Almost everyone involved in humanitarian aid agrees that more “localisation of aid” is a good thing. From staff in small NGOs to leaders in multilateral and bilateral donor agencies, few would admit to being against localisation.
But this does not mean there is agreement on what localisation entails in the context of humanitarian aid. The word leaves a lot of room to move.
On the one hand, there are minimalists who want localisation to mean small shifts in funding flows and more local participation in program design and implementation. On the other, there are maximalists who want localisation to entail radical shifts in power relations in aid systems, greater power for local and national leaders over resources and coordination, and greater attention to the value of local knowledge. They argue that the localisation agenda can be manipulated by powerful international agencies to actually disempower local and national NGOs. As Rana Khoury and Emily Scott put it in their study of Syria, international agencies “went local” by using Syrians for delivery but did not “localise” by devolving leadership or authority.
These critiques are important. But in these debates, both minimalists and maximalists often share an underlying assumption: that “local” refers to local and national civil society organisations. Localisation, in this framing, is largely about shifts in the relationship between organisations from aid recipient countries and their international funding partners. This has been the dominant framing since the Grand Bargain was struck at the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit.
In our research with Myanmar humanitarian organisation leaders, we found an interesting contrast. Across six interviews and 22 focus groups in August and September 2023, with 74 participants drawn from a national humanitarian organisation and its local partners, participants frequently interpreted localisation to mean changes at the community level, and particularly the building of community leadership and resilience.
Myanmar is an unusual case. Since the 2021 coup, international agencies have, in most parts of the country, been unable to work directly with Myanmar communities. This has produced what some have called “forced localisation” or “localisation by default”: Myanmar organisations now carry the weight of humanitarian delivery. That proximity to affected communities may sharpen how local actors think about what localisation is actually for. The language itself hints at the gap: there is no settled Burmese translation of “localisation”, and the English word is often dropped into Burmese sentences within the aid sector. Outside that sector, few people would recognise the term at all.
Senior leaders in our study, who engaged most directly with donors and international agencies, did echo familiar arguments about funding, decision-making power and recognition. “Locals have no decision-making power, or negotiation power in this situation,” one leader said, “so this is not localisation.” A sub-partner was blunter: “when talking about localisation, they are just asking us to sit at the table without giving the power to decide the actual funding arrangements”.
But operational staff and smaller partner organisations tended to talk about localisation in different terms. “We promoted localisation at the community level,” one staff member said, “where we encouraged local needs and how to address local issues with the community”. Another leader put it more directly: “[localisation] is basically all about prioritising the community’s wish”. The leader of a sub-partner working in urban slums described meeting small local slum groups every six months to reflect on progress and adapt strategy: “we listen to their voices”.
Participants also linked localisation to grassroots self-reliance, even in the absence of external programs. “Localisation is still working well without financial support from others,” one leader explained. To illustrate the point, he described a village in Myanmar’s conflict-affected Sagaing region that mobilised to help a neighbouring community after fighting between armed groups. “When they saw the smoke [in a neighbouring village], and it burning down, the community … prepared food … and some people already chopped down some of the trees to make a temporary shelter for them”. No formal aid program was involved. For him, this was localisation “working well”.
Participants were also alert to the opposite risk: that donor-driven work at community level could undermine grassroots decision making. “Those donor-driven projects will not have community ownership and promote local values,” one local partner leader said. They “are like someone who won the lottery, and the results will be ended in one or two years after the project”.
We have rarely heard these interpretations of the “local” in practitioner or academic debates on localisation. Institutional mechanisms such as the Accountability to Affected People agenda do point to relationships at the community level. But the localisation agenda is far more influential, and it shapes how the sector thinks about the “local”.
The Myanmar findings remind us that all humanitarian reform agendas ought to share the same end goal: improving the lives of people affected by crises and building grassroots leadership and resilience. They also point to a danger in framing localisation primarily as a matter of relationships between local and national civil society organisations and their international funders.
There is no doubt that a shift toward greater funding, leadership and recognition for local organisations is valuable. Local and national actors are usually far better placed to navigate humanitarian challenges in complex environments. For their part, international NGOs and UN agencies need to step back and allow more decision-making power and funding to go to local and national groups.
But shifting resources and decision-making power to local organisations does not guarantee that grassroots leadership and resilience will thrive. Local and national organisations are not immune to the hierarchical structures and donor-oriented decision making that plague international agencies. Given more direct funding and authority, some may reproduce these same problems and make little difference at the community level.
To facilitate the necessary shift away from the old hierarchical systems of international intermediaries, donors are creating new funding mechanisms, such as country-based pooled funds, that channel resources to Myanmar or other contextually embedded humanitarian groups and networks around the world more directly, without routing them through international intermediaries.
This is encouraging. In contexts of high risk however, the temptation for donors is to ramp up compliance requirements for local organisations and networks, emphasising upward accountability. If we see the “local” not only as local and national humanitarian agencies, but also as local communities, then the emphasis in these new mechanisms needs to be on downward accountability to those communities, rather than upward compliance. It is not enough to simply say, “we did our job and got the funding into the hands of local groups.”
This is what scholars call “critical localism”: examining the implications of what we define as “local”. Our reference point for the “local” in aid localisation ought not to be just local and national NGOs. As Koenraad Van Brabant and Smruti Patel argue, the ultimate purpose of localisation is not only strong national intermediaries but greater resilience among communities affected by crisis. Shifting resources and decision making into the hands of local civil society organisations is a crucial proximate goal. The overarching goal must be community-level change.
The way we think about the “local” in aid localisation matters a lot.
