#ShiftThePower or Repackage Empire? Seeing Through the Aid Sector’s Facade. By Naomi Yehdego
*these views are my own*
A decade of unfulfilled promises, a decade of unrelinquished power
It has been ten whole years since the Grand Bargain was agreed at the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit, marked as a pivotal moment for the localisation agenda. Through what were ultimately (unbinding and unincentivised) commitments, governments, western donors, United Nations agencies and international Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) gathered and pledged to make humanitarian responses more “locally-led”. Some of the key commitments included increasing flexible, multi-year funding to local and national actors, strengthening local leadership, supporting participation of communities affected by crises and ensuring they shaped humanitarian responses. The most renowned commitment – and often entirely reduced to this target - was the promise to channel 25% of humanitarian funding “as directly as possible” to local and national actors.
The reduction of the localisation agenda to merely a funding target suggests the sector's understanding is that channelling funds automatically equates to a shifting of power to local actors. Of course, direct funding matters. But, it cannot be separated from the deeper and critical questions of who is actually setting the priorities, defining risks, controlling compliance and which knowledge is valorised and who is subjugated. The localisation agenda risks becoming a technical rearrangement of funding flows, instead of a deep decolonial rupture of the hegemonic structures that continue to organise the aid system.
We can interpret the ambiguity around localisation not just as accidental, but rather a reflection of the deeper reluctance to confront what it would actually require: a redistribution of power, authority and legitimacy away from western actors.
The façade works because it looks like change
One reason localisation has remained as an agenda item, is because it offers the illusion of rupture of the status quo, all whilst leaving the deeper distribution of power untouched. The sector continues to generate an endless choreography of frameworks, consultations and working groups and wait for it … (my personal trigger word)… “reform” initiatives.
Veiled in the vocabulary of structural change, signalling transformation, they simultaneously preserve the very architecture it claims to (allegedly) disrupt. These processes therefore create the facade of movement, whilst operating as mechanisms of containment through absorbing critique into procedure, managing dissent through consultation, and translating demands for justice into bureaucratic exercises that defer any meaningful transfer of authority, resources or risk. A result of this process, is that power remains concentrated with western actors who have long self-bestowed the authority to define communities’ needs, design the solutions, determine the acceptable terms of change and decide the limits of … (pseudo) “reform”.
Superficially progressive terms, such as ‘equitable partnerships’, ‘complementarity’ and ‘capacity strengthening’, also continue to obfuscate and retain the same power asymmetries where local organisations implement programmes designed outside of their context, must comply with reporting systems they did not design, and have their knowledge validated only when translated through international institutions. “Participation” can therefore become a performative mechanism whereby local actors are consulted, represented and even invited to contribute- all whilst decision making authority remains concentrated in the global north. A clear example of the epistemic extractive nature of the aid architecture.
“Capacity strengthening” provides another example, again seemingly benevolent however, it is premised on the assumption that superior expertise must flow from north to the South, positioning international actors as knowledge bearers vs. local actors as recipients of technical assistance. Local knowledge, lived experience and contextual expertise continue to be inferiorised unless validated by international institutions. Their knowledge is extracted to legitimise “reform” processes they did not design, while their proximity to the crisis is exploited as evidence of inclusion, without any real transfer of power. What Gayatri Spivak says comes to mind here, where she helps us understand the problems surrounding representation: it is not that global majority actors cannot speak, but that dominant institutions retain the authority to interpret, curate and operationalise what is said. The result? A sector highly skilled at absorbing local expertise, redistributing risk and responsibility downwards, and preserving the very hierarchies it claims to dismantle.
Coloniality of “reform”
Critiques of localisation tend to focus on the visible failures such as insufficient direct funding, weak accountability, limited incentives or the lack of political will. Indeed, these are real barriers, but they do not fully explain why, after a decade of commitments and reform initiatives, power continues to sit with the same institutions localisation was supposed to disrupt.
Modern aid architecture remains organised through the patterns of Empire. We see the colonial distribution of humanitarian authority: the global north occupies the position of funder, expert, and decision maker - the Global South is constructed as a site of crisis, capacity deficiency and intervention. Undoubtedly, western aid does save lives and provide essential support to crisis-affected communities, however it often does so while refusing to confront the political economy produced by its own implication in sustaining that order. Modern (capitalistic) humanitarianism therefore becomes a mode of crisis management rather than transformation. It instead responds to suffering whilst disavowing the root causes, translates structural violence into technical problems, leaving untouched the hierarchies that made such crises possible.
This is coloniality in practice.
Coloniality also shapes how local actors are perceived, consistently framed through the language of risky, capacity gaps, weak systems and institutional fragility, even when they are the actors closest to communities and often the first and fastest to respond. This is not merely a technical assessment, but a judgement about who is deemed credible and trustworthy. International organisations were once untested too, yet donors invested in their growth, infrastructure and legitimacy despite the risks. Why are local actors so rarely afforded the same trust, patience and long term investment? And if ‘organisational/capacity strengthening’ is always the condition for leadership, where is its endpoint? When does ‘strengthening’ stop being support and become a mechanism for indefinitely delaying the transfer of power?
Local actors are not waiting
Across the world, communities have long organised and financed responses to crisis through systems of solidarity that predate the formal humanitarian sector itself. These are not temporary acts of resilience to be romanticised (which we have seen) but long standing infrastructures of collective care; built by communities forced to respond in the absence, delay or failure of international support. In Sudan - one of the defining humanitarian crises of our time - Emergency Response Rooms (ERR) have coordinated mutual aid, protection and humanitarian assistance amid war, displacement and the collapse of public services.
This is a clear example that disrupts the colonial fictitious narrative that local actors need to be empowered by the same system that has historically, and continues to, inferiorise and subjugate them. They are already exercising power through negotiation with local authorities, mobilising domestic and diaspora resources, sharing risk, producing knowledge and sustaining communities under conditions the international system often deems too complex or far too risky. What many localisation debates fail to recognise is that local and national organisations are embedded within broader, messier and more plural ecosystems of trust, reciprocity and collective action. Systems, often invisibilised, because they exist outside formal humanitarian architecture. This is precisely where Mignolo’s idea of ‘delinking’ becomes helpful, not as a total withdrawal from the world, but as a refusal to accept that legitimate solutions must be authorised by eurocentric institutions before they can be recognised as valuable knowledge or leadership.
This localisation agenda itself was formalised through a space shaped largely by the UN, donor governments and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development – Development Assistance Committee(OECD-DAC) countries at the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) in 2016, externally to local communities. Locating the origins helps explain the localisation paradox, something international actors deliver to local actors, rather than something communities define for themselves.
Donors, international actors and intermediaries must stop continually designing new mechanisms and instead recognise, trust and resource what already exists, on the terms of local communities. Indigenous and community-led practices are continuously ignored until translated into the language of international aid, repackaged as innovation, and presented back to communities as more “legitimate” versions of what they were already doing.
At the very bare minimum, a decolonial localisation agenda is needed, we must veer away from what Tuck and Yang (2012) correctly warn of, the ‘metaphorization of decolonisation’, away from the language of “reform” and towards a politics of solidarity, supporting existing local networks, relationships and forms of collective care that have long sustained communities prior and post crises - a dignity, justice, reparative and solidarity approach. International actors must move towards an acceptance of pluriversal humanitarian futures, where diverse ecosystems of knowledge, solidarity and responses can coexist without being absorbed into the neat image of the formal, yet dysfunctional, international aid system.
I want to leave this piece with a confronting question: