Beyond accountability? Exploring the promises and challenges of citizen collectives

While humanitarian accountability has been a trending topic for quite some time, most of the debate has revolved around formal mechanisms that are used by large, professional (international) non-governmental organisations. In spite of the ‘localisation of aid’ agenda, only a handful of studies have explored how grassroots actors deal with questions of accountability, and how this differs or aligns with the practices of their professional counterparts. This article contributes to this emerging line of inquiry by zooming in on a specific type of grassroots actors: citizen collectives in Europe, who act in solidarity with people on the move. In spite of the apparent absence of scholarly and practical debates on accountability within such collectives, I argue that issues of accountability lie at the heart of what citizen collectives do, and that they deal with these issues in a way that distinguishes them from other actors. By drawing on a re-interpretation of several ethnographic projects, I formulate four exploratory theses on what accountability looks like within such collectives, and what promises and pitfalls their approach may hold for broader debates on humanitarian accountability.