Our flagship event, the biennial Humanitarian Leadership Conference, attracts leading thinkers in the humanitarian, academic and policymaking space.
2025 Humanitarian Leadership Conference: Transformative leadership in times of polycrisis
As the number of people living in crisis continues to break records, with more than 300 million people in need of life-saving assistance and billions more in or on the edge of extreme poverty, the climate emergency and polarising and inequitable political-economic systems are compounding and growing the problem.
The 2025 Humanitarian Leadership Conference will focus on the very human element of leadership: of who takes risks and how they can make real, positive change. Disrupting the usual discussions and creating space for emerging and insightful analysis, the 2025 Humanitarian Leadership Conference will explore the multiple aspects and impacts of the polycrisis as well as the multi-faceted nature and influence of transformative leadership. It will showcase the increasing reality of diverse leadership and its capacity to navigate and affect positive change in crises around the world.
The 2025 Humanitarian Leadership Conference is hosted by the Centre for Humanitarian Leadership in partnership with the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies.
2023 Humanitarian Leadership Conference: Re-engineering the global disaster response system
The humanitarian system is no longer fit-for-purpose to deal with the scale and severity of crises in the 21st century. Climate change, increasing fragility and conflict, and financial and economic crises are compounding disasters, while system reform initiatives have failed to deliver transformational change. Progress towards decolonising aid, shifting the power and achieving the localisation agenda has stalled.
The 2023 Humanitarian Leadership Conference investigated why the system is ‘stuck’ and will proposed ambitious and pragmatic ways to reinvigorate change and build a better global disaster response system fit for the world in 2050.
2021 Humanitarian Leadership Conference: Who are the Humanitarians?
The 2021 Humanitarian Leadership Conference was part of the global transition from rhetoric to action. More than 1000 delegates from across 80 different countries came together to determine where change is needed and what a reshaping of the humanitarian ecosystem might looks like, from the actors involved and ways of working to the very definition of what constitutes a humanitarian crisis.
2019 Asia Pacific Humanitarian Leadership Conference
The 2019 Asia Pacific Humanitarian Leadership Conference brought together leading humanitarian practitioners, academics, researchers and stakeholders from government, NGOs and the private sector from around the world for three days of plenary sessions, panels, presentations and networking in Melbourne. Participants critically reflected on the challenges facing good leadership in the humanitarian space and the future of humanitarian action in the Asia Pacific and fragile states.
