![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
Abstract
Calls for a greater inclusion of local actors have featured for some time in debates on how to make humanitarian action more efficient and address unequal power relations within the humanitarian system. Though the localisation agenda is at the core of current reform efforts in the humanitarian sector, the debate lacks a critical discussion of underlying assumptions – most strikingly, the very conceptualisation of the local itself. It is argued that the current discourse is dominated by a problematic conceptualisation of the local in binary opposition to the international, leading to blind spots in the analysis of exclusionary practices of the humanitarian sector. As such the localisation agenda risks perpetuating the very issues it wants to redress. A critical localism is thus proposed as a framework for much needed research on the localisation agenda.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my colleagues at the Department of Political Science, Otto von Guericke University, for their feedback on earlier versions of the paper. I want to especially thank Alexander Spencer, Chair of International Relations, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, for his continuous encouragement and support. Further thanks go to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the paper, which helped me refine the argument in the paper. Moreover, I want to thank Chris Busse for his feedback and support. I am particularly grateful to all interview partners and humanitarian practitioners who shared their knowledge with me.
Notes
1 Wall and Hedlund, Localisation and Locally-Led Crisis Response, 9.
2 In preparation for the WHS, which was initiated by the then General Secretary of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, more than 23,000 people in 153 countries were consulted on how to reform the humanitarian system.
3 IFRC, Localization, 1; ICVA, Localization Examined, 4.
4 Fabre, Localising the Response, 1.
5 Els, On the Road to 2020.
6 C4C, Charter for Change.
7 Svoboda and Pantuliano, International and Local/Diaspora Actors; Kenney and Phibbs, “A Māori Love Story”; Corbett, South Kordofan; de Geoffrey and Grunewald, More than the Money; Antequista and Corbett, Learning from Survivor and Community-Led Crisis; Abdulkadir, Improving Aid Delivery through Localization in Somalia; Lehoux, Localisation in Practice; Ayobi et al., Going Local; Featherstone, Missed Again; Humanitarian Leadership Academy, Local Humanitarian Action in Practice.
8 The Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2018 finds that there was a slight increase in direct funding to national and local NGOs, rising from 1.7% in 2016 to 2.7% in 2017. However, only 0.4% was directly funded to them. In the case of Somalia, on the other hand, the direct channelling of funds through local NGOs has exceeded the 25% target (OCHA, Global Humanitarian Overview 2019, 10). One mechanism that is considered to support localisation is the channelling of monies through pooled funds that are accessible to local actors. CBPFs, that disburse funds at country level, have grown from US$486 million in 2014 to US$833 million in 2017 (Ibid., 71). On these and progress in other domains see also C4C, Charter for Change.
9 Wall and Hedlund, Localisation and Locally-Led Crisis Response, 14.
10 Christie, “Critical Readings“; see also Barnett, “Humanitarian Governance,” 382.
11 While this lack of conceptualisation of the local is acknowledged in the humanitarian sector and several publications highlight this, the discussion so far does not go beyond a mere problem description. See IFRC, World Disasters Report 2015; Wall and Hedlund, Localisation and Locally-Led Crisis Response; Barbelet, As Local as Possible; Pouligny, Supporting Local Ownership.
12 Christie, “Critical Readings,” 43.
13 The paper builds and elaborates on findings presented in Roepstorff, “Chance Für den Frieden?”
14 Hilhorst and Jansen, “Humanitarian Space as Arena.”
15 Mac Ginty, “Where is the Local?”
16 Feldman and Ticktin, In the Name of Humanity; Fassin, Humanitarian Reason; Barnett, Empire of Humanity.
17 Paffenholz, “Unpacking the Local Turn,” 868; Hunt, Beyond the Binaries; Bräuchler, “Cultural Turn in Peace Research”; Bräuchler and Nucke, “Peacebuilding and Conceptualisations.”
18 Accessed August 29, 2018. https://www.agendaforhumanity.org/sites/default/files/resources/ 2018/Jan/Grand_Bargain_final_22_May_FINAL-2.pdf
19 Accessed August 26, 2018. https://charter4change.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/charter-for-change-july-20152.pdf
20 StP, Localisation of Aid; Zyck and Krebs, Localising Humanitarianism; Wall and Hedlund, Localisation and Locally-Led Crisis Response, 3; ICVA, Localization Examined, 3–4; Svoboda et al., Holding the Keys.
21 This is a contentious issue: while the importance of local knowledge for security risk management has been highlighted, the unethical aspects of risk transfer to local actors through the localisation agenda and the need for better protection mechanisms for local humanitarian actors have been stressed. Indeed, according to the Aid Worker Security Database, national and local actors are more likely to be involved in incidents than internationals. For figures see https://aidworkersecurity.org; on the security of aid workers, remote management and risk transfer see Egeland and Stoddard, To Stay and Deliver; Wall and Hedlund, Localisation and Locally-Led Crisis Response, 33; Donini and Maxwell, “From Face-to-Face to Face-to-Screen”; de Geoffrey and Grundewald, More than the Money, 25.
22 Fassin, Humanitarian Reason; Barnett, Empire of Humanity; Davey et al., History of the Humanitarian System; Daley, “Rescuing African Bodies”; Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator; Mostafanezhad, Volunteer Tourism.
23 Barnett, “Humanitarian Governance,“ 379.
24 Garnier, Jubilut, and Sandvik, Refugee Resettlement as Humanitarian Governance, 2.
25 Barnett, Empire of Humanity, 12.
26 Fassin, Humanitarian Reason; Agier, Managing the Undesirables; Barnett, Empire of Humanity; Barnett, “Humanitarian Governance“; Feldman and Ticktin, In the Name of Humanity.
27 Johnson, “Click to Donate”; Malkki, “Speechless Emissaries”; Rajaram, “Humanitarianism and the Representations of the Refugee.”
28 Slim, “Dithering over Darfur?,” 5; Donini, “Humanitarianism, Perceptions, Power.”
29 I’Anson and Pfeifer, “A Critique of Humanitarian Reason”; Donini, “Humanitarianism, Perceptions, Power”; de Wall, Famine Crimes.
30 Roepstorff, “India as Humanitarian Actor”; Binder and Meier, “Opportunity Knocks.”
31 Bornstein and Redfield, Forces of Compassion, 13; Khakee, “Humanitarian Action in International Relations,” 23; Barnett, Empire of Humanity.
32 Gingerich and Cohen, “Turning the Humanitarian System on its Head.”
33 Stoddard and Harmer, “Little Room to Maneuver,” 31.
34 IFRC, World Disasters Report 2015, 11; Obrecht, ‘De-Internationalising’ Humanitarian Action; de Torrenté, “Relevance and Effectiveness of Humanitarian Aid.”
35 Scheper et al., Impact of the Tsunami Response, 10.
36 IFRC, World Disasters Report 2015, 11.
37 C4C, Charter for Change; Ahmed, “Local Aid Groups.“
38 Bennett, Time to Let Go.
39 Barnett, “Humanitarian Governance”; Donini, “Humanitarianism, Perceptions, Power”; Khakee, “Humanitarian Action in International Relations”; Duffield, “Governing the Borderlands”; Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War; El Taraboulsi et al., Localisation in Humanitarian Practice.
40 IFRC, World Disasters Report 2015, 17.
41 Ramalingam et al., “Missed Opportunities.”
42 de Torrenté, “Relevance and Effectiveness of Humanitarian Aid.”
43 Schenkenberg, The Challenges of Localised Humanitarian Aid.
44 NRC and HI, Challenges to Principled Humanitarian Action; Labbé and Daudin, “Applying the Humanitarian Principles“; Zyck and Krebs, Localising Humanitarianism, 6.
45 Wall and Hedlund, Localisation and Locally-Led Crisis Response, 2; Schenkenberg, The Challenges of Localised Humanitarian Aid; Svoboda et al., Holding the Keys, 14.
46 Churruca-Muguruza, “Changing Context of Humanitarian Action,” 4.
47 IFRC, World Disasters Report 2015, 17.
48 Fast and Sutton, Localisation. Opportunities and Challenges, 3.
49 Churruca-Muguruza, “Changing Context of Humanitarian Action,” 4.
50 Gingerich and Cohen, “Turning the Humanitarian System on its Head.”
51 Churruca-Muguruza, “Changing Context of Humanitarian Action,” 4.
52 Schenkenberg, The Challenges of Localised Humanitarian Aid.
53 Hellmüller, “Owners or Partners?”; Wilén, “Capacity-Building or Capacity-Taking?”; Pouligny, Supporting Local Ownership.
54 There the realisation that the liberal peace and the related dominant approach to peacebuilding did not deliver the anticipated results spurred a debate on the shortcomings of internationally-led interventions – especially in light of the challenges peacebuilders faced in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Paris, At War’s End; Campbell et al., A Liberal Peace?; Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace.
55 This expression is borrowed from the peacebuilding literature where it gained currency over the last couple of years. For a literature review of the local turn in peacebuilding see for example Mac Ginty and Richmond, “The Local Turn” and Leonardsson and Rudd, “The ‘Local-Turn’ in Peacebuilding.”
56 Mac Ginty, “Where is the Local?,” 846.
57 Bornstein and Redfield, Forces of Compassion, 5–6; Hilhorst and Pereboom, “Multi-Mandate Organizations.“
58 While the first ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding scholarship of the 1990s stood for transformative and emancipatory approaches and focused on questions of how local actors and their capacities could be strengthened by outside support, the current second ‘local turn’ is, in contrast, inspired by postcolonial and poststructuralist thinking and turns its attention to more fundamental and conceptual questions regarding the notion of the local. Moreover, it contributed to the debate by producing a wealth of empirical case studies, which scrutinised the interaction of local and international actors, the hybridity of peace regimes, resistance to prevailing discourses and practices and the search for a post-liberal peace order. See Paffenholz, “Unpacking the Local Turn,” 859–61.
59 Mac Ginty, “Where is the Local?”
60 Autesserre, Peaceland.
61 Paffenholz, “Unpacking the Local Turn.”
62 For example, Mac Ginty sees the cause of the marginalisation of the local in a combination of long-term processes associated with modernity. Mac Ginty, “Where is the Local?”, 842ff. Similarly, Autesserre in her analysis of international peace interventions describes the various narratives and practices that led to an exclusion of the local. She identifies one of the main obstacles to local participation in the politics of knowledge. This is closely linked to a continued professionalisation of the aid sector and the prioritisation of thematic knowledge over local expertise. Based on Bourdieu she shows how dominant practices have emerged and sustain in ‘peaceland’. These practices include the hiring of staff that is not familiar with the local context; basing interventions on universal templates and lessons learned from other intervention contexts, whereby the input of the affected population is not included in project planning. Autesserre, Peaceland, 68ff. Similar arguments have been made in the development field, see for example Chambers, Can We Know Better?
63 Eurocentrism is here understood as ‘a conceptual and philosophical that informs the construction of knowledge about the social world – a foundational epistemology of Western distinctiveness. In this sensibility, “Europe” is a cultural-geographic sphere which can be understood as the genealogical foundation of “the West”’; Sabaratnam, “Avatars of Eurocentrism,” 261.
64 Anderson and Olson, Confronting War, 36.
65 Pouligny, Supporting Local Ownership, 12.
66 Findings from field research conducted in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, in March and April 2019. See also Wilder and Morris, “Locals within Locals”; Pouligny, Supporting Local Ownership, 12.
67 Roepstorff and Bernhard, “Insider Mediation in Peace Processes,” 164–5.
68 Anderson and Olson, Confronting War.
69 As has been argued elsewhere: ‘the insiderness and outsiderness are ascribed both on the basis of how actors are perceived by others and how they perceive themselves. This happens at different levels. First, an actor might subjectively perceive himself or herself as insider, while being perceived as an outsider by the (affected population) … To further complicate matters, perceptions can change over time, depending on the context, position and perspective. Moreover, some actors can simultaneously hold insider and outsider positions’; Roepstorff and Bernhard, “Insider Mediation in Peace Processes,” 165.
70 Fabre, Localising the Response, 2–3.
71 While this might be justified on the basis of a perceived greater marginalisation of local humanitarian actors in the Global South, first findings from field research on Lampedusa and Sicily in 2018 by the author portray a different picture, suggesting a similar side-lining and marginalisation of local humanitarian actors in the European context.
72 In Cox’s Bazar, where localisation has become a contentious issue in the Rohingya response, organisations that consider themselves as local have urged INGOs and UN bodies to distinguish between local and national NGOs. Local organisations are defined as having their headquarter in the District of Cox’s Bazar and working in only a limited number of the country’s other districts. Interestingly, interview partners from INGOs considered this distinction as unimportant; Findings from field research in Cox’s Bazar in March and April 2019.
73 Barbelet, As Local as Possible, 6.
74 Wall and Hedlund, Localisation and Locally-Led Crisis Response.
75 Barbelet, As Local as Possible, 6.
76 I owe this and the previous point to the reviewer of an earlier version of the article.
77 Roepstorff, “Local Actors in the Maritime Humanitarian Arena.”
78 Accessed February 20, 2019. https://noborderkitchenlesvos.noblogs.org/manifesto/; Lauble, Motive für humanitäre Akteure.
79 ICVA, Localisation Examined, 8; IFRC, World Disasters Report 2015, 9; Barbelet, As Local as Possible, 6; Wall and Hedlund, Localisation and Locally-Led Crisis Response, 15.
80 Mac Ginty, “Where is the Local?,” 862.
81 This has been problematized by a number of postcolonial scholars. See Bhabha, The Location of Culture; Bhambra, Rethinking Modernity; Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs.
82 Leonardsson and Rudd, “The ‘Local-Turn’ in Peacebuilding.”
83 Ibid.; see also Hunt, Beyond the Binaries, 219.
84 Canagarajah, “Reconstructing Local Knowledge,” 248; Mac Ginty, “Where is the Local?,” 850.
85 Leonardsson and Rudd, “The ‘Local-Turn’ in Peacebuilding”; Appudarai, Modernity at Large; Hannerz, Cultural Complexity; Lambek, “Catching the Local,” 216; Escobar, “Culture Sits in Places”; Bräuchler and Nucke, “Peacebuilding and Conceptualisations.”
86 Richmond, A Post-Liberal Peace, 13.
87 Escobar, “Culture Sits in Places”; Bräuchler and Nucke, “Peacebuilding and Conceptualisations,” 426.
88 Hilhorst and Jansen, “Humanitarian Space as Arena”; Bräuchler, “Cultural Turn in Peace Research,” 21.
89 Long, Development Sociology.
90 ICVA, Localisation Examined, 8.
91 Obradovic-Wochnik, “Hidden Politics of Power and Governmentality”; Mac Ginty, “Where is the Local?”; Lambek, “Catching the Local,” 1999; Sabaratnam, “Avatars of Eurocentrism,” 272.
92 Christie, “Critical Readings.”
93 Feldman and Ticktin, In the Name of Humanity; Fassin, Humanitarian Reason; Barnett, Empire of Humanity.
94 Canagarajah, “Reconstructing Local Knowledge,” 253; Mac Ginty, “Where is the Local?,” 84; Sabaratnam, “Avatars of Eurocentrism,” 267.
95 From a scholarly perspective, this line of inquiry could speak to research on norm diffusion in international relations and research on new and emerging actors in a fragmented humanitarian landscape, see Anderl, “The Myth of the Local”; Sezgin and Dijkzeul, The New Humanitarians in International Practice.
96 ICVA, Localisation Examined, 11.
Additional information
Kristina Roepstorff is Lecturer in International Relations at the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and Associate Faculty member at the School of Humanitarian Studies at Royal Roads University. In her research she focuses on humanitarian action, forced migration and peacebuilding. With a particular interest in ethnographic methods and local perspectives on, and approaches to humanitarian action she has conducted field research in India, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Italy and is currently writing a book with Routledge on local humanitarian action in the context of forced migration.