Beyond accountability as feedback: Lessons from Somalia in holding humanitarian responses to account

‘Accountability to affected people’, as it is currently most commonly understood, focuses on providing channels for feedback and relatively superficial communication between humanitarian actors and aid recipients. Accountability efforts have paid far less attention to questions of power, particularly in terms of how powerful humanitarian actors can be held to account. In protracted crises, in which large-scale and long-term humanitarian responses have significant distorting effects on host countries’ political economies, the relationship between power and humanitarian accountability is particularly acute. The ‘accountability as feedback’ paradigm which has tended to dominate accountability to affected people (AAP) initiatives in these settings has largely failed to address the challenge of increasing accountability in such crises. →