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Contribution short abstract

A reflection on how humanitarian workers navigate moral and ethical tensions in aid organizational settings, and how this navigation shapes professional trajectories, decision-making cultures and humanitarian outcomes.

Contribution long abstract

This contribution reflects on how humanitarian workers navigate moral and ethical tensions within organizational environments shaped by structural inequities, institutional priorities and uneven access to influence. Drawing on more than a decade of experience in humanitarian field operations and early-stage doctoral research on humanitarian careers, reputation and moral labour, I use “navigation” to describe the everyday interpretive and relational work through which workers engage with expectations, read constraints, assess implications and situate both their actions and their careers within organizational dynamics. I approach these processes through the lens of positionality, paying attention to how power structures shape whose questions, hesitations or objections can move through an aid organization and have the potential to influence outcomes.

I raise questions about how these uneven forms of navigation intersect with professional trajectories, decision-making cultures and the design of programmes. How might uneven access to influence relate to the kinds of ethical tensions that surface within humanitarian work, and those that remain unspoken? What might this mean for an organization’s ability to uphold the humanitarian imperative in practice? And how could exploring these questions help illuminate how responsibility and authority are distributed across humanitarian workplaces?

By situating humanitarian workers’ moral and ethical navigation within debates on inequity, legitimacy and organizational culture in the aid sector, this contribution speaks to the roundtable’s interest in understanding development work as a human, relational and power-laden practice.