The central challenge facing localisation is no longer simply recognising that local actors matter. It is that current humanitarian financing, partnership models, coordination systems and risk frameworks remain poorly aligned with the realities they claim to support. They continue to sort diverse local actors through narrow compliance and funding pathways, favouring those already better positioned to meet donor-facing requirements, while offering weaker pathways for smaller, community-rooted, informal or less formalised actors whose contribution may nevertheless be essential to humanitarian response.
Moving from local presence to local power, therefore, requires not one model of localisation, but a more differentiated partnership and financing architecture, one that supports direct funding where appropriate, accompanied funding where useful, and locally led or co-governed mechanisms in which international actors play enabling rather than controlling roles.
The task is not simply to multiply isolated localisation initiatives, but to move beyond fragmented, siloed practice toward a more coherent system that aligns financing, partnership, coordination, risk-sharing and accountability with how local leadership already works in practice. This requires UN agencies, pooled funds, donors and international NGOs to rethink their roles in ways that enable a structural transition, shifting from gatekeeping resources and decisions toward creating the conditions for local actors to lead more effectively, influence more meaningfully, and sustain
their work over-time.
In this transition, organisations such as CAFOD, Caritas member agencies and others working through accompaniment-based modalities can play an important role — not as permanent intermediaries, but as strategic actors helping to de-risk, resource, accompany and strengthen more locally led systems. This is the practical implication of the Grand Bargain commitment to make humanitarian response “as local as possible and as international as necessary”.
Humanitarian systems should not route all local actors through the same funding and compliance model. Direct funding, accompanied funding, pooled or locally governed funds, intermediary partnerships, and small grant or community-level mechanisms should be used according to actor, function, risk, formality and context.
Access-building, trust maintenance, accompaniment, negotiation, protection referral, accountability, locally grounded verification, coordination, staff care, cultural translation, system navigation and institutional continuity should be recognised as core humanitarian functions — not absorbed as unpaid local advantage.
Local leadership requires investment in organisational systems, staff, governance, safeguarding, financial management, logistics, security and institutional resilience. These costs should be transparently recognised and shared across partnership chains.
Local actors should not only be consulted or invited into coordination spaces. They should have meaningful authority in convening, agenda setting, decision-making, allocation, adaptation, evaluation and donor-facing evidence generation.
Risk-sharing should include proportionate assurance, security and duty of-care budgets, flexible procurement, visibility-risk analysis, contingency resources, timely disbursement and mutual accountability for partnership quality.
Local actors who generate contextual intelligence, community evidence and operational learning should have the authority to shape the decisions that follow from them.
Localisation policies, platform, donor strategies, pooled funds, government-led processes, private-sector engagement and civil society initiatives should be harmonised around clear action plans, shared indicators, monitoring mechanisms and accountability for whether they shift authority, resources, risk, visibility and influence toward local actors and affected communities.
