Champaign, United States and Birmingham, United Kingdom — 'International actors have the power to let local actors into the humanitarian club - or to keep them out.'
The aid sector's localisation agenda is falling short.
This is hardly a secret. Years of underfunding, systemic power imbalances, and frustration from local humanitarians are proof.
But what if the very processes meant to localise aid are part of the problem, rather than the solution?
For years, the international aid sector has tried to shift power and make aid more locally driven.
More direct funding, capacity building, equal partnerships, local positions in coordination structures - these are the gears of the localisation machinery.
But international aid actors are actually reinforcing their power through these processes. The system still determines whether local actors are worthy humanitarians, if they're capable of receiving funding, how much core support costs they're allowed, who can participate in coordination meetings, and even who is able to respond to crises in their own countries.
In other words, international actors still have the power to let local actors into the humanitarian club - or to keep them out.
We know this because we interviewed 250 local and international aid workers and activists working in response to the Syrian war in neighbouring countries - in Jordan, Lebanon, and Türkiye - and international organisation headquarters.
Time and time again, we saw examples where international humanitarian organisations relied on the labour, risk-taking, access, and knowledge of local actors - all while maintaining their subordination. International humanitarians "went local" in the Syria response by using Syrians for delivery, but they did not "localise" by devolving leadership or authority.
The implication: Doubling down on localisation as it's currently practised is likely to only increase international power over local actors.
Trying harder to localise will likely just replicate the same results. Trying something new is the greater challenge.
How localisation reinforces international power
On paper, the Syria response should have been a relatively easy place for localisation to occur.
Government restraints, insecurity, and attacks on aid workers led to the unprecedented use of remote management and cross-border aid into rebel-held territory.
In other words, it should have been a ripe opportunity to truly put power in the hands of the local humanitarians who were best able to access their communities, even while taking on the most risk.
But our research, conducted over four years from 2014 to 2018, shows how the system reinforced imbalances, leveraging power through funding restrictions, demands for capacity-building, unequal partnerships, and coordination structures where Syrians were either excluded or given tokenistic roles.
Syrian organisations grew substantially to participate in the crisis response, particularly in regions where cross-border operations were conducted. The number of partner organisations in northwest Syria - in practice, Syrian organisations - increased almost tenfold from 2014 to 2017, according to UN coordination data on cross-border operations from Türkiye. The international system depended on Syrians to deliver and implement nearly all humanitarian aid in rebel-held territory.
While Syrian organisations grew to meet the demand, however, the system stayed the same.
The UN-led humanitarian response transferred only limited funding - mostly indirectly - to Syrian organisations to carry our projects, even as these local responders gained experience year after year.
Shelling and security risks presented constant threats to Syrian aid workers. Short project timelines, limited budgets, and a lack of overhead or core cost support challenged Syrian organisations.
"It's always a race," a staff member of a Syrian emergency medical care organisation with fieldworkers in northern Syria and a managerial office in Türkiye told us. "Projects last three to six months - at most, one year. So by the time you set up the work, you need to scramble for funding again."
Even a "pooled fund" designed explicitly to support local organisations saw Syrian groups receive many project contracts, but with far lower budgets and overhead costs than international NGOs and UN agencies were getting from the same fund. For example, international NGOs were contracted for less than one third of the cross-border pooled fund's projects. Yet they consistently had higher budgets, direct costs, and indirect costs than those of national NGOs.
Nor did Syrians enjoy greater agency, protection, or voice in international-local partnerships.
Risk was transferred to local actors by international actors who perceived the Syria context as a new, dangerous environment, where security guarantees were weak and attacks too brutal.
As international actors withdrew, the cross-border and remote management practices they put in place relied on "implementing partners" - Syrians, in other words. Local Syrian organisations became the gateways for humanitarian access - and the risk-takers for humanitarian action, balancing killings, kidnappings, and other threats that made Syria one of the most dangerous places in the world for aid workers.
"We've gotten used to this, thank God," a member of a Syrian civil society group told us. "We have a lot of experience with shelling."
Yet, when international actors withdrew and transferred risk, they did not transfer either control over funding or the authority to make decisions. Partnerships failed to shift power over agenda-setting or decision-making to them.
We found that local actors were offered limited representation - and even less voice - in international coordinating structures. "We have access. We know how to work with the parties; how to speak the language," the head of a coalition of Syrian humanitarian organisations in Türkiye told us. "All of this should give us the ability to speak about the people on the ground more than the international. But they don't try to listen."
His impression, shared by many of our interviewees, was further confirmed by our analysis of attendees and comments in UN and World Health Organization (WHO) coordination meetings in Lebanon. Local actors - when in the room - spoke extremely rarely. When Syrian actors were not excluded, their presence did not translate into opportunities for leadership. Theirs were not the voices heard, nor listened to.
For example, we gathered data on the inclusion of local NGOs and civil society groups in UN coordination meetings for the health sector in Lebanon from 2013 to 2015: When the flows of Syrian refugees into the country surged. Lebanese or Syrian civil society groups and NGOs never made up more than 15% of attendees.
On top of this, the UN or the WHO chaired all health sector working group meetings over this period. While local or Syrian actors were present at almost all of these working group meetings, they scarcely commented on topics raised. In available meeting records from 2014 and 2015, local organisations did not comment at all.
Finally, the processes meant to shift power actually made Syrian civil society groups more dependent on the international system.
"Capacity building" is a key tool of the localisation agenda. In practice, local leaders often say it can trap grassroots organisations in an unending cycle of training. And rather than strengthening crucial skills or improving aid for people in crisis, "capacity building" often seems aimed more at helping local organisations navigate the convoluted international machinery.
Trainings and workshops may have enabled Syrian aid organisations to meet the demands of international actors related to such tasks as monitoring and evaluation. But even as Syrians professionalised, they still lacked the overhead funding to support such expansion.
Measures taken to improve organisational capacity - like hiring staff for administration and monitoring and evaluation - left local groups scrambling because they lacked overhead funding to sustain those measures. Local organisations were often left more, not less, dependent on international giving.
Don't try harder, unless you're trying something new
International humanitarians are broadly aware of the aid system's power imbalances. The push to localise aid, after all, was intended in part to even the scales.
But the institutions that international actors have designed and continue to control are not fit for localisation. They don't shift power - they reinforce old power structures.
To make real strides towards local leadership, localisation must fit what is happening on the ground in crisis contexts. This means challenging assumptions about local humanitarians, and looking beyond the system as it exists today.
Many local aid workers are committed to the principles of neutrality, impartiality, and independence. At the same time, they are embedded in communities in crisis, live alongside people who use aid, and suffer the same insecurity and violence faced by the families they help - look no further than the unprecedented aid worker death toll in Gaza. But in the name of "neutrality", international humanitarians expect their local counterparts to remain operationally indifferent as a condition for contracts and funding.
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International aid organisations should consider withholding judgement when local aid workers express political solidarity, if they hope to make localisation fit local context. They might even find that local organisations that enjoy legitimacy in their communities, which can derive from such solidarity, can improve how aid is delivered and implemented.
Local aid workers are willing and able to lead. From Syria to Ethiopia, Yemen, or Ukraine, they offer care and compassion in the face of conflict, and work within well-established local crisis response and coordination systems.
When these capable local actors take risks or gain access to hard-to-reach places, it is for them to judge what is best. Local actors must have the power and authority to set agendas and design risk mitigation strategies where their lives are on the line, and to determine how aid is delivered to populations they alone have reached.
International humanitarianism is often justified as a moral duty to respond where local systems are overwhelmed. But the international response itself can be damaging - such as when Syrian-led organisations spend precious time and money on donor-driven admin costs instead of on-the-ground aid, or face unnecessary risks because security protocols are designed by global actors who are not facing them. Giving space for local humanitarians to lead and to set their own priorities can prevent the further erosion of local systems.
International organisations must start looking for examples of successful local leadership, without expecting to find these in the processes they control.
Finding pathways to the decolonisation of aid, and to social and racial emancipation, depends on a willingness to not just turn the humanitarian system on its head, but to think outside of its processes and power.
Rana B. Khoury, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign specialising in displacement, nonviolent organising, and humanitarianism, particularly in Syria
Emily K.M. Scott, Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham, UK, focused on humanitarianism, conflict, health, and migration, with specialisation in the Middle East
