Bond and the struggle to rebuild trust in international development

Bond and the struggle to rebuild trust in international development | Photo: Joel Muniz

Published on 20 March 2026 at 02:01 GMT

By Editorial Team SDG16

At a time of tighter aid budgets, stronger public scrutiny and growing demands for locally led development, Bond has become an important reference point in the UK’s international development sector. Bond, the UK network for organisations working in international development, is not a frontline aid agency, yet its influence reaches into some of the sector’s most difficult questions. Those questions include how charities should build fair partnerships, how they should prevent abuse and misconduct, and how they should show that development work remains effective when trust is under pressure.

That makes Bond significant not because it delivers programmes itself, but because it helps shape the rules, language and expectations that govern how many organisations operate. In recent years, international development has faced overlapping pressures. Funding has become less certain, humanitarian needs have expanded, and criticism of unequal power relations between organisations in the global North and their partners in the global South has become harder to ignore. In that environment, umbrella bodies such as Bond play a public-interest role. They help translate broad principles into guidance, peer learning and sector standards that smaller and larger organisations alike can use.

The importance of that work is partly a result of crisis. The safeguarding failures exposed across parts of the aid sector in recent years did lasting damage to confidence in international NGOs. The issue was not only whether policies existed on paper. It was whether organisations had the culture, leadership and reporting systems needed to prevent sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment, and to respond properly when harm occurred. Bond has become one of the key places where UK organisations look for practical resources on safeguarding, governance and organisational responsibility.

Safeguarding now stands as one of the clearest measures of whether an aid organisation deserves public trust. For many years, safeguarding was often treated as a technical compliance issue, managed by specialists and discussed mainly in formal policy language. That is no longer credible. In international development, safeguarding goes to the heart of power, access and accountability. Aid agencies often work with people facing displacement, poverty, conflict or exclusion. Those conditions can increase vulnerability and deepen the duty of care that organisations owe to staff, volunteers and communities.

Bond’s role in this area reflects a broader lesson from the sector’s recent failures, that written policies mean little without leadership, training and an organisational culture that allows concerns to be raised safely. The challenge is especially acute for organisations working through complex chains of contractors, local partners and community groups. A charity may have strong standards at headquarters, but still struggle to apply them consistently across countries and partnerships. This is one reason sector networks matter. They can help organisations compare practice, identify weaknesses and avoid treating safeguarding as a box-ticking exercise.

Other civil society organisations are relevant here too. Keeping Children Safe has long focused on child safeguarding and safer organisational standards. CHS Alliance has worked to strengthen quality and accountability across humanitarian action. Their presence underlines a basic point. Safeguarding is not an isolated human resources matter. It is tied to programme quality, accountability to affected people and institutional legitimacy. An organisation that cannot protect people from abuse, hear complaints properly or respond transparently to misconduct is unlikely to be effective in any serious development sense.

Partnerships form the second major area where Bond’s influence matters, because the traditional model of international development is under growing pressure. For decades, many UK based organisations raised funds, designed programmes and controlled reporting, while local organisations carried out much of the implementation. That model is now being challenged by calls for localisation, decolonisation and more equitable partnership. The argument is not simply that local groups should receive more praise. It is that they should have more authority, more direct funding and more say over priorities and risk.

Bond’s work on partnerships matters because it reflects an effort to move the sector away from paternalistic habits and towards more balanced relationships. That is easier to say than to do. Donors often still require reporting structures, risk controls and compliance systems that favour larger international organisations. Local groups may be described as partners while remaining financially dependent and strategically constrained. In that context, guidance on fair partnerships is not an abstract exercise. It becomes part of a larger struggle over who sets the terms of development work.

The difficulty is that every reform agenda carries tensions. UK organisations face legitimate pressure to account for public money, especially when domestic political support for aid is uneven. They are expected to manage risk, show measurable results and maintain public confidence. At the same time, if they centralise too much control in the name of accountability, they can weaken the very local leadership that donors and sector leaders increasingly say they support. Bond occupies an important space in this debate because it convenes organisations that must live with both realities at once.

This is where effectiveness becomes more contested than it first appears, because the question is no longer only whether aid achieves outputs, but whether it is delivered in ways that are fair, accountable and durable. Traditional donor language often emphasised measurable outcomes, value for money and delivery targets. Those remain important. Yet there is a growing recognition that effectiveness cannot be reduced to short-term metrics alone. Programmes may meet immediate targets while reinforcing unequal relationships, sidelining local expertise or failing to build institutions that last.

That broader understanding of effectiveness connects directly to the public-interest value of sector networks. Bond is able to convene discussion on what good development practice should look like when pressures are moving in different directions. Organisations want to be fast, flexible and responsive in crises. They also need to be transparent, inclusive and procedurally robust. Smaller charities may lack the specialist staff to interpret every new policy demand on their own. Larger agencies may have more systems but can still struggle to change entrenched ways of working. A network that gathers tools, standards and peer learning can therefore act as common infrastructure for the sector.

The deeper issue is that the UK development sector is being asked to reform itself while operating under financial and political strain. That creates a risk of superficial change. Organisations may adopt the language of locally led development without altering decision-making structures. They may strengthen formal safeguarding rules without building the trust needed for disclosure. They may speak about accountability while still treating communities mainly as beneficiaries rather than rights holders with agency. In this setting, Bond matters less as a brand than as a test of whether collective reform can become practical rather than rhetorical.

There is also a wider policy context. The UK has long tried to present itself as a serious development actor with strong standards and global influence. Yet cuts to aid spending and a more defensive political climate have made that claim harder to sustain. Civil society networks cannot solve those contradictions. They cannot replace predictable funding, coherent government policy or a genuinely enabling environment for local actors. What they can do is help preserve institutional memory, maintain pressure for better practice and provide a forum where shared standards remain visible even when the broader climate is less supportive.

The relevance to SDG 16, peace, justice and strong institutions, and SDG 17, partnerships for the goals, is genuine because safeguarding, accountability and equitable partnership are institutional concerns at the core of development practice. These goals are sometimes invoked too loosely, but in this case the connection is concrete. Strong institutions are not only ministries and courts. They also include the norms and accountability systems through which civil society organisations exercise power responsibly. Effective partnerships are not simply about collaboration in principle. They depend on who holds resources, who sets priorities and who is answerable when things go wrong.

Other networks reinforce the same message. ICVA has been active in debates on principled humanitarian action and localisation. Accountable Now has pushed for stronger civil society accountability and stakeholder engagement. Their work suggests that the future credibility of international development will depend not only on defending aid in general terms, but on showing that organisations are prepared to share power, hear criticism and reform their own practices.

What Bond ultimately represents is the argument that development quality depends on collective standards, not just individual organisational goodwill. That is why its resources on partnerships, safeguarding and effectiveness matter. They speak to the practical realities of a sector trying to rebuild trust, adapt to shifting power and maintain legitimacy under pressure. For the UK’s development community, the real question is no longer whether these issues are central. It is whether enough organisations are willing to treat them as structural obligations rather than optional improvements.

Further information:

·       Bond, the main UK network for organisations working in international development, relevant for its resources on partnerships, safeguarding, policy and organisational effectiveness. https://www.bond.org.uk/

·       Keeping Children Safe, relevant for its safeguarding standards and guidance on protecting children in organisations and programmes. https://www.keepingchildrensafe.global/

·       CHS Alliance, relevant for its work on humanitarian quality, accountability and the Core Humanitarian Standard. https://www.chsalliance.org/

·       ICVA, relevant for its focus on principled humanitarian action, NGO coordination and localisation debates. https://www.icvanetwork.org/

·       Accountable Now, relevant for its work on civil society accountability, transparency and stakeholder-centred governance. https://accountablenow.org/