From listening to action 

What is called “listening” is, in reality, just hearing—passive, selective, and disconnected from action. It reinforces rather than reimagines the status quo. 

True listening can make people uncomfortable. It requires those in power to act on what they hear—to shift resources, change course, and rethink power structures. Until this happens, listening remains symbolic; actors are not listening, they are simply hearing, and mistaking the presence of impacted people for influence. 

Yet is real listening enough? Does it translate into more effective policies and programming? History tells us it does not. Without structural change, listening risks tokenizing people’s experiences, reducing them to testimonies that might stir donor empathy or satisfy organizational mandates. The real challenge is moving from listening to meaningful participation. This means humanitarian actors must ask: How can directly impacted people shape the decisions that govern their futures? Are we extracting stories to validate pre-set priorities? Or are we ready to be reshaped by the perspectives of people who have lived through crisis, displacement, and recovery?  

Participation as the way forward

Meaningful participation goes beyond merely being consulted[1]. It means being present at decision-making tables as equals. It requires a shift in mindset, from seeing affected people as “beneficiaries” to recognizing them as leaders, experts, and partners in humanitarian response. Their knowledge is not anecdotal; it is political, strategic, and rooted in lived experience. 

Encouragingly, we are beginning to see change. Refugee-led organizations (RLOs) and refugee leaders are compelling states, UNHCR, donors, and other stakeholders to recognize them as central to designing and delivering solutions. Five states have established national refugee advisory boards, and at 2023 Global Refugee Forum, fourteen states included refugee advisors in their delegations. UNHCR has also instituted a global refugee advisory group with the potential to influence policies at the highest levels. 

These partnerships recognize the deep contextual knowledge within refugee communities, qualities that external experts, however well-meaning, cannot replicate. This shift is not easy. It requires courage from institutions to share power, and humility to accept that expertise exists in many forms. Solutions imposed from outside rarely last; solutions built with those who live the consequences every day have a chance to transform systems. 

Listening must therefore be understood as a political act. It only becomes meaningful when paired with action—when it drives systemic change. A true humanitarian reset depends on this evolution: from symbolic participation to structural, sustainable, and substantial leadership by impacted people. The polycrises of our time—conflict, mass displacement, and climate emergencies—demand responses as complex and nuanced as the crises themselves.  

Directly impacted people are not voiceless; they have been systematically excluded by systems that prioritize expediency over equity. If we are serious about effectiveness, legitimacy, and justice in humanitarian action, listening must lead to shared governance, co-design, and ultimately, co-leadership. 

Conclusion

Tom Fletcher names listening as one of four key principles for humanitarian action—alongside outspokenness, innovation, and effectiveness. But listening is what unlocks the others. Without it, innovation misses the mark, advocacy rings hollow, and effectiveness is measured by outputs, not outcomes. When we listen fully—with intent, humility, and follow-through—we build systems not just for people, but with them. 

Let us listen not to validate our strategies, but to confront them. Only then will listening become not a tick-box exercise, but an act of transformation. 

Footnote

[1] Refugees Seeking Equal Access at the Table (R-SEAT) defines meaningful refugee participation when refugees from diverse backgrounds have sustained influence in all fora where decisions, policies, and responses that impact their lives are being designed, implemented, and measured in a manner that is accessible, broad, informed, safe, free, and supported.

About the authors

Rez Gardi is an international lawyer and human rights advocate. Born as a refugee in Pakistan, Rez sought to use her difficult start in life as motivation to help others. She became New Zealand’s first female Kurdish lawyer and the first Kurd to graduate from Harvard Law School, where she graduated as a Fulbright Scholar with a Master of Laws. Her previous roles include working for the New Zealand Human Rights Commission, as lecturer on international law and human rights, and a Harvard Human Rights Fellow in Iraq working to build cases for the prosecution of ISIS regarding their targeted genocidal campaign against the Yezidis. Rez is the founder of ‘Empower’ – a refugee-led organization which aims to address the underrepresentation of refugee youth in higher education. She is also the Co-Founder the Centre for Asia Pacific Refugee Studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Rez represented New Zealand at the first ever Global Refugee Youth Consultations in 2016, helped establish the Global Youth Advisory Council to the UNHCR, and is a co-founding member of the Refugee Advisory Group to the UNHCR Annual Tripartite Consultations on Resettlement (ATCR). She currently serves on UNHCR’s Advisory Board and as an expert on the Refugee and Forced Displacement Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Rez has received an array of awards including: 2017 Young New Zealander of the Year, 2018 Women of Influence Finalist, 2019 Outstanding Youth Delegate Award at the UN Youth Assembly, 2019 Eisenhower Youth Fellow, 2020 Global Impact Award, and 2021 Peace Ambassador for the One Young World Summit, and was recognized as a Gates Foundation Global Goalkeeper in 2022.

Marisa Leon Gomez Sonet is the Partnerships and Communications Coordinator at R-SEAT in Geneva, Switzerland. She has extensive experience in policy and advocacy on migration, refugee, and human rights issues across multilateral, national, regional, and city levels. Previously, Marisa worked with Quaker organizations to advance migration justice, lobbying U.S. Congress for regularization pathways, opposing discriminatory travel bans, and increasing refugee resettlement. At the Quaker United Nations Office (QUNO) in Geneva, she contributed to strategies for meaningful migrant participation in processes such as the Global Compact for Migration (GCM) and the International Migration Review Forum (IMRF). In Chicago, she supported sanctuary migration policies led by directly affected communities. Originally from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Marisa began her career focusing on U.S. foreign policy and military spending in Central America in connection to human rights. She holds a Master’s in Global Affairs (International Peace Studies) from the University of Notre Dame and a Bachelor’s in Global Studies and Development from Salve Regina University.

Global voices for humanitarian assistance

Inspired by Tom Fletcher’s statement of commitment to the humanitarian community when he resumed his position as Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator (OCHA) in November 2024, this channel provides expert views and impulses that highlight the current importance of listening, efficiency, outspokenness, and innovation in humanitarian assistance.

All too often, we focus on the evident, we highlight new insights, which then change our views of the world etc. This is because our eyes supposedly present things to us as they are. But what about listening? I don’t mean to set hearing and seeing in opposition, but I do want to advocate for the importance of listening—and reflect on why it matters. In particular, I want to explore four particular characteristics of listening: that there can be no responsibility without listening; that listening is always active, not passive; that listening reveals lives and stories; and that listening is both transient and yet enduring.

In order to respond meaningfully, we must first listen

Let’s begin with responsibility. The clue is in the word itself: response-ability—the ability to respond. In order to respond to someone meaningfully, we must first listen. This idea is in line with another core value of UNOCHA, namely outspokenness, but it also reveals a deeper truth: what is said must be heard and understood if it is to receive a response. Someone who talks without listening—or without seeking to understand—fails to take responsibility. Genuine responsibility only arises through the interplay of listening and speaking.

Listening is always an active process

Secondly, listening seems simple and easy: I hear you speak and understand what you say. But is it really that simple? In fact, listening is always an active process. It is not just your words, but, to put it vividly, it is what I inhear. Meaning emerges through interpretation, which depends heavily on my own background: the things I’ve heard before, the experiences I’ve had.

Take the word war, for instance—it means something very different to someone who has experienced war than it does to someone who has not. The same goes for love, car accident, and many other expressions. Or consider music: if I regularly listen to jazz, I begin to recognize patterns, nuances, and expressive detail. But if I’m unfamiliar with the genre, it may all sound the same—just noise or repetition. Something similar happens with foreign languages: if I don’t understand the language, I may perceive it as undifferentiated sound, a kind of background noise.

Listening discloses personal histories and individual voices

This brings me to the third point: listening discloses personal histories and individual voices. Listening is rarely abstract or detached. It connects us directly to the person speaking. Through attentive listening, we start to perceive their unique vocabulary, their tone, their pace. We begin to recognize their voice—not just acoustically, but existentially. A person’s voice has a meaning that goes beyond the words themselves; it tells us something about the speaker’s life and world.

Think of iconic examples: Martin Luther King Jr., or—returning to music—John Coltrane. Both had voices, literal and artistic, that were instantly recognizable. Their expressions carried a particular urgency and individuality. And while most of us are not Martin Luther King or Coltrane, the same principle applies: voices are an expression of an individual life.

Listening is ephemeral, yet it can have lasting impact

Which leads to the fourth point: listening is ephemeral, yet it can have lasting impact. Listening happens in time. Acoustically speaking, sounds and words vanish the moment they are spoken. And yet, words can echo through our lives. A sentence my grandmother said to me before she died, or something a teacher once mentioned in passing, might seem fleeting. But perhaps I, so to speak, re-hear these sentences again and again throughout my life. They resonate differently in different moments, unfolding their effects by maintaining an inhe(a)rent connection to my lived experience. The same applies, again, to the case of music where pieces may stay with me over time.

This kind of ongoing listening is, of course, a deeply sustainable process. And notably it is not about volume or force but about meaning and connection. Shouting may cause more people to hear me in a physical sense—but it rarely leads to more people listening, at least not in any deep or enduring way.

Thus, it is precisely the ephemeral and discursive dimension of active listening that paves important ways towards a responsible and sustainable world. The transience of sound and the immediacy of listening are of unique value in a changeable, fast-moving, and volatile world. Where images may attempt to freeze time and preserve evidence, sounds pass on and demand attention in the moment. Thus, cultivating the virtue of listening may help us meet the world—and each other—with openness, humility, and care.

Last but not least, of course, I cannot resist pointing out the title of this column: ‘Outside View’. However, I hope that I have not provided an outside view, but an outside voice that is worth listening to and that invites further responsible discourse!

About the author

Norman Sieroka is professor of philosophy at the University of Bremen. He studied philosophy and physics in Heidelberg, Cambridge, and Zurich. Listening is one of his central research themes, where his interests in psycho- and neuroacoustics, consciousness studies, philosophical anthropology as well as phenomenology converge. His interdisciplinary expertise has led to numerous collaborations with philosophers, physicists, chemists, statisticians, architects, historians, pharmacists, computer scientists, and others. He also frequently collaborates with musicians and organizes concerts to make philosophical themes audible in a literal sense. For more information about his research group see www.uni-bremen.de/theophil

Global voices for humanitarian assistance

Inspired by Tom Fletcher’s statement of commitment to the humanitarian community when he resumed his position as Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator (OCHA) in November 2024, this channel provides expert views and impulses that highlight the current importance of listening, efficiency, outspokenness, and innovation in humanitarian assistance.