Coordinating a revolution: the critical role of response leadership in improving collective community engagement

The Transformative Agenda, World Humanitarian Summit and Grand Bargain gave response-wide community engagement for Accountability to Affected People (AAP) its ‘moment’. The commitment of donors and agencies alike to a ‘participation revolution’ highlighted the need for change, and attention shifted from individual agency feedback mechanisms to the collective, putting increasing pressure on the coordination system to integrate and mainstream community voices into decisionmaking. However, while humanitarian agencies have increasingly engaged affected people in operations as a matter of course, a genuinely collective approach cannot rely on the sum of these individual efforts. Rather, it demands significant systemic change.