76 Brad K. Blitz As the profile of statelessness within UNHCR increased, so too did budgets. There was a marked upturn in 2010 when UNHCR allocated US $38.5 million for its statelessness operations – approximately three times the expenditure on such activities just one year earlier.21 Expenditure on this head has continued to rise. For 2021, $81.6 million has been allocated to UNHCR’s statelessness program – 1 percent of the agency’s overall budget.22 Accompanying this expansion has been a greater emphasis on targets. In the mid1990s, on the heels of the Srebrenica massacre and genocide in Rwanda, the UNHCR was struck by several scandals that forced donors to question its accountability and effectiveness at supporting those in need of humanitarian protection. Since then, the UNHCR, like other humanitarian agencies, has worked to develop more coherent systems of accountability and has strived to recast its image to donors. To this end, it has enthusiastically embraced the use of standards and indicators. Most notably, the UNHCR was a founding member of the 1997 Sphere Project, which set out minimum standards to improve the quality of humanitarian responses. In 2002, UNHCR launched the “Standards and Indicators Initiative” to firm up assessment, planning, and implementation within the agency. The collection and presentation of statistical data was seen as promoting efficiency and measuring the effectiveness of projects in order to satisfy donors and other stakeholders. It also gave the impression of greater accountability, though as Dunlop argues, internally generated indicators may be less than objective and raise questions about who is collecting data, for whom, and who shapes the ways in which findings are presented. Regardless of whether the resulting data is released publicly or used internally to determine the effectiveness of programs, there may be incentives for collection officers to downplay or couch certain failures if they are perceived to reflect poorly on sectoral management.23 In 2004, UNHCR published a Practical Guide to the Systematic Use of Standards and Indicators in UNHCR Operations, which was followed by a comprehensive management and structural reform process two years later.24 Although the reform process was sparked by external events that had exposed the agency’s failures, Reichel contends that internal factors, including a new institutional culture based on the need to show improvement for its legitimacy, set the See UNHCR, “Addressing Statelessness,” UNHCR Global Appeal 2010–11 (2010), www.unhcr .org/4b02c5e39.pdf, p. 42. 22 See UNHCR Executive Committee, Update on Budgets and Funding (2019, 2020–2021), U.N. Doc. EC/71/SC/CRP.6 (February 20, 2020), www.unhcr.org/5e6a3c497.pdf. 23 E. Dunlop, Indications of Progress? Assessing the Use of Indicators in UNHCR Operations (UNHCR, July 2011), www.refworld.org/docid/4e55ec4e2.html. 24 See UNHCR Policy Development and Evaluation Service (PDES), Measure for Measure: A Field-Based Snapshot of the Implementation of Results-Based Management in UNHCR, U.N. Doc. PDES/2010/13 (November 2010), www.unhcr.org/4cf3ad8f9.pdf. 21 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press