As global crises intensify and aid budgets tighten, the humanitarian and development system is being forced to confront a difficult reality: the current model is no longer sustainable at the scale required.
To mark the Sydney launch of Professor David Sanderson’s new book, Design for Disaster Recovery, RDI Network brought together a panel of humanitarian leaders and researchers to ask what it actually means to shift power, funding and decision-making to those closest to a crisis. The event, co-hosted with the UTS International Development Researchers Network and held at the University of Technology Sydney, was moderated by RDI Director Dr Melissa Phillips and featured Professor David Sanderson (UNSW), Dr Betty Barkha (Save the Children Australia) and Dr Tazrina Chowdhury (UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures).
The conversation ranged well beyond the book itself, into the funding models, language and power structures that shape who gets to lead in humanitarian and development work, and what needs to be let go for that to change.
The case for a reset
Opening the discussion, Betty Barkha pointed to the scale of what her team was managing in real time. Save the Children was on its fourth situation report for the Solomon Islands tropical cyclone response as the panel began, a reminder that these conversations are not abstract. For Barkha, the reset needed comes down to three shifts: moving localisation beyond rhetoric to genuinely meet communities where they already are, shifting from short-term project cycles toward anticipatory action, and moving away from measuring success purely through speed and output.
Tazrina Chowdhury made the case for connecting humanitarian response to longer-term development thinking, rather than treating disaster response as a short, ad hoc, fly-in-fly-out exercise. She shared an example from Timor-Leste, where a cash and savings scheme introduced through a disaster preparedness program had effects well beyond its original brief. Women in the community used the savings to reinforce their homes against storms, build a financial buffer for recovery, and keep their children in school. What looked like a modest, indirect initiative ended up strengthening the whole community’s ability to withstand and recover from disaster, a result made possible because the international NGO involved worked closely with local organisations who understood the context.
David Sanderson placed the discussion in a longer history. He pointed to the Grand Bargain, agreed a decade ago by major humanitarian donors, and to the Overseas Development Institute’s Time to Let Go report that preceded it, both of which called for exactly the kind of decentralisation and localisation still being discussed today. The need for reform, he said, is not new. What is different now is the human cost of aid cuts happening in real time.
Money and trust
A recurring theme was the link between funding models and genuine local leadership. Barkha described trying to deploy a medical ship providing primary healthcare into the Solomon Islands after a tropical cyclone. The initiative was entirely Pacific-led and Pacific-run, but funding could not be mobilised in time. For her, the reset requires flexible, long-term funding and a willingness to invest in the social capital and networks that already exist in communities, from formal partnerships to informal networks like the women-led WhatsApp groups coordinating support after disasters across Fiji and Vanuatu.
Sanderson traced the accountability problem back to donor systems built on an assumption of no trust, structures designed for oversight rather than partnership. He argued this doesn’t have to be the only model. Participatory and action-based approaches to programming have existed for decades and show that funding, accountability and trust are not mutually exclusive. The barrier is rarely the absence of good models. It is whether those holding power are willing to let go of it.
Chowdhury added that many local organisations are already doing excellent work but lack visibility and access at the global funding level, often because they don’t meet the criteria set by funders who aren’t looking in the right places. Peer-to-peer learning networks, she suggested, are one practical way for organisations to share what’s working and build the case for more flexible, multi-year funding.
What localisation actually looks like
The panel pushed back on treating “local” as a single, uniform category. Barkha described how, for Save the Children, “local” refers to the specific communities the organisation partners with, and that engagement steps look completely different from one community to the next. Some countries, like Fiji, have clear and even mandated community engagement protocols. Others are still developing them. What holds across contexts is that meaningful engagement depends on relationships built over years, not a standard checklist.
Sanderson was candid that the framing of donor accountability versus local ownership as opposing forces is often overstated. He pointed to examples, including a five-year Care Bangladesh program where the first two years were dedicated entirely to listening, engaging and building local ownership, as proof that well-designed programs can meet both.
Measuring what matters
Asked how success should be measured if not through speed and efficiency, Chowdhury argued the answer needs to come from the community itself, not indicators set from the top down. Sanderson referenced Robert Chambers’ phrase “whose reality counts” and pointed to a broader problem in the sector: efficiency has too often trumped effectiveness, with delivery targets prioritised over whether an intervention actually worked for the people it was meant to serve.
Both speakers also flagged how language shapes practice. Terms like “resilience”, “local” and “donor” carry embedded assumptions that can distance organisations from the communities they work with. Phillips reflected on her own experience in South Sudan, where the aid community might have done better to frame its work around the outcomes it was delivering for people, rather than around donor visibility and branding.
Where next
Sanderson closed on a theme from the final chapter of his book: serendipity. He argued that the sector’s rigid planning frameworks, several of which, he noted, were originally developed by NASA to launch rockets, leave little room for the unplanned, relationship-driven moments that often produce the best outcomes in recovery and development work. His challenge to the room was to build more space for agency, flexibility and trust into how programs are designed, rather than assuming everything valuable can be planned for in advance.
About the book
Design for Disaster Recovery: Putting People First to Reset Humanitarian Aid in the Built Environment by Professor David Sanderson is available now through Routledge.
Watch the full panel discussion on YouTube.
Thank you to Professor David Sanderson, Dr Betty Barkha and Dr Tazrina Chowdhury for such a generous and candid discussion, and to the UTS International Development Researchers Network for co-hosting.
