This week, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Sir Mark Lowcock, gave a speech in Washington DC in which he stated that the international aid system struggles because it does not listen to those who need the aid it supplies. Too often, he said, a top-down approach is used where suppliers of aid supply what they think is needed, rather than what those in receipt of aid say they need.

These comments drew our attention for two key reasons. Firstly because it is fairly rare to see the head of a major organisation acknowledging publicly their problems (more often we see it done privately, if at all), and secondly because it got us thinking about the challenges and advisability of global scale consultation and engagement.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OHCA) works around the world, with 2300 staff across 60 nations. It has offices on every continent, often in countries where there is an increased need for international aid. So could more and better consultation and engagement help them solve their little inverted pyramid problem?

Much of their ‘intellectual backing’, the reports and studies that inform their work, is academic and staff lead, but a quick look at them reveals that they do involve many stakeholders in the preparation of these documents. In light of Sir Mark’s comments however, it is perhaps noteworthy that most of these contributors come from exactly the sort of institutional backgrounds that he highlights as being part of the problem.

Enthusiastic consultors will know that there are many reasons we consult, and one of the key ones is to take advantage of the knowledge and lived experiences of consultees and those involved in engagement. It can help to ensure effective programmes and policies and to avoid the sort of paternalistic (conceivably in this particular case, even pseudo-colonial) thinking that authorities always know best about the needs of the individual.

In the international context there is perhaps even more of a need to challenge this sort of attitude. The post-World War II international system is still fundamentally derived from the ‘Great Powers’ approach that characterised international relations formally from the post-Napoleonic era, and less formally for several centuries before then. It would be a bold advocate who argued that every citizen in the world shared the same power of voice.

So would more ground-level consultation and engagement help? That’s very dependent on how well it is done. Consultation is always a challenge to make work, to prevent it from being tokenistic or merely feeding the same flawed patronising approaches that can sometimes be the consequence of authorities. If done well though, it could be a positive boon to an agency looking to increase its effectiveness in fulfilling a vital global role.

Whilst many of the challenges are the same as for smaller scale consultations, there are distinct challenges for the large scale consultation and in this case running one enormous consultation process would almost certainly not provide useful results. It would miss many voices that needed to be heard- many from communities that already by definition suffer a lack of political voice- and would either produce a report so summary as to be useless, or one so lengthy and wordy as to be obfuscating.

What would work better would be smaller scale local consultations. With 60 offices across the world, a programme of consultation run by each could be used to better inform the wider organisation about the needs of individuals and groups, possibly contributing to a wider report outlining a new approach for the organisation as a whole. This would enable locally-led knowledge to feed upwards to counter the approach being criticised in Sir Mark’s speech.

One of the key reasons why such consultations would be best run by local bodies and offices rather than by the overarching organisation is so that these bodies could better take account of and utilise local customs, traditions and situations. Although the basic principles of good consultation tend towards similarity, pushing a default universal view of consultation led solely by the conventions and mechanisms we have developed in the West would only risk lack of participation, ineffectiveness and serve to perpetuate the same problems again.

The truth is of course that it is very easy to say, rather more difficult to do. Sixty offices might sound like a lot, but there are 193 UN Member States, so even then many offices would be covering significant numbers of countries in expansive regions. One advantage the UN perhaps has is that it does have resources in each member state- could these be drawn on to ensure that those most in need get what they require?

Not all regions would require the same degree of attention of course. In Europe, where the need for international aid is (generally) far less keenly required, any consultation and engagement process would be far simpler (also because in Europe we tend to be more au fait with consultation and engagement as part of normal democratic processes). In areas where aid is a more vital part of life, reaching communities could be challenging, and particularly in areas that have suffered from political instability and lack of individual citizen power there might be problems encouraging people to speak to consultors.

Another challenge is perhaps the highly political nature of aid. Although it does great humanitarian work, it would be a great act of naivete to assume that for the providers (particularly state providers) the supply of aid is entirely a moral gesture in support of our common humanity. State control over the disbursement of their aid is a vital aspect of soft power, and it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that states may see an attempt to move away from the traditional system to a more needs-led system as a challenge to this.

The important thing to note however is that none of these challenges are insurmountable. The pandemic has highlighted and illustrated the novel and imaginative forms of consultation and engagement that can be used. The Institute has been doing some very interesting work with the Council of Europe in Drohobych Municipality, Ukraine with young people helping older, less connected people in their families and communities to better engage with change programmes.

With more locally-led consultations, using novel and innovative techniques, it could be ensure that the end product of the consultation both involved the people it needed to involve, and produced effective results that could then be acted upon by the commissioners to improve the international aid system.

On the political side, one of the core things that states must demonstrate to their own citizens is that international aid money is being used well. Particularly in liberal democracies, ideas of consultation and engagement as key parts of political processes still hold a strong sway over the individual political conscience. A combination of these two features, and a push on the moral ideas of aid could help to alleviate political concerns about the change from a top-down to a bottom-up system in determining both what aid is necessary and how it is used.

Giving people an individual voice through consultation and engagement is an important form of empowerment, and can help people to feel more involved with their societies and the world they live in. Although this is usually a by-product of the primary purpose of the consultation, in this case the improvement of supply of international aid, it could prove to be an advantageous and stabilising one that helped communities in the long term, and even potentially eventually help to lift them out of the situations they find themselves involuntarily trapped in.

In light of Sir Mark’s comments, it seems that an appetite for change may be building- and in our view, consultation and engagement with recipients of aid should form a key part of any change. In 2014, a group of organisations and individuals involved in international humanitarian aid got together and established the Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability, a document that established principles by which those working in the area should work. It touched upon the need to involve communities in decision-making affecting them, but only in very broad terms. Perhaps it’s time for some new standards, and a more detailed framework for how effective consultation and engagement in this sector could be achieved.