Is the humanitarian system being reset? What does that mean? Amid growing challenges to its legitimacy, can we forecast more progressive futures for humanitarianism?
On December 16th 2025, HUD’s Copenhagen team is co-organizing an event on ‘Forecasting the Humanitarian Reset.’ The event is convened with Team Adaptation from the Norwegian Technical University (NTNU) and the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). It draws together a team of humanitarian designers aiming to open difficult and uncomfortable conversations around the goal of ‘resetting’ humanitarianism globally. Part of a longer two-year series of events, the goal is to use disruptive designerly approaches to draft scenarios for what the humanitarian reset could/should look like going forward.
The event is based on a rapid interview study starting with Norwegian led NGOs that shows a strong internal hope that recent geopolitical and large funding cuts, while disastrous in some areas, have the potential to trigger some of the changes that many have been talking about for decades. Yet, there are few signals that any strategic or coordinated humanitarian reset is actually happening. And, can the humanitarian system actually reset itself? To explore these questions, we want to try something new, where this team of systems-oriented humanitarian designers will facilitate a series of forecasting workshops that invite humanitarian actors, system thinkers, civil society and researchers with the aim to outline bolder frames for a humanitarian system shift.
In all this, our mission is to remain open to the discomfort and complexity of defining what the Humanitarian Reset truly means. A methodological openness will allow us to challenge assumptions, embrace innovation, and co-create pathways for systemic change.
The first event will comprise, first, an in-person kick-off event at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), drawing together humanitarian NGOs, donor agencies, humanitarian or civil society actors or diaspora organizations, and researchers working related to this field. Second, we will convene a digital Global Voice Reset room to gather a wider lense of voices from the Global North and South, including but not limited to staff working on strategic level initiatives at iNGOs, civil society organizations globally, as well as conventional and non-conventional humanitarian actors. This Global Voice Reset room will be facilitated by CEO Michael Ngigi from ThinkPlace.
The first event takes place on December 16th between 12:00 and 17:00 at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) or online (for the digital Global Voice Reset Room)
For registration details see the link available here.
For further details contact Jonathan Luke Austin (jla@ifs.ku.dk) or Brita Nielsen (brita.nielsen@ntnu.no).
