Localisation (humanitarian practice)

There is lack of consensus between humanitarian practitioners and scholars in defining localisation, with some believing that the definition should vary depending on the country and emergency. Most commonly, localisation is understood to mean the practice, in humanitarian aid, of giving donor funding to aid agencies that are geographically located close to an emergency. The practice also includes increasing the number of people from communities affected by emergencies in senior leadership roles at humanitarian aid organizations. == Background ==

Humanitarian aid agencies tend to employ European and North Americans into senior leadership roles and tend to hire staff from countries more commonly affected by crises into more junior, local roles, blocking local staff from senior leadership roles. This tendency prevents people from local communities from influencing decision making about emergency responses to disasters. Among humanitarian professionals, there is a widespread perception that increasing localisation will improve the quality of humanitarian aid. The lack of evidence is a battier to increasing localiastion. Barriers to localisation include the self-reservation incentives that international humanitarian aid agencies. == History ==

Although the importance of local aid agencies is acknowledged by United Nations Resolution 46/182, by 2015, only 0.2% of humanitarian aid funding was allocated to local aid agencies, in contrast to national or international organisations. An emphasis on localisation in the humanitarian sector occurred at the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit. At the summit, donor governments struck an agreement, known as the Grand Bargain, to increase that percentage to 25%. From 2016 and 2020 the percentage of funding that flowed to local organisations reduced from 3.5% to 2.1%. In 2020, Degan Ali, described the Grand Bargain as a "failed effort". In 2020, Kristina Roepstorff of Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg criticised binary approaches localisation that defined people as local or western, noting complex social hierarchies and a risk of shifting power away from western humanitarians towards local elites, disconnected from the communities with needs. His comments prompted criticisms from the Network for Empowered Aid Response and others who perceive the problem to be a result of those in power not relinquishing it. Donors committed to more reforms, signing the Grand Bargain 2.0 agreement in mid-2022. == See also ==