International Humanitarian Action and the Accountability of Official Donors

Over the past decade, there have been significant changes in the way official donors finance and organise their response to humanitarian crises. These changes have been dubbed the ‘bilateralisation’ of humanitarian response –acatchy,butoftenmisleading,label.This Briefing Paper reports on one aspect of a larger study of these trends: how donors themselves are held accountable for their performance as humanitarian actors.
Donor agencies have become increasingly concerned to strengthen the accountability of the operational humanitarian agencies that they fund. This concern has not been matched by a similar level of attention to how effectively donors are held to account for their policies and for the impact of their aid.