Humanitarian Governance under an Evolving Climatecrisis: Examining National Pathways from the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Pacific Island States to Strengthen International Humanitarian Responses to Climate-induced Displacement

Climate change has become a direct and escalating threat to communities worldwide and to the humanitarian sector. A compounding nexus between climate change, conflict and forced migration is placing unprecedented pressure on the humanitarian sector, exposing deep structural gaps in the legal and operational frameworks underpinning international humanitarian responses. This thesis seeks to examine the extent to which current humanitarian governance pathways — including legal and operational frameworks, shape accountability within humanitarian responses to climate-induced displacement across three national contexts: the Philippines, Bangladesh, and the Pacific Island States. The research analysis focuses on two distinct but interconnected international and national humanitarian governance spheres. At the international level, the Governance Analytical Framework examines macro landscapes, revealing that humanitarian governance is structured through multi-level and multi-actor sites of exchange without a single overarching coordinating authority. No binding legal instruments currently governs cross-border climate displacement, and existing frameworks remain either soft law instruments without enforcement mechanisms or have yet to achieve legal force. Whilst important juris generative tools, facilitating state cooperation and demonstrating genuine normative progress through a rights-based approach, they leave climate-displaced populations without legally binding, inalienable rights specific to climate change. At the national level, Ostrom's Institutional Analysis and Development framework is applied to the Haiyan response, with Bangladesh and the Pacific Island States serving as comparative cases. Analysis of the Haiyan response identified five core components of accountability within humanitarian governance: monitoring and evaluation systems, information management, community feedback mechanisms, affected community participation, and incentive structures. Across all three cases, national-level coordination proved largely effective whilst accountability consistently broke down at sub-national and local levels, irrespective of the quality of legal or operational frameworks. The critical differentiating condition was not the presence of DRRM architecture but the degree to which authority was genuinely transferred rather than partially delegated to local actors. Where governance was genuinely polycentric and decentralised, embedded in local social structures, accountability became relational and bidirectional, producing more accountable outcomes. These findings are consistent with the trajectory of the Grand Bargain's localisation agenda and the 2025 Humanitarian Reset. The case studies equally reveal the limits of governance-based adaptation without binding international legal mechanisms. The extent to which governance pathways can shape accountability is ultimately bounded by the legal architecture which they operate within, which this research demonstrates remains structurally insufficient for the scale and multicausal nature of climate-induced displacement. Accountability in humanitarian governance therefore requires both binding international and national legal frameworks, which must be shaped directly by the communities whose survival depends on them.