Super-localisation in Myanmar: uncomfortable truths

Localisation agenda dominates the aid sector. Almost everyone now wants to be associated with it. Donors promote it, international agencies build strategies around it, national organisations claim the role, and staff pursue related positions. It is both a policy agenda and a source of funding and legitimacy. This is not inherently negative. Localisation has opened important debates about power, funding, partnership and leadership; expanded recognition of local actors; and challenged international dominance. Yet has it changed how the aid system thinks and behaves at its core?

In Myanmar, as elsewhere, this question is urgent. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, and especially the 2021 military coup, aid has moved through contested, insecure and politically fragmented spaces. Local organisations, community networks, ethnic service providers, faith-based groups, volunteers and informal responders have become indispensable to conflict-affected and displaced communities. In this context, localisation means more than transferring funds or listing local partners. It concerns who carries risk, makes decisions, is trusted and heard, and who might also remain invisible despite doing the hardest frontline work.

Ten years after the Grand Bargain, the sector cites stronger language on equitable partnership and local leadership, alongside the symbolic 25% funding target for local and national actors. But targets do not equal transformation. The question is whether power has shifted or old hierarchies have gained new procedures. Visible, English-speaking, donor-facing organisations often benefit most because they understand the system and can become intermediaries – or bottlenecks.

Smaller groups, informal networks and community responders often remain outside formal localisation processes and understanding, despite their proximity to communities and willingness to work in difficult areas. Cyclone Mocha in 2023 and the March 2025 earthquake exposed this imbalance: local civil-society networks, volunteers and community organisations mobilised first, supporting evacuations, assessments, medical care, shelter, water, food, ambulance services, and early relief where formal access was restricted, while international agencies later relied on these networks to extend assistance. Yet many still depend on pass-through funding, lack control over resources and decisions, and remain invisible to donors because of language, registration, compliance requirements, or limited access to high-level forums. Localisation can therefore reproduce the inequalities it seeks to challenge and, when delivery and danger are pushed further downward without adequate funding, safeguarding, coordination, authority, or protection, it can create the risk of ‘super-localisation’.

Gatekeeping, security and donor accountability

Security complicates localisation because open engagement can put local organisations and communities at risk. Yet concrete experience shows what locally led response can achieve. Since the 2021 coup, women-led and civil-society organisations embedded in communities have delivered cash assistance and protection support to underserved women, adolescent girls, people with disabilities, and other minority groups, including through organisations formed in response to new humanitarian needs like informal networks that could not meet conventional partnership requirements. In conflict-affected areas, ethnic-minority and community-based organisations have also continued providing essential services in remote communities and have built partnerships with CDMers (civil servants and other public sector workers who joined the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) after the February 2021 military coup). These examples show that localisation works when donors recognise trusted local access, adapt compliance and partnership arrangements, fund local capacity, include frontline actors in decisions, and share protection responsibilities and risk rather than merely transferring accountability downward.

The most important shift must occur within donors and international agencies. Localisation is often framed around how local organisations should strengthen systems, meet compliance requirements, coordinate, manage risk, and become more professional. But international actors must also change. Are funding mechanisms flexible enough for frontline realities? Do reporting requirements support learning or institutional protection? Is risk shared or pushed downward? Are communities decision-makers or merely ‘beneficiaries’ and data sources? These are political and ethical questions about power, not only technical ones.

A people-centred approach begins with communities rather than institutional architecture. It asks how affected people define safety, dignity, access, trust and accountability, and whether aid strengthens local agencies or uses local actors to deliver externally designed projects. Communities are political, social and moral actors with their own knowledge and decision-making. Yet donors and agencies ask local organisations to coordinate and adapt while controlling resources, timelines, indicators and definitions of success. Genuine localisation requires humility, shared authority, and perhaps less institutional visibility.

The risk of super-localisation

Super-localisation is not a deeper or more virtuous form of localisation. It is a risk that arises when the localisation chain becomes too fragmented and responsibility is pushed from international agencies to national intermediaries, then to small community groups and volunteers, without a corresponding transfer of funding, authority, protection and support. Myanmar’s aid history also shows how intermediary power can become institutionalised. After Cyclone Nargis in 2008, international support helped create capable national organisations fluent in donor systems, but these organisations also absorbed upward accountability, bureaucracy, competition for visibility and distance from grassroots constituencies. Similar incentives emerged when HIV/AIDS funding drew organisations and professionals towards a well-resourced, visible field.

As funding shrinks, localisation can likewise become a route to resources, jobs, influence and institutional survival, encouraging organisations to compete for recognition as the most legitimate local actor. Those closest to communities may gain visibility but inherit disproportionate compliance burdens, security threats and expectations, while better connected organisations retain control as gatekeepers. In this form, super-localisation does not remove hierarchy, but relocates risk to the bottom while using the language of local leadership without changing aid’s underlying power relations.

For Myanmar, this distinction matters deeply. Aid operates amid conflict, displacement, surveillance, contested authority and restrictions on civil society. Localisation cannot mean endlessly subcontracting delivery to actors closest to danger. It must strengthen community and frontline agency while ensuring that strategic decision-makers share risk and remain accountable. Donors, international agencies, national organisations and intermediaries must examine their incentives and treat affected communities as participants in how aid is imagined, designed and governed.

If localisation is to mean more than institutional adaptation, it must move closer to the ground. It should focus less on who speaks the aid system’s language and more on whom communities trust as legitimate service providers; less on visibility and more on accountability; and less on shifting responsibilities downward than on honestly sharing power, risk and decisions. Only then can localisation reshape how aid relates to people.

Si Thu Htin Aung is Atlantic Fellow for Health Equity in Southeast Asia, and a humanitarian, health advocate and development practitioner with a medical background.