* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Dr Randolph Kent is director of the Humanitarian Futures Programme, a humanitarian policy research unit at King's College, London.
Accountability rhetoric is high on the radar of all governments and yet when they talk of accountability, they focus on tax-payers and voters and not the most threatened constituency of all - the vulnerable of future generations who will be exposed to increasing diversity, frequency and intensity of humanitarian threats.
Over the past decade, the issue of accountability has been bandied about ever more vociferously and now perhaps even more stridently. The call for greater accountability to the "beneficiary", the seeming determination of governments to be more accountable to their tax-paying publics, NGOs' responsibility to be more accountable in terms of the ways needs are assessed, and multilaterals in terms of reporting to member states are all part of the accountability rhetoric.
But there remains a major accountability gap that the rhetoric to date has assiduously ignored. That gap is the failure of those with humanitarian roles, responsibilities and influence to inform and prepare potentially crisis-affected publics about the types of threats they will have to face in the foreseeable future. This failure also explains in no small part why there is so little evidence of efforts to identify, mitigate and where possible undertake prevention measures for dealing with longer-term threats.
This focus on the accountability gap is not intended as a criticism of those efforts to be more sensitive, open and transparent about the ways that humanitarian assistance is provided. It is, however, to suggest that while accountability standards are often pushed by governments on the broader humanitarian sector, these same governments continue to fail one of the most fundamental tests of accountability, namely, to present potential risks and ways to deal with them to an increasingly vulnerable global community.
The nature of emerging threats has been extensively discussed in various fora around the world, including King's College, London's Humanitarian Futures Programme. New types of crisis drivers and ever more intensive conventional crises are having greater and more extensive impacts around the world.
A recent spate of emergencies underscores the point. The Russian heat wave and brushfires in the summer of 2010 that affected wheat exports and ultimately contributed to food riots in Mozambique, the unprecedented scale of the July 2010 Pakistan floods, the bauxite sludge in October 2010 in Hungary that came close to endangering the Danube, the simultaneous Indonesian tsunami and earthquake all suggest that the dimensions and dynamics of more and more crisis drivers are becoming increasingly interconnected and complex.
LACK OF STRATEGIC THINKING
Yet despite a mounting number of such examples, there is little evidence of a commensurate attempt to think and act more strategically about foreseeable and plausible humanitarian crises and solutions. The multinational sector, principally the United Nations system, seems stymied by a perceived lack of willingness on the part of member states to support longer-term strategic thinking. Similarly the non-governmental sector seems to have lapsed into what has been described as managerialism rather than demonstrating the strategic leadership and commitment to advocacy which the spectre of the future requires.
There are probably few successful commercial or military organisations that fail to devote considerable attention to long-term strategic planning, and yet a sector ostensibly committed to saving lives and sparing suffering seems to have tuned its back on preparing for the threats and opportunities of the future.
If, however, this accountability gap is to be narrowed effectively, it will take first and foremost a commitment on the part of governments to provide necessary incentives for the humanitarian sector. At the same time the humanitarian sector will have to think more deeply about its role and responsibilities - recognising that dealing with the future is far more about changing mindsets than engaging in organisational change and restructuring.
To be accountable to the vulnerable, the humanitarian sector - supported by governments - will have to think differently about new forms of collaboration, will have to engage more with those involved in the natural and social sciences, and ultimately will have to focus more on anticipating the "what might be's" than on conventional approaches to last-minute response.
