Power lies at the heart of change (Green, 2016) and change in the international humanitarian sector is no exception. Over the past three decades, the international humanitarian system has been dogged by well-evidenced and systemic failures to appropriately respond to the needs of people caught up in large-scale crises and to safeguard them from exploitation and abuse. In response to calls for change – reinforced by more recent demands to decolonise aid (Paige and Kotsiras, 2021) – the sector has made recurrent commitments to make humanitarian aid more people-centred, accountable and locally led. But despite the ambitious promises, little has changed. Evaluators make exactly the same recommendations on localisation and accountability that they were making 25 years ago (Alexander, 2022). The failure to change the humanitarian model is clear, for instance, in the missed opportunity to support local responders in the Covid-19 pandemic (Konyndyk et al., 2020) or in the response to Russia’s war on Ukraine (Stoddard et al., 2022).