‘The humanitarian system is facing a period of significant uncertainty. […] In this environment, learning is more important than ever.’  Juliet Parker, Director, ALNAP

How can we know whether humanitarian action is truly making a difference? For nearly two decades, the OECD criteria have been a benchmark for evaluation, shaping the way aid organisations assess relevance, effectiveness, and impact. However, as crises become increasingly complex, and calls for localisation and accountability grow louder, evaluation frameworks must keep pace with the changing landscape.

This is where ALNAP’s new guide, Adapting the OECD Criteria for the Evaluation of Humanitarian Action, steps in. It is the most significant update since their 2006 publication, designed to make the widely used OECD criteria fit for today’s humanitarian realities.

What’s new?

The guide updates the definitions of the seven OECD criteria for today’s humanitarian landscape: relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact, coherence, coverage and inclusion, and inter-connection, but adapts them to crisis contexts:

• Relevance is framed around the needs and priorities of people affected by crisis, not just in terms of policy alignment. 

• Coverage and inclusion (a criterion specific to humanitarian action) examines who is reached, who is excluded, and why, directly linking impartiality and protection.

• Inter-connection replaces sustainability, reflecting the need for humanitarian action to consider the medium and long term, and how it links to development and peacebuilding.
• Coherence focuses on coordination and complementarity, paying attention to power imbalances between international and local actors.

The guide emphasises that not all criteria must be applied in every evaluation; evaluation questions should instead be shaped by users’ needs.

Priority themes

ALNAP also introduces three ‘priority themes’ to help evaluators address transformational challenges:

• Putting people affected by crisis at the centre. This means examining agency, participation, and whether feedback is acted upon.

• Locally-led humanitarian action. Probing the quality of partnerships, power-sharing, and whether funding and recognition flow to local actors.
• Environment and climate crisis. Evaluating whether humanitarian action reduces harm, integrates local knowledge, and considers environmental consequences.

Another striking thread throughout the guide is the focus on who decides what counts as success. Each chapter includes a ‘shifting the lens’ section, inviting evaluators to reflect on biases, dominant narratives, and whose knowledge is valued. This is an explicit acknowledgement of the colonial legacies within the humanitarian system.

Although written for evaluators, commissioners, and practitioners in the humanitarian action space, the insights of this guide will resonate widely. Its emphasis on inclusivity. Adaptive management and system-level thinking will be valuable to development researchers, funders, and policymakers in uncertain environments.