Mutli-Disciplinary Strategies and the Humanitarian Reset

The humanitarian sector is facing a “profound crisis of legitimacy, morale, and funding,” as described by the United Nations’ Emergency Relief Coordinator, Tom Fletcher. The dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and broader funding shifts are not just reducing resources, but reshaping the way organizations engage with one another, including severing ties with key partners or limiting opportunities for new partnerships. Yet, as the sector tightens its belts, we must ask: Are we making the right adjustments, or more to the point, are the sector’s efforts to meet the challenge of the moment strengthening or eroding our capacity to contribute to the protection of civilians in times of crisis?

This is not the first time this question has been raised. Funding to the sector stalled in 2023, and COVID-19 previously offered a chance for the sector to “rewrite the rules of humanitarian action.” To date, many efforts at reform have been found wanting, especially regarding increases in funding to local actors or creating incentives to change the status quo. Now the challenge to learn from previous crises and rise to the moment has been forced before leaders in the sector, including donors.

InterAction has long posited that multi-disciplinary strategies are essential to reducing protection risks, emphasizing the importance of full engagement with local actors. If this is the case, then a contraction of partnerships in response to financial pressures risks undermining protection outcomes. This case example, drawing from InterAction’s Results-Based Protection (RBP) work in Colombia, illustrates these tensions and explores the need for creative, adaptive partnerships in the face of crises.

Sectoral and area-based approaches have long recognized the need to coordinate assistance between different domains—such as shelter, health, WASH, and protection—and with different types of actors. In 2010, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) called for a “paradigm shift in humanitarian assistance” to district or community-based approaches. Rather than focusing on individual beneficiaries, these approaches seek to forge partnerships with actors who are more closely tied to affected communities and not only support the delivery of assistance but sustain recovery. Likewise, USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) began advocating for a “neighborhood approach” more than a decade ago, emphasizing community-driven decision-making processes and responsiveness to the social, economic, and physical features of a defined area.

Yet despite these efforts, coordination has too often meant parallel planning of sequential implementation, rather than joint problem analysis and strategy. Multi-disciplinary strategies for protection risk reduction require more than co-location or referrals. They demand intentional alignment around a clearly defined risk, with each actor contributing something essential toward a common outcome. This does not always require formal consortia but does demand shared accountability and strategic coherence across actors.

Key to this response was the role of non-traditional humanitarian actors, including the Catholic Church, whose position allowed them to engage with non-state armed groups (NSAG) in ways that INGOs and humanitarian organizations legally cannot.  Additionally, several small, hyper-local civil society organizations connected to different minority communities—each with distinct legal protections and relationships with armed actors—were critical for tailoring responses to the specific needs of different populations.

Initially, the project sought to build a broad coalition, leveraging diverse actors to implement community-driven risk reduction strategies. However, as the funding landscape has and continues to rapidly deteriorate, INGO partners expressed reluctance to engage in expansive partnerships. The sudden and extreme changes in financial resources severely restricted their capacity to support a multi-disciplinary coalition, especially engaging with smaller partners who potentially lack the institutional capacities and financial systems required by international donors. Instead, they preferred to limit engagement to two or three established INGO partners with whom they had previous experience.

This shift had immediate consequences. The originally envisioned response—designed around pathways for change identified through the protection risk equation in partnership with conflict-affected communities—is undergoing adjustment to conform to existing mandates and partnerships rather than pathways for risk reduction. The decision to narrow partnerships was not just about funding; it reflected a broader instinct to contract in moments of crisis. While lead agencies cited limited capacity to manage multiple small partners, they also opted to restrict participation to international organizations already known to them, even though several community-based groups had substantively contributed to the development of risk reduction strategies. Such gatekeeping, whether intentional or not, undercuts the very premise of the project, that achieving protection outcomes requires the inclusion of actors with specific contextual knowledge and access, regardless of their institutional proximity to existing INGOs.

In Colombia—where both state and non-state actors frequently restrict humanitarian access—excluding civil society and community-based organizations further constrained the humanitarian space. These groups are often best placed to operate in confined or hard-to-reach areas due to their lower profile, established local relationships, and different risk tolerances. For example, local faith-based groups can navigate roadblocks established by armed groups through long-standing community connections that international staff or relocated national staff of INGOs simply do not possess. The instinct to default to familiar, established partners not only limits inclusion, but it effectively narrows the operational bandwidth necessary to reduce confinement, ultimately leaving the most vulnerable communities without adequate support precisely when conflict intensifies and international presence decreases.

Lessons from past integrated programming efforts show that effective multi-disciplinary strategies do not always require large-scale formal partnerships. Creative solutions—such as indirect partnerships through networks (a pathway that will likely be followed in Colombia), leveraging informal relationships, and cross-sectoral collaboration outside formal funding structures—can still enable protection outcomes. INGOs and donors must be willing to adapt their models to accommodate diverse actors, even in constrained funding environments. While compliance systems are essential for donor accountability, overly rigid models often prioritize donor reporting at the expense of community ownership.

This tension is well-documented in research by Patrick Kilby, who examined how accountability requirements create power asymmetries between NGOs and local partners, and Omer Aijazi, whose 2021 field research in Pakistan demonstrated how humanitarian bureaucracy can sideline local knowledge systems and community-led recovery processes. Their work collectively demonstrates that top-down and rigid approaches typically prioritize upward or donor-facing accountability—rather than downward or community-facing accountability—undermining the community ownership necessary for sustainable protection outcomes.

The humanitarian sector’s current upheaval is an opportunity to rethink how we structure collaboration. Rather than defaulting to existing frameworks, we need to explore new ways of mobilizing resources and expertise. This could include flexible consortia that allow for phased or indirect partnerships with local actors; pooled funding mechanisms that reduce administrative burden and lower the barrier to entry for smaller organizations; and governance models that embed community representatives in strategic decision-making, not just consultations. It also means treating informal networks and social infrastructure as legitimate actors in response planning, particularly in protracted or access-constrained settings. If we fail to adapt, we risk sidelining the communities we aim to serve and further eroding the legitimacy and effectiveness of the humanitarian system itself. Now, more than ever, we need a humanitarian system that is not just more efficient but fundamentally more inclusive.