We Might Need to Calm Down about Reactive Feedback Mechanisms

Feedback mechanisms offer crisis-affected people a way to participate in aid provision and improve its quality. Or do they?

Feedback mechanisms have featured prominently in global discussions about accountability reform. In early 2022, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee Principals recommitted to improving and monitoring collective accountability to affected people, with meaningful engagement defined as “strengthening collective feedback mechanisms,” as well as “enabling timely collective action and course correction based on people’s needs and regular feedback.”

Claims about the usefulness of feedback mechanisms are grand. If they are designed based on community preferences and accessibility concerns, implemented effectively, and all feedback followed up, they are supposed to enable aid providers to respond to individual concerns, and to improve overall programme relevance and quality based on the suggestions, concerns, questions, and compliments reported. This understanding that feedback mechanisms improve aid quality is reflected in almost all major aid organisations’ policies.

In one way or another, each of the listed organisations expect feedback mechanisms to improve quality and accountability. They assume an inherent link between the feedback collected, decisions, and large-scale action.