Interview with Sarah Strack

Ten years after the Grand Bargain, where have we got to with implementing localisation?

In 2016, the Grand Bargain defined concrete commitments: lower the barriers and reduce the administrative burden for local and national actors; invest in their institutional capacity; strengthen coordination mechanisms; and allocate ‘as directly as possible’ a minimum of 25% of humanitarian aid funding to local and national actors.

Ten years later, there has been genuine, progress but it’s uneven: localisation as a concept is now much more embedded in humanitarian aid discourse, and some new mechanisms have been developed, but change is still too often at the margins rather than structural or organic.

The 25% objective is still far from being achieved overall, although some donors and organisations have made efforts towards it. The funding share that can be traced to local and national actors remains small, and there is even less direct funding. A significant level of funding still passes via intermediaries, which makes for increased costs, longer timeframes and even more administrative demands. It also dilutes decision-making power.

The principal blockage: the architecture of the humanitarian aid system, which makes it hard to move forward on essential issues. These include: Who decides? Who bears the risks? Who has direct access to resources? Fundamental changes are required in the following areas, among others: eligibility rules, risk-sharing, transparency of cascaded financial flows, indirect cost financing, joint decision-making.

There’s a lot of talk among us [humanitarian aid practitioners] of the consequences for international actors of the crisis that began in early 2025, but can you say something about the impact of the crisis on local and national NGOs, from the operational standpoint?

In-country, in the field, the impact of the crisis resembles a sort of scissor movement: on the one hand, needs are becoming greater, while on the other hand funds are contracting or are highly unpredictable. For local and national organisations, this often means budgetary crisis. Business is interrupted, with staff suspensions and delays in paying salaries and other bills. Forward planning’s complicated by unpredictability. It’s difficult for slippages simply to be absorbed by local and national NGOs. In the end, programmes are frozen, teams are downsized, things close down entirely in some cases.

Many local organisations have very modest reserves and really rely on their funding sources. That makes them very vulnerable. For these organisations, the shock of the crisis has often been brutal: they are on the front line, but they have very little margin for manoeuvre. Also, they need to deal with the burden of official administrative demands, for which additional funds are often not available.

The crisis is also a sort of political amplifier: in some cases, it’s been a pretext for undermining civic space to a greater extent even than before. Civil society organisations (CSOs) are stigmatised. Their scope for action is curtailed.

And we’re not only talking about a budgetary crisis. For plenty of CSOs, and the communities they serve, there’s a question mark over their survival. The crisis undermines not only operations, but also organisational infrastructure – all of which damages the fabric of associative life, in key ways.

There are also ethical consequences, with a crisis of confidence, anger and incomprehension at local level. Do you agree?

The crisis brings into sharper relief dynamics that have long been criticised. They include decisions that have been passed down a chain of command, with local partners simply expected to absorb their impact. When a partnership, so-called, is structured around distrust (disproportionate demands for official administrative paperwork, risks shouldered entirely by the partner), it may be viewed locally as incorporating double standards, and this leads to frustration and suspicion.

Localisation isn’t, of course, just a question of money. It’s about power (who decides), risks (who has fiduciary or reputational responsibility) and accountability (it should not be a matter of  ‘upward’ accountability alone). Genuine efforts at localisation must rhyme with tough political choices and fundamental change.

Many fear a global trend towards turning in on ourselves for our own safety’s sake. This is likely to make for a static situation, at least for now. Will it then lead to structural transformation?

Yes, it’s real risk: at a time when things are contracting, certain protective reflexes kick in (for example, turning in on ourselves, centralisation, cutting down the number of partners, more administrative paperwork and accountability requirements).

But it’s precisely at this moment that genuine change should be implemented, because the crisis is exposing the limitations of our model, which relies on a long, costly, fragile chain of management. Now could be the right time to unblock a situation that wasn’t evolving as it should: for example, donors and intermediaries could simplify, standardise and coordinate their accountability procedures and their reporting requirements, and accept that risk be shared more fairly.

What are the next steps? How do we make opportunities out of difficulties and accelerate the change that’s needed? How do we identify new ways of proceeding? Do you have any recommendations for improving coordination between the work of international and national actors?

It’s important to highlight examples that show that serious efforts at localisation, and properly shared implementation, do actually bring benefits.

Simplifying procedures will free up the time of local actors so they can concentrate on the impact of the work they do, and on being accountable to their communities. The result would surely be an improvement in the way interventions by different international cooperation organisations were perceived.

To improve coordination between international and national organisations and levels of engagement, there are several approaches that could be adopted right now:

• Quality funding: flexible, multi-year, to include coverage of indirect costs, capacity building costs, the costs of accountability and reporting exercises.
• Risk management: due diligence procedures should be reviewed to ensure that they are proportionate, take account of local circumstances and don’t add to the cost burden of local organisations.
• Decision-making power: joint leadership (or co-leadership) in imagining activities, in setting priorities, and in making judgements and carrying out assessments.
• Transparent financial flows: all stages of ‘cascaded’ funds should be fully visible, as far as the implementing partners at the receiving end of the cascade.
• Simplification and harmonisation of procedures: agreed common formats in order to reduce transaction costs.
• Support for the ‘ecosystem’: strengthened cooperation arrangements and the creation of more learning spaces and opportunities.

We need to accept the challenges head-on:  take the dialogue further, constantly looking for ways of learning and adapting. It will help us build a better future for international cooperation, introducing greater diversity, drawing to a far greater extent on local talent, experience and knowledge, and being enriched by them.