From the Ground up: It’s about time for local humanitarian action

Achieving a more ‘local’ response to humanitarian crises has been an explicit ambition of the formal humanitarian sector for several decades. Yet examples of progress are isolated, and have yet to tip the humanitarian system towards a more substantial and sustained shift.

Between 2017 and 2019, Humanitarian Policy Group researched local humanitarian action from a ground-level perspective across four key themes: capacity and complementarity, financing, dignity and protection. This report synthesises what we learned:

1) Humanitarian action is always stronger with local action. 2) Effective and local humanitarian action is not a zero-sum game of reduced roles for international humanitarian organisations and increased roles for local actors. 3) Power is both the greatest resource and greatest impediment to effective local humanitarian action: the power relations embedded in formal humanitarian structures must be confronted and transitioned to reflect new possibilities. The resport shows that the barrier to greater local action is not a dearth of capacity, but instead the reluctance of international actors – donors, United Nations agencies and international non-governmental organisations – to cede power. The necessary shifts in the system will require effort and will take a generation to embed, but they are long overdue.