Beyond definitional ambiguity: locally led action as baseline, localisation as reform

As donors and humanitarian agencies reaffirm commitments to localisation amid protracted crises and funding pressures, the lack of conceptual clarity remains a barrier rather than a catalyst for change. Nearly a decade after the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS), localisation continues to be described as poorly defined and contested, despite sustained attention from scholars, practitioners, and policymakers.

This ambiguity has concrete consequences in practice. Divergent interpretations of localisation can translate into confusion and poor implementation on the ground. In the Rohingya response in Bangladesh, for example, Roepstorff shows how differing understandings of localisation among international and local actors hindered efforts to reach consensus on roles, priorities and approaches.

That such uncertainty persists suggests that the problem is not simply analytical. Rather, it reflects political and institutional compromise, as this article argues. Looking at the WHS process and what followed shows how demands for redistributing power were reframed into something more acceptable.

Clarifying localisation means starting from what already happens in crises – locally led humanitarian action – and defining localisation as reforming the international system so its funding, rules and accountability reinforce that baseline rather than bypass or undermine it.

Localisation emerged as an ambiguous political compromise

The process preceding the WHS in 2016 sheds some light on why definitions remain so ambiguous. During the extensive consultation process, participants from the Global South voiced coherent, bold demands regarding power, agency and decision-making. The consultation report called for local and national leadership to be reinforced and ‘backed by stronger regional cooperation and supported by global institutions’.

When these demands entered formal negotiations, donor governments and large organisations considered them unachievable and even damaging to their reputation. In turn, the Grand Bargain emerged from a small group, composed mainly of signatories, rather than from the preceding consultative process. It appeared more like business as usual than a breakthrough.

‘Localisation’, in the sense of power shift and the reinforcement of local leadership, was reframed through ‘the normative discourse of what is possible’. Rather than outlining a transformative path for the humanitarian system, the Grand Bargain focused primarily on increasing funding for local actors and on reviewing partnership models. Also, the Grand Bargain largely retained the status quo by reproducing a ‘capacity gap’ narrative, framing local actors as in need of ‘necessary’ international support.

The conceptual looseness of localisation is therefore a political product, not an accidental failure of definition. The Grand Bargain does not explicitly define ‘localisation’ and leaves considerable space to interpretations of what ‘as local as possible, as international as necessary’ means. The commitment to allocate 25% of funding ‘as directly as possible’ further reinforces this vagueness.

More recent publications from the Grand Bargain Localisation Workstream acknowledge this lack of an agreed definition. It does not, though, move the debate towards consensus. Instead, it presents localisation through a range of interpretations, thereby sustaining conceptual openness embedded in the original framework.

Localisation as aspiration versus a policy agenda

Across literature, localisation has generally been used in two distinct ways. One strand frames localisation as an ethical orientation – articulated through normative language emphasising recognition, respect, dignity, and strengthened local leadership and capacity. Another defines localisation as a concrete reform agenda that targets the policies, practices, funding instruments and institutional behaviours of international humanitarian actors.

These strands, however, operate at different analytical levels: one expresses values and intent, the other specifies a concrete object of change – the international humanitarian system and its architecture. Yet they are frequently invoked interchangeably in policy discourse, blurring responsibility for action. This slippage allows localisation to be endorsed rhetorically while responsibility for reform remains diffused.

A nuanced but critical question emerges here: does the system require reform to recognise local leadership in humanitarian response, or to better support existing local leadership? Though subtle, the answer is crucial to the clarity of localisation. To resolve it, we must first establish what ‘locally led’ means – and whether it describes something to be achieved or something that already exists.

Locally led action as an empirical baseline

Unfortunately, as with localisation, what is being ‘locally led’ – a humanitarian action, a response, an international practice – is often unclear. But understanding ‘locally led’ is not merely semantic; it shapes where agency is located and what kind of change localisation is expected to deliver.

‘Locally led action’ and ‘localisation’ are often used interchangeably without making a conceptual differentiation. In some cases, ‘locally led action’ is presented as a more advanced form of the localisation agenda, one that recognises contributions of local actors. Similarly, some view localisation through a journey metaphor toward the locally led practice as a destination.

Others frame locally led action as more context-specific, with greater support for local and national actors, yet facilitated through international partnerships. In this view, locally led action fully materialises only after reforms to the international system. This future-oriented, conditional framing subtly shifts agency back to international actors as the ones who make it possible.

Less frequently, ‘locally led action’ is used to describe the reality that, in many crises, local and national actors are the first responders. For instance, from the first days of the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, local and national actors mobilised immediately to provide humanitarian assistance. Many self-organised volunteer groups simply combined their own resources and began addressing urgent needs, such as food distribution and evacuation. Ukraine is just one example of how emergency response begins locally, before the international system fully engages.

Thus, talking about ‘locally led action’ as a distant future enabled by external actors sounds unsuitable. It is rather an empirical baseline from which humanitarian action already functions, rather than an outcome to achieve. Certainly, the scale, capacity and actors vary across humanitarian contexts. But initial humanitarian action does emerge inevitably; it is driven by self-organisation within the affected society.

Any attempt to define localisation without acknowledging this baseline risks mischaracterising the problem localisation aims to address. This is where much definitional ambiguity originates. If locally led action is not recognised as the default, localisation leans toward aspiration – for the international system to recognise that it is happening. But if locally led action is acknowledged as a baseline, the issue localisation seeks to address is how the international humanitarian system can reform to best support that action.

The externality of humanitarian funding

Having established locally led action as a baseline, we can examine the next issue: the funding.

Humanitarian funding is intrinsically linked to values of humanity and solidarity – the willingness of some populations to alleviate the suffering of others in times of crisis. Whether through public funding from taxpayers in donor countries or through private donations, remittances and diaspora support, humanitarian financing reflects transnational expressions of care and responsibility.

Precisely because humanitarian funding stems from such transnational expressions of solidarity, it is also inherently external to crisis-affected contexts. The analytical and policy question, therefore, is not how to make funding local, nor how to make humanitarian action local. It is about how humanitarian financing can be organised to reinforce rather than undermine locally led response – an existing reality in every crisis context.

That is where localisation comes in. Its purpose is to connect humanitarian aid, inherently external, to locally led responses. From this viewpoint, localisation is best understood as a reform of the international humanitarian system and architecture, so that decision-making authority rests with national and local actors, while external actors play primarily redistributive and supportive roles.

A ‘good enough’ definition to move forward

Nearly a decade after the WHS, localisation is still described as ‘contested’ and lacking an agreed definition. But persistent ambiguity is not a neutral academic issue. It resulted from a political compromise that allowed a reform agenda to be endorsed without determining exactly what is being reformed.

A clearer starting point is to recognise locally led humanitarian action as an empirical baseline. In every crisis, local and national actors mobilise first through civil society, volunteers, diaspora networks, community organisations, and national and local authorities. The scale and shape vary by context, but the reality remains consistent: humanitarian action does not begin with the international system.

From there, ‘good enough’ definitions become achievable:

• Locally led action is what local and national actors do to organise relief and protection in their own context.
• Localisation is how the international humanitarian system – including external funding flows – is reorganised to reinforce that locally led action, with decision-making authority residing with local and national actors and international actors playing primarily supportive and redistributive functions.

This framing shifts the debate from terminology to accountability. If locally led action is the baseline, the question is not whether humanitarian action can be made ‘local’, nor whether funding can become entirely ‘local’. Humanitarian financing will remain structurally external in many crises. The question is whether the rules, incentives and accountability mechanisms attached to that externality strengthen locally led responses or override them.

Clarifying definitions will not dissolve the politics that have shaped localisation since 2016. But it does remove one of the most convenient defences: the ability to endorse localisation while diffusing responsibility for change. Treat localisation as a reform agenda, and misalignment between stated commitments and the system’s operating rules becomes easier to identify – and harder to justify.

Anna Postovoitova is an independent humanitarian policy researcher with previous experience at the World Health Organization (WHO) in emergency response.