The abrupt freezing of foreign aid for 90 days by President Trump on his first day of his second term and the subsequent dismantling of USAID plunged the humanitarian sector into a deep crisis. This comes at a time when other traditional (western) donors have reallocated or cancelled resources previously dedicated to international cooperation for domestic and security-related purposes. The World Food Program estimated that more than 16 million people might lose food assistance by the end of the year due to funding cuts by the US and other traditional donors. For the same reason, millions of displaced children have lost access to education. Many humanitarian organizations, including UNHCR and IOM, had to cut 30% or more of their staff.
Not just a temporary crisis
The crisis affects internally displaced persons and refugees to a particular degree, because the majority of the UN’s humanitarian action, which accounted for 45% of UN expenditure in 2023 alone, targets their needs. Regardless of whether displacement is due to conflict or occurs in the context of disasters and the adverse effects of climate change, people displaced usually have no or only very limited opportunities to become self-reliant. This is true for those fleeing at height of a disaster or conflict and is especially so for the vast majority of the tens of millions of persons who have been living in protracted internal displacement for years or decades, experiencing impoverishment, marginalisation, and dependence on humanitarian assistance with no prospect of solutions that would end their displacement.
The funding crisis has devastating impacts because the vast majority of resources for the UN’s humanitarian action comes from voluntary contributions provided by member States. In 2024, approximately 60% of the funds were provided by just four donors. The US contributed around 39%, the EU and Germany around 8% each, and the UK a bit more than 6% to the UN’s humanitarian action. Whilst humanitarian funding has experienced a “freefall”, it is expected that development resources will follow a similar, albeit delayed, trajectory.
This is not a temporary crisis. It is unlikely that the US will return to previous levels of funding, even if a new administration comes to power. European countries will continue to substantially cut and/or reallocate their funding in the face of economic and security challenges. More importantly: The financial dependence of the humanitarian system on the US and a few other States is unsustainable. It creates systemic risks because, regardless of the current US administration, it makes UN humanitarian organizations and agencies vulnerable to political changes in these countries. Tom Fletcher, the UN’s Emergency Relief Coordinator and head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), was certainly right with his recent warning that “The future of the humanitarian sector, of the UN and of multilateralism, of our organization is at stake.”
The humanitarian “reset”: A step backwards?
Faced with this reality, Fletcher, early in this year, called for a “humanitarian reset”. He initiated not only a series of cost-cutting measures but also several reforms to reduce bureaucracy and enhance the effectiveness of the UN’s country operations. They now have more flexibility and leaner processes, while staff and bureaucratic structures at the headquarters level have been reduced. Particularly important is the decision to allocate more money to local actors that are closer to the people and can act more efficiently.
While these reforms are meaningful, they do not constitute a real reset. Particularly troubling for displaced people is the fact that the UN as well as key donors insist that in the face of the current funding crisis, humanitarian actors have to prioritize short-term life-saving action and refrain from investments that would help them to rebuild their lives and ultimately reach a solution ending their displacement. Certainly, such strict prioritisation appears logical and unavoidable in the short term. In the long term, however, consequences can be devastating and counterproductive. The past decades have shown that saving the same lives year after year in protracted disaster or conflict situations, rather than putting people on a path towards self-sufficiency, creates protracted humanitarian dependency that robs people of their dignity and contributes to the radicalization of the younger generation. The Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on internal displacement, which was constituted by major donor countries who questioned a lack of success in the international community’s efforts in “ending displacement”, recommended a stronger, nationally led and human development oriented drive towards solutions. Moreover, primarily focusing on life-saving assistance isn’t necessarily “cheaper” as compared to an approach that places prevention and solutions upfront. This is why the heads of humanitarian agencies in September 2024 committed to “laying the groundwork for durable solutions, with affected populations at the centre” as a key principle of humanitarian action addressing internally displaced persons – a focus that seems to have been forgotten just one year later.
The UN80 Initiative: Reform without a vision?
Can we expect more of the “UN80 Initiative” launched by Secretary-General Guterres in March of this year to address the financial crisis? The aim of this reform initiative is to create a more efficient and cost-effective organization that can better respond to crises and is more accountable to the people it serves.
The reform efforts are based on three pillars. The first pillar focuses on cost-cutting measures. These include the reduction of costly high-level positions within the UN bureaucracy and suggest to move some UN agencies from expensive New York and Geneva to cheaper locations in the Global South. Such efforts are unavoidable, but they alone cannot reposition the UN in the present difficult and volatile environment.
The second pillar is a review of the mandates that States, through the General Assembly and other UN organs, have issued to the UN. As the Secretary-General has highlighted, the mandates of the many UN entities are too numerous, often not supported by sufficient resources, and their duplications and overlaps create inefficiencies.
The third pillar looks at possible structural changes to the architecture of the UN System. Regarding the UN’s humanitarian sector it proposes a New Humanitarian Compact with six elements. In addition to administrative reforms, such as reducing bureaucracy, integrating the many supply chains that procure and deliver humanitarian goods to affected areas, and reducing costs by increasing the use of shared services, such as premises, vehicles, and security measures that support several agencies simultaneously, Secretary-General Guterres proposes to strengthen the roles of UN Resident Coordinators and Humanitarian Coordinators to effectively bring together and lead humanitarian actors at the country level. He also calls for ways to ensure that UN agencies speak with one voice when carrying out humanitarian diplomacy. Finally, he requests agencies to align their responsibilities, including UNHCR and IOM on human mobility and UNICEF, WFP and UNHCR on beneficiary data.
All of this makes a lot of sense. To make UN country operations more cost-effective means that a greater proportion of available funding can be spent on goods and services that actually reach those in need. But is it good enough and will it make the UN more relevant for IDPs and the communities affected by displacement? We have our doubts. The reform process is rather compartmentalised and driven by cost considerations rather than functional thinking, e.g. on how the UN Secretariat and the humanitarian agencies relate to each other, or what the role of the UN and its relationship with actors at country level should be. There is a lack of “blue sky thinking” on different approaches where prevention, humanitarian action and solutions to displacement are nationally owned and incentivised by the international community. The UN still places itself at the centre of international cooperation, rather than providing sufficient space for other cooperation modalities at national, regional and intergovernmental levels.
The mandate review report, for instance, lists in great detail how many UN entities refer to the same resolutions when justifying their budget requests, thus identifying areas of potential duplication of work. But the report lacks any discussion of criteria to assess the relevance of specific mandates or the identification of gaps, for instance with regard to persons displaced in the context of disasters and adverse effects of climate change and for whom no UN agency has clear responsibility. Similarly, the proposals for the New Humanitarian Compact are overly inward-looking and don’t address key questions such as how to overcome the UN’s project-based approaches in ways that would allow the scaling up of action, including on addressing protracted internal displacement. It is significant that previously promoted notions such as “collective outcomes” or “humanitarian-development-peace nexus” and their equivalents cannot be found in these reports. Such action would require humanitarian, development and peace-building/disaster risk reduction actors to work hand in hand. However, the current proposals, while calling for more joined-up approaches that work across these pillars, are weak on how this could be achieved in a system where agencies and staff have no incentive to cooperate rather than defending their agency’s turf. Importantly, the reform process fails to reflect the role of national and local governments, the private sector, local organizations, and other non-international actors. It speaks about accountability, but does not examine if and when it makes sense for the UN to substitute for these actors, and whether this undermines the agency and legitimacy of national and local actors.
The UN reform process as presently envisaged does little to transform the current humanitarian sector from a competitive, self-sustaining and underregulated “business”, driven by supply- and donor-related considerations, to one that respects true national and local ownership in prevention, response and solutions. There is a genuine risk that the proposed reforms, even if implemented in full, may not result in significant improvements for IDPs and the communities hosting them.
The 80th session of the General Assembly: An opportunity to call for a strategic vision
On 19 September of this year, the UN General Assembly celebrated the 80th anniversary of the organisation. Later in this year’s session, the General Assembly will adopt a budget for 2026, providing for very substantial cuts. It will also debate Secretary-General Guterres’s proposals for the reorganization of the UN’s humanitarian sector and the suggested New Humanitarian Compact.
It can be expected that States will support these reform efforts. However, the current session of the General Assembly also presents delegations with an opportunity to be critical. Reading official documents, one gets the strong impression that the current reforms are rooted in an underlying consensus among UN actors that doing the same – or less – with less money is their ultimate aim. As Richard Gowan from the International Crisis Group recently observed, “there is no sustained, strategic discussion about what the world organisation’s trajectory should be and what priorities it should have.” Without a vision of how the UN can use its limited resources to help States achieve the goals and purposes of the UN Charter in a radically changing world, and without an inclusive process for building consensus around such a vision, the UN80 Initiative risks failure – an outcome that, in the current environment, is likely to have negative effects on IDPs and their hosts alike.
Walter Kälin is emeritus professor of constitutional and international law, the Envoy of the Chair of the Platform on Disaster Displacement, presently a Richard von Weizäcker Fellow at the Bosch Academy in Berlin, and formerly the Representative of the UN Secretary-General on the human rights of internally displaced persons. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author. They should, in particular, not be attributed to the staff, officers or trustees of the Robert Bosch Stiftung.
Peter de Clercq is Adjunct Professor at the Law Faculty in Nelson Mandela University (South Africa) and a Research Fellow at the Refugee Law Initiative (University of London). He is the former UN Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General (and Resident/Humanitarian Coordinator) in Somalia and Haiti.
KEYWORDS: Internal displacement, UN80 Initiative, humanitarian reset, New Humanitarian Compact
Selected Bibliography
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KÄLIN, W., 2023, Internal Displacement and the Law. Oxford University Press.
KÄLIN, W. & CHAPUISAT, H. E. 2017. Breaking the Impasse: Reducing Protracted Internal Displacement as a Collective Outcome. OCHA Policy and Studies Series, United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Available: https://interagencystandingcommittee.org/sites/default/files/migrated/2018-04/breaking-the-impasse.pdf
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