Humanitarian Standards: Too much of a good thing?

JSI commissioned John Cosgrave to write a thought-provoking paper to stimulate constructive debate and discussion around the subject of standards, in order to contribute to the consultation process.This paper reviews the use of humanitarian standards as part of an external regulatory environment for humanitarian action.

This paper examines where the humanitarian community is now in terms of quality and accountability,
how we got here, and what some of the challenges are for the future. There are two broad areas of
use for standards:
? Internal regulation: Standards provide benchmarks for individual agencies to measure their
own work against. Thus they can help agencies improve the quality of the humanitarian action
that they implement. This use of standards is broadly non-controversial and is widely
supported in the humanitarian community. This is how most standards are currently used.
? External regulation (including peer review mechanisms): Standards provide benchmarks for
external assessment of the performance of agencies. It is this use of standards and the
associated question of regulation, accreditation and certification that is the most controversial
aspect of the whole standards and quality debate.
This paper addresses the use of standards for internal regulation, and an associated paper addresses
the issues of standards and external regulation.