The World Humanitarian Summit held in Istanbul, Turkey on 23 and 24 May 2016 saw 9,000 delegates from governments, United Nations agencies and civil society come together to address a ‘broken humanitarian system’. Did it achieve what it set out to do?

The World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul on 23-24 May 2016 achieved two notable goals despite the absence of several world leaders. The first was a ‘Grand Bargain’ to distribute humanitarian funding more equitably by 2020. The second was the formal launch of the Regional Organisations Humanitarian Action Network. However, in a side-event, a significant step forward was achieved for Southeast Asia – the launch of an ASEAN-United Nations humanitarian partnership highlighting the increasingly prominent role of regional organisations.

The absence of several world leaders, aside from the summit ending with only a general commitment to enhance compliance to humanitarian principles, however, raised questions over the progress made on the global humanitarian front.

… Alistair D. B. Cook is Coordinator of the Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Programme and Research Fellow at the Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies (NTS Centre), S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.