This conversation has been edited for print and permission purposes – listen to the full episode from Rethinking Humanitarianism. This story was originally published by The New Humanitarian.

Ben Ramalingam has spent 20 years thinking and writing about the complexity of the humanitarian system and what makes it shift.

His conclusion? It changes the wrong way around.

“We’ve tended to evolve not through trial and error, but through error and trial,” he says. “So we respond to what goes wrong, we absorb the shock through processes which are often very painful, and then we return to something that’s not too far removed from what we had before.”

In this episode, the hosts of Rethinking Humanitarianism, Tammam Aloudat and Christina Bennett, examine the sector’s recent reform drives with Ramalingam and Nadine Saba, head of the local Lebanese NGO Akkar Network for Development.

Saba, who once represented local organisations in the Grand Bargain – the sector’s most ambitious attempt at change in decades – explains why her views on reform have grown more conflicted the longer she’s tried to make a difference from within the system.

Saba and Ramalingam also explore what systems change teaches us about what drives the sector to pivot, and why fear, lack of humility, and unrealistic expectations stand in the way of that change.

CB: Ben, I was a big fan of Aid on the Edge of Chaos when you wrote it 13 years ago, and at that moment you had theorised that “aid would resemble the world of which it is part: fluid, dynamic, emergent.” Thirteen years later, sort of reflecting on what you were thinking then and where you see things now, has aid moved in that direction? And if not, what’s gotten in the way?

BR: Thank you, Christina. And yeah, it’s great to be with you. And yes, indeed, it’s a book that seems to, you know, I still get commentary and feedback on it today about the relevance of the ideas, and it does seem to have gotten more relevant over time.

I guess that the core piece is that I do think the sector has moved, but perhaps not as much as we would need it to meet the needs of those people we are meant to serve. And I want to give an explanation of as to why I think this is.

You know, in the book I talk about aid as an ecosystem, and this is language which we’re seeing more and more. Some people use it metaphorically; some people use it more formally. You know, the OECD recently analysed the aid system using network analysis, you know, doing all kinds of different really formal methods of understanding the aid system.

What natural ecosystems do is they evolve through variation, selection, and amplification: see what’s going on, the selection pressures that mean that certain things are more preferable, and those things get amplified. So that’s trial and error writ large. And I think the humanitarian ecosystem has tended to evolve the other way around. We’ve tended to evolve not through trial and error, but through error and trial. So we respond to what goes wrong, we absorb the shock through public and private processes, which are often very painful, and then we return to something that’s not too far removed from what we had before.

And since 2013 there have been examples of changes that have happened that have moved away, which have been genuinely that trial and error, but I don’t think they’ve been fundamental or deep enough to really move us so that the aid system matches the world that we’re part of.

CB: I want to come to you now, Nadine. The Grand Bargain was arguably the most ambitious humanitarian reform of the last decade, but I was recently at a conference where someone said it was never grand, nor was it ever a bargain. Is that your assessment, that we didn’t have the right ambition from the beginning? And maybe in answering that, discuss a little bit about where you see it has brought us to today, and where it could possibly lead us to somewhere we need to go.

NS: You know, whenever we’re implementing any project, we have some assumptions, and we build our framework and our luck frame and our work based on these assumptions, and these assumptions are mainly related to the situation where we are. And here is my question: are we at this moment in 2026 dealing with the same assumptions, the same geopolitical context, the same political will, the same public opinion about aid as it was in 2016? I don’t think so.

So, for me, if I want to look into where the Grand Bargain is, I believe it would be a bit unfair to say that, you know, it wasn’t a bargain, and it wasn’t grand. I think that within the Grand Bargain signatories, we have two, or more than two groups: we have the believers, and we have the ones that just went with the flow. I do think that there was an ambition and the will, but I’m not sure that the ones who committed to the Grand Bargain were completely and fully aware of the implications of their commitments, and this is where I question how things have moved. So, I don’t think that the ambition was not there, I think that throughout those 10 years, the ambition faded through different pathways, and for different reasons, and for different factors.

Now, if I want to look into the strength of the Grand Bargain, I said it before, and I will say it again: the Grand Bargain is as strong as its signatories want it to be, and at this moment it doesn’t look like the signatories want the Grand Bargain to be that strong.

Whenever I speak with different other local leaders, we always have this dilemma: do we still need to put energy in the Grand Bargain? Do we still want to engage? Isn’t it a bit tokenistic? And when I look into this, I completely see their perspective, and at the same time I think about, you know, the price of inaction.

The Grand Bargain remains one of the very few fora where all stakeholders are sitting at the same table. Now, let’s not dig into the efficiency of sitting at the same table at the moment, because there is a lot of imbalance, but at least it’s a place where you can still voice out the concerns and say, ‘This is not working.’ Now, is it being followed up with the action that needs to be taken? I’m not always sure about that. But at least it’s a forum where you can still come and say, ‘Listen, this is not good, this is not functioning, this is not being as it needs to be.’ So, ‘Grand’ Bargain or not, it was a bargain.

My problem is, was it because it was at the mindset of a bargain that it did not work? I’m not sure. Did we need to do something else from the get-go? I am not sure. Because I think that the bargaining principle in it, is it the reason why it’s not as successful as it needs to be? I don’t know.

BR: I want to give an example from some of the work that I did around the time of the Grand Bargain, where I looked at partnerships between national and local actors and international organisations.

And there was one particular phrase that really stood out from an INGO, a big INGO, where this senior leader said a local actor or a national actor has to be really special to tell us they want to do something a different way and get away with it. And it really kind of still stayed in my mind, because you know, across the whole thing – it was the Missed Opportunities work, which was done with the coalition of INGOs and led to what ODI then referred to as the best longitudinal kind of evidence base on localisation – and in that research we found that local actors were more effective, more efficient, they did what was more relevant, greater levels of trust, and yet there was just this attention, because essentially the incentives were not there to give up the power.

Donors retain visibility and control, because they basically have allocation power. They have power over where they want to give their resources and why. There’s a political role that that… and a political function and they need that for domestic political impact and domestic political accountability.

INGOs and UN agencies are the intermediaries, they have power in that intermediary that is for resources, for influence, for their position. And national and local actors lack the leverage to say no. They have to take what’s on offer. And so, there is a voluntary subordination of power and agency and capability to a system that is well understood to be blunt and sometimes ineffective, but at least is the source of money that otherwise wouldn’t be available. And that incentive structure runs all the way through the system. The Grand Bargain, for all of the pronouncements and the statements, and the, you know, the signatories, it did not touch that incentive system one bit. It didn’t change it, in my opinion.

And Nadine’s point earlier on is the critical one. What is changing it right now is the fact that the resources are no longer available in the same way. We’re now in a different geopolitical moment, which is marked by fragmentation, marked by great power, economic warfare essentially, and aid is fundamentally changed in that model. And in that model, there’s a different window of opportunity for change, which I guess is part of the reason we’re having this conversation in the first place.

But what exactly is that window of opportunity, and how do we find our feet in it? I think that’s the critical part in this world of shifting sounds.

NS: It looks like, for me, that whenever we’re speaking about any reform or any type of change, we’re just sticking to the structures and policies, which is the surface level, whereas what we need to really tackle is the mindset and paradigm.

You know, a lot of people, when you tell them about localisation, they start talking mainly about the funding, they talk about, you know, equal partnership, the ICR [Indirect Cost Recovery] cost, and for me, this is not what it is. These are the things that I can see, and I can compute and I can measure, but when we’re talking about localisation, it’s a paradigm shift in the way we look towards aid. And this is where I think the flaws are.

And the fact that we think that if we put a guidance note or if we establish a certain rule, then change will happen. Yes, change might happen, but at the same time, throughout my work, I’ve seen real change happening when it is intentional. When you have people who are convinced and who want the change, and you do not need to convince them that make things happen.

And here I remember my years when I was studying law, and my first year a professor came in and said: there isn’t a law that has been written by a human being that cannot be turned around, or you can go around it. So even if you have a policy, even if you have a guidance, if the person implementing that is not convinced about it and does not want to make it happen, they would still have ways to go around it.

So, for me, again, going back to, you know, the idea: Grand Bargain, was it grand? I think the ambition for it wasn’t to be grand. The ambition for it, at least in the eyes of the believers, to go towards the mindset. But ultimately, what we have seen is that we’re thinking at the level of the structure and the policy rather than digging in terms of the mindset and the paradigm.

BR: I think there is an answer to this. The seeds of the answer are already within the system.

We have got examples of, you know, it’s a cliche now, but we’ve got examples of the future already working within the sector. It’s just not, we’re not giving the resources to that.

So if you look at the ways in which, for example, Indonesia or Mozambique have placed kind of clear limits on the engagement of the international humanitarian system, and said, ‘We are going to coordinate, we’ll bring in resources as needed, but we’re not going to catalyse and trigger international appeals for humanitarian aid, because it doesn’t help us,’ and so there’s more of a nationally-led process of engaging with crises and disasters.

Obviously, that’s a challenge if you’re talking about conflicts and fragility and situations where the government themselves may be creating the conflict, creating the vulnerability. But we’ve got in the modern system examples of national, accountable institutions taking on and resourcing the system differently, resourcing humanitarian aid and humanitarian action differently, and the international actors have had to adjust and adapt and work in more of a partnership model, and saying, ‘Well, okay, we’re not going to have boots on the ground, we’re not going to have a cluster, we’re not going to have INGOs, but we still want to support in this way, and so we’re going to have to find different ways of engaging,’ you know.

So that’s a really good example, where the domestic accountability and structures and systems exist in such a way that gives prominence to those national local actors, and they have an alternative that is genuinely empowering, and then the aid system is additive to that. Another example, you know, cash, there’s a really great report from The CALP Network, which is looking at the efficiency of cash versus other forms, and it turns out that cash is demonstrably, across all different settings, something like 37.5 per cent more efficient than in-kind aid.

Again, if you’re in the private sector, you would be buying cash big time, right? But cash is still capped at what, 20, 22 per cent? Well, not capped, but limited to 20, 22 per cent.

Efficient is not the same thing as cheap. But if we were going to be, you know, a rational system, we would do that. What is stopping us from doing it? What is stopping this thing there is that there is an allocative power that says we must give in-kind, we must give to the actors we like, must give to the INGOs we want to, and that’s limiting, even in this moment, the resources that can genuinely get to the people that most need it. 

NS: I’m going to be a bit like the broken record, but I’m going to go back to the mindset, and to the assumption, and to the paradigm. And sometimes, you know, between quote unquote, humanitarians, lack humility.

We tend to believe that we know better than the people what they need, and sometimes because of that, we stick to our old habits, to our ways of business as usual, and do have some resistance to change. So, putting cash as an example, we are used to provide, you know, the food boxes, we are used to provide the kits, and the value chain is there, the system is there, the procurement is there, the whole industry is there.

Changing completely to cash is a bit of a disruptive agent, [for] one. I remember my first encounter with cash in my own organisation. When they first talked to me about cash assistance, my first reaction was like, ‘We are not a charity, and how would we do this?’ And then, after the first and second experience, and I was talking, and it was at that moment, it was a, it was an initiative mainly for women head of households who had come from Syria to Lebanon. And then when I talked to them, it was for me a complete shift in my perspective, because most of those women were telling us ‘We have our dignity, we know what we want, we know what we need, and we go and buy it.’

But at the same time, it felt a bit awkward for me because we used to do an info session whenever we were providing the bank cards and explaining them that, you know, ‘We don’t want you to buy cigarettes, we don’t want you to buy, you know, whatever items, we don’t want you to buy such and such,’ and at that moment I really felt a bit patronising. Who am I to come and tell that woman, who is 50 years old, who is like my mom – well, I’m not that young anymore – who is like my mom, to tell her, you know, ‘You buy this and don’t buy that.’

CB: Let’s step back a little bit to the case for change, or the process of change. You, Ben, have talked about this, the steps, or the elements that are needed in order to be able to enact systemic level change.

Ben, what are those three elements that are required for systemic change to take place, and then of those crises, of those solutions that may be waiting in the wings, are they the right ones, and are the conditions in place for them to actually take hold?

BR: This comes from the research which I led for ALNAP [Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance], which looks at the history of humanitarian systems change.

We looked at all these different examples and looked at where change has actually happened. And the first is that different kinds of crises, both actual crises, but also crises on the sector, create threats and opportunities. And the pressure on the system basically intensifies demands and places hard limits on ways of work, and that opens up the space for new ideas that would otherwise remain on the margin.

And then these ideas that are on the margin, the ones that tend to emerge are the ones where there are networks of people who’ve already been working away at it, and where they’ve been testing it, often below the radar. And these ideas lose their worth in the heat of the moment. And then those networks grow through a kind of process of diffusion of the ideas and experiences. They grow, they get spread far and wide, they change behaviours, they change attitudes, and they, in doing that, they reshape the system.

So first, the crisis creates threats and opportunities, it pushes the system to an edge. Then you’ve got marginal approaches, which have coalitions of people that were really kind of working away at it, and then they, having got into the kind of mainstream, they then get spread.

So cash is the emblematic example. You know, for 150 years, cash was resisted for all of the reasons that we’ve talked about. You know, there were studies published in the 1990s that said we should give people cash, we just don’t trust them enough. And it was a kind of almost like a retread, a rewarmed version of that Victorian argument that poor people cannot be trusted.

And you know, even talking about cash in pre-2004 was enough to get you blackballed by certain UN agencies – and the reason it changed was the tsunami happened, and suddenly the system was literally awash with cash, huge amounts of fundraising, and needed to programme it in countries where they didn’t have a presence. And there was an embryonic version of CALP that was set up, and I was involved in facilitating that across three or four of the affected countries, actually getting people to learn and share their experiences, because cash had never been applied at that scale before. And a lot of lessons got shared.

And straight after that emergency, Pakistan happened, so loads of the cash people went from the tsunami countries to the Pakistan earthquake, and it just kind of spread, and digitalisation happened, and got folded into that.

So it kind of evolved over time. It wasn’t because anyone said, “Right, let’s make cash a thing.” It was a social movement, and like those social movements, you have kind of the individuals within it that really make a difference.

So those four areas – localisation, resilience, innovation, adaptive leadership – you know, some of them have genuinely made a contribution. I think resilience has become more part of the way the sector operates – there’s more investment. Innovation, you could argue there’s more of.

Localisation and adaptive management had struggled because they’ve really tackled the culture, trying to tackle the culture of the system. And where the system is able to kind of turn something into a technical process of change that it gets incorporated without challenging the power dynamics, it’s better at doing that. The areas of localisation and adaptive leadership have done less well – you know this is my in-person experience of trying to push and nudge and encourage these changes – they’ve done less well because they are much more political and can’t easily be turned into a technical use.

So, I think that’s something we just need to be aware of. If you think about what the kind of the idea of being co-opted, Rosa Parks being the emblematic leader that signals why change is needed, Luther King that’s able to stick between the powerful and the oppressed, Malcolm X is the aggressor that is uncompromising – you need all three of them to really affect change.

TA: That’s brilliant. My question is, who’s the, who’s the Malcolm X of the humanitarian system? Because I see a lot of Martin Luther Kings, but I don’t see many Malcolm Xs.

CB: And where is the energy for Malcolm Xs to emerge?

BR: I do think that as a sector, we’ve lost some of that campaigning zeal and energy. MSF, I think, still has it and is able to articulate eloquent anger about injustices.

I think there are many entities that will be doing quiet work – you know, less Malcolm X, more Luther King – doing quiet work and trying to bridge the gaps.

I don’t think it’s an either or, but I do think if we are going to especially speak to and counter the alternative narratives that are surrounding us right now, we do need to have a way of bringing, bringing the anger back.

Humanitarian vulnerability is not a technical, neutral thing. It exists because of choices we are making as a society that are making some people systemically more vulnerable, and we should be angry about that, and we should be raising our voices up about it. But not every agency sees it in their mandate or their culture to do that, and not every agency will.

TA: I mean, I don’t want to consume the metaphor. I agree that there are rare examples, MSF being one of, you know, what you called eloquent anger.

We’ve been talking technical talk about internal innings of the system. Nadine is sitting in Lebanon that has been being bombed for weeks on end. Do I accept the argument that it’s not their mandate or culture to do everything in their power to stop the slaughter of civilians that they supposedly exist to protect? Especially when it’s nearly, it’s very difficult to deliver aid. Gaza is another example. Yemen is another example.

When I find people want to say, you know, ‘We’re Martin Luther King,’ despite no one having articulated their dream in a very long time. Where’s the accountability, when we are sitting here and talking while people are being killed wantonly? What is the accountability mechanism?

And Nadine, I want to ask you, what is it that you want to see? I mean, you are sitting, hopefully as safely as you can, in a country that is being incessantly bombed. What do you want? What is it, other than people claiming their own culture and mandate as if they are scripture, that you want from them, you need from them?

NS: People’s needs are extremely simple: they want to live peacefully and in dignity.

So you know all the jargon that we have been talking about – from the pooled funding to the systemic change, transformational change, the commitments – on the field, nobody cares about it, nobody has heard about it, nobody wants to hear about it. People want to live in peace, in their homes, being able, you know, to go plant their own orchids, you know, get pruning their own trees, and getting their own food.

So I think that’s, you know, within our work we did get lost on purpose, if I may say, in the intricacies of the system, while forgetting that on the ground, on the field, people don’t care of all this narrative and galactic that we are talking about.

And if you tell me, what do you want in Lebanon? I want this war to end. But I don’t want it to end while people are staying in the schools in the collective shelters without being able to return home.

One of the things that kind of sometimes hits me when I spoke about, you know, the poverty of some groups, I was told ‘Poverty is not humanitarian issue,’ and I will challenge and say no, it is because ultimately when you say poverty is not humanitarian issue, poverty is going to create an emergency that will become a humanitarian issue. So for me, if I want to go back to the change. If I want to go back to things, I would say we need to go a bit simpler. We need to be more humble. We need to remember what we’re doing here.

And why is the narrative going against us? Okay, let’s look back a bit inwards. Let’s look into our own salaries, into our own payment packages, into our own, you know, conferences, work, cars that we go into the field. I mean, sometimes I’ve been hearing from people, the car that they come in can feed I don’t know how many groups of people for I don’t know how long. So I do think that we truly lack humility, and sometimes we’re disconnected from the people that we are supposed to be serving. And this is where I think it kind of makes a difference.

Early in the times of the Syrian crisis, we’ve had in one community an issue with some of the organisations working there, and I’ve been asked not to go into that community. I’m like, ‘No, we need to go into that community.’ And they said, ‘but they’ve blocked the road.’ I’m like, ‘they cannot block the road on me.’ I go in my own car, in the car of my team. I don’t go in a rented car where I have this big logo. I am in the community. And this is where I think that this disconnect from us and them is a breaking point for the system.

It’s not only the funding that is a breaking point, it’s also this disconnect, because on the side of the donor and on the side of the recipient, I’m not sure that we’re ranking in a very satisfactory manner on both sides. And this is where, when you’re talking about the change, we’re always asking others to change. Are we having a retrospective look? I am not sure.

BR: There is a connection between this conversation about ending impunity and localisation. It might seem disconnected, but actually, it is about the costs, you know, the costs of acting in a certain way are for certain actors seen as higher than the costs of not acting. It comes back to incentives and why people behave in certain ways.

And if you look at all of the channels we currently have for dealing with accountability for ending impunity, they root through powerful states that are either perpetrators or protectors of those states.

So the humanitarian system has tried in different ways, you know, MSF exists because of a deep and profound division with the Red Cross about how to take on the punishable and their protectors.

To my mind, it’s not actually through the legal architecture and institutional architecture that we see those kinds of changes happen, but it’s through public attention, mobilisation campaigns. It’s much more the human rights tradition than the humanitarian one that I think we see genuine levers for change, because of all of the things that we have been kind of talked about already.

The other thing that kind of comes to my mind as well is that, you know, having worked with both the Red Cross and the UN system, the calculation that’s made typically is you’re choosing access overbearing witness, because, specific, to your point, being present means that we will save more lives than if we were expelled. And that’s the calculus that’s made time and time again. It’s not like the conversation doesn’t come up in the corridors of entities, but that’s the calculation that– but I guess the challenge with that is that it can’t become an easy fallback. It can’t become a way of permitting presence without protection, because then it essentially, it’s complicity dressed up as pragmatism.

I would add to Nadine’s pieces, you know, I think we do need humility, but we also need greater levels of courage to actually call these things out when they’re happening. You know, and I think we look to the local and national actors and organisations like Nadine’s, because I think that’s where we’re actually getting the truth telling happening.

Many at the highest levels of international organisations are promoted because of their ability to administrate and manage budgets, not because of their ability to call out normative frameworks and rights-based arguments for how people should be treated, and that campaigning zeal is no longer at the top of the organisations that we are part of.