Responding Under Pressure: Lessons from MOPAN Assessments on Organisational Adaptation to Reform and Funding Constraints

While multilateral organisations (MOs) responding to humanitarian crises are adapting to today’s funding pressures, the critical question is whether that adaptation is strategically designed or is driven by attrition. MOPAN evidence shows that reform can enhance MOs’ focus, efficiency and responsiveness when it is deliberately designed and adequately resourced. By contrast, poorly managed cuts risk eroding capabilities and accountability, resulting in a smaller humanitarian system that will not automatically be more effective, efficient, or locally led.

The humanitarian system is entering a period of acute financial constraint while pursuing ambitious reforms to make humanitarian action more focused, efficient, locally led and accountable. Between 2023 and 2025, international humanitarian assistance declined by 29.7%, from USD 47.4 billion to USD 33.3 billion, with the sharpest contraction occurring in 2025 ​(ALNAP, 2026[1])​. At the same time, the IASC Humanitarian Reset and the New Humanitarian Compact under the UN80 Initiative are seeking to sharpen prioritisation, simplify co-ordination, expand common services, strengthen country-level leadership and accountability, and shift greater power and resources towards local actors.

Though the magnitude and breadth of recent cuts and reform agendas are unprecedented, neither resource constraints nor reform pressures are entirely new phenomena. Well before 2025, humanitarian needs grew faster than available financing, and many MOs relied heavily on short-term and earmarked funding. In some cases, individual MOs, such as the ICRC and WFP, also faced organisation-specific crises that resulted in significant funding contractions, distinct from broader system-wide trends. In parallel, the Grand Bargain, the Humanitarian-Development-Peace (HDP) Nexus and reforms around localisation, cash assistance, anticipatory action and accountability to affected populations were already requiring MOs to change how they operated and delivered. 

This review examines what can be learnt from these earlier instances. It draws on the most recent MOPAN assessments of 19 MOs with roles in crisis prevention, preparedness, response or recovery.1 The review is retrospective and does not seek to predict the effects of the Humanitarian Reset, the New Humanitarian Compact or the sharp funding reductions that occurred in 2025 and accelerated the decline in funding. 

Adaptation by design and adaptation by attrition

Building on the framework developed in MOPAN’s Mapping of Multilateral Organisations’ Response to the Current Funding Environment (MOPAN, 2025[5]), this review distinguishes between adaptation by design and adaptation by attrition. Adaptation by design is characterised by deliberate strategic choices, adequate resources for implementation, meaningful transfers of authority, and clarity of roles within organisations and across the humanitarian system. In this case, change is strategically steered, and essential capacities are protected. Adaptation by attrition, on the other hand, occurs where abrupt funding cuts drive a reactive contraction characterised by immediate cost reductions that risk eroding organisational capabilities, weakening reform implementation and transferring risks and responsibilities without corresponding resources and authority.

MOPAN evidence shows that MOs have repeatedly adapted to resource and reform pressures through prioritisation, restructuring, workforce and organisational restructuring, operational innovation, new delivery modalities and stronger collaboration. Five cross-organisational lessons emerge from this evidence. The effectiveness of these adaptations, however, depends not only on the measure adopted, but on how they are designed, resourced and implemented.

Prioritisation strengthens organisational focus when it is strategic, explicit and clearly communicated. As reflected in the MOPAN assessment of the ICRC, clear choices about mandate, comparative advantage and the capabilities to protect can help organisations concentrate scarce resources where they add greatest value. By contrast, prioritisation driven mainly by the availability of project-specific funding can fragment strategies and shift difficult choices to country offices, such as in the case of WFP.

Organisational restructuring and workforce changes can improve coherence and reduce duplication, but a cost reduction does not in itself constitute an efficiency gain, as demonstrated by the MOPAN assessments of WFP, IOM, OCHA, UN-Habitat, FAO, OHCHR and the ICRC. Organisational restructuring and workforce changes are more likely to support effective adaptation when they are aligned with strategic priorities and protect essential technical, operational and field capacities. Staff reductions are among the most readily available responses to budget pressure, yet poorly planned reductions can weaken technical expertise, institutional memory, staff wellbeing, oversight and surge capacity and may reverse earlier decentralisation gains.

Operational and programming innovations produce more durable gains when they are embedded in organisational systems and backed by sufficient expertise, financing and country-level capacity. MOPAN’s assessments of UNHCR, IOM and UNDP illustrate how digitalisation, improved procurement and supply chains can result in efficiency gains. Innovations in programming and delivery modalities, such as cash assistance, preparedness and anticipatory action, can also improve responsiveness, as demonstrated in the cases of WFP, FAO, UNHCR, UNDP and WHO. Yet implementation is often uneven because of insufficient resources, organisational bottlenecks or limited country-level capacity, as found in the assessment of IOM. 

Efforts to advance localisation and accountability to affected populations remain contingent on the availability of sufficient resources and the transfer of decision-making authority. Progress is strongest where flexible financing, capacity support, meaningful participation and fair risk-sharing are combined, as illustrated in the MOPAN assessments of UNFPA, UN Women and UN-Habitat. Conversely, heavy compliance requirements, inadequate overhead recovery and limited decision-making authority can shift responsibilities and risks to local actors without shifting power, as in the case of IOM and OCHA.

Collaboration can reduce duplication and allow a clearer division of labour when shared capacities and complementary roles are adequately supported. Shared services – such as UNDP’s Global Shared Services Centre or WFP’s United Nations Response Depot –, mutual recognition, integrated supply chains and stronger collaboration across the HDP Nexus offer opportunities for efficiency and complementarity. Multilateral development banks can play an important role in sustaining public services, preparedness, resilience and recovery, as demonstrated in the case of the World Bank and some regional development banks, but they complement rather than replace rapid, needs-based humanitarian action.

Across these areas, governance and financing arrangements shape whether adaptation proceeds by design or attrition. Governing bodies and donors can enable strategically managed change through clear direction, political support and flexible, predictable resources. Conversely, abrupt funding cuts, short-term earmarking and uncertainty over future funding constrain planning and tend to encourage reactive decision-making.

The central lesson from recent MOPAN evidence is that the critical question is not whether MOs adapt to funding pressures and reform agendas but how they adapt. Where organisations are able to pursue adaptation by design, funding and reform pressure can support beneficial change if donors and governing bodies make explicit choices about priorities, trade-offs and the capabilities that need to be protected. Organisation structures and operating models are most coherent when they follow mandates and strategies rather than the distribution of projectised income.

Many reforms also require investment. Digitalisation, shared services, preparedness, anticipatory action, accountability to affected populations and effective local partnerships only deliver durable gains when organisations can finance the staff, systems, training and country-level capacity needed to implement them. Similarly, decentralisation and localisation improve responsiveness only when decision-making authority and resources move together.

By contrast, adaptation by attrition is observed when repeated workforce reductions hollow out technical expertise, oversight, institutional memory and surge capacity, while under-resourced innovations linked to reform agendas widen the gap between corporate commitments and operational practice. Attrition can also produce devolution without empowerment. Delivery responsibilities, risks and difficult prioritisation decisions may be pushed towards country offices and local actors without a corresponding transfer of resources or influence. The result may therefore be a smaller humanitarian system that is not necessarily more coherent, accountable or locally led.

The type of adaptation has clear implications for an MO’s ability to respond to a crisis and to meet its corporate reform commitments at the field level. Whether the Humanitarian Reset delivers a more focused and effective system will depend on whether the current funding contractions are governed through deliberate choices about what the humanitarian system should preserve, change and stop doing.

• Deliberate choices are based on mandates and comparative advantage.

• Essential capabilities are identified and protected.

• Authority moves with resources.

• Reform is financed and implemented.

• Roles and transition points are clear

• Reactive contraction is driven by immediate financial pressure.

• Expertise, oversight and field capacity are progressively hollowed out.

• Responsibilities and risks move without resources or influence.

• Ambiguity and fragmentation persist.

The considerations below draw on this review’s conclusions to suggest practical actions for MOs, MOPAN members, and other stakeholders in support of the priorities of the Humanitarian Reset under conditions of marked resource uncertainty. 

The review of previous MOPAN assessments will provide the basis for the next two outputs of the MOPAN Insights study on multilateral effectiveness in humanitarian crises. The second output will examine how the funding contraction and reform initiatives that intensified from 2025 are affecting MOs operating in humanitarian crises, including how they are adapting and the difficult choices and trade-offs they are making. The third output will look further ahead, reflecting on comparative advantage by identifying the functions that need to be performed for the humanitarian system to deliver assistance effectively in the future, and considering how MOs are positioned to perform these core functions.