Listening and Localisation

At the landmark 2016 World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) in Istanbul, a long-standing ‘dialectical deafness’ appeared to have finally run its course. Chief among the summit’s momentous commitments was an unexpected pledge by donors and aid organisations to allocate 25 per cent of global humanitarian funding to local responders by 2020—a commitment that appeared to heed strenuous calls from Global South humanitarians for increased localisation of power and resources during the consultations that led up to the summit. This research includes interviews with key stakeholders in the humanitarian system, questioning whether the WHS process and the Grand Bargain, with its apparently hefty commitment to localisation, indicated a profound shift towards a longer-term trend to listen to humanitarians usually excluded from such summits.