Opinion: Why a 'grand bargain' on localization keeps falling short

Almost six years ago, the World Humanitarian Summit convened the major players in the international system to devise a framework for reforming humanitarian assistance. One of the event’s dominant themes was “localization,” defined by Véronique de Geoffroy and François Grünewald as a process that “aims to return local actors, whether civil society organisations or local public institutions, to the centre of the humanitarian system.”

What followed typified the boom-to-bust reform cycle in humanitarian governance. Dozens of agencies and donors agreed to localization commitments in a “Grand Bargain” agreement, and “localization” earned a prominent place in the humanitarian lexicon. And yet, years later, little has come from the summit’s efforts.

In June of last year, signatories reconvened for a “Grand Bargain 2.0,” which promised to shift the needle on localization. However, even with a refined agenda, this top-down approach will fail to meaningfully achieve localization as it depends on those with the greatest interest in preserving humanitarian hierarchies to elicit change that requires dismantling existing power structures.

Rather than allocating resources to futile reiterations of international agreements that wait for change “from above,” humanitarian groups should shift support to localization initiatives operating outside of formal reform frameworks.

The international aid system has long functioned as a hierarchy dominated by those in the global north — or in the words of a 2016 report on the subject, “a kind of self-governing ‘oligopoly’ of mainly Western donors and large international and non-governmental aid agencies.” The concentration of monetary resources at the top facilitates accountability to global north donors at the expense of accountability to aid recipients.

Humanitarian elites wield power by dominating the discourse that sets the agenda for action, notes scholar Sheila Nair. Meanwhile, power imbalances in humanitarian governance tend to exclude local communities from direct funding and leadership opportunities.

The Grand Bargain presents localization as a means to transcend these power asymmetries. The agreement’s Workstream 2 set a target for allocating at least 25% of humanitarian funding to local and national responders by 2020. Workstream 6 calls for a “participation revolution” to center involvement from local communities in humanitarian responses.

Its proponents view the Grand Bargain as a mechanism to democratize humanitarian governance by transferring resources and decision-making power from elites to the humanitarian entities most embedded within and attuned to the needs and perspectives of aid recipients.

But localization through the Grand Bargain has failed on almost all accounts. The “Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2020” reveals that just 0.5% of tracked funding in 2019 directly financed local and national NGOs, a far cry from the Grand Bargain’s target.

Even where international organizations have adopted localized funding models, international-local partnership practices remain highly hierarchical. In a 2019 survey by the Accelerating Localisation through Partnerships consortium, only 24% of local and national NGOs said international-local partnerships seemed “genuine.”

COVID-19 presented the greatest opportunity yet in the Grand Bargain era for operationalizing localization. Amid pandemic restrictions, many believed that disruptions to the standard international aid model would provide the needed push to transition the Grand Bargain’s rhetoric into action. A significant drawdown of on-the-ground international humanitarian presence resulted in expanded roles for local organizations in aid delivery, as revealed by the largely locally led response in Vanuatu to Tropical Cyclone Harold in 2020.

However, emerging evidence suggests that humanitarian donors and international organizations have largely squandered this unprecedented opportunity to implement the Grand Bargain. A July study from the Overseas Development Institute, or ODI, reported few improvements in the allocation of resources and decision-making power to local groups in support of their expanded responsibilities during the pandemic.

If one of the greatest disruptions to the aid delivery status quo has not substantially reoriented control of humanitarian funding and decisions, a future Grand Bargain-induced transformation of the aid architecture seems unlikely.

Scholarship on hierarchical systems offers insight into why this approach has and will continue to fail as a vehicle for democratizing humanitarian governance. The Grand Bargain places the onus on those at the top of humanitarian hierarchies to shift power downward. However, as Thomas Diefenbach details in the book “Hierarchy and Organisation,” superiors’ prime interest lies in protecting the influences, privileges, and resources that their dominant position grants them.

This scholarship highlights self-preservation as a driving interest among global north donors and international organizations. That fundamentally conflicts with transformative localization, which requires dismantling the hierarchies that sustain these organizations and their global influence. The Grand Bargain’s expectation that dominant groups will willingly cede resources and space to local ones fails to acknowledge the power of dominant organizations’ instinct for self-preservation, which blocks meaningful top-down progress on localization.

While the Grand Bargain has not yielded significant results, local groups are busy enacting change outside of formal international frameworks. ODI’s July study identifies bottom-up action as the driving force for the most significant localization shifts during the pandemic.

Standout initiatives include an informal coalition of Red Cross national societies in the Pacific region that draws from their collective resources and expertise to improve local capacity and access to funding. And in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Santé & Développement emerged as a grassroots effort to address pandemic-related needs with the support of locally raised funds.

Providing financial and discursive support to these productive initiatives represents a more prudent investment in localization than propping up Grand Bargain forums that inspire little action.

Buy-in from global north entities is ultimately necessary and desirable to shift power and resources that remain concentrated in their hands to those marginalized by humanitarian power dynamics. However, elites’ self-interest in preserving these hierarchies indicates that the localization agenda cannot rely on them to kick-start change.

To escape a never-ending cycle of fruitless reform commitments, humanitarian groups should provide weight and financial backing to bottom-up localization efforts that are already generating meaningful results instead of preparing for a not-so-grand Grand Bargain 3.0 in five years’ time.