Opportunities for enhanced institutional accountability and professionalization: The relationships between refugee resettlement organizations, humanitarian bodies, industry and academia

Abstract

Critiques of resettlement bodies exist in both formal and informal discourse, though these concerns had heretofore been allowed to remain liminal. The push towards accountability engendered through the rapid democratization of media, accelerated by several high visibility humanitarian crises, has now revitalized the trajectory of criticisms through some degree of institutional reflection. While formal critiques of humanitarian bodies often focus on the philosophical and moral quandaries of the quest to decolonize and de-weaponize social sciences (as well as the systematic disempowerment of resettled communities), fewer address the syndemic ethical challenges encoded into the daily operations of the humanitarian ecosystems themselves, as well as the feedback loops which they foment. This article is concerned with matters of praxis, professionalization and transparency, addressing blocks to the information flows necessary to enable the level of introspection and systems thinking which should underpin all human sciences, but which have been conspicuously absent in the U.S. resettlement bodies, despite their being so directly intertwined with life outcomes. Absent the development of dedicated, integrated health and other supportive infrastructures independent of resettlement organizations, and primarily utilizing the U.S. resettlement bodies to inform its arguments, it highlights the need for the resettlement field, and by extension, similar humanitarian sectors, to align themselves with various disciplinary standards that will promote and valorize accountability over expansion. It concludes that to accomplish this, fields must also seek to catalyze the exploration of the many tensions inherent to equitable restructuring through the empowerment of practitioners as well as the elimination of barriers to constructive discourse.