Abstract

For humanitarian organizations, the concept of accountability shapes both strategy and operations. Guidance concerning the application of various accountability frameworks to humanitarian stakeholders has proliferated over the past decade. Yet as ongoing conflicts have demonstrated a shrinking of the humanitarian space and restrictions in access to and information about populations in need, ethical challenges abound for humanitarian actors. Large organizations, in particular, are faced with the quandary of entering into a duty of care with people and communities in need while simultaneously doing their utmost to maintain security for their personnel and programs. Considerations of the latter push organizations to manage their operations remotely by contracting their operations to implementing partners, further complicating chains of accountability. In order to maintain accountability amongst contracting organizations, we introduce the concept of a duty of care transfer review and link it to a five-step process. Through a brief case example, we briefly illustrate the applicability of such a process by using a commitment from the Core Humanitarian Standard and show how relevant indicators, sources of verification, tolerances, and consequences could be set. These steps involve an agreement on commitments between the contracting and implementing organizations that should be part of a regular duty of care transfer review and we encourage humanitarian organizations to engage in further thinking about the institutionalization of this process.