Access, Power, Trust: Lessons from Humanitarian Aid in Protracted Displacement

Ensuring accountability – from matters of finance and bookkeeping to pervasive issues of transparence, trust and legitimacy – is central to the effectiveness of humanitarian aid. Considering a range of humanitarian actors, over the long internal displacement history of Muslims from northern Sri Lanka, we find that access, power and trust are key to the success or failure of attempted accountability practices. Accountability-conducive relationships are based on dynamic and transparent interactions, and fostering these relationships necessitates recognizing, navigating and challenging, pervasive asymmetries across contexts.