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Humanitarians operating in highly volatile environments face a wide range of institutional, operational, access, and security challenges that necessitate carefully designed responses and mitigation measures. These challenges and good practices were analysed and subsequent recommendations provided in a landmark study, entitled To Stay and Deliver: Good Practice for Humanitarians in Complex Security Environments, commissioned by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in 2011.
Five years on, the purpose of the present study is to examine progress in responding to the various issues raised in the original 2011 report. The report shows that humanitarian community continues to grapple with the problem of its ability to stay and deliver effectively and responsibly in highly insecure environments. Progress has been made in a number of areas. Humanitarian leaders consistently talk of their commitment to staying and delivering where at all feasible, and we have seen notable instances where UN agencies, NGOs, and others have stayed and delivered at great risk. Yet despite these improvements, this study also broadly finds that not enough has changed, particularly at the field level, since the publication of To Stay and Deliver in 2011.