(HAGs rocking the blue carpet in Istanbul)
Ten years ago this week, Josie and I were in Istanbul
Around us, thousands of humanitarian workers, government officials, celebrities, academics, and affected community representatives had gathered for the first-ever World Humanitarian Summit (WHS), a moment the then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called a global call to action.
The energy (and the baklava) in Istanbul was real. So was the ambition.
Over 3,700 commitments were made across five core responsibilities and 24 transformations. The Grand Bargain was struck. The Agenda for Humanity was launched.
This ambition sparked the idea of creating our Humanitarian Horizons Research Programme which kicked off in 2018, and we have charted these agreements and commitments over the last decade.
In Istanbul, I remember feeling two things simultaneously: moved by the scale of intention, and quietly uneasy about who was doing most of the talking.
Ten years on, I keep returning to three questions that felt urgent in 2016 and feel even more urgent now.
Has the sector actually changed?
Yes. And also: not nearly enough, and not in the places that matter most.
The language has shifted dramatically. “Localisation,” “participation revolution,” “do no harm” – these are now standard vocabulary across the sector.
Anticipatory action has grown from a fringe concept to a funding priority. The humanitarian-development-peace nexus, once dismissed as scope creep, is now embedded in most country strategies.
The cluster system has been interrogated, reformed, and is now mid-reset again. These are not nothing.
But language and structure are not the same as power. The WHS generated momentum and political goodwill. What it could not generate, because no summit can, was the political will to genuinely redistribute authority, funding, and decision-making to the people closest to crises.
A decade later, we are still having the same foundational argument about who leads, who decides, and who gets resourced. The sector has changed at the margins. Its architecture has not.
(Josie and Beth with the first Executive Director of the AHA Centre was Mr.
Said Faisal at the World Humanitarian Centre)
Where has power ended up?
Concentrated. Still. Almost exactly where it was.
The problem, as critics identified early, is that the localisation agenda depends on those with the greatest interest in preserving humanitarian hierarchies to elicit the very change that requires dismantling those structures.
UN agencies and international NGOs still hold the majority of cluster leadership roles. Funding continues to pool at the top of the system and trickle – slowly, with conditions attached – to local actors who are often the first responders and last to be resourced.
The WHS was not naive about power.
The Agenda for Humanity named it directly. But naming power and moving it are different things, and the structures of the international humanitarian system – voluntary commitments, self-reporting, no enforcement mechanisms – are not designed to force the latter.
What we built in Istanbul was a more sophisticated conversation about power. We did not build a mechanism (or the incentives) to shift it.
(Josie on arrival at the WHS – before we remembered we’d left our HAG banner at the airport)
Have people received better humanitarian assistance and protection?
This is the question that should anchor every reform process, and the one we most consistently fail to answer with rigour.
The honest answer is: for some people, in some crises, yes. Cash and voucher programming has expanded meaningfully, giving people more dignity and agency in how they meet their needs.
Anticipatory action has reached communities ahead of predictable shocks in ways that were rare a decade ago. Community feedback mechanisms exist in more contexts than before. These gains are real and they matter.
But the aggregate picture is bleak. Humanitarian needs have grown faster than the system’s capacity to meet them. The number of people requiring humanitarian assistance has more than doubled since 2016. Protracted crises – Syria, Yemen, Sudan, the Rohingya – have tested every principle the WHS articulated about civilian protection and found them wanting.
International humanitarian law has been violated with near-complete impunity. And now, in 2025-2026, the funding crisis triggered by the withdrawal of major donors has not just stalled the system – it has pushed it into reverse, undoing years of hard-won progress on the ground.
The sector’s recurring vulnerability is its habit of investing energy in process while the underlying conditions that produce humanitarian need – conflict, climate, inequality – continue unchallenged.
So, what do I make of Istanbul, ten years on?
The commitments that stuck were the ones driven by people with genuine skin in the game, not the ones brokered in plenary halls.
What I’ve come to believe is that summits can create permission to change. They cannot create change itself.
The decade since Istanbul has produced real progress, genuine innovation, and important normative shifts. It has also revealed the stubborn limits of voluntary reform within a system that rewards incumbency and punishes disruption.
The question for the next decade is not whether we need another summit. It’s whether we are finally ready to build accountability mechanisms with teeth – funding flows that actually reach local actors, protection frameworks that carry consequences, and a participation revolution that is more than a well-named workstream.
The people in crisis deserve more than an agenda. They deserve a system that delivers.
