Managing Legitimacy Crises in Humanitarian Organisations: Strategic Silence, Selective Transparency, and the Refinement of Crisis Communication Theory

ABSTRACT This study examines how humanitarian and development organisations communicate during reputational and legitimacy crises within politically sensitive, donor‐dependent environments. It draws on two anonymised cases: an international non‐governmental organisation (INGO) and an intergovernmental organisation (IGO), specifically a United Nations agency. The study asks how communication professionals respond to reputational threat under structural constraint, and what those responses reveal about the assumptions embedded in established crisis communication (CC) theory. The design combines systematic autoethnographic reflection on eleven years of practitioner experience with critical discourse analysis (CDA) of practitioner and journalist interviews and media coverage. Three themes are identified: a disconnect between internal and external readings of restraint, strategic silence as a routine stance, and donor‐driven framing of organisational language. Image repair theory (IRT), situational crisis communication theory (SCCT), and the internalisation, distribution, explanation, and action (IDEA) model serve as comparators against which specific assumptions are tested, alongside recent SCCT extensions and the contingency theory of strategic conflict management. The findings position strategic silence not as a discovery, since it is already theorised, but as a structurally conditioned default interpreted internally as ethical stewardship and externally as evasion. The study refines CC theory toward legitimacy maintenance and offers guidance for practitioners working under severe constraint.