If Not Feminist, Then What? Situating Feminist Approaches to the Humanitarian Reset

In this blog, Gabriela Villacis Izquierdo (Educator and Academic Researcher), Swarna Rajagopalan (Political Analyst, Educator and Constultant), Catalina Domínguez (Human Rights Lawyer and Gender Specialist), Mihir Bhatt (Director of AIDMI) and Khayal Trivedi (Project Lead, HOISA), discuss the outcome of the panel discussion held in July 2026 on what feminist approaches have to offer to humanitarian action.

Organised by the Humanitarian Observatory Initiative of South Asia and EADI Gender Justice Working Group, the panel brought together voices from Colombia, Ecuador, India, and beyond, to ask a very crucial question: how can humanitarian action be anything but feminist?

Image by Samithu Siriwardana on Unsplash (CC-0)

Grounding the Discussion in Research: Case Study from Colombia

Gabriela Villacis Izquierdo, Educator and Academic Researcher, opened with findings from her five-year doctoral research in Colombia. Her research points to a part of humanitarian action often overlooked by the formal system: the everyday, relational and community-embedded work carried out by women-led organisations living through crisis themselves.

Drawing on 11 months of fieldwork with 108 research participants across three domains—feminist NGOs, women-led grassroots organisations, and initiatives led by women affected by crisis—she explored how feminist approaches differ and can shape alternative forms of humanitarian action. She gathers the following.

First, everyday practices and contextual dynamics matter. Humanitarian action does not happen in an abstract space; it takes place within relationships, histories, communities and existing systems of care and support context.

Second, feminist transformation looks different across different scales. What transformation means for a grassroots collective may not look the same within an international humanitarian organisation or government institution.

Third, Gabriela spoke about the political resignification of care. Rather than distant compassion or an individual act of helping, feminist approaches position care as a collective responsibility and political practice.

Finally, she returned to something deceptively simple: humanitarianism’s original focus on saving lives. The question is not whether that objective remains relevant, but what it means to pursue it differently, with greater attention to relationships, power, agency and local realities.

Politics of Humanitarian Systems: Vulnerability, Visibility and Voice

Elaborating further on feminist approaches to humanitarian systems and the current status quo, Swarna Rajagopalan, a political analyst based in India, brought feminist politics into the conversation through three entry points: vulnerability, visibility and voice.

Her intervention asked to reconsider what we mean when we describe someone as “vulnerable”. Who is considered vulnerable? Why? And what happens when vulnerability is treated as fixed rather than shaped by social, political and economic systems?

Swarna then draws our attention to whose work is visible and whose is invisible? If we don’t see and acknowledge the work carried out by certain communities or gender, how can we give them voice, space and power to make systemic changes? The current systems fail to include everyone.

Feminist thinking expands the layers of factors shaping people’s experiences of disasters and crises. It helps us to look closer, while acknowledging and confronting the current politics of systems in place. Swarna ji highlights that we must stop looking at a crisis as a single moment followed by recovery. It is a continuum, where existing inequalities shape who is exposed to risk, who receives assistance, who is heard, and who can recover. And to understand these layers, one must adopt a feminist approach – as Gabriela laid out.

Women Leading Through Crisis

Catalina Domínguez, a Human Rights Lawyer and Gender Justice Specialist, added to the discussion by tracing the role women have played in Colombia when formal systems and traditional forms of leadership break down. Colombia has experienced natural disasters, conflicts, and has been both a country of origin and host for displaced populations. Where men were displaced, recruited or killed, women took on responsibilities extending far beyond the household. Women-led and feminist organisations consequently have become central to responding to violence, displacement and protection needs.

Yet there is a striking contradiction: despite having helped shapes humanitarian systems on the ground, women and feminist organisations rarely have a seat at the table where those systems are designed.

This makes the current humanitarian reset particularly concerning. Women-led and feminist organisations have been pushing issues such as gender-based violence and protection into formal humanitarian architecture, strengthening leadership and protection mechanisms while often operating from outside formal decision-making structures.

The current funding cuts are now placing additional pressure on women’s organisations, especially smaller grassroots groups, while the sector continues to speak about localisation and gender mainstreaming.

The contradiction is difficult to ignore: how can localisation and gender equality become meaningful commitments if the organisations that have been practising them for years are among the first to lose resources and influence?

What Would a Feminist Humanitarian Reset Actually Look Like?

Gathering inputs from all panelists, Mihir Bhatt, Director of AIDMI invited humanitarian actors towards a clear call to action: gather the knowledge existing in informal and formal women-led organisations, acknowledge their contributions and role, share power and resources, recognise care and livelihoods as inseparable from humanitarian response, and build accountability around what actually changes people’s lives as they wish.

That means asking questions beyond how much aid was delivered or how many people were reached.

Did women feel safer? Did they retain control over resources? Were their organisations strengthened? Did they have a meaningful role in decisions affecting their communities?
And perhaps most importantly: did the humanitarian system itself change in favour of women’s leadership?

These questions point towards a different understanding of humanitarian accountability—one that measures not only outputs, but power, agency and lived experience. The discussion also made clear that feminist humanitarianism cannot simply mean adding a gender component to existing programmes or ensuring women are represented in a meeting. Representation matters, but representation without power risks becoming another layer of the same system.

A feminist approach asks us to look at who defines the problem, who controls the resources, whose knowledge counts, who makes decisions, and who is expected to provide care. The panel’s shared conclusion was blunt and difficult to argue with: feminist humanitarianism is not an additional agenda sitting alongside humanitarian justice. It asks us to reconsider what justice means within humanitarian action.

Key takeaways from the discussion:

• There can be no humanitarian justice without gender justice. The two are ultimately inseparable.
• Any humanitarian reset must include these principles and values, without which meaningful transformation cannot happen.

For more information about HOISA, please see the Observatory website

 

Views expressed within this blog are the author’s own, and not necessarily those of the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam.