Please note that this is a hybrid event on Tuesday 7th May with the in-person session taking place in Geneva at the Humanitarian Partnerships and Networks Week from 09:00-10:30 UTC+2.

This panel aims to help interrogate and strengthen the Accountability to Affected People (AAP) agenda by focusing on the narratives through which AAP is understood and justified, and how narratives around ongoing and future AAP interventions can be grounded in the voices of affected communities.

Narratives – stories with a purpose – have a central place in humanitarian communications, fundraising, advocacy and attempts at reform. They shape how crises are understood and responses are prescribed. Though humanitarian organisations are adept at framing their work in technical terms, it is a sector founded on narratives that dictate who is vulnerable and who can help and continuously fuelled by the need to raise funds. And though external narratives challenge humanitarian exceptionalism today, the sector has greater power to shape narratives than often willing to admit. As HPG has demonstrated in recent work, narratives have been explicitly and effectively utilized in successful reform in cash programming and increasing humanitarian budgets.

Understanding and engaging with the narratives underpinning approaches to AAP is essential to formulating new ways of thinking about AAP which will tackle head-on the ongoing power inequalities and failures to translate accountability commitments into action. There are persistent narratives about what AAP entails in practice, and how it can be strengthened, from the centrality of feedback to accountability, to the role of data and digital technologies as key to improved delivery on AAP.

The extent to which these narratives reflect or conflict within on-the-ground humanitarian action, and how far they are grounded in the priorities and interests of different affected communities, remain key questions. Narratives, including those that emphasise forms of structured feedback and the reliance on digital data, too often seem to reflect the experiences and perspectives of humanitarian actors.

With the aim to help centre AAP narratives in the voices of affected communities, this panel will interrogate the implicit and explicit interests and assumptions that underpin narratives within the AAP agenda. Panellists will consider whose interests and assumptions are and are not present in the narratives that are told about the need, justification and aims of the AAP agenda. The panel will conclude by discussing roles that different actors, including in the humanitarian and media sectors, can play to reconstruct narratives around AAP grounded in the voices of affected communities.

The panel and anticipated audience will comprise of experts and practitioners within the AAP community, as well as from the media sector and local civil society working on accountability.