The perfect storm that’s currently battering global development—a combination of retreating donor governments, rising geopolitical headwinds, and public fatigue with nonprofits—has been beyond any single agency’s control. And yet it reveals the cracks we’ve learned to tolerate for too long. Before we can rebuild, we must embrace a culture of accountability and own how our systems slipped into complacency, and we must learn from sectors that routinely weather disruption, from fast-pivoting startups to the emergency response teams that must redesign protocols after every crisis.

For years, the development community has learned to congratulate itself on heroic outputs—vaccines delivered, wells dug, and schools opened—while ignoring the sluggish machinery behind the scenes, showing the importance of embracing a culture of accountability. Layers of headquarters, regional hubs, and country offices multiplied until decision-making could often feel more like the function of postal forwarding officers than problem solvers. The "searchers" that economist William Easterly so desperately wants us to empower have been replaced almost entirely by "planners." But well-intentioned programs could live on because they pleased donors, preserved jobs, or fit legacy missions (even as local partners signaled that needs changed or perhaps were never adequately met to begin with).

Bloat thrives in the absence of hard feedback loops. When a project underperformed, the default fix has long been an extension, a rebrand, or a bigger grant. We could assure ourselves that if someone on the ground is better off, then the model must be working. We hire external consultants to do impact evaluations and feed them just enough work to make them grow dependent on us being happy return customers. But all the post-hoc rationalization masks a harsher truth: When accountability is diluted across dozens of actors and hidden under a veneer of poorly tested results, real responsibility evaporates.

The pandemic and the recent donor pullback tore the cover off that illusion. Empty field offices, duplicated supply chains, and half-measured impact data suddenly look untenable when measured against collapsing budgets. The wake-up call is loud: Good intentions are not a performance metric, and "good enough" is neither good nor enough. It is time for embracing a culture of accountability.

Read the full article about accountability culture in development philanthropy by Sarah Holloway and T. Alexander Puutio at Stanford Social Innovation Review.