Summary Points
Accountability and participation are different ways of addressing the inequalities that arise when an actor acquires and exercises power:
o Accountability mechanisms address inequalities by creating structured relationships through which one actor is enabled to assess and approve of another actor’s actions through the provision of information and/or the opportunity to influence how that party acts through rewards or sanctions.
o Participation, in contrast, addresses these inequalities by seeking to remove them entirely, bringing in the stakeholder to take decisions and act alongside the actor and thus re-distributing the power of decision-making.
One of the main problems in the humanitarian sector today is that there are no consequences for operational agencies when they fail to meet the expectations of other actors (except for donors) and, hence, no ‘real’ accountability between aid agencies and many of their stakeholders.
While accountability and participation share connections to quality standards and the humanitarian principles, they should be treated separately, as they specifically address the issues of power and choice.
Under recommendation areas, points for action include:
o Establish clear criteria for applying participatory or accountability mechanisms based on evidence of how these approaches work in different contexts;
o Engage national NGOs as key leaders in reforming humanitarian accountability, soliciting their expertise to ensure that international accountability mechanisms do not compete with or overrun accountability mechanisms already present in the state-society relations in host countries;
o Generate lessons on the comparative advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to accountability and participation, drawing on the lessons being collected by the IASC members;
o Consider new technologies and approaches from outside the humanitarian sector in order to create more choice and voice for affected people and local actors in humanitarian action;
o Identify new rewards and sanction mechanisms—both legal and financial— that support a humanitarian system that is accountable to affected people;
o Define collective responsibilities and appropriate mechanisms for holding multiple actors to account for the impact of a response. This approach to multiactor accountability should not rest on ideal actor types, but should instead focus on the information and influence available to different actors;
o Address the constraints of the shorter time horizon of humanitarian action by either lengthening this horizon, or finding ways to use participation compatibly with the long term presence of development and DRR structures and professionals.
Under recommendation areas, points for further discussion and research include:
o Understand the different types of context in which humanitarian action occurs and the different roles of actors in these contexts
o Identify different levels of responsibility of different humanitarian actors and the different accountability relationships these require.
o Consider new responsibilities that humanitarian actors will need to meet in order to respond effectively to new types of crisis, in a rapidly changing world.