Posted on 15 September 2025
Kia ora Humanitarians
I’ve been a bit quiet here over the last little while. Not because things have been quiet at CID, quite the opposite. Between conference season and various hui, we’ve been up to our eyeballs in ‘thinking more deeply’ and up to our ears in conversations about purpose, leadership and values. While I’ll always be a cynic at heart there are some genuinely exciting shifts under way. Taking a breath has helped. Instead of standing headlong in the torrent, I’ve been trying to sip selectively on the firehose of current events and think about what it all means for humanitarians, NGOs and what we’re all here for. Here are a few notes on some of the strategic shifts affecting us all.
What’s hard to ignore is how quickly the space for humanitarian action is narrowing. Attacks on aid workers hit another grim record last year (383 people killed in 2024) with the trend carrying into 2025 and, tellingly, state forces now the most common perpetrators. Acceptance is thinner, impunity is thicker, and duty of care isn’t a paragraph in a plan; it’s the plan. (Humanitarian Outcomes Aid worker security report 2025)
Power politics aren’t politely staying in their lanes either. Israel’s strike in Doha marked a brazen moment, an attack on Hamas figures on an ally’s soil that rattled mediation efforts and reminded everyone that sovereignty has become negotiable when hard security is invoked. Only days earlier, Washington confirmed a lethal strike that sank an alleged Venezuelan drug boat, killing eleven and triggering fierce debates about due process at sea. Whichever way you cut it, cross-border force is getting less exceptional and more normalised; those ripples reach supply chains, access, and the safety calculus of field teams.
Then there’s the theatre of it all. Beijing’s anniversary parade rolled out not just hardware but optics: Xi, Putin and Kim on the same grandstand, signalling an alternative ordering that complicates sanctions regimes, bargaining space and the political weather humanitarians work in. This might be more opportunism than solid alliance, but it’s still a headwind and sends strong signals.
Multilateralism is still there; compliance is what’s wobbling. The UN turns 80 with the Pact for the Future on the books, and a visibly weary Secretary-General keeps reminding capitals that the Charter isn’t pick-and-mix. The problem isn’t a shortage of rules; its powerful actors choosing when to heed them. For those of us in operations, expect legal processes to loom larger; more ICJ orders, more ICC warrants, more sanctions tweaks and humanitarian carve-outs. That gap between rulings and reality shapes acceptance, access, and risk, so we need to be explicit about how we work when courts say one thing and combatants do another.
Funding, meanwhile, is heading in the wrong direction. The 2025 Global Humanitarian Assistance report warns of a sharp contraction across public donors, and OCHA’s “humanitarian reset” is pushing the system to hyper-prioritise what we can deliver, not what we wish we could. That’s not defeatism, it’s triage in public. The practical take-away for all of us is ruthless focus, faster cash to front-line actors, and coordination that removes friction instead of performing it.
Add the plumbing problems. Even with humanitarian carve-outs in sanctions regimes, de-risking and counter-terrorism rules keep choking payments and slowing operations. FATF has started nudging toward better practice, explicitly warning against blanket de-risking and setting up a process to fix unintended harms to NPOs. But bank risk appetite hasn’t caught up. The translation of this is we need donors and regulators in the room when we plan, so financial access is a design feature, not an afterthought.
Closer to home, Asia–Pacific volatility is structurally higher. Myanmar’s displacement is near 3.6 million and access keeps tightening. The climate drumbeat isn’t pausing either: ENSO remains neutral for now, with La Niña-like signals and a watch in place. This gives enough uncertainty to justify early, Pacific-fit readiness rather than last-minute panic. Anticipation isn’t a pilot anymore; it’s table stakes. See NIWAs climate outlook for September – November here.
None of this calls for despair; it’s simply the terrain we have to work in. It does ask us to look in the mirror and see how fit for purpose we are in 2025. Humanitarianism has always been the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, but do we also need to help put up the fence at the top, promote safer speeds or lobby for a response helicopter? For anyone who was at the MFAT NGO hui a few weeks back, you’ll have heard the line about “doing less with less, but better.” Yes, we have less but that shouldn’t shrink our ambition; it should sharpen it.
Which is exactly why we’re opening a conversation on a refreshed humanitarian strategy for the CID Humanitarian Network; not a manifesto from on high, a practical map we co-own. A map that helps us decide where to put the fence, when the ambulance must roll, and how we measure success. If you’ve views on what to stop, start or scale, or simply how our role is changing, drop me a line and be part of shaping where we go next.
It’s an exciting conversation to be having.
Sam
Photo Credit: ADRA PNG, Agnes Wagi