How should humanitarian organisations respond to system-wide reform commitments?
In May 2020, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) issued guidance on how to build “responsible partnerships” based on equality, mutual respect, mutual accountability, trust and understanding. It characterised responsible partnerships as including local leadership of and meaning participation in co-ordination mechanisms. The localisation agenda is nonetheless beset by definitional problems that make it more difficult to identify concrete commitments. There are uncertainties over what is meant by ‘local and national responders’ (e.g., do they include local affiliates of international NGOs?), what kinds of funding is referred to (core or project funding) and what ‘as directly as possible’ means in different contexts.23 The 2020 Grand Bargain independent assessment found that there had been an increase in the volume of humanitarian funding directed to local responders, either directly or through intermediaries, with 10 signatories claiming to have achieved the 25% target. Country-Based Pooled Funds (CBPFs), which are managed by OCHA, played an important intermediary role, shouldering much of the administrative burden of conducting capacity assessments and monitoring local partners. However, the assessment found no increase in the resources going towards strengthening the capacity of local partners, and little progress in creating more meaningful partnerships with them, beyond subcontracting. Accountability remains an upward process from local to international actors, rather than a mutual relationship, with donors wary of the financial, reputational and operational risks involved in the localisation of humanitarian action. Most of the Grand Bargain signatories “acknowledged that progress remains at the normative level, there is as yet no system-wide shift in practice.”24
Feedback from case study organisations Interviews with the case study organisations revealed a number of common challenges that were preventing progress towards localisation, or else causing it to take relative superficial forms. •
The subcontracting model: The increased participation of local actors almost exclusively takes the form of subcontracting by international HOs – a form of localisation that does little to increase their autonomy or change underlying power dynamics. It tends to favour a small number of professionalised NGOs in each country that can meet international standards for risk management and monitoring, rather than government or other national actors who may be equally well placed from a delivery perspective.25 The financial model requires that funding pass through an international intermediary organisation – an international NGO, UN agency or pooled funding instrument – which carries out due diligence on local partners, taking a share of the funding intended for on-theground services. As a result, the model tends to strengthen the dominant position of international HOs, leaving local responders with limited autonomy and little recognition for their work.
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Capacity constraints: There are widespread concerns that, in many fragile contexts, local responders lack the collective capacity to absorb 25% of humanitarian finance, as suggested by the Grand Bargain commitment, and lack the technical capacity to undertake certain types of interventions.26 While the solution to this may lie in capacity building, so far there has been no collected effort to increase the level of capacity-building support for local responders to enable them to absorb the
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OECD DAC, Localising the Response, World Humanitarian Summit ‘Commitments into Action Series’, 2017, https:// www.oecd.org/development/humanitarian-donors/docs/Localisingtheresponse.pdf. 24 Victoria Metcalfe-Hough et al., Grand Bargain Annual Independent Report 2020, Overseas Development Institute, June 2020, p. 52, https://interagencystandingcommittee.org/system/files/2020-12/Grand Bargain Annual Independent Report 2020.pdf. 25 Sultan Barakat and Sansom Milton, Localisation Across the Humanitarian Development-Peace Nexus, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar, 2020, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1542316620922805. 26 Ibid.
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