Localisation Re-imagined: Localising the sector vs supporting local solutions

I scroll through my social media feeds to see friends in the Philippines involved in their own respective causes.

Gela started a fundraiser to help an island community – the same one she’s worked with over many years – recently devastated by a typhoon. Rafa helped set up a community pantry in his barangay[1], joining hundreds of others who have done the same to support those whose livelihoods have been disrupted by COVID-19. Jenica, who is the Philippines director for a US-based non-governmental organisation (NGO), is leading an effort to provide access to clean water and proper sanitation for marginalised communities. Michael, who works for an Asia-based foundation, led the distribution of essential supplies to urban slum populations affected by the pandemic.

I chat with my friends and many others who are working on national and local initiatives in the Philippines. I read their online posts and participate in their Zoom webinars. A range of things are discussed: the technical stuff around community-based interventions, government accountability, citizen participation, funding.

Everyone is busy trying to come up with solutions to their respective cause’s problems.

Meanwhile, in the same social media feeds, I see international colleagues – many of whom work for large international NGOs based in the US or Europe – grapple with issues within the so-called humanitarian system. This includes localisation, a concept that intends to ‘shift the power’ to national and local actors, who, it is argued, are more effective at finding solutions to problems within a context that they know better than outsiders.

I talk to other INGO professionals who are working on localisation. I read reports and am invited to Zoom webinars – but this time, the focus appears to be on the humanitarian sector, while humanitarian solutions seem secondary. In a recent tweet, I wrote about how the concept of localisation seems to be predominantly used in the Global North. Others quickly chimed in to agree.

I cannot help but sense a disconnect. What would local humanitarian problem-solvers, many of whom are outside the formal humanitarian system, make of the current discourse on localisation? How can, say, a capacity enhancement framework developed by an INGO be relevant to the work of a group of young people who are setting up a community pantry in the Philippines or that of scientists developing affordable ventilators in India?

That is to say, might we be conceiving localisation in a way that does not speak to local realities, and does not go far enough in supporting local people who are trying to solve their own problems?

Winners and losers of the localisation debates

In the final version of the Grand Bargain, the richness of these regional conversations was distilled into one line: ‘more support and funding tools for local and national responders’.

Specific commitments under this include: increased direct multi-year investment to local actors; removing administrative burdens on local partners; supporting national coordination mechanisms; and promoting instruments like country-based pooled funds. The aim was to make humanitarian action ‘as local as possible and as international as necessary’.

The letter of the localisation commitment was vigorously debated. Does direct funding mean no intermediaries, or is one layer of INGO acceptable? Should national affiliates of international organisations count as ‘local responders’? So too was its spirit – framed by Van Brabant and Patel as a dichotomy between localisation as merely decentralisation (i.e., shifting funding and decision-making to those closer to the context) and transformation, where success is defined as ‘much stronger national capacities and leadership’.

Five years after the WHS and the Grand Bargain – and the plethora of position papers, policy briefs and panels that have been produced since then – the dust has begun to settle. Localisation, once nebulous, is taking shape – particularly through what has been cut. Winners and losers have emerged in this process – and the decentralisation interpretation has largely won.

This is evident in the way the localisation commitment focuses on formal organisational dynamics that, in the words of the Report of the WHS Secretary-General, does not seem to shift away ‘from delivering aid to ending need’. In the Grand Bargain, localisation is framed as strengthening the organisational capacities of local responders, or as improving partnerships between international agencies and donors and local actors. The official Grand Bargain localisation marker – a tool that tracks the localisation performance of donors/INGOs – focuses exclusively on a single metric: funding.

More sophisticated localisation indices similarly put formal organisations at centre stage. NEAR’s (Network for Empowered Aid Response) Localisation Performance Measurement Framework is used mainly by local/national actors, and looks at six components of an organisation (partnerships, funding, capacity, coordinating and complementarity, policy and influence, and participation). The Shift the Power coalition – comprising Christian Aid, ActionAid, Tearfund and Oxfam – developed a global localisation framework based on national localisation frameworks developed in four countries (Myanmar, Nepal, Nigeria, South Sudan), which evaluates localisation progress across four areas (partnerships, capacity, financial resources, coordination). The Global Mentoring Initiative, commissioned by the Start Network, emphasises the need for changes at the systemic level, but the 57 indicators of their seven dimensions of localisation overly focus on formal organisations.[16] 

The transformation agenda – including the radicalism and richness of the WHS regional consultations and the idea of locally led solutions – has lost out. Within the Grand Bargain – and indeed in much localisation discourse and practice – there is a lack of attention directed to things like the primacy of government, what strengthening civil society actually looks like,  the role of markets and the private sector, and the potential contributions of informal networks.

This is reflected in the five-year assessments of the Grand Bargain by Global South-led coalitions. The Alliance for Empowering Partnerships (A4EP) points out the ‘noticeable reluctance to open the space for meaningful inclusion and participation of local actors’[17] and how ‘Northern jargon-led discourses do not speak to how national and local practitioners think and communicate, just as the energy, time and money devoted to conforming to the international relief sector's way of operating seems a massive distraction to them, from what is needed in a more “real” world’.[18] Charter4Change recommends that the Grand Bargain in the future must ‘connect to a wider range of local and national NGOs (LNNGOs)…including diverse forms of civil society often marginalised by the mainstream international response’.

All this seems to explain the sense of disconnect between the international humanitarian system’s localisation efforts and the grassroots work that continue regardless of it – not just in the Philippines and India, but in many other places.