Socializing accountability in humanitarian settings: A proposed framework

•Efforts to promote accountability in humanitarian crises have historically focused on formal mechanisms.•Socializing accountability refers to interpersonal processes through which interdependent individuals hold each other to account.•We adapt an existing conceptual framework of socializing accountability to the humanitarian context.•This framework may assist aid actors to identify and strengthen socializing accountability processes in humanitarian settings. With more than 65 million people forcibly displaced in 2017, accountability has received increased attention in international humanitarian action. Efforts to enhance humanitarian accountability have historically focused on formal, technocratic processes. Scholars in other disciplines have explored non-formal forms of accountability including socializing accountability, which refers to interpersonal processes through which interdependent individuals hold each other to account. Yet little empirical data on socializing accountability exists in the humanitarian context. We draw on a conceptual framework that outlines practical dimensions of socializing accountability among networked non-profit staff (Romzek, LeRoux, Johnston, Kempf, & Schede Piatak, 2013) and apply it to the reproductive health responses in two case studies, Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar in 2008 and the Haiti earthquake in 2010. Using interviews with 96 aid workers in the two cases, we explore the ways in which they held each other to account through social, interpersonal means for the implementation of the minimum standard in reproductive health service provision. We identify new behaviors, rewards, and challenges, such as constructive criticism and overwhelming workloads, that augmented or undermined socializing accountability within the two case studies. We adapt and extend the model for the humanitarian context and propose a preliminary conceptual framework for assessing socializing accountability in a crisis response.