribution of leadership roles.[7] The issue is becoming crucial: when funding collapses, structural dependency tends to ossify. National NGOs, already short of funding, tend to become increasingly vulnerable. Agencies, already under pressure, can fall back on their control mechanisms and their hierarchies. Instead of getting simpler, the system may become more rigid.

I realise, nonetheless, that the UN-led humanitarian aid system is not simply a bureaucratic colossus. It is the custodian of institutional memory and a shared heritage that includes best practice, procedures for coordination, platforms, tools and accumulated experience and knowledge, all of which in combination regularly make it possible to avoid massive duplication of effort, and to organise responses to complex emergencies.

The issue is not ‘should the UN be saved?’ but ‘what should we preserve from the UN-led humanitarian aid system, and what needs to be fundamentally changed?’.

Re-thinking without destroying

When it comes to restructuring, it is often the same old story: in-country jobs and operational functions are the first to be sacrificed, ostensibly to protect what are known as ‘strategic’ positions. But precisely those protagonists who are closest to the action in the field are the ones needed for continuity, for their contextual memory, for their sensitive understanding of local situations and daily dealings with affected communities.

The issue is not whether the system is going to change, but how – and what should be the priorities? There is currently a twofold risk.

On the one hand, it is tempting to react to the current crisis by centralising everything: merge, regroup, simplify HQ arrangements, basically build a ‘compact’ version of the system. The debate about UN80 tends in that direction, with several sources referring to scenarios that entail agencies being regrouped, especially humanitarian aid and health agencies.[8]

On the other hand, there is the opposite temptation: cut back inexorably, even at the risk of losing irrevocably both expertise and relevant capacities. In this scenario, the agencies do not aim to reform: every agency just quietly downsizes, leaving the sector as the preserve of a fragmented collection of practitioners, which may be effective at local level, but which has no overarching guiding principle.

Between these two extreme positions, a third way seems to me a possibility: recreating the sector on the basis of a straightforward if exigent principle: preserve whatever contributes to the general humanitarian good, and change everything related to the preservation of bureaucracy.

What must be saved: principles, coordination mechanisms, legitimacy

Despite its limitations, coordination remains essential to the humanitarian aid sector. By coordinating, the sector has been able to respond collectively to emergencies, to avoid unnecessary duplication, to share data, to organise complex aid interventions. Coordination also lies behind the development of shared norms which, if duly observed, protect vulnerable groups.

If we are to maintain coordination structures, there must be progress in the way we deploy them, in comparison with the present situation. They will need to be less cumbersome, less patronising, better rooted in reality, more open to local organisations and to non-institutional protagonists in the sector. The Global South’s take on all this will be crucial: there are many examples of coordination’s currently being employed as a power ‘space’, a place where Western filters are applied, rather than a space where people come together to agree on their local community’s needs. The current crisis should give us the opportunity to reconfigure that space.

What must improve: governance, bureaucracy, the ‘expert’ culture

Reform must go beyond the given of funding cuts. It needs to address the governance of the humanitarian aid sector: who decides, using what criteria, with what kind of accountability to communities where humanitarian interventions are made? The ‘reset’ obliges us to make choices, the consequences of which are most immediately visible in the domain of human resources. Preserve headquarters structures including senior levels of management, or preserve operational capacities in-country, in the field? In other words, save our bureaucratic architecture or save the means to continue providing humanitarian assistance long-term.

When it comes to restructuring, it is often the same old story: in-country jobs and operational functions are the first to be sacrificed, ostensibly to protect what are known as ‘strategic’ positions. But precisely those protagonists who are closest to the action in the field are the ones needed for continuity, for their contextual memory, for their sensitive understanding of local situations and daily dealings with affected communities. Switching around the ‘hierarchy of sacrifice’ would be more than a merely symbolic change: it would be a choice that determined how far the core of the humanitarian aid system might be maintained while at the same time there is systemic change.

Make our heritage of knowledge and skills more widely accessible: translate, share, open up

If we want to preserve the good parts of the system, we need to promote easier access to the best of what the system has achieved and produced in the past: tools (rapid needs analysis, emergency coordination mechanisms, information-mapping sites, etc.). Tools are jointly owned capital. If the system has to downsize, it will be vital for resources including tools to be more widely available, better adapted to purpose and transferable among potential end-users. They will become humanitarian public goods.

Conclusion: an old crisis, a new choice ahead

The UN-led humanitarian system is going through an acute crisis, which is in part an existential crisis, inherent in the environment in which it has operated ever since it was set up: crises of legitimacy, funding crises, crises about the mismatch between principles and practice. What is currently a novelty is that everything is happening at once: issues relating to funding, to politics, to ethics.

The ‘reset’ is therefore more than just a tightening of belts. It highlights a question which the sector previously refused to contemplate: what is the role of the UN-led humanitarian aid system in a world where institutional legitimacy is no longer enough, where budgets grow ever smaller, and where local actors call for more authentic leadership, specifically at national and local level?

My view is that we have the makings of a blueprint for reform: it includes maintaining coordination as a public good, simplifying the architecture, making governance more open, protecting and using local expertise and skills, sharing and making accessible the tools that have emerged from decades of learning and improvement. This is not a turn-key reform process. It is, however, a tentative roadmap: it takes us in the direction of a system that will be less of a colossus, humbler, but more relevant.

What we do right now – reforming, merging, cutting back or handing on – will determine whether the UN-led humanitarian aid system drags its feet and presides over its own demise, or seizes the chance of a new ethical and operational contract, or protocol, agreed between organisations and institutions, civil society and communities affected by humanitarian emergencies.

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[1] OCHA. The Humanitarian Reset: ERC letter to IASC Principals. 11 March 2025. Available at https://www.unocha.org/publications/report/world/humanitarian-reset-erc-letter-iasc-principals-11-march-2025

[2] The New Humanitarian. Reset, reform, repeat? Key questions about the humanitarian reset. 16 June 2025. Available at  https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/analysis/2025/06/16/reset-reform-or-repeat-humanitarianisms-reboot-searches-right-script

[3] Le Monde in English. UN agencies could be merged to improve effectiveness. 20 May 2025. Available at https://www.lemonde.fr/en/science/article/2025/05/20/un-agencies-could-be-merged-to-improve-effectiveness-of-humanitarian-and-health-action_6741433_10.html

[4] Le Monde in English. UN agencies could be merged to improve effectiveness. 20 May 2025. Available at https://www.lemonde.fr/en/science/article/2025/05/20/un-agencies-could-be-merged-to-improve-effectiveness-of-humanitarian-and-health-action_6741433_10.html

[5] Reuters: UN eyes major overhaul amid funding crisis, internal memo shows. 1 May 2025: available at https://www.reuters.com/world/un-eyes-major-overhaul-amid-funding-crisis-internal-memo-shows-2025-05-01/

[6] ALNAP. State of the Humanitarian System (SOHS). Available at https://alnap.org/sohs/

[7] ODI / Humanitarian Practice Network. Taking localisation beyond labels and lip service. Available at https://odihpn.org/en/publication/taking-localisation-beyond-labels-and-lip-service/

[8] Reuters. World eyes major overhaul amid funding crisis, internal memo shows. 1 May 2025. Available at https://www.reuters.com/world/un-eyes-major-overhaul-amid-funding-crisis-internal-memo-shows-2025-05-01/